IN THIS BULLETIN:
- HONG KONG: Government adopts ASI policy on Hong Kong, 31 years in the making
- TAX FREEDOM DAY: Woohoo! We’re free. (But next year might be rather different…)
- YOOF: New-look Freedom Week; Young Writer on Liberty; Gap-year opportunities
BUT FIRST...
In the UK, it was the sunniest May on record (despite Brexit). But now the weather’s turned (so if you intended a jaunt to Barnard Castle, you’ve missed your chance). Don’t plan any long trips, though: Brits aren’t welcome in Greece, and France is insisting that we should quarantine for two weeks. Though they’ve also said they won’t enforce it, which is a bit odd. And when you return from your visit overseas, you’ll have to quarantine yourself here too, unless you happen to be a lettuce picker, sewage worker or nuclear inspector. (I find the inclusion of the last two on this list strangely reassuring.)
If you've now realised that your main hobbies are visiting pubs, restaurants and non-essential shops, you’ve done your time, I reckon. Now at least you can go out to buy a car or visit an open-air market. (Which must be an improvement: not so long ago we were all scared of our vegetables.) And have you noticed? In normal times we all stay indoors staring into our separate phones and tablets, but now we’re locked down we’re all out walking, running and cycling? (I’ve come to understand why the dog dashes straight out of the house when the front door is open.) But now we can get out more, we’re starting to recognise who we will drive to drink with and who drives us to drink.
Scotland today announced it's going to stop collecting numeracy and literacy figures from schools. Presumably because after decades of socialism no one is numerate enough to calculate the figures or literate enough to write them down.
The artist Christo, who famously wrapped the Reichstag in cloth, died this week. (Which is a pity: I was hoping he might swing by Westminster and wrap the whole place in razor wire.) MPs are complaining that with social distancing rules, it takes hours to vote on every measure. (Well, there’s a simple solution, guys—just don’t try to pass so many daft laws.) When I worked for the US Congress in 1976-7, Representatives could already vote electronically from their offices. (We just need to drag Parliament into the mid-twentieth century?—Ed.)
And Professor Neil Ferguson has admitted that Sweden had just as much effect bashing the virus as did the UK, but without the draconian lockdown. (Have a chuckle about that as you join the socially-distanced unemployment queue…)
But I digress...
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HONG KONG POLICY WIN
Today is the 31st anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre. As vigils take place across the world, we are also staring down the barrel of an illegal and immoral authoritarian crackdown by the Chinese Communist Party in Hong Kong.
The UK must stand with the people of Hong Kong in the hour of their need––we know full well what happens when ordinary citizens attempt to stand up to China alone.
We welcome the Government’s announcements to expand the British Nationals (Overseas) visa programme in both length and scope. Ensuring that Britain does her duty in upholding the liberties of the people of Hong Kong directly reflects the suggestions of the ASI.
We have advocated for the Government to acknowledge the rights of Hong Kongers and the UK’s moral and legal commitment to them for decades. In 1989, our friend the late Douglas Mason wrote a report for the ASI titled A Home for Enterprise called for the UK to recognise the citizenship of Hong Kongers and provide them a place to live off the coast of Scotland should they face persecution. Radical indeed, but it has been explained again more recently by ASI Fellow Sam Bowman.
In August 2019, our report, Doing Our Duty, explained the need for the UK Government to let British Nationals from the territory move to the UK for work and to reside, let all those who once had BN(O) status be able to apply, and let their dependents and descendents do so too.
Our recent social media campaign has received widespread attention across the Commons and the Lords, with MPs like former Defense Secretary Rt Hon Penny Mordaunt MP, former Conservative Party Leader Rt Hon Iain Duncan Smith MP, Foreign Affairs Committee Chair Tom Tugendhat MP, Owen Paterson MP, and many more, using the ASI video in their posts to show their support for the issue.
If you’d like to help speak up for the liberties of Hong Kong and ensure Britain does her duty, please be sure to contact your MP asking them to uphold the commitments made in the Sino-British Joint Declaration.
Your support for the Adam Smith Institute has directly helped to ensure that millions of people will have an option to leave the cold grip of communism if Beijing continues to close in on Hong Kong’s liberties. We couldn’t do this without you.
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ASI Video: Hong Kong’s freedom is being extinguished. The UK must not turn her back on British nationals in need.
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HAPPY TAX FREEDOM DAY
Well, sort of. Tax Freedom Day is that point in the year when you have paid all your taxes and at last start earning for yourself. This year, we had to work a gruelling 149 days for the tax authorities—from 1 January to 30 May! That’s nearly a full month more than we had to slave back in 1996. And some people might well ask what exactly all that extra effort has delivered us. But then we had Blair, Brown, Cameron-Clegg, Cameron, May...
Medieval serfs had it easy. They were only expected to work about a third of the year for their feudal lord. We have to work far longer for our government lords. No surprise that, according to our opinion survey (see ‘Lockdown hits young hardest’), people want lower taxes, especially younger people who are annoyed at being fleeced to pay for their parents’ generous benefits.
Where is tax heading? Well, the £300 billion or so spent on virus containment policies will take a lot of paying for. So Tax Freedom Day won’t be moving to January any time soon. But most of the cost will be met by borrowing (particularly now that the government has discovered people will pay money to lend to them—Ed.) Still, we can easily deal with that. We just leave the debt to our children...
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NEW REPORTS
Lockdown hits young hardest: An ASI-commissioned poll reveals just how anxious the lockdown has made people about their future livelihoods. While most over-65s reported that they weren’t suffering financially, half of those under 54 complained that they certainly were. Nearly everyone wanted to see coherent plans to end the lockdown, and most people—particularly younger people--thought that the government should cut taxes in order to encourage recovery. Which is just what we have been advocating.
Reopening the economy: The economy is not a machine that can be switched on and off, Matt Lesh and I argue in this recent report. It’s a complex fabric of relationships that are torn asunder as firms close, forcing the knock-on closure of their suppliers and in turn their producers and dislocating production everywhere. So the longer shops and restaurants remain closed, the more the damage escalates. The UK has been slower to unwind things than most European countries. Let's get opening up, cutting tax and bureaucracy, and start re-growing our productive network.
Winning the peace: Matt Lesh and Matt Kilcoyne look at practical ways to start healing our economic scars and get the economy fit again. Their approach is based on the six principles of generating new prosperity, scaling back the emergency measures, being flexible not prescriptive, allowing people to use common sense rather than micro-managing things, supporting people not businesses, and not shoring up firms that cannot survive anyway. And they have specific recommendations on tax, employment, insolvencies, the hospitality and retail sectors, housing, childcare, trade, transport and more.
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Universal Basic Income — a regular payment for all citizens — is a radical idea that has been around for centuries that is supported, and opposed, across the traditional political spectrum. The ongoing pandemic has thrust the policy to the forefront of popular and political discussions.
For the ASI’s next webinar, our expert speakers will explore whether a basic income (or something like it) should be part of the Government’s response to COVID-19. We will examine the latest international evidence and delve into the theory behind building an effective welfare state.
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Innovation is the key to progress and prosperity. But how do you get it? Not by relying on governments to ‘pick winners’, say our Webinarians. And they should know:
- Matt Ridley is a best-selling science author who has a new book out on innovation;
- Victoria Hewson is head of Regulatory Affairs at the IEA and author of Rules Britannia;
- Matthew Lesh is Head of Research at the Adam Smith Institute (And he’s always publishing things too, the little swot—Ed.)
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Tax rises or tax cuts? How should the Western World rebuild and recover after the economic damage wrought by the virus and our own virus poles? Our panel included:
- Grover Norquist, founder of Americans for Tax Reform;
- John O’Connell, President of the World Taxpayers Association;
- Lord Peter Lilley, former Treasury minister and Cabinet minister;
- Madsen Pirie, President of the Adam Smith Institute
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Being economical with the facts is bad enough, but now China is showing its muscle in Hong Kong and around the South China Sea in general. What does that mean for us? Discussing it we had:
- Jonathan Ward, author of China’s Vision of Victory;
- Latika Bourke of the Sydney Morning Heraldand The Age;
- Juliet Samuel of the Daily Telegraph;
- John Macdonald, Head of Government Affairs at ASI.
All of our past lockdown webinars are available here and are uploaded each week.
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DONATE!
Many businesses have taken taxpayers’ money to tide them through the current crisis. But we haven’t. And we don’t intend to. Government (over)spending is already too high, and for our part, we’re doing the right thing, conserving our resources and working out innovative ways to do more with less.
Yes, we feared the impact of Covid-19 on our finances. But many of you have realised how much the world needs our critical voice at this time, and stepped in with donations. So if you are one of them—thanks from us all, we depend on our friends and supporters more than ever right now.
And if you, er, haven’t quite got round to it yet, don’t despair: it’s easy. Just click the button and bask in the glow of making a real difference at a crucial time.
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YOOF
Come spend a gap year with us! We are looking for up to two young students to work for up to a year with us as members of our dazzling team. One of this year’s gap-year duo, Charlie Paice, describes what it’s like here—a world of glitzy events, free drinks and the Westminster buzz, according to him, but I’d like to point out there’s researching information, writing articles and organising meetings too ( if we’re ever allowed to meet again in person by the Government— Ed.)! Competition is fierce, but read Charlie’s piece and give it a think.
Freedom Week 2020
This year’s Freedom Week will be unlike any before. (And that’s saying a lot—Ed.) Due to lockdown restrictions, we’ve opted to move this year’s event online. And as a consequence, we’ve extended our application period until the end of this month to give more of you who couldn’t make the physical event a chance to get involved! More details on the exact format to follow, but in the meantime you can still apply here.
Young Writer on Liberty
Congratulations to Amos Wollen, Simran Lakhotia and Tim Edwards for excelling in their Young Writer on Liberty 2020 entries! You can view the first of the winning entries on the madness of ‘veggie discs’ here, and keep your eyes on our blog as the rest are released in the coming days. Our winners all receive £250 prize money and one of them will be interning with us in the coming months to see the inner workings of the Adam Smith Institute first-hand.
Our friends at the Objective Standard Institute are running some slick new courses for students and young people. The goal is to teach young folks "principles and practices for living the happiest life possible and defending freedom on solid ground". They've even shared a discount code with us (enter PN30) to bring the cost down to $30.
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MEEJA
We’ve revamped our website to include a digital portal for these digital times. It includes our webinars, and Twitter feed, but also has a section of our media appearances—those that we can get recordings of, that is. You’ll find radio appearances and TV spots featuring all the best from the ASI staff.
But we’ll keep updating you here so you don’t miss a thing.
Our John Macdonald has found himself a fan club in the Daily Express. His comments on Brexit and Boris’ negotiating stance appeared in no fewer than 5 different articles. His comments also appeared in Brinkwire and the International Finance Review (popular guy! - Ed.)
With the news that government spending is likely to hit £1 trillion this year (I hope you were sitting down - Ed.), Matt Kicoyne has been sure to caution against a state of such gargantuan size in The Telegraph. He also joined John with comments about Brexit in yet another Daily Express article.
You may have heard of Project Birch, the Government’s plan to bail out “strategically important companies”. For too many, this will sound like altruistic good government. To you though good capitalist reader, it will sound like it does to us: picking winners and propping up losers. We made sure to say so in The Telegraph and CapX.
And don’t worry, we haven’t stopped banging on about the bureaucratic mess of a system which has bungled the coronavirus response. Matthew Lesh is in The Telegraph on the bungling of testing and track and trace, and our paper on the necessary economic recovery was mentioned by our friend Daniel Hannan in The Sunday Telegraph.
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SHUFFLING ELECTRONS
On the ASI superblog
Paying for social care: Very soon we’re producing a report on social care that explains why the whole system is so chaotic that simply throwing more money at it won’t fix it. Nor will making it free like NHS healthcare, partly because there are 400,000 folk in care and nursing homes, which is twice the number in NHS beds. And getting those homes up to modern standards won’t be cheap.
Oz-style health co-payments: Celebrity doc Laurence Gerlis of SameDayDoctor extols the virtues of Australia’s mixed public-private healthcare system. There, you can see a GP no bother by paying a (subsidised) fee or with a free appointment. And you get access to high quality privately provided healthcare, no matter how rich or poor you are. Recently, the private sector gave up its hospital beds to give Covid-19 capacity to the NHS. Why don’t we turn that into a set of permanent partnerships?
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“The priority should be ensuring that everyone has access to a minimum standard of healthcare—not that everyone has access to the same, but lower, level of care.”
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Supermarkets and success: A lot of people are saying that we need to build up stocks of PPE, spare capacity in ICUs, and extra nurses and doctors so that future pandemics can be coped with. Close, but no cigar, says Tim Worstall. The most successful part of the economy in the last few weeks has been the food retail sector. They don’t keep surplus stock they don’t need, but they are generally able to get it when they need it—when worried hordes are stripping the shelves, for instance. That’s because supermarkets are highly flexible and competitive. Unlike our national healthcare system.
Ditch the quangocracy: ASI Fellow and former FTSE-100 Finance Director Tim Ambler reviews the sad experience of government grants aimed at growing business, the bureaucracy that administers them, and the tick-box culture that strangles any idea of commercial value. The best way for these quangos to help business, he concludes, is to close themselves down.
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MUSING AND AMUSING
How members of the ASI team are keeping (mostly) sane during lockdown
Morgan has taken to rewatching Chernobyl the award-winning mini-series which dramatises the events before, during, and after the nuclear disaster. It’s well worth a watch—for the writing, the acting, and the reminder that communist Russia did whatever they could to save their reputation, even at the cost of thousands of lives.
Daniel got excited about the recent SpaceX launch and rewatched The Martian, which sees Matt Damon’s character stranded on the Red Planet. Thankfully he also happens to be one of the world’s best botanists (Daniel or Matt Damon? The former does have a keen interest in cannabis policy... - Ed.) He’s also been reading through some of SlateStarCodex’s excellent ‘Adversarial Collaboration’ essays, which see two people who disagree on a topic trying to write one piece that fairly summarises both of their viewpoints.
To cure her travel bug, Julia has been reading William D. Phillips Jr and Carla Rahn Phillips' 'A Concise History of Spain'. She has only reached 711 AD so no spoilers, please.
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AND I QUOTE...
Just in case you thought we’re going to need higher taxes to revive the economy:
We contend that for a nation to try to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket and trying to lift himself up by the handle.
—Winston S Churchill
Bye,
E
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