IN THIS BULLETIN:
- A broken home — Why the Home Office is unfit for purpose, and how to fix it
- Corporate confusion — Why Corporation Tax is a thoroughly damaging tax
- Reaching young people — One of the best things we do. You should support it.
BUT FIRST...
It could be worse, I suppose. Things are just as bad in France, with the added misery that you are in France. Not that you could get there, because Heathrow is apparently straining under a baggage mountain. Or maybe it’s an incompetence mountain. Meanwhile the trains are on strike and oil protestors are gluing themselves to the motorway while the police make them a nice cup of tea.
A bison has been born in the UK for the first time in 6,000 years. Also on the wildlife front, former Health Secretary Matt Something has been suspended for appearing in I’m a Celebrity—Get Me Out of Here! Which is odd, because ‘Get Me Out of Here!’ is exactly what most Tory MPs seem to be wailing right now, particularly Chancellor Jeremy Whatsit as he stares into the black hole and sees Rishi still digging.
On second thoughts, maybe it is worse. Collins Dictionary’s word of the year is Permacrisis, which about sums up life now, and No.1 in the ‘Most Popular Articles’ section of The Week is ‘Are we heading for World War Three?’ Well, it would clear the air, I suppose.
But I digress...
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Research
A Broken Home (What deranged person thinks up these titles?) Our latest report, by Henry Hill, says the home office is dysfunctional and should be split in twain — immigration, and security. The latter crew can focus on fixing the fuzz, while the former can focus on the small boats (and maybe sort out fiascos such as the passport backlog).
The final installments in our review of government departments—authored by the tenacious Tim Ambler—are out now. We can trim the fat from the Department for Health to the tune of over 11,000 civil servants and arrest the steady growth of Defra by closing, merging, privatising and more.
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Events
What’s next for UK economic policy?
Utter disaster, you might think, along with most of the Great British Public. So we invited US economist Dan Mitchell, head of the Center for Freedom and Prosperity, to give us an outside perspective. I’m not sure he was impressed by the amount of either freedom or prosperity he found in the UK, but he outlined some pro-growth ideas that might well get the economy moving again without throwing everyone into a tizz.
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This week our Next Generation group welcomed free wine The Spectator’s Diary Editor James Heale, co-author of Out of the Blue: The inside story of the unexpected rise and rapid fall of Liz Truss. His riveting speech on being a front-row observer to the drama of recent weeks was to be expected—James being well-trained in speaking (And drinking!—Ed.) at our annual Freedom Week summer school a few years ago.
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SUPPORT OUR WORK WITH YOUNG PEOPLE
One of the great benefits of consistently meeting young people, engaging them in the principles of social and economic freedom, bringing them on, helping them get college places and influential jobs afterwards — as we have done for over 30 years — is that you end up with friends in high places.
For instance, one of the first students that we had at one of our one-week Cambridge seminars has just been knighted after a prominent career in Parliament, and he’s not the first to be. And there are newspaper and media editors and many others who count us as friends because we helped them well before they were famous. Quite a few of our Next Generation Group are now special advisers to ministers in the new administration, and keen to take up our ideas.
This work continues: right now, for example, we have taken on two gap-year interns, Eddie (from Leeds) and Sofia (from Manchester) and they’ve already organised events with all sorts of important people and written their first pieces for us. Soon they will learn how to tell troublesome politicians to get lost and all sorts of other useful skills. It’s a life-changing opportunity for them, but it’s only possible with your support. Please contribute whatever you can (and a bit more) to support these talented youngsters and all the other work we do to inform, help and change the outlook of the next generation.
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I’m delighted to see that the British Nationals Overseas scheme has officially been opened up to young Hong-Kongers. We’ve worked on and wrote about that idea for several years, so that’s a big win for us.
We’ve suggested that the Home Office should be split in two (I’d recommend it be split asunder—Ed.) as it’s pretty dysfunctional right now (What in Whitehall isn’t?—Ed.). It sparked plenty of coverage, including the Daily Mail, the Independent, the Telegraph’s daily politics blog and Chopper’s Politics newsletter. Report author Henry Hill wrote about it for the Daily Express, the Telegraph, the New Statesman, and ConservativeHome, and appeared on GBNews and Times Radio. Elsewhere, Emily wrote about it for Reaction, ASI intern Sofia Risino made her debut in 1828UK and Morgan was on TalkTV. Phew!
Emily was also in the Scottish Sun on the economic illiteracy of Sturgeon’s rent freezes, and in Guido Fawkes and the Telegraph on Jeremy Hunt’s budget backtracking. John was on Times Radio to discuss the future of the Conservative Party. Morgan was in CapX calling for a review of our tax system. Daniel was in The Sunday Times on cutting marginal tax rates, City AM on calls for more windfall taxes, the Daily Mail on demands for higher taxes on alcohol and on GBNews discussing the Home Office’s Rwanda plan.
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SUPERBLOG
As I say, our gap year interns aren’t chained to the photocopier, we make them a full part of the team. And as such, they have to write things, appear in the media, tell ministers they’re barking and all that sort of stuff. And now they have public pieces on the ASI superblog. Eddie’s is here and Sofia’s is here. Pretty good, huh?
Tim Worstall, meanwhile, has been busy too. He’s taken on Kit Malthouse’s comment that companies simply pass corporation tax rises on to consumers through higher prices — which, says Tim, just ain’t true. You can only raise prices if you dare, and when you do, competitors will pounce. So who pays? Well, it might be company bosses, but it's a big world and more of that bunch will decide to invest in cheaper places than the UK. The other payers are workers — and there is good economic research to suggest that the wage loss to workers as a result of corporation taxes is actually greater than the revenue the tax raises.
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It’s communism, Jim, but not as we know it
A remarkable number of young people, and quite a few deluded oldies, think that communism is the bee’s knees. We’re about to disillusion them with our film on the real history of communism. It’s in production right now and we’ll be releasing the trailer at the end of the month. I’ve already seen some stills from the production and it’s sensational. We’ve chosen young producers whom we have worked with before, and who know how to give the material an edge that makes it attractive and accessible to young people in particular.
It’s broadcast quality, so we’ve already been talking to distributors and we are getting some very positive feedback on TV stations — not just here but round the globe — who are likely to show it. We’ve fully funded the film, but we still need funds to push it out there, and to break it into teaching segments so that it can be used in classrooms. I’m hoping you will help. It’s a really important project, and we need to educate our youth and the wider public on how badly communism went wrong and how it is always going to be like that.
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KNOW SOMEONE WHO MIGHT BE INTERESTED IN OUR E-BULLETIN?
SEND THEM THE LINK BELOW!
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AND I QUOTE...
I scanned my notebook (that means something else to us pre-internet fossils) for suitable quotes about the present situation. I quickly turned to D, for ‘disaster’ and found this:
"The worst evils which mankind has ever had to endure were inflicted by bad government. The state can and often has been, in the course of history, the main source of mischief and disaster. "
— Ludwig von Mises.
Well, quite.
Bye,
e
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