Wait, that's good sun protection!

[link removed]

It’s really too hot to read (or edit––Ed.) a boring newsletter. So you struck paydirt with this one.

In this bulletin:
* CUTTING BACK WHITEHALL. How to get eye-watering headcount reductions with no loss of function.
* SCHOOLS, STUDENTS, SEMINARS. All sorts of stuff going on, really.
* SMILE. How you can support us as you shop. Woohoo!

BUT FIRST...

Here in sunny Westminster, two MPs were kicked out for disrupting Prime Minister’s Questions. (A good start: only 648 to go.) Boris has of course had to resign for telling lies and putting scumbags on the payroll. (Mind you, where would we be if all lying politicians were forced to resign? And how many ministers would we have if scumbags were excluded?) Maybe one day we’ll wake up and discover that the whole Boris episode was just a hoax account on Twitter.

Anyway, there’s now an election on and all the candidates are busily stabbing each other in the front. Or even stabbing themselves in the front, which is why Theresa May was the last person standing back in 2016. Amusingly, Michael Gove was asked if he was a snake but said he wasn’t (How do you know he wasn’t speaking with a forked tongue––Ed.)

The next step is that there will be various voting rounds in which some candidates will be eliminated. Maybe a bit Soviet, but I’m content to see most MPs (figuratively) eliminated. And if they’re true to form, they’ll end up with the millionaire ex-banker who got us into this pickle in the first place.

In business news, Elon Musk has withdrawn his bid for Twitter. (Perhaps he realised he could read all the Tweets for free.) And after Netflix pulled out of Russia, subscribers there are suing the broadcaster for loss of service. (Funny they never did that when the BBC got taken off their screens.)

But I digress…


** PUT A SMILE ON OUR FACES
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You can now give to our research as you shop with Amazon Smile. Just go tosmile.amazon.co.uk on your desktop or mobile phone browser. Log in with your Amazon account (or create a new account). Select Adam Smith Research Trust as the good cause you would like to give to. And bookmark the Amazon Smile link on your browser. Then, next time you go to buy something on Amazon, shop through the Smile link and Amazon will make a donation to our work - at no extra cost to you!

Use Amazon Smile here ([link removed]) .


** REPORTS
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We’ve taken the government at its word (Never a wise policy, but still—Ed.) and have embarked on a series of reports by management consultant Tim Ambler, showing how we could lose headcount in Whitehall with no discernible loss of service to the public. In fact, we identify savings many times larger than the government’s initial target. That’s because so many ministries have grown and spread over time, without any clear objectives, and with endless duplication on the way. Here is a taster of the first four in the series.

Culture Wars: Reforming the Department for Culture, Media and Sports ([link removed]) . The behemoth of DCMS employs over 35,000 people once you include the 19,000 staff at the BBC, and spends nearly £10 billion a year. Shockingly, we’re not sure all of that staff and spending is employed in the most efficient manner. Many of its responsibilities would be more at home in other departments and plenty of its 45 arm’s length bodies are ripe for simplification.

Brits Abroad: Reforming the Foreign Office ([link removed]) . As you can tell from its title, the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office has just growed and growed. It needs to be pared back and brought into line with the UK’s current and real role in the world. It has no coherent vision or clear lines of communication. There is no transparency about how staff are allocated. It needs to look more to the UK’s trading interests and focus development aid where it is really needed.

Count Down: Reforming the Cabinet Office ([link removed]) . We find the Cabinet Office complex, confused, unwieldy and unclear about what it spends money on or even how many people it employs. Lots of its functions should be moved to other ministries, while its agencies and quangos should mostly be privatised, closed or integrated into the main core staff. We could reduce the department’s head count by 1,000 with these reforms alone.

Report Card: Reforming the Department of Education ([link removed]) . It has to be an ‘F’ grade. This ministry is stuffed full of quangos and agencies that step on each others’ feet. A lot of them duplicate what the centre should be doing. And the way that the department hands out money to schools needs serious simplification. Do all that, and you could empty the grand edifice across the road from us in Great Smith Street by a third of its staff.


** MOVIE, MOVIE
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How do you identify a communist? Well, it’s someone who reads Marx and Lenin. And how do you identify an anti-communist? Simple, it’s someone who understands Marx and Lenin.

Well, we’re working hard to make our projected educational documentary on the reality of communism happen. With so many people who should know better calling themselves Marxists (and being indulged as commentators on the BBC), and so many students who think the system that killed around 100 million people is really cool, we want to tell the story of how communism really (and always) turns out, and why. Watch this space for updates. And in the meantime, if you would like to support the venture financially…you know what to do!
Donate to the Adam Smith Research Trust ([link removed])

This month’s The Next Generation meeting was fun. The speaker was to have been the Health Secretary Sajid Javid, but he resigned five minutes into the start of the event. Didn’t mind him resigning so much, but not then showing up… well, I supposed he had other things on his mind. Probably just as well though, because we’d have had the media fifteen deep parked outside the front door, and I don’t know that we have that many teacups….

Freedom Week. Our annual boot camp for gifted young freedom-minded students, which we run with the Institute of Economic Affairs, is back again in August. We’re looking forward to welcoming the next crop of students to Cambridge (as long as the striking train staff allow––Ed.) where they’ll experience lectures, debate in groups, and even have a little fun. Stay tuned for updates on how the week goes.

Skools visits. The team, including me, spent a day this week with the sixth form economics and politics students at Wilson’s School in the distant wilds of south London — and it was good to be back. We covered a wide range of topics — immigration, tax, intergenerational unfairness, drugs policy, how politics messes up economics and even a bit on universities and careers. All stuff they don’t get in the textbooks. Some nice thank-yous from the kids — and the teachers — made it all worthwhile. If you would like us to bring a seminar to your school, just ask Daniel at [email protected] (mailto:[email protected]?subject=ISOS%20School%20Visit) .


** CATCH UP WITH OUR RECENT SEMINARS
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On YouTube and Googly stuff and probably lots of other interweb gizmos, you can catch up with ASI events even if you didn’t manage to get there in person. Our ex-employee and now Mercatus Centre Senior Fellow Adam Thierer, for example, told us ([link removed]) what the rules on artificial intelligence should be if we really want to make it work for us rather than thwarting innovation in an EU sort of fashion. And superstar economic historian Deirdre McCloskey outlined ([link removed]) how what created the Great Enrichment of the nineteenth century was not investment, exploitation or whatever, but the power of the human mind. A power that was unleashed then and which we need to unleash again.

[link removed]
Governing Artificial Intelligence with Adam Thierer

[link removed]
How Liberty Made the Modern World with Deirdre McCloskey

If you can bother to wade through the media storm around the leadership contest you might have seen us about!

I was in CapX ([link removed]) urging Boris to avoid being protectionist a la Trump. Hopefully [insert new PM here] will still heed my advice. Emily Fielder also made a similar case in CapX ([link removed]) on why buying British won’t help consumers. Hopefully [insert new Chancellor here] will listen to her! And rounding out the triad of very-quickly-dated CapX articles, Morgan Schondelmeier wrote a wish list ([link removed]) for the current Chancellor Nadhim Zahawi. But considering we don’t know who will be Chancellor in a few weeks, it’s more of a general trashing of ‘Treasury Brain’.

Speaking of Treasury Brain, we also targeted ‘Cabinet Office Brain’ with our new report by ASI senior fellow Tim Ambler. The report featured in Politico’s London Influence newsletter, and Daniel Pryor wrote an explainer for CapX ([link removed]) and featured on Times Radio ([link removed]) .

And in miscellaneous news, Morgan praised telehealth solutions as a way to free up GP time for more in person appointments for the Daily Mail ([link removed]) and Dan commented on attitudes towards cannabis legalisation for Politics.co.uk ([link removed]) .


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** AND I QUOTE...
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There’s been lots of talk around Westminster about inflation and debt. Twas ever thus. The two worst decisions in the last 30,000 years were to let governments borrow money and to put them in charge of the currency.

This from the American founding father, Thomas Jefferson:

And I sincerely believe with you, that banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies; & that the principle of spending money to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding, is but swindling futurity on a large scale.

When you remember that, recall that you are now ‘futurity’.

Bye,

e

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