On YIMBY Pod this week:

• We try to uncover the truth about the electricity interconnection that was supposedly diverted by Dobby’s grave.

• And we speak to London Assembly Member Neil Garratt about his fantastic London travel times map, and his Euston, we have a problem: Mind the funding gap report on why infrastructure is so damn expensive.

The Energy Revolution podcast we talk about is here.

Dan Davies’s post about Dobby’s grave is here. Chris Curtis’s is here.

This week James made the case for why the AI ‘bubble’ narrative might be nonsense.

Martin’s piece on ‘picky bits’ and national decline is here, and his YouTube channel is here.

Don’t forget to tell your friends about the pod – and leave us a nice review on Apple Podcasts!

YIMBY Pod is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, Substack and hopefully wherever you get your podcasts!

You can find James on Bluesky here, and Martin here.

POD! On YIMBY Pod this week, Martin and I dig into Andy Burnham’s devolution agenda, talking about integrated transport ticketing, making the lines on the map more consistent, and much more. Then we speak to Jamie Airnes from Cornish Lithium about his attempt to turn Cornwall into a lithium superpower. Listen here, or wherever you get your pods!

If you’re a smart opinion-haver on the internet, there’s one position on AI you can hold where you can’t really go wrong.

AI, you tell everyone, isn’t snake-oil, like the loudest detractors claim. The people who cling on to phrases like “fancy autocomplete” and “stochastic parrots” are clearly missing the bigger picture at this point. According to OpenAI, a billion people use ChatGPT at least once a month. AI is clearly doing something useful for them.

However, having conceded this, you’re supposed to turn and caveat your view, pointing out that despite this, it can still be the case that the current AI moment is a bubble. The unprecedented capital investment, which has now reportedly topped $1 trillion since early 2023, will ultimately prove unsustainable.

There are plenty of weird-looking, circular-ish deals that would seem to evidence this too. For example, last September Nvidia pledged to invest up to $100bn in OpenAI – and in return OpenAI pledged to use the cash to buy huge numbers of Nvidia chips. And last November, Microsoft and Nvidia pledged to invest up to $15bn into Anthropic, in exchange for the company behind Claude committing to spend $30bn on Microsoft Azure cloud computing capacity that uses Nvidia chips.

There are other oddities too. In recent days, Nvidia has announced a new plan to work with institutional investors like pension funds to invest in chips as a new asset class.

So I can understand why seeing this, it might feel as though something strange is going on – and that it feels like at some point, the bubble is going to have to burst.

And as a narrative, this makes total sense. After all, this is the exact story of the original dot-com crash. The underlying ‘internet’ technology was far from worthless, but billions of dollars were wiped out nonetheless.

Anyway, this is all to say that I think the bubble hypothesis is a completely reasonable analysis of the current situation. It might even be correct. I am very open to the idea that this wildly hyped new technology might not work out in the short to medium term, as this is a reasonable default assumption, similar to predicting that Spain will do well in a World Cup, or that a Christopher Nolan film will receive positive reviews.

But here’s the thing that’s awkward to admit. The more I see of what AI is now capable of, and the more I experience these new capabilities for myself, the more I’m sympathetic to the Silicon Valley perspective that this is not a bubble – that this technology is really – rapidly – changing everything. And that, despite the ungodly sums of money spent fabricating chips and pouring concrete to build data centres, there might not be a bubble at all.

So this week, I thought I’d explain how I’ve ended up here – and make the bull case for the AI investment boom, and explain why the bubble explanation might not be true.

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POD! On YIMBY Pod this week, Martin and I dig into Andy Burnham’s devolution agenda, talking about integrated transport ticketing, making the lines on the map more consistent, and much more. Then we speak to Jamie Airnes from Cornish Lithium about his attempt to turn Cornwall into a lithium superpower. Listen here, or wherever you get your pods!

Hello! It’s time for Odds and Ends, your semi-regular round-up of the most interesting links I’ve seen this week, plus some shorter takes.

This week, you’ll have to indulge me as I’m going to tell you about an interesting place I visited recently – though I think you’ll find it interesting. Then we’ve got some fun and scary links on what’s going on in AI – and whether you like it or not, I’m going to tell you what I think of the Jason Arday controversy.

Now let’s get started!

My trip to Europe’s craziest border

Every so often someone will confuse me and Jonn Elledge. I can sort-of see why1 – we both write nerdy Substacks that often touch upon similar topics, especially as Jonn is one of the people who radicalised me on housing back when he was the editor of CityMetric.

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On YIMBY Pod this week:

• We talk about Andy Burnham’s big plans to devolve power across the country – and focus on the most important issues, like integrated transport ticketing and whether or not the boundary lines are consistent.

• And we speak to Jamie Airnes, CEO of Cornish Lithium, about his ambitious plan to make Cornwall central to the battery supply chain.

This week James wrote about why people are arguing about Net Zero badly – and what the real debate over the policy is about.

Martin’s piece on ‘picky bits’ and national decline is here, and his YouTube channel is here.

Don’t forget to tell your friends about the pod – and leave us a nice review on Apple Podcasts!

YIMBY Pod is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, Substack and hopefully wherever you get your podcasts!

You can find James on Bluesky here, and Martin here.

POD! On YIMBY Pod this week, Martin and I tell the respective stories of why we both decided to get solar recently – and Martin risks cancellation with his opinions on electric cars. Then we speak to Ben Garratt from Logistics UK about why, well, logistics, is an underrated part of getting Britain growing. Listen here or wherever you get your pods!

“Net zero scepticism is not climate-change denial,” wrote Kemi Badenoch at the end of last week, in a blog post.

It was in response to a frankly surprising column by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard1 in the Telegraph, criticising her purge of prospective Conservative candidates who don’t share her desire to repeal the Climate Change Act, and other measures that have been put in place to tackle climate change.

Leaving aside the fact that ‘prospective Conservative candidate’ sounds like a position about as enviable as Trump Administration ethics advisor, it was a striking moment. Not just because it barred well-known figures like former cabinet minister Michael Green Grant Shapps from standing for the party, but because it seems like the end of an era.

Wherever the party goes now, it seems a long way from David Cameron’s ‘hug a husky’ moment, Theresa May’s passage of the 2050 Net Zero target into law, and Boris Johnson hosting the COP climate change summit in Glasgow.

Needless to say, then, Badenoch’s response has proved extremely controversial. Many people on my timeline were quick to jump in, snarking at Badenoch for questioning the wisdom of Net Zero during a historic heatwave, when the stakes of the climate change debate have been made clear by nature itself.

But there was something that bothered me about the response on my half of the political spectrum. I’m worried that many people on my side – the lefty side – aren’t quite grasping the contours of the debate. Because it’s much easier to argue about the principle of Net Zero, where the answer is unambiguous – obviously we should decarbonise – than it is to engage with the actual policy choices that Badenoch is disputing.

Because here’s the worst thing about Badenoch’s Net Zero criticism: she might have a point.

Now, I’m not saying that I agree with her diagnosis, or her prescription. But what’s clear is that if you take Net Zero seriously, under the high-level argument about principles there are actually some difficult trade-offs we need to navigate.

So let’s dig in and find out what they are.

If you like nerdy stuff like this, support my work by subscribing for free:

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The complexity of energy pricing

The reason the Net Zero debate often defaults back to abstract principles is that understanding energy pricing is unbelievably complicated. But let’s run through some of the basics to make sure we’re all on the same page.2

First, the price of electricity is always changing and is pretty volatile. In principle, the price is set by the amount of energy being supplied in the system and how much demand there is for that energy at any one time.

Secondly, because the plug sockets in your house don’t care whether the electricity came from a gas plant, wind turbines or a solar farm, the cost of the energy that reaches your home is heavily influenced by the price of power needed to meet demand at any given moment – which is often gas. This means that even if gas is only supplying 14.6% of the grid – as it is right now at the time of writing – if gas prices rise or fall, it also influences how much money renewable suppliers can earn selling electricity they have generated too.

The consequence of this is that it makes it pretty difficult if you’re an investor thinking of building, say, a wind farm. If you put millions of pounds into building turbines, whether you make back your money is basically entirely out of your control – it depends on what happens with gas. So why risk putting up the cash to build the turbines in the first place?

This problem is why during the Coalition years, the government started a scheme called Contracts for Difference (CfD). The idea was that the government holds a reverse auction where renewable developers bid for contracts guaranteeing a fixed “strike price” for the electricity their project generates.

The developer then still sells their electricity to the wholesale market like normal, but if the market price for their energy is £60/MWh, and their agreed strike price is £90/MWh, the CfD makes up the £30 difference. And what’s smart is that the contracts also work in reverse. If the market price rises above the agreed strike price, the generator pays back the difference.

In the years since, this scheme has basically been wildly successful in supporting Britain’s energy transition. Our electricity is now over 50% renewable. It’s a genuinely huge transformation of Britain’s energy system that has taken place.

But the CfD system does have certain trade-offs embedded within it.

Top-up cash

The benefit of CfDs is that they take the risk away from the renewable generators, which is good for building out renewables. But one consequence of them is that the corresponding gains and losses have to be accounted for elsewhere in the energy system.

To continue the example from above, who is paying the extra £30 to top-up what the generator gets paid, if the market price is only £60/MWh? If the generator was promised £90/MWh, the extra cash has to come from somewhere.

So in the short term, the top-up cash to make up the difference is paid by energy suppliers like British Gas and Octopus, who are charged a levy on the energy they buy from generators. And this – usually – leads to an increase in energy bills as the costs are passed on to consumers.3

For example, the Q3 price levy for this year has been set at £10.559/MWh – or just over a penny per kWh. So for a typical household using 2,500kWh of electricity every year, that works out at around an extra £26 per year.

Ed’s gamble

I know what you’re thinking - £26 per year isn’t that much money. So why did so many people get so mad at Ed Miliband when he was Energy Secretary?4

Ignoring the hysterical know-nothing frothing, the serious critique is that he’s basically placed a big bet that might not pay off, and that his choices in his previous job have stored up more energy bill pain at a time when there’s already a cost of living crisis.

This is because so far any levy that has increased energy bills so far is actually a consequence of earlier CfD auctions – those made under previous Conservative governments. The real-world impact of Ed’s choices hasn’t actually been felt yet.

So what exactly did he do? When he took office in July 2024, he inherited the sixth round of CfD allocations, known as AR6, and he chose to pile in an extra £530m to projects representing 9.65GW of generation capacity, much more than had been planned by the Tories.

Then, between August last year and February, the seventh allocation round took place – AR7. This increased the offshore wind budget by £890m, taking it to £1.79bn, and increased the total guaranteed generation across all technologies to 14.7GW.

In other words, he’s been signing contracts that could conceivably lead to an even larger premium on energy bills in the future, depending on future wholesale energy prices.5

And because of his more aggressive approach, it’s also conceivable that the hit on bills could go higher still. CfD top-ups only pay for the cost of the energy generated, but we will also need to build more infrastructure to actually use it, such as new pylons and substations to take energy to where it is needed. And if we build more renewables more quickly, more supporting infrastructure will be needed more quickly too. So it will probably lead to an increase in standing charges on energy bills too.

Of course, all that said, it could turn out that Ed’s bet will pay off, and that bills won’t increase by all that much as a consequence of these choices. The start of the Iran war in the spring certainly makes his commitments during AR6 seem less crazy. Because if we’re now facing years of structurally higher energy prices, the wholesale price of energy will be higher – meaning fewer top-up fees that need paying and thus a lower levy. Which still won’t be great for bills in the short term, as the underlying cost of fossil fuels has shot up, but it will make the idea of more rapidly building out renewables seem smarter in the long term.

However, this is, ultimately, a bet that has been placed with some degree of uncertainty. And this leads us to something else worth noting about the downside risk if it doesn’t pay off. Which is that though we mostly think about energy costs in terms of household bills, the levy affects businesses too. And this means that any increase in bills could have a larger downstream economic impact in terms of competitiveness, productivity, investment and so on too.

Zero vs Cheap

So what is the real, serious debate at the heart of Net Zero? It’s not about the principle of Net Zero – but a question of speed.

When he was Energy Secretary, Ed Miliband chose to optimise for speed, in order to meet the Labour manifesto’s Clean Power 2030 commitment – which pledged to have a 95% Net Zero electric grid by the end of the decade.6

And as per the wildly complicated explanation above, what this essentially meant in practice was a commitment to front-loading more of the costs of decarbonising now, instead of spreading that commitment out over a longer period of time.

This is why the policy has been repeatedly attacked by the Shadow Energy Secretary, former YIMBY Pod guest Claire Coutinho. She instead argues that it is more important to optimise for making energy as cheap as possible – which implies a slower transition as it means fewer risky bets on CfDs, and fewer top-up fees put on energy bills.

And what I think is interesting about this debate is that there isn’t really a clean answer here.

On the one hand, if we optimise for ‘speed’, we can choose to decarbonise the grid quickly. This would increase bills in the short term, but it would pay off in the long term, when we would have more, cheaper, clean energy – not to mention the political benefits of a more resilient energy system that is less exposed to international turmoil. We’d also be setting an example internationally, and would further reduce Britain’s contribution to global emissions.

But on the other hand, if we optimise for ‘cheap’, we could help people with the cost of living in the short term, and reduce the cost burden on businesses – but at the cost of leaving us more exposed to Putin, and pumping more carbon into the atmosphere.

Details, not principles

At risk of giving you an unsatisfying conclusion, I think both sides of the debate make strong arguments. There are real trade-offs involved, and I say that even though I’m a solar panel guy who cares deeply about climate change and the principle of Net Zero.

But there are obvious challenges to the speed approach. For example, ultimately Britain’s actual contribution in terms of carbon emissions is tiny. We’re responsible for less than 1% of global emissions, so what we do with our grid doesn’t really matter all that much, whatever we do.

That’s also why I think Tony Blair is right that the most effective thing we can actually do is use our scientific and financial muscle to support India and China’s development needs by pushing them in a cleaner direction. What those two countries do is basically going to entirely determine whether the world mitigates climate change or not.

So if our scientists can, say, invent solar panels that are 1% more efficient and their innovation is deployed globally, that will matter far more than the exact proportion of renewable energy on our grid.

It’s also why – and I hate that I’ve reasoned myself to this view – I’m not that fussed if Andy Burnham decides to allow more North Sea drilling. The emissions impact would be small,7 and it would, more importantly, neutralise a dividing line between Labour and Reform, making it more likely Labour will be reelected and that we’ll actually still have people who believe climate change is real in power.8

But despite this, and though I am a staunch advocate of cheap energy abundance, I also want it to be clean. And that’s why I think the “cheap” advocates have a flaw in their argument.

Despite the current debate, I still haven’t really heard an argument from Kemi Badenoch or any other sceptic of the current policy about what a path to Net Zero actually looks like if we dump the current approach. Like, what should the revised timeline look like?

And this is why despite recognising the criticisms, I’m sympathetic to the fact that the Ed Miliband approach actually grapples with the need to decarbonise. If there is one iron rule of British politics, it is that politicians love to kick the can down the road – so is there not something to be said for actually doing something?

So even if we slow the Net Zero transition now because of our current economic woes, at what point will it ramp back up? This question matters, because if the world doesn’t mitigate climate change, that too will not be costless in terms of global population displacement, crop yields and increasingly catastrophic weather.

And this is ultimately why I think that despite the difficult trade-offs, on balance I’m on Team Speed. Well, perhaps more accurately Team Tony. But more importantly, instead of just snarking about abstract principles, I’m happy to admit that when you look at the details the choices become rather complicated.

Phew, you made it to the end! If you enjoy deep dives on policy and politics, then make sure you subscribe (for free) to get more like this in your inbox!

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On YIMBY Pod this week:

• We discuss why both of our respective households have pulled the trigger on getting solar panels installed – and we detail our experiences during the installation process.

• And we speak to Ben Garratt from Logistics UK about why getting goods from A to B is critical to a growing economy.

This week James totally failed to publish anything, but will have something landing early next week. In the meantime, his links newsletter has more on his solar journey.

Martin’s piece on ‘picky bits’ and national decline is here, and his YouTube channel is here.

Don’t forget to tell your friends about the pod – and leave us a nice review on Apple Podcasts!

YIMBY Pod is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube and hopefully wherever you get your podcasts!

You can find James on Bluesky here, and Martin here.

POD! On YIMBY Pod this week, Martin and I talk about Andy Burnham’s first week and the consequences for abundance issues we care about. And then we speak to Michael Dnes about his bold plan to build a new tunnel under the Peak District using dynamite. Listen here, or wherever you get your pods!

Hello! It’s time for Odds and Ends, your semi-regular round-up of the most interesting links I’ve seen recently, plus some shorter takes.

This time, I’m featuring:

• I reveal some very exciting news from my household

• My contribution to The Odyssey discourse

• The best attempt yet at making wave energy happen

• A mad alternative to air conditioning being taken inexplicably seriously

• Why Andy Burnham should still prioritise growth

• And how to make digging up roads less annoying

Now let’s get started!

Read more

On YIMBY Pod this week:

• James and Martin review Andy Burnham’s first policy and personnel moves – and ask whether Britain is really ready for a Northern Prime Minister.

• Then we speak to Michael Dnes about his big plan to solve one of Britain’s biggest transport bottlenecks… with dynamite.

You can find out more about the proposed Trans-Pennine Connect tunnel here, and on Michael’s fantastic Substack here.

The Centre for Cities report on fiscal devolution in England that Martin mentions is here.

This week James wrote about why he’s worried that Andy Burnham isn’t serious, and offered some broader takes on Burnham’s cabinet here.

Martin’s piece on ‘picky bits’ and national decline is here, and his YouTube channel is here.

Don’t forget to tell your friends about the pod – and leave us a nice review on Apple Podcasts!

YIMBY Pod is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube and hopefully wherever you get your podcasts!

You can find James on Bluesky here, and Martin here.

POD! On YIMBY Pod this week, a double-interview special. We talk to Guy Ward Jackson and Elizabeth Seger from the Tony Blair Institute about why they think Britain needs a state-funded open-source AI lab. And then Joe Hill from Re:State makes the case for rethinking the regulatory state. It’s good nerdy stuff, and the perfect savoury alternative to the Westminster personnel drama this week. Go have a listen!

Don’t forget to catch-up with my two other posts this week – I wrote about why I’m worried that Andy Burnham isn’t serious, and then a reaction pieces to some of his cabinet choices and the bizarre decision to exile a bunch of digital government functions to DCMS.

Hello! It’s time for Odds and Ends, your regular round-up for the most interesting links I’ve seen lately, plus some shorter takes. This time I’m featuring:

• Why my friend wants to dynamite the Peak District

• A smart analysis of Andy Burnham’s first policy moves

• How I’ve made an addictive mobile game that has a weird ethical quandary attached

• A tiny plane that cancels out turbulence

• My mildly contrarian take on smart glasses

• And an excellent new polling aggregator

Now let’s get started!

Read more

POD! On YIMBY Pod this week, a double-interview special. We talk to Guy Ward Jackson and Elizabeth Seger from the Tony Blair Institute about why they think Britain needs a state-funded open-source AI lab. And then Joe Hill from Re:State makes the case for rethinking the regulatory state. It’s good nerdy stuff, and the perfect savoury alternative to the Westminster personnel drama this week. Go have a listen!

Hello! It has finally happened – Andy Burnham is our new Prime Minister, and this means that you’ll be drowning in pieces about What It All Means.

I’m afraid I’m going to add another to the pile.

I’ve already written about my mild scepticism of Burnham, but I’m hoping I’ll be pleasantly surprised. So this time I thought I’d offer up four shorter takes looking at some of Burnham’s first decisions in office.

So read on to find out:

• Why breaking up the Department of Science, Innovation and Technology was a strange decision.

• My enthusiasm for the new AI minister (and what tempers it)

• Is the new Energy Secretary a NIMBY?

• How the Burnham government offers Angela Rayner an enormous opportunity for redemption (it’s nothing to do with the tax thing).

• And why the decisions Burnham has made so far point to (oh no) the possibility of an early election.

Now let’s get started!

The bizarre fate of the Government Digital Service

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On YIMBY Pod this week:

• Should the British government create an open source AI lab? We speak to Guy Ward-Jackson and Elizabeth Seger from the Tony Blair Institute.

• Is Britain’s regulatory system out of control? Re:state’s Joe Hill tells us what to do about it.

The TBI paper on open source AI is here, and Re:state’s paper on the ‘law of rule’ is here.

This week James wrote about how Britain is fixing it’s airspace problem, and also why he’s worried that Andy Burnham isn’t serious.

Martin’s piece on ‘picky bits’ and national decline is here, and his YouTube channel is here.

Don’t forget to tell your friends about the pod – and leave us a nice review on Apple Podcasts!

YIMBY Pod is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, Substack and hopefully wherever you get your podcasts!

You can find James on Bluesky here, and Martin here.

I really want to be optimistic about the start of the Andy Burnham era – but he’s not making it easy.

On paper, our new Prime Minister is a necessary correction for some of Keir Starmer’s most painful flaws. Unlike his predecessor, Burnham seems at ease in front of a camera. When he talks about his sincere love of football, he actually sounds like he means it.1

By wiping the slate clean with someone not tainted by the Ancien Régime, there’s an opportunity for the Labour Party to reset the story they are telling the electorate, now that Starmer’s huge victory in 2024 has turned sour. If the former Mayor of Manchester remains as popular as he is now, then Labour might stand a chance of winning a majority after the next election.

Most of the Labour people I speak to seem pretty happy about the change too. After months spent defending a terminally unpopular Prime Minister, one Labour-aligned commentator who regularly appears on TV told me the other day that the vibes felt good again.

However, as much as I would like to join in with the enthusiastic reception for the new PM, I can’t silence the nagging doubt in my mind – because almost everything Burnham has said and done since the Makerfield by-election has just seemed… not… great.

Take the cutesy line in his speech last Friday when he officially became Labour leader, saying that when a ‘Burnhamite’ walks into a bar, he wants the barman to say “Great to see you. We don’t like factional politics in here”, referencing the well-worn joke about Burnham lacking ideology.2

The problem is that as nice a platitude as that is, politics is about making choices, and there really are significant ideological differences between the different wings of the Labour Party. Perhaps the single most damaging criticism of Starmer was that he lacked ideology – which made his government feel rudderless.3 Burnham is essentially promising the same thing here, and I’m not confident a strategy of wishing much harder that everyone can just get along is going to cover the cracks.

One tangible manifestation of this over the last few weeks has been in the tension inherent in the definition of ‘Manchesterism’. Simultaneously the label has been used to describe the private-sector driven growth in Manchester under Burnham, and a return to more soft-left Labour values. In his speech, Burnham criticised the ‘failure’ of four decades of ‘neoliberalism’ – I’m not sure how to reconcile that with the forest of new skyscrapers around Deansgate.

However, this is not just about philosophy. Over the last few weeks, stories have been leaking out about what Burnham has planned once he takes office. Some of them will no doubt turn out to be nonsense – his inner-circle is reportedly pretty fluid, so some of the plans attributed to him may just be loud-mouthed would-be advisers bullshitting to journalists.

But what is striking is that in the steady trickle of specific ideas attributed to him is just how consistently bad they have been.

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A question of policy

Let’s go through some of Burnham’s reported policy commitments.

A couple of weeks ago, the Guardian reported that Burnham is planning ‘rent freezes’, to help with the cost of living – essentially a form of rent control. The problem is that though superficially attractive, they don’t actually work. They discourage people from moving, the benefits are poorly targeted, and they just shift demand – and therefore pressure on property prices – around. They don’t reduce it. Plus controls are a huge disincentive for private developers and investors to actually build new housing.

Then, relatedly, on a slightly hazier note, Burnham reportedly plans to distance himself from the ‘Build Baby Build’ pledge that Starmer’s Housing Secretary Steve Reed publicly made his mantra, along with the Starmer-era rhetoric about backing the “builders, not the blockers”.

Instead Burnham apparently intends to take a more “collaborative” approach to house-building. And though there’s not much substance here – the story is more about a change of tone in the rhetoric – it does make me fear that Burnham won’t be as zealous on building, especially as “collaborative” invariably means giving in to the NIMBYs. It’s perhaps not a coincidence that during the by-election, Burnham suddenly decided that he opposes green belt development.

There are ominous signs in other policy areas too.

According to the FT, “Team Burnham” wants to slow down the introduction of driverless taxis in London, asking “What’s the point and who is it for?”. Which is, in my view, an utterly moronic position to take. Leaving aside the potential safety and transport system benefits of the technology, a more hostile posture would be a great way to kill one of Britain’s most promising start-up companies, Wayve. This is a firm that is currently valued at $8bn (a rare ‘unicorn’ company), and if successful could mean that a British company supplies the intelligence inside millions of cars worldwide – and gives us a toe in the AI future that is currently being built.

Then there is digital ID, which Burnham is apparently going to scrap because it has proven unpopular. I’ll obviously concede that the Starmer government’s rollout of the policy was not handled well – framing it as immigration control appears to have backfired. But the fundamental idea at the heart of digital ID, of giving everyone a consistent identifier so that government services can be more joined up is fundamentally one that is sound.

But, alas, Burnham will apparently reallocate resources from the policy to help people with the cost of living in some unspecified way instead – which feels like selling your car to help pay for your weekly grocery shop. It might reduce your shopping bill in the short term, but will ultimately make your life more difficult.

And finally, there is Burnham’s refusal to rule out a ‘wealth tax’, in an interview with Gary Lineker.

It’s hard to know exactly how to parse this, both because “refuse to rule out” is a classic politician phrase that can mean almost anything, but also because there’s a stupid version and a plausible version of a ‘wealth tax’.

I’ve written before about how I’m emotionally sympathetic, but the stupid version – taking a percentage of rich people’s assets every year – doesn’t make any sense. The short reason why is that it’s extremely hard to define and measure ‘wealth’, and even if we could it would require an impossible level of international cooperation to be implemented.

So I hope here he is only refusing to rule out the smarter, workable version – which is essentially fiddling around with capital gains tax, and calling it a ‘wealth tax’, like the one Wes Streeting proposed in May. This I do think is a good idea.

But honestly, the reason I mention it is because who the hell knows at this point what he’s thinking. I’m not sure even he does.

Taking trade-offs seriously

This brings me back to the importance of choices.

By all accounts, Burnham is very much a people-pleaser. He likes to be liked, which is both why he’s more charismatic on screen, and ideologically unmoored. It feels like he’ll say whatever is needed to placate whoever he is talking to.

And what worries me is that this doesn’t scream “serious person”.

I mean, look at the various spending commitments he has made in the last few weeks as he has positioned himself for Downing Street. He’s promised the biggest council-house building programme since the war, he wants to exert great public ‘control’ over water and other utilities.4 He wants to increase defence spending, filling the funding gap that caused John Healey to quit as Defence Secretary. And there are other vaguer promises about re-industrialisation and skills.

I don’t think any of these ideas are particularly bad in and of themselves.

But what I can’t work out is how he intends to pay for them, as they all have a price tag attached, and when he takes power he’ll be constrained by exactly the same fiscal situation that Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves were. This means if he wants to spend more money, he’s going to have to choose between raising taxes, cutting spending elsewhere, or borrowing more money.

If there was a fourth option where he could press a magic button and get everything he has promised with none of the constraints, then surely his predecessor would have pressed it too.

And my fear is that the closest thing we do have to a magic button – economic growth – will be harder to achieve if he does all of the mad stuff he has promised above, like rent controls. So I worry that the ceiling on the best-case scenario for Burnham might be Starmerism, but with a principal who is even less willing to make political choices, who will cave to the whims of whichever faction of his party shouts the loudest at the same time.

Finally, this brings me to what I fear will be the punchline Burnham’s ascendancy.

One thing that is clear from the Starmer era is just how much the Labour Party hate the tough and often cruel line taken on immigration, such as with the plans to change Indefinite Leave To Remain and the “Island of Strangers” rhetoric. If only we could have Starmerism, but without the nasty stuff is a common thing you hear from Labour-ish people. I strongly agree that Blue Labour is not the answer.

Yet if the reporting is correct, more Blue Labour could be exactly what we’re getting. Burnham is reportedly planning to appoint Shabana Mahmood as his Chancellor, not because he wants to move away from the tough line on immigration, but because the Treasury would give her more control over cutting immigration, by putting her in charge of Britain’s entire economic model. Patrick Maguire characterises Burnham as a shift from the “London left”, not towards it.

Time to be serious

At this point, we obviously don’t know exactly how the Burnham era will play out. But it does feel as though the idea of Andy Burnham might turn out to be much more compelling than the actual Andy Burnham we’re going to get.

I hope I will be proven wrong. Because I want Andy Burnham to be successful – I want him to grow the economy, pursue abundance, and win the next election.

But if he’s going to be successful, he’s going to have to do more than placate his party and tell people what they want to hear. He’s going to have to show us that he is serious.

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It’s not hard to see the signs of HS2’s construction.

Though slow and mind-bendingly expensive, the new railway is emerging in the English countryside. Once it is complete, it will relieve a major infrastructure bottleneck that is holding back the country.

If you look at a map of Britain from space, you can even see the works – there’s a thick brown line of construction activity stretching all the way from London to Birmingham.

But what you might not realise is that the photo above also contains another of Britain’s major infrastructure projects.

Don’t waste too much time scouring the image for it, as this project is invisible. It is hidden in the space between the land you can see above and the lens on the satellite that took the photo.

As very quietly, without the same attention or (mercifully) expense, a project is underway to upgrade Britain’s airspace.

What’s wrong with how we currently do things? In short, even though air travel is hugely important to the British economy, and millions of people pass through Britain’s airports every year, the entire way we manage airspace is built on top of 1960s foundations that are long out of date.

And if we can drag the system into the 21st century, then there could be huge advantages: We might be able to fit more planes into the sky, make flight times shorter and release less carbon into the atmosphere.

So what’s happening, and why haven’t you heard anything about it?

Read on to find out.

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On YIMBY Pod this week:

• James pitches Martin on an idea he has had to solve the problem of congestion caused by robotaxis.

• And we speak to Sky News Technology Correspondent Rowland Manthorpe, who has been reporting on the data centre water usage controversy – and has been figuring out what the situation is here in the UK.

Rowland’s Substack piece on AI water usage is here, and he made a fantastic video about it here. The film he mentioned on ‘A machine to watch the world’ is here.

James picking a fight with half of the internet over robotaxis is here.

Martin’s piece on ‘picky bits’ and national decline is here, and his YouTube channel is here.

Don’t forget to tell your friends about the pod – and leave us a nice review on Apple Podcasts!

YIMBY Pod is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, Substack and hopefully wherever you get your podcasts!

You can find James on Bluesky here, and Martin here.

Hello! It’s time for Odds and Ends, a semi-irregular round-up of the most interesting links I’ve seen lately.

Don’t forget to check out this week’s essay post, on what everyone is getting wrong about autonomous cars – and this week’s YIMBY Pod, where Martin and I talk about delivery robots, and I speak to Labour MP Dr Jeevun Sandher about how exactly ‘good growth in every postcode’ might work.

But let’s talk links – this week:

• Could Burnham liberate the PAF?

• Why Martin doesn’t like ‘picky bits’

• Why I think Ireland should stop free-riding on NATO

• When wifi becomes art

• Can we trust this scary new “bus” technology?

• Is Great British Railways screwing up its brand strategy?

• And will Euston still be a building site in 2027?

Now let’s get started!

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Late on Saturday the 27th June, on the Old Kent Road in South London, a Waymo autonomous taxi collided with a motorbike.1

The Waymo was attempting to leave a queue of traffic on the main road to turn right into Marcia Street. The motorbike was heading in the opposite direction.

After it happened, Gautam Kambhampati posted the above photo to Bluesky, and the reaction was, well, exactly what you might expect. It was seen by many people as conclusive proof that autonomous vehicles are dangerous, and shouldn’t be allowed on Britain’s streets.

Here’s a representative sample of responses:

However, there was just one problem with drawing these conclusions. The car, it turns out, was not actually operating autonomously at all. In fact, the crash was the result of a human driving the Waymo, a modified Jaguar I-PACE, in manual mode, exactly like a normal car.

I know this because when I saw the photo, I reached out to the company to clarify the situation. Waymo told me that:

We can confirm that a Waymo vehicle was being manually operated by an autonomous specialist when it was involved in a low-speed collision with a motorcyclist. The motorcyclist was able to stand and walk immediately after the collision and declined ambulance transportation. We are fully cooperating with local authorities to review the incident.

I then posted the statement to Bluesky as a corrective to the narrative that was emerging, but there was still some scepticism about Waymo’s statement.

So to be clear, “autonomous specialist” is just the company’s euphemism for human drivers.2 And to add further context to the incident, I understand that the sequence of events was that the car was driving autonomously as it travelled along Old Kent Road, but when stopped in traffic the human driver chose to disengage the autonomous software and take full manual control, at which point they pulled out and hit the motorcyclist.

In other words, despite appearances, this wasn’t evidence at all that Waymo’s self-driving cars are dangerous. In fact, it’s the opposite – it’s another example of the risk of letting humans pilot heavy lumps of metal around our cities.

And it was important for another reason too. It meant that I got to win an argument on the internet.

I first posted about the Waymo incident before we knew the full story. I suggested that we didn’t yet know if the car was operating autonomously – and it turned out that in doing this, I was picking a fight with basically all of Bluesky. And what was striking was that the vast majority of the anti-autonomy arguments made in response to me were actually the result of some pretty sloppy thinking.

That’s why this week I’m going to follow in the grand tradition that was established by my post defending ‘industrial scale’ solar farms, and make this story all about me.

So let’s go through some of the things people said about autonomous vehicles and pick apart why they are wrong.

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Autonomous cars aren’t safe

This was the most bizarre response I received, which was the claim that the evidence that autonomous cars are safer than humans is all just “marketing”.

The problem is that this claim has no basis in reality, because in mid-2026, autonomy is not just some hypothetical or highly experimental technology. Self-driving cars have already been invented, and are a thing that have existed in the world for some time.

For example, Waymo and other operators are currently running real robotaxi services in a number of American and Chinese cities. There are tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of autonomous journeys being taken every single day in the real world – and nobody is dying or getting hurt.

If anyone were, we’d be hearing about it on the news – but these services have been running for months, and in some cases years. That’s not to say that the robotaxi rollout has been completely without incident – Waymos and other autonomous cars have blocked traffic and caused other second-order problems. But in terms of keeping the passengers inside and the passengers around them alive? The safety record is remarkably good.

This is even the case for Tesla, the least risk-averse of the autonomous operators. When it first rolled out a supervised “full self-driving” (FSD) mode with private car owners, and likewise when it launched a driverless robotaxi service in Austin, Texas, there were reports of cars behaving erratically at times. But now the software appears to have matured to a point where it basically just works.

If you don’t believe me, type “Tesla” into YouTube, and you will find videos of extremely long and complicated journeys taken without human intervention.3

However, I’ll be generous. Let’s steelman the safety argument. As things stand, it is true that autonomous vehicles are still unproven on the streets of London. It’s common to hear people observe that though autonomous vehicles might work well on the wide highways of California, we don’t know if they’ll work on the unplanned, narrow streets of a European city.

There is at least some ambiguity here, though I’m pretty sceptical there’s really a problem at this point. This is partially because downtown San Francisco is still a pretty dense, complicated city, full of pedestrians, bikes and other hazards just like London.4

But it is also because Waymo’s British rival, the similarly named Wayve, seems to have demonstrably proven that autonomous driving in London is possible.5

If you want another indicator, back in April, Tesla launched FSD mode in the Netherlands – which is just as dense and squirly as Britain is. And the reason you probably didn’t know that unless you follow this stuff closely is because there hasn’t been a glut of news stories about the havoc and devastation that Tesla’s supervised autonomy software is unleashing on the country.6

In fact, according to the Dutch regulator, as of a couple of weeks ago 40,000 Teslas in the country had driven over 24 million kilometres without any serious incidents.

But if you want a more vivid illustration of this, here’s a twenty-minute video (admittedly from a couple of Tesla fanboys), putting FSD through its paces in a number of difficult scenarios which are very analogous to driving in the UK.

However, despite all this, I will concede that it is true that we still don’t know for sure whether or not autonomy will work in London. But you know what might be a good way to figure it out? How about if, say, we let autonomous vehicle companies like Waymo and Wayve test their vehicles on London’s streets with human drivers behind the wheel, to gather data and test their software’s effectiveness?

You know, like we’re doing.

Autonomy creates an America-style hellscape

There wasn’t a perfectly representative single post, but many responses to my post were essentially cycling and walking advocates making the urbanist critique of autonomy. This is basically the argument that autonomous cars won’t solve any problems, they’ll just add yet more congestion, making our cities worse for everyone. Why would we want to turn our streets into an American-style car-dominated hellscapes?

Emotionally, I’m very sympathetic to this concern, but I think the flaw with the argument is that it simply doesn’t have to follow that autonomous vehicles must mean car-dominated cities.

I mean, I also consider myself an urbanist. My favourite urban form is probably Amsterdam or Copenhagen.7 If I had my way, every city would be optimised for pedestrians and ‘active travel’, with wide cycle lanes, and restrictions on the number of cars allowed into the centre.

Where I differ with many people who think like this, though, is that I recognise that we’re still going to need cars, vans and lorries in some places and contexts.8 And if we can make these vehicles autonomous, that could save lives, improve mobility, and create economic growth – even if it doesn’t reduce congestion directly.9

But, you might then ask, what about our inner cities specifically? These are the places where robotaxis like Waymo, Wayve and Chinese operator Apollo Go want to operate. And the problem is that road space is a genuine zero-sum conflict between competing interests. So won’t the sheer convenience of these vehicles induce demand, and cause people to take even more car journeys, at the expense of buses and bikes – and therefore massively increase congestion?

If this was the case, this would be really bad. One example of why is the impact on buses. Average bus speeds in the capital are already getting slower with current technology, so, in theory, throwing hundreds of robotaxis into this mix could make bus services even worse and less attractive to passengers.

However, I simply do not think this is as inevitable as the urbanists fear – thanks to a little something called ‘regulation’.

In fact, I think that if we had a situation where a significant proportion of vehicles were part of autonomous fleets, it could create a much better equilibrium between the different modes of transport than we have now.

(Prepare yourself, I’m about to pitch what I think might be an original, novel policy idea.)

Take London. At the moment, the Mayor only has some relatively blunt controls over traffic. The biggest lever he has is the congestion charge, which is currently fixed at £18, with no hard cap on the total number of vehicles. If he wants fewer vehicles clogging London’s streets, he could raise the price to dissuade people, but it would be politically tricky, as it would upset and inconvenience thousands of individual motorists.

But in a robotaxi world, the political pain melts away, and there’s an enormous opportunity to manage traffic much more dynamically. For example, it would be easy to impose a hard cap on the number of robotaxis allowed into London using the power of market forces.

Just as New York has a fixed number of taxi ‘medallions’ that grant yellow cab drivers the right to operate in the city, London could auction robotaxi slots to operators like Waymo and Wayve,10 with a ceiling on the total number available. And just as we’re all used to surge pricing on Uber, the laws of supply and demand will set robotaxi prices.

This would essentially hand the Mayor a dial he can turn up and down that adjusts exactly how attractive robotaxis are compared to buses and other forms of transport. And it would be politically more straightforward to implement too. If the cap is raised it would directly inconvenience only a handful of large corporations, instead of thousands of human drivers, as would happen if such a system were to be tried today with human-driven private hire taxis.

Taken to its logical extent, I think such a system could be phenomenally effective. If the Mayor wants fewer robotaxis, he increases the medallion price. If he wants more, he reduces it. The market could even work in real time, responding to changes to congestion in London, and could work on a much more granular level than the congestion charge.

For example, late at night, more robotaxis could be allowed in. If a bridge is closed and traffic snarls up? Then the price could rise, sending robotaxis streaming out of the city to free up the roads.11

So, this is all to say that the urbanists should not confuse the technology with the outcome. The congestion argument is mostly a red herring. Robotaxis don’t make congestion inevitable, and we have the power to shape outcomes. And managed effectively, robotaxis will actually make it easier for us to have the best of both worlds.

Who is liable if there’s a crash?

Another pushback was about responsibility. If a normal car hits someone, the driver will face the consequences – they might lose their licence, or even face prison. But who is to blame if a robotaxi hits someone?

For a start, the 2024 Autonomous Vehicles Act has already figured this out in terms of legal liability and insurance and so on. In short, instead of responsibility falling on the person inside the autonomous vehicle, it falls on the companies behind it, such as the software developer or the licensed operator.

But more broadly, I think this is a pretty strange thing to worry about, because there are many situations where harm can be caused by companies or organisations, rather than individuals.

For example, what would happen if a drug company were to produce a new medicine that accidentally killed people? Or what if a new model of car had malfunctioning seatbelts that didn’t keep people safe in a crash?

The answer is that we have well-developed legal and regulatory mechanisms for dealing with them. Regulators can impose fines or withdraw operating licences. In some cases, individuals inside a company can face criminal sanctions.

And sure, we can argue about whether or not these punishments are harsh enough, or how consistently the rules are applied, but… well, that's politics. And I’m just not sure what would make autonomous vehicles uniquely different in this respect.

We can’t trust Big Tech

The most surprising response to my posting came from an elected politician. Caroline Russell is a London Assembly Member, the leader of the Green group and Chair of the Assembly’s Transport Committee.

And her take was… that the human wasn’t at fault even though they were the one driving? Which is certainly an interesting flip on the liability question.

Still, this wasn’t the most frustrating response, as even though I had shared the statement from Waymo, many respondents were clearly desperate to find something about the incident to be mad about, so they resorted to speculation that, basically, Waymo had lied to me.

And this is where the issue becomes genuinely a bit irreconcilable.

I mean, maybe I’m too trusting of Big Tech, because I’m a credulous establishment shill in my old age, but I think it’s unlikely that Waymo would lie about the details to me.

First, lying to journalists is always a bad idea. If the lie is discovered, they can quite easily blow things up into a scandal. Second, the robotaxi trials are supervised by TfL, and traffic accidents are often investigated by the police. Would it really be good for Waymo’s future business if a more official investigation later discovered the company was covering up an incident where a motorcyclist was hurt because of autonomous software?

I can totally believe that the company might use slippery language, as that’s what all corporate PR people do. But Waymo has provided enough basic facts to basically box in an account of what has happened. We know where the car was going, we know when the autonomous software was disengaged, and we know that it was the human’s choice to disengage it.

And if you can’t accept this, and need to rely on a conspiracy explanation instead, I’m not sure what to say.

Taking autonomy seriously

Over the last ten years, there has been an average of around 106 traffic deaths every year in London alone. The numbers are pretty consistent year on year.

But it no longer has to be this way. We have invented the technology that could significantly reduce this number. At some point in the next few years, the safety question is going to flip, and we’re going to ask why we’re allowing anyone to drive the old-fashioned way, given how demonstrably proven autonomous vehicles are.

And that’s why I’ve spent this post settling scores with randos on the internet. Because now that autonomy is arriving, there are real questions ahead about how to manage the transition, and balance the trade-offs this new capability presents.

The congestion issue I describe above is a good example of this. It won’t be a problem if we plan ahead. It could actually work out better.

There are other real issues too. There’s the reality that London currently employs thousands of taxi and private hire drivers. We’ll need to figure out how to manage the technological transition fairly, so that we can take advantage of the new technology, while taking care of the people displaced.

And there are also questions around digital sovereignty. My friend Tym wrote recently in my newsletter about how Chinese robotaxis conceivably present new security challenges that policy-makers will have to grapple with.

If we actually want to build a future that works, then it means being serious, and not just reflexively cynical, in a hazy, reality-denying way, because it is more comfortable to simply assume the new thing is bad.

I think it’s now obvious that autonomous cars are not a false dawn. They have been invented. They work effectively. They can drive more safely than humans. So let’s take advantage of them.

If you enjoy deep dives on politics, policy, tech, infrastructure and media, with some slightly bitter score-settling on the side, then make sure to subscribe (for free) to my newsletter to get more of this.

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Follow me on Bluesky

On YIMBY Pod this week:

• James and Martin talk about a new campaign to ban delivery robots – and why it may prefigure a future political realignment.

• And then we speak to Labour MP Dr Jeevun Sandher about his recent posts on good growth in every postcode, and how Britain’s growth problem isn’t what we think it is.

James’s undercover reporting from his tour of the Amazon warehouse is here.

Martin’s piece on ‘picky bits’ and national decline is here, and his YouTube channel is here.

Don’t forget to tell your friends about the pod – and leave us a nice review on Apple Podcasts!

YIMBY Pod is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, Substack and hopefully wherever you get your podcasts!

You can find James on Bluesky here, and Martin here.

POD! On this week’s YIMBY Pod, we talk to Michael Hill from Britain Remade about Manchester’s theory of growth, and what ‘Manchesterism’ should be. And Martin and I look into three new energy storage projects, and try to coin the nickname ‘The Electric Arsehole’ for one of them… Listen here, or wherever you get your pods.

Last week, I did something I’ve never done before in the pursuit of journalism.

I went undercover.

Back in 2018, I read a fantastic book called Hired by James Bloodworth, which captures the emergence of the gig economy not by simply studying it, but by living it. In the book, James tells the story of how he got a job at an Amazon warehouse – or ‘Fulfilment Centre’ in company parlance – in Rugeley, Staffordshire, and he details what the experience of working there was like, as someone on the front line.

And frankly, it sounds horrible. He describes the precariousness of the job, how sick days counted against your performance, and how colleagues were permanently terrified of not meeting tough targets. He even claims to have heard stories of workers who would urinate in bottles, to avoid taking time out for toilet breaks.

But as a big fat bloke, what made me feel the most stress reading his account was his description of the enormous distances he was forced to walk every day, up and down the aisles of the warehouse, to retrieve the goods that customers had ordered.

Anyway, in the years that followed, thanks in part to James’s book, there was a surge of interest in working conditions at Amazon. In America, the book even piqued the interest of Bernie Sanders.

And the attention did appear to lead to changes in how the company does business. In fact, Amazon went on something of a PR blitz to try and restore its reputation, and today the company makes bold claims about how it has improved employee compensation and employment terms.

But the obvious question to ask is, has this actually made a difference? Is working at an Amazon warehouse any better today? That’s why I, like James Bloodworth, decided to go undercover.

And sure, I know what you’re thinking: Did I really get a job at an Amazon warehouse, like James did?

Er… No, I didn’t. Not only would that take ages, James’s book makes it sound like really hard work.

But I did do something that I, personally, consider equally as journalistically rigorous and impressive.

For the past few years, because of the criticisms, Amazon has been offering free public tours of its warehouses. So I signed up for one at my nearest Amazon warehouse – and crucially I didn’t tell them that I’m a journalist.

I mean, sure, they didn’t actually ask what I did for a living, but I think this still technically counts as undercover work, because I wasn’t just some random member of the public – I was a random member of the public with a blog.1

And frankly, what I saw on my brave, hour-and-a-bit-long undercover investigation surprised me. So read on to find out what I saw on my Amazon propaganda tour.

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POD! On this week’s YIMBY Pod, we talk to Michael Hill from Britain Remade about Manchester’s theory of growth, and what ‘Manchesterism’ should be. And Martin and I look into three new energy storage projects, and try to coin the nickname ‘The Electric Arsehole’ for one of them… Listen here, or wherever you get your pods.

A brand new essay post will be landing later this week (hopefully tomorrow). In the meantime, I thought I’d liberate another paid post from behind the paywall, given that today the government is expected to announce significant new spending on drones.

This was originally published in March 2025. Some of the specific reference may be a little dated now, but the core point is still a good one, I think.

If you enjoy reading it, please consider taking out a paid subscription to get more like this direct to your inbox every week.

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Finally, Europe has woken up to the new reality.

Like it or not, Britain and our European allies are now participants in a new Cold War – and this time around, we can’t be certain that America will always be on our side.

However, it isn’t just the prospect of Donald Trump withdrawing support for Ukraine that keeps me awake at night – it’s China doing the same.

Obviously, Beijing is not on our side in this fight. Ideologically, China is a part of the emerging authoritarian axis, and in practical terms it is by some distance our most powerful strategic adversary. If Xi Jinping ever sends his troops into Taiwan, it will make events in Ukraine look like little more than a minor skirmish.

But since the beginning of Putin’s full-scale invasion, China hasn’t been entirely helpful to Russia. Instead, it has followed the classic Iran-Iraq war playbook of effectively selling its most valuable weapons to both sides: drones.

I say “effectively”, because on paper, Beijing has imposed restrictions that prevent Chinese companies like DJI, the world’s largest drone maker, selling their gear for use in war. But in practice, both Ukraine and Russia have continued to acquire drones through third-party and grey-market channels.

That’s why today Chinese drones are utterly dominant on the battlefield. For example, in 2023, Ukraine reportedly bought 60% of DJI’s entire global supply of its flagship Mavic drones, and though hard numbers are hard to find, there are clearly thousands in use on the frontlines today.

And this is why I worry. The reliance on Chinese drones puts Ukraine, and the rest of Europe, in a precarious position.

It means that if China were to choose to clamp down on grey-market drone sales to Ukraine, or were to impose broader restrictions on sales to Europe – as it has reportedly tried to do – then Ukraine will lose access to this critical battlefield technology.

And what makes this situation worse is that even if drones can be sourced from other countries, then we might still be at a disadvantage – because China, and DJI specifically, make arguably the best drones in the world.

So what can we do about it?

I think it is time for Britain to take the drone gap seriously, just as we would if we didn’t have the best fighter jets or missiles. That’s why we should establish a new company in the mold of the forthcoming state-backed Great British Railways and Great British Energy.

It’s time for us to create Great British Drones.

The drone paradigm

It’s hard to overstate the impact drones have had on how wars are fought. Crucially, this is not just large “military” drones that look like small planes and are designed to fire missiles or drop bombs. As Ukraine has demonstrated over the last three years small, commercial-grade drones have also proven decisive, for several reasons.

Most obviously, there’s reconnaissance – sending a drone up gives a squad of soldiers better visibility of their surroundings, and helps them spot the enemy. Combined with a technology like Starlink,1 drones can stream live video back to base – giving senior officers the live intelligence they need to make real-time tactical decisions.2

But just as importantly there is the difference these small drones are making to the actual fighting.

For example, drones are extremely useful when paired with artillery, as Ukraine discovered in the early days of the war. The way an artillery gun works is that a shot is taken – and then subsequent shots are ‘corrected’ for accuracy, so that munitions land closer to the target. And unsurprisingly, it turns out that having an extra pair of eyes in the sky makes this trial-and-error process much quicker.

However, this is just the beginning. Now we’re three years in, drone tactics have evolved significantly.

Here’s a video showing what appears to be a deactivated drone lying on the ground. But when the Russian troops in the video find it, it springs to life and attacks them.

And another major innovation has been the rise of first-person-view (FPV) drones, where the pilot wears a pair of VR glasses to fly the drone precisely towards a target, as you can see in this extremely grim video.3

They’re also often used in battle as “kamikaze” drones. Because drones are so comparatively cheap, it makes sense to sacrifice them in order to, for example, drop a grenade through the hatch on top of a tank, or ram into larger aircraft, to knock them out of the sky.

Then finally, the other reason drones have changed how wars are fought is that drone technology itself has been rapidly improving because of the war, just like how World War II accelerated the development of radar and jet planes.

For example, check out the video above, which shows a small military drone made by American firm Skydio. It has cameras on board that can automatically build 3D models of the environment it is operating in. And perhaps more importantly, it can navigate optically using just its cameras – which helps it get around GPS jamming, which has been a permanent feature of the frontlines in Ukraine.

So this is all to say that drones have changed the face of war, and any country that wants to defend itself needs a significant drone capability.

China’s drone advantage

This brings me to China.

It might be tempting to think – because it has been historically true – that the west will always continue to have the technological edge. But this hasn’t been true for some time.

Today, many Chinese-made products are not just on-par with what American and European companies produce – they are in many cases the best in the world. China is no longer just a workshop that churns out plastic widgets, or inferior copies of western technology. Chinese companies are today producing leading edge technology in a number of fields, such as phones, electric cars, and even humanoid robots.

And this is especially the case when it comes to drones.

For example, take a look at this video showing off the DJI Matrice 4. It replicates many of the capabilities of the American Skydio drone above.

I won’t run through a detailed breakdown comparing different makes and models – I’m not writing a buyer’s guide for any warlords reading – but suffice to say, on many dimensions the two companies (and thus, countries) have technological parity. Though Skydio appears to have an edge when it comes to current AI-powered capabilities – on some comparisons, DJI’s drones have better cameras, or can spend longer in the air.

And what’s also notable is that DJI is not just producing well-crafted flying machines. It has also built out a highly sophisticated range of accessories that can be bolted on to their drones. And there’s an entire ecosystem around their products – such as ground transmitters that extend range, and a software backend that makes it easy to process and review captured images and data.

So though the above video is focused on civilian uses – for emergency service uses – you don’t have to think too hard about how these same capabilities could be used during a war. And if we ever end up in a shooting war with China – these capabilities will be deployed against us.

This brings me to my final example of Chinese drone supremacy.

The above video – from China – is awesome. It’s incredibly cool to see thousands of drones perfectly synchronised together.4 But I also think that it should strike fear in us.

This is because the next generation of drone warfare is swarms – autonomous drones acting together, as a team, to take out targets.

Today, swarming technology is only at a very early stage. On the battlefield, there are only anecdotal reports of Ukraine testing swarms of between three and ten drones.

But it seems obvious to me that we’re only a few years away from swarm warfare changing everything about how wars are fought all over again.

For example, imagine if the thousands of drones in the display above did not just have LED lights, but carried explosives. And instead of swirling majestically in the sky, shaped like a dragon, if they were charging together, in formation against a target.

Given how cheap drones are to make, this is obviously where things are heading.

This will make drones even more difficult to defend against. As instead of needing to deflect one missile, or shoot down one plane, war becomes a game of numbers. Say a thousand drones are sent after a high value target – what are the odds of a 100% success rate in taking them out?

The good news for now is that no country or company appears to have yet mastered drone swarms. Despite the eye-catching vision of the future in the video, in reality light shows are much less sophisticated from a software perspective as drone performances are pre-programmed, and follow a fixed path.5

So to make swarms a reality, drones will need to be equipped with sensors to understand their environment, and there will need to be software capable of managing airspace and responding to unexpected events in real time.

But as things stand, China is arguably best placed to get to this place first. We can see from the DJI video above how China can manufacture advanced hardware at scale, and it already has an advanced drone software platform. And if China does get there first, it will be another ‘Sputnik’ moment for America and Europe.

The case for GB Drones

What we face then is a drone gap.

Even if America beats China to mastering drone swarms – which it might, as the Pentagon is reportedly working on it – it will still not be good news for Europe. Either drone supremacy will belong to our biggest strategic adversary – or our newly unreliable friend, who has been going through a very public breakdown.

Given the centrality of drones to the future of warfare, it’s strategically essential for Europe to have its own independent capability, so we are not at the mercy of China or America restricting drone sales, or even remotely triggering the “off” switch if we use them in a war they don’t like.

This is why I think there is a big opportunity for Britain.

At the moment, we have a small drone industry. Big weapons companies, like BAE Systems, sell a number of large, aircraft-like drones for long distance missions – the sorts of drones that replace fighter jets.

But there isn’t much on the smaller end – the commercial-grade quadcopters that are the workhorses in Ukraine. There are a few smaller British companies making them, but none of them are particularly substantial.

The same is true across Europe more broadly. The largest European drone company is Parrot, a French firm, which is of a similar size to Skydio, the American company above. In any case, both are miles behind DJI in terms of scale, revenue and capability.

So what can we do to change this and give Europe the technology it needs? As strange as it might sound to our modern, neoliberal ears – I think the answer could be state intervention.

That’s why we should establish GB Drones – a company that will build and scale small drones, so that Britain and our allies have access to the same capability as our biggest strategic rivals.

As this is only a back-of-the-envelope sketch, I admit that I haven’t got a fully worked out plan for exactly how the new company should be structured. I don’t think it needs to be nationalised, though the government could take an equity stake, like it does with the OneWeb satellite network.

Similarly, I don’t have a strong feeling on whether GB Drones should be started from scratch, or created by acquiring an existing firm, like the UK arm of American firm Anduril, which last week did a drone deal with the Ministry of Defence.6

But however it happens, what’s crucial is that GB Drones, as our “national champion”, should be heavily supported by the British government. It should receive tax breaks, grants, and regulators should treat it favourably – such as by massively liberalising our drones laws – so that it can build up the domestic drone business we need. The goal should be to create a company the size of DJI that sells to both friendly nations’ militaries, and commercially.7

Creating a national champion like this isn’t a new idea. We used to have several “national champion” companies during the twentieth century, until Thatcherism happened. And there are also plenty of examples from around the world.

For example, the reason Taiwan is home to TSMC, the company that makes the world’s most advanced semiconductors, is because Taiwan’s industrial policy in the 1980s was geared towards helping the company grow.

And the same goes for Huawei, the Chinese telecoms company. This is perhaps the best analogy for what I’m proposing.

In Huawei’s case, China decided that it was unacceptable to have foreign companies dominate the country’s telecoms – so it used state subsidies, tax breaks and grants to support the growth of the company. This gave Huawei the room it needed to grow and mature, in a way that may not have been viable in straightforward commercial terms. And as a result of these efforts, today Huawei equipment powers 5G networks around the world, and millions of people use Huawei phones – which conceivably gives China enormous leverage.8

And this is why I think we need GB Drones, and that the government should support such a company. Not because it necessarily makes commercial sense – because it wouldn’t in a pure free market where DJI can manufacture more cheaply and at a larger scale. But because we need it.

As Ukraine has demonstrated, the future of warfare is drones. Europe needs a powerful drone industry. So why can’t it be Britain that makes it happen?

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On YIMBY Pod this week:

• James and Martin talk about some exciting new energy storage schemes to help us during the next heatwave.

• And we speak to Michael Hill from Britain Remade about Manchester’s theory of growth, and what the much-discussed ‘Manchesterism’ could actually be.

James’s piece reflecting on the Londependence movement is here, and his argument for a Gamer’s Charter is here.

Martin’s piece on ‘picky bits’ and national decline is here, and his YouTube channel is here.

Picture credit: Peter McDermott (CC BY-SA 2.0)

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YIMBY Pod is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, Substack and hopefully wherever you get your podcasts!

You can find James on Bluesky here, and Martin here.