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
