Build the rail! Save the snails! — Labour Together Why does British infrastructure cost so much? This paper, by economist Dan Davies, argues that Britain’s adversarial planning system forces developers to gold-plate solutions to hypothetical problems....

Here's the @labourtogether.bsky.social collab, in which I argue that adversarial-judicial structures aren't "planning" in any normal sense, and we could have more output from the same people doing the same job for the same money
www.labourtogether.uk/all-reports/...

(know that’s not the main point of your tweet, but I think the general point that gov having a record of the checks makes the substance it helping on illegal migration more likely)

It is a different mechanism, but when we paired UC with hmrc data, fraud on earnings outside of self employment reduced to zero.

My (unsurprising!) bet is that this will help much more than you expect, and we should be thinking about regularisation etc

I might be blind here, but I don’t see what is supposed to be the lie here.

Separately, my case is we require checks but have no audit trail of those checks. Doing that helps enforcement. I think this is most obviously clear in right to rent checks when paired with a national landlord database.

The case for contribution — Labour Together This essay, by Labour Together’s chief policy adviser, Morgan Wild, argues that this Labour government should root itself in an ethic and expectation of contribution : the actions we take that make o...

Really like this from @morganwild.bsky.social.

Lots of attention on the immigration implications. But not enough on the radical potential on social policy - counting unwaged work like care as contribution, proper income protection, long-term care funding.

www.labourtogether.uk/all-reports/...

This from @morganwild.bsky.social and @peterhyman.bsky.social is excellent. Was waving a lighter in the air while reading.

www.labourtogether.uk/all-reports/...

Why Future North Now 80%, soon 100%!

🚀 Introducing Future North - a Substack exploring the people, projects and ideas shaping the future of the North of England.

First post below - please subscribe to get new posts directly to your inbox!

futurenorth.substack.com/p/why-future...

sorry - missed this reply in my response. amen to experimenting with rooftop solar if we can!

I guess not even about meeting the target - just we're accelerating towards clean power a long way, and so (I hope!) domestic energy consumption should be less carbon constrained reasonably quickly

We just got an aircon unit for our bedroom - part of why I was comfortable with it was confidence about Lab's clean power plan. It's carbon intensive now, but it won't be soon. Obviously politically, I want energy abundance & clean power to be consistent. Am I kidding myself?

Polls which ask people to have opinions that they previously did not have for a small monetary prize where there is no downside to being wrong probably do more work to persuade policy wonks the public are stupid than any other single thing

You've signed up to a polling platform in return for monthly entries into a £100 Amazon voucher prize draw.

Quick, rank these monkeys by their population size.

Primatologist: no wonder our orangutans are so endangered with a public thinking there's so many of them

@britishprogress.bsky.social @labourtogether.bsky.social

Getting Britain off the ground — Labour Together A runway is a several kilometre length of reinforced pavement. Building Heathrow’s first runway took around a year. It is everything else that now takes time. This paper tries to answer a simple ques...

And you can read the full report here: www.labourtogether.uk/all-reports/...

Labour considers fast-tracking approval of big projects The move, which would take years off the planning process, is loosely modelled on a Canadian scheme developed by Mark Carney

Great write up from @oliver_wright here: www.thetimes.com/article/42ff...

Infrastructure boosts growth - but only when it’s built. Lots of this Labour government’s decisions are difficult. A larger economy makes all of these decisions easier.

We could replace most of the report with a post-it note: Parliament is sovereign. MPs saved Scunthorpe steel in 9 hours. If we bring that urgency to building, we can bring down people's costs much quicker.

But we can use the tools in the report to massively ramp up building. New homes means cheaper rent. New grid means cheaper, cleaner bills. New transport means access to better jobs. More runways means cheaper holidays. Labour can fix the cost of living crisis - but only through building.

✈️ Britain’s talked about a third runway at Heathrow for two decades. Our new report with @BritishProgress shows how a flight could take off before 2029 - if Parliament chooses to speed up the process through a Public Bill.

Quite. The right is always setting the ability to speak English well as a test of integration and these children pass with flying colours.

Nation Rebalanced: How do we create a country that works for all places? — Labour Together This report, by Labour Together’s Director of Devolution, JP Spencer, sets out a bold vision for how to rebalance the UK economy and create prosperity in every part of the country. It outlines four k...

📣 New report 📣

In a volatile world, we need an economy that is firing on all cylinders - but regional imbalances are driving overheating and stagnation in different places.

www.labourtogether.uk/all-reports/...

In the last 5 years, there have been 23 mentions of Oasis tickets, 5899 mentions of Debt, 1634 mentions of National Debt, 1026 to British Debt, and 434 to Household debt.

Taming the unaccountability machine “Public choice cybernetics” for the 21st century.

This from @dsquareddigest.bsky.social on the big state capacity problems and where they came from is so excellent. I find it gives me an intellectual permission I didn't realise I needed to think past public choice theory:

hypertext.niskanencenter.org/p/taming-the...

West India lobby was the prototype of an industry under attack. One of its first impulses was to consider cosmetic changes.* "The vulgar are influenced by names and titles," suggested one proslavery writer that year. "Instead of sLAVES, let the Negroes be called ASSISTANT-PLANTERS; and we shall not then hear such violent outcries against the slave-trade by pious divines, tender-hearted poetesses, and shortsighted politicians. On May 12, 1789, Wilberforce rose to make his first speech against slavery, in the famous voice that, as one observer noted, was "so distinct and melodious that... if he talked nonsense you would feel obliged to hear him." He spoke from

when the abolitionist movement was gaining steam in Britain in the late 1780s, one of the pro-slavery lobby’s very first responses was trying to change the word “slave” to “assistant planters”.

Always thought there was useful think tank gap in the market for this kind of thing. Centre For Ruinously Tedious Policy Work

Unless your appetite for periods of sustained disruption is very high, this is the way. Having sat on energy code reviews, it is still burned into my brain as the single most tedious thing I have ever done in my life.

Doctor Who predicting 2000 years of absolutely riotous public planning committee meetings.

This isn’t quite the paeon to deliverism I meant it to be - my point is if the idea of deliverism is only improvement in economic aggregates it might fail. But proper attention to delivering what voters actually want (eg stable prices) might not.

the ‘Calver Gaps’ also made a lot of sense to me. It would be weird if any given n% change in population affected you personally! It can still be a big deal for the country