June Newsletter: Standing Stones and Supercomputers
Dear friends,
Happy Summer Solstice!
And happy birthday to our favourite pagan and head of special projects, Andrew Bennett. You can see him tweeting about building durable state capacity for a country’s long term strategic interests here and fawning over standing stones here. Summer is upon us, and so is another round of papers, events, and wins for British progress.
💫What we’ve been up to
Our Chief Economist Pedro serves up two riveting reads to accompany your weekend coffee…
ISA & pension reform: Why forced investment is not real investment
Compelling British households to invest in British assets risks undermining their pensions without improving the economy. Creating real investment opportunities requires addressing the barriers currently stopping UK companies from being attractive to investors. Read it here.The Case for Abundance: Why Demand Suppression Won’t Fix the Cost of Living
The composition of inflation means that the cost of living is more acute for ordinary households. Solving this requires abundance: particularly in the supply of housing and energy. Read it here.Tract: We relaunched Tracts Scout - a brilliant tool to visualise planning data across the country. We’re really looking forward to keeping this amazing tool going, and we’ll be adding more data soon.
Mini Research Infrastructure: Ben built a small home server out of a Raspberry Pi 5, and downloaded the OpenAlex snapshot: a database of detailed information on more than 250 million+ scientific research articles, including funder and citation information. Reach out if you have any ideas for tools or analytical products!
🎟️ Upcoming events
A Summer of Progress: the Centre for British Progress Rooftop Party
We’re delighted to be hosting a special summer evening reception on the rooftop of our building, overlooking the river and the best city in the world. Join us for an evening of progress and prosecco, in the company of Parliamentarians, policy thinkers, and innovators working to shape a brighter, more forward-looking future for Britain.
Request to join here →The Intelligence Explosion: A Debate
There has been growing discussion on the West Coast about the possibility of making much faster progress in AI by automating the research pipeline. Our fellow Jack Wiseman is bringing together Tyler Cowen, Michael Webb, Tom Davidson, and Connor Leahy to debate the likelihood of this, and its possible effects.
Request to join the event →Labour Digital conference
David is speaking at Labour Digital’s conference on 30 June, assessing the new Government’s technology policy one year on.
🏗️ In other news…
How has Britain progressed in June?
We are building nuclear energy again. The Government has committed £14.2bn to Sizewell C and given the go-ahead for Rolls Royce to build Small Modular Reactors – which could lower energy bills and provide baseload power for new data centres.
This time next year, you could be making your daily commute in a driverless taxi. The government has given the go-ahead for trials to begin next spring. British companies Wayve and Oxa are pioneering autonomous technology, which could create 38,000 British jobs.
We’re also building supercomputers! Labour has relaunched the Edinburgh supercomputer project, committing £750m to Britain's most powerful computer, as part of a wider £86 billion science & tech boost.
The Centre for British Progress Bookshelf
Here's what we’ve been pondering in the sun :
The birthday boy recommends The Reenchanted World: On finding mystery in the digital age, by Karl Ove Knausgaard. It’s a meditation on his alienation from nature, the role of technology in mediating reality, and his return to gardening and other rituals – not as an escape from the digital, but as an intentional way to reconnect with the enchanted world. Characteristically mystical from Andrew.
An oldie but a goodie from Pedro, who recommends: Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy by Joseph Schumpeter – deeply relevant today for its explanation of how liberal democratic success creates the conditions for bureaucratic institutions (and professional elites) to drift toward technocratic planning. Worth a read for its framework analysing the erosion of democratic trust, and the growing scepticism of markets in many contemporary societies.
John recommends Get In — the inside story of Labour under Starmer. How did Labour go from electoral collapse to vote-winning machine?
Julia is reading Wind, Sand and Stars by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry: a short autobiographical account of being an aviator in the early 20th century and an exploration of freedom, self-actualisation, and courage.
David suggests How Big Things Get Done. Why do some infrastructure projects succeed, while others don’t? And what does it take to build well at scale?
And finally, Ben recommends The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn, by Richard Hamming – full of absolute gold dust on how to approach problems clearly, ambitiously, and usefully, from one of the 20th century’s most confident minds. Part-biography, part-case study, part-truth-telling - Ben says it absolutely sucks you in.
As always, thanks for reading — and we hope to see you in the London sun at our first summer party.
(perhaps a little too) warmly 🌞
The Centre for British Progress Team
…. Is there a July postcard?…
I have just watched a great interview with Julia and Tom from IEA on their podcast at end of June last. I was very taken with the idea of a ‘reset’ on policy. I’m all for that! All our politicians and their policy’s have become too complicated and converted. They get involved because they want to try and control policy whereas, I can see that Julia is looking for a better policy snd a better outcome. But all political policy’s and deductions stand or fall in their ability to create tax revenue sufficient for their needs. So I’m afraid it all comes back to money. Julia, you are so right! Your mission statement described our hold on the best of the past and our present inability to make better whilst placing our future generations in the noose of our debts! Our ability to put this right is floundering and it’s now getting critical. So I would like to take a shot at what can be done with a reset. Thatcher took away exchange control regulations, in the hope money would flood in! But whether it did or not is argumentative. But what we have is a near £3,000,000,000,000.00 trillion pound debt! So it hasn’t worked! I have lived and worked through the first post war recession of the oil crisis in 1974. We haven’t recovered since! We’ve been in the same recession since in varying degrees since. So I pondered this for many years and have, I think come to the conclusion we need to reset. Firstly, we need to make a framework that supplies the tax triggering pot from which we all earn and pay our taxes, with the money it needs! At the same time taking away the present hope and pray formula for the money we all need. The only good thing out of Brexit is our now ability to reinstate exchange controls. Stop money leaving the UK. Good dnd services can flow, just not the money itself. We can for the first time in monetary history make all money move and return to the tax paying pot in a set time by using the digital bank accounts we all now have to have! Even pensioners have to have a bank account! My proposal is to put a ‘spend by date’ on all money electronically! Take away immediately the unknown quantity in our monetary equation that is supply! In one fell swoop we can make everyone SPEND their hard earned income back in a set time, say a month. Or have it taken by the exchequer! It’s no good hanging on to money as it does no one any good. Even foreigners must have a UK bank and card to sell here! And they must spend here in the same time frame! In one fell swoop we take away hope and replace it with certainty. Without SPENDING we can’t run an economy properly. At present any money held and not spent is idle and useless! It triggers no automatic flow into our tax triggering economy and it triggers no tax! None!! There lies our problem! If that were to be the framework for a reset then, that tsunami of flow will automatically fill the coffers of the nation let alone the exchequer! If will mean higher benefits and pensions. Higher wages for the incentive to work! It could mean a proper gap between non work snd work to show work pays. And irony of irony’s it rill mean the rich will be richer! Just not with money itself! Richer from the goods and services they too can buy more of! I also predict a new tax regime, just Vat! We won’t need anything else if all 19 trillion pounds is being spent every month! I think it would be autonomous, perpetual and streamline government who can concentrate on how they spend their new found wealth! Then dnd only then can you and your team Julia, get to grips with that conundrum! How to make exchange of work value be fair and democratic. Whilst letting the market work out the rest! What do you think? I’d love to debate it with you all!