On YIMBY Pod this week:

• We talk about the security implications of the latest AI advances – and how the British government should respond to threat. And more importantly, James claims victory in his argument with Martin over AI.

• Then we speak to the brilliant Jonn Elledge about his new book, 31 Inventions that Built Our World.

James recently wrote about the national security case for building data centres, and how to fix Top Gear.

Martin’s Substack 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.

ICYMI: I got so annoyed by bad data centre takes last weekend that I decided to remove the paywall from my recent post on Britain’s looming AI national security crisis. Go and read it if you missed it!

I’ve also written about the slightly less important issue of how I picked a fight with Jeremy Clarkson (which he then went on to win).

POD! On YIMBY Pod this week, Martin and I talk about a Cambridge new-build estate where it is literally illegal to recycle rainwater – and we speak to Sunny Hundal about his new campaign to make energy both clean and cheap. Listen here, or wherever you get your pods.

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

This time I’m featuring:

• How the UK consensus on Net Zero has broken down

• Why globalisation can’t be stopped

• The case for municipal bond markets

• Andy Burnham not being serious about Freeview switch-off

• A tiny sign the Democrats are taking winning seriously

• A great TV drama about feminism in the 1970s

• Can AI reason itself to constitutional government?

• An amazing four hour podcast about the history of electric grids

• And a sign the future could entail a whole new season of Star Trek: The Next Generation (!).

Now let’s get started!

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BIG NEWS! I got so annoyed by bad data centre takes last weekend that I decided to remove the paywall from my recent post on Britain’s looming AI national security crisis. Go and read it if you missed it!

POD! On YIMBY Pod this week, Martin and I talk about a Cambridge new-build estate where it is literally illegal to recycle rainwater – and we speak to Sunny Hundal about his new campaign to make energy both clean and cheap. Listen here, or wherever you get your pods.

Jeremy Clarkson once brutally humiliated me.

Read more

On YIMBY Pod this week:

• It turns out it is literally illegal to recycle rainwater and use it to flush your toilet – and this is causing problems in Cambridge.

• And we speak to Sunny Hundal about his new campaign to make energy both cheap and clean at the same time!

The Guardian reporting on Cambridge’s grey water problem is here.

The Cheap Clean Energy Alliance is here.

This week James wrote about the national security case for building data centres.

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, we talk about the government’s latest efforts to make it easier to build near train stations and densify our cities. Then we speak to Nick Maini about why Hammersmith Bridge has been closed to public transport for six years – and how autonomous pods could fix it. Listen here, or wherever you get your pods.

I swear I don’t mean to keep writing about AI, but it’s the biggest story in the world, and I think this is particularly important…

Every so often, our lives are punctuated by shocking events that change everything.

9/11 is an obvious example. I was 14 when it happened, and though I didn’t fully understand it at the time, I still remember having the visceral feeling in the pit of my stomach that nothing was ever going to be quite the same again.

I felt something similar a few weeks ago. I was watching two OpenAI employees give a presentation at the DefCon security conference, detailing what happened in the now-infamous cyberattack that OpenAI’s AI models autonomously carried out against Hugging Face, another AI company.

In case you missed it, the technical details are complicated but the story is simple. An AI model was being evaluated internally. It had essentially been tasked with an assignment to solve a particular digital security puzzle. But due to an error on the part of the testers, the AI was unable to access some of the documents it was supposed to use to find the solution.1

However, instead of giving up and declaring the task not possible, something extraordinary happened. Over a period of a couple of months, the AI explored alternative solutions to the problem it had been tasked with, and essentially discovered that it could create a 'message board’ where it could interact with other AI models inside the company. Then astonishingly, unbeknownst to any human, the AIs figured out how to work together to not just break containment and access the internet – but they reasoned to themselves that the best way to solve their problem was to hack Hugging Face. Which they did successfully.2

I’m assuming that after this, the examiners were not too worried about the examination, as this whole incident was an absolutely spectacular demonstration of just how sophisticated AI has become in such a short space of time. Give a sufficiently powerful model a task and it will pursue its goal relentlessly until it finds a solution.

This brings me to Britain.

Though we are only a middle power, and the ‘frontier’ models like ChatGPT and Claude are being developed elsewhere, we have so far carved out a rather successful niche in the AI present. The AI Security Institute (AISI) was created by Rishi Sunak, and in less than three years has proven itself seriously credible in the eyes of both the tech industry and foreign governments.

AISI has assembled a team of world-leading experts who, when new AI models are created, can credibly evaluate the threats they may pose. When Claude Mythos, a powerful new model, was created by Anthropic earlier this year, AISI was granted early access to test the model – and it published a warning about its capabilities, which was taken very seriously.

However, as effective as this new institution is, following the Hugging Face incident I’m not convinced it is enough if we want to protect Britain and our allies from AI threats in the future. 9/11 was a clear indication that global peace and stability were about to be upended, and Hugging Face is the same. And unless Britain acts now, it won’t be ready for the threat that is rapidly emerging.

So this week, please allow me to explain the emerging problem – and what we can do about it.

I’ve got so annoyed about the discourse on this, I’ve now removed the paywall on this post. So if you find it useful or informative, please consider subscribing.

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The new security threat

As Ben Thompson has observed, the next few years are going to be a security nightmare.

However optimistic I may be about the potential good things that AI will make possible, there is going to be an awkward period of adjustment as sophisticated AI models pick over the code that humans have written over the last half-century. AI will reveal bugs and vulnerabilities at an unprecedented scale – in software that we use every day, and in code that underlies the infrastructure of the modern world.

This isn’t because the code is bad, per se. It is because writing code is inherently an imperfect process. An operating system like Windows or MacOS, for example, is the combined work of tens of thousands of people. It is so bewilderingly vast and complicated, that it simply isn’t possible to ensure that it is impervious to threats.

Think of it like an airport. We can add layers of checkpoints, bag searches and x-ray machines to reduce the security risks, but it is impossible to make such a complicated building completely safe.

So since the dawn of computing, cybersecurity has been a permanent fact of life. The bad guys find vulnerabilities, and the good guys update the code to make it safe again. This is a never-ending process, and it is the reason why with annoying regularity Windows will insist on installing updates when you power down, or MacOS will randomly reboot to update.

For a long time, the game of cat and mouse has just about held – but now AI is getting involved in finding vulnerabilities. And we’ve already seen what that looks like – it’s overwhelming.

When Claude created Mythos, it let the makers of some of the world’s most critical software use the new model to look for vulnerabilities in their own code and the results were striking. Cloudflare, which provides important internet infrastructure, found over 2,000 bugs (including 400 critical security issues), and Mozilla, which makes the Firefox web browser, found 271. And in addition, over 3,900 high or critical security vulnerabilities were found in an analysis of various open source projects.

And it is not just Mythos that is the problem. Earlier this summer, OpenAI used its latest model, GPT-5.6 to find numerous bugs in apps like Chrome and Safari, as well as in the kernels of Linux and FreeBSD3 – two operating systems that run the vast majority of the server infrastructure across the internet.

Pandora’s box

Perhaps you can see the problem. We’ve now got highly sophisticated AI tools that can detect vulnerabilities at unprecedented scale, far faster than they can be patched by traditional methods – and they will relentlessly pursue the goals they have been given. This is not a hypothetical future – this is the world we live in today. And right now is the worst they will ever be.

In the early days of the post-ChatGPT AI explosion, some serious people talked about how governments could set rules to slow or regulate AI progress. This was basically one of the reasons the AI Security Institute was created in the first place – to give the government a role in deploying this potentially dangerous new technology.

But now it is clear that the brakes cannot be applied.

If we lived in a world where OpenAI and Anthropic were the only companies that had this technology, it might conceivably be possible. But unlike other dangers like, say, nuclear or biological weapons, we can’t control AI models with treaties or restrictions on materials. The technology runs on commodity computer hardware and the models are ultimately just large text files full of numbers.

And even if we could, somehow, control these things, then there’s the problem that other countries are working on AI too, including most notably, China. And this makes clear why we now face an unprecedented security threat.

So far, China’s AI progress has lagged the US, but it has consistently only been behind by months. When it was first released last year, DeepSeek caused a minor freakout as it was almost as sophisticated as the best ChatGPT model available at the time, and shockingly it ran much more efficiently. Then more recently, another Chinese model, Kimi K3 has done the same. Though comparing AI models like-for-like is difficult, on some benchmarks it is only narrowly trailing the capabilities of GPT-5.6 Sol and Claude Fable.

This is to say that the genie on this technology is already out of the bottle.

Perhaps if Chinese companies had pursued an approach to development similar to OpenAI and Anthropic, it might be possible to just about imagine a modern equivalent to an arms control treaty between the major powers. Maybe.

But the problem with this though is that China is pursuing a completely different AI strategy, and its government and businesses have wildly different incentives.

As China is currently trailing US capability, most Chinese models are open source and/or open weight – meaning the raw code and data used to create the models have been published freely for anyone to use.4

Why would Chinese companies do this, given that Anthropic and OpenAI have both received astronomical valuations in part by keeping their models closed? Isn’t that the ‘secret sauce’ that makes the companies so valuable? The difference is that because China is trailing on raw capability, it has decided to compete instead in the ecosystem around the models. (This is a strategy that has come all the way from the top, with Xi Jinping himself calling for this.)

So the hope is that people and companies will choose to use Chinese models because open models can work out cheaper to run. Openness also creates an incentive across the companies that use them to work out how to run them even more efficiently, reducing the need for cutting-edge Nvidia AI chips, which are subject to export controls that have been imposed on China by the West.

And though this is great from an AI-ecosystem perspective, arguably for everyone in the world except Anthropic and OpenAI, openness does also have one difficult geopolitical consequence: As anyone can use them, it really does mean that anyone can use them.

That could mean that rival powers like China and Russia, rogue nations like Iran and North Korea, or hackers and terrorist groups. They can take these open models and do with them, well, whatever they like. Unlike closed models, where usage runs through OpenAI and Anthropic’s servers, if you have enough compute capability you can run these models without restrictions on nefarious uses.5

So this is why I think we’re hurtling towards an AI security crisis. Though the open-weight models are still not as capable as GPT-5.6 Sol, or Claude Fable, if history is any guide they are not far behind. And when they catch up, there will be no effective limitations on their use – we will have to assume that the worst possible person or group, with the worst intentions, will make use of these models too.

And that’s why we need to prepare for that world now.

A war of resources

Let’s go back to Britain.

Choose your own ominous metaphor: It’s 1938 and Germany is rapidly rearming. It’s 2001 and a CIA memo is warning that Bin Laden is determined to strike the United States. It’s 2013 and Vince Cable is signing the paperwork to sell off the Postcode Address File. It’s 2020 and there are reports of a strange virus in Wuhan.

In the not-too-distant future, it is incredibly likely that we will be living in a world where sophisticated AI models, which cannot be controlled or regulated out of existence, can be deployed to relentlessly and autonomously assault every digital system in our lives by actors unknown.6

How does global power work in this world? And how can Britain protect itself?

In terms of the mechanics of defending, the old paradigms of cybersecurity are dead. Any human-led efforts to patch and update software will simply move too slowly. They will not be able to keep up with the AI assault.

So the weapon we will need to use to defend ourselves is, well, AI. Just as AI can find vulnerabilities at speed, it can also conceivably patch them just as quickly too.

In other words, the only way to stop a bad guy with an AI, is a good guy with an AI.

If you’re a traditional IT security person reading, this might sound like a heresy. What I’m arguing here is that it simply won’t be possible to have a human in the loop, reviewing code before it is patched in. We will need to defer authority to defensive AI systems to update critical systems to defend them. There will be no other way to do this.

And the consequence of this fact is something quite profound, I think, as it essentially reshapes global power.

Power has always been a function of hardware. The number of tanks, missiles and (increasingly) drones that a country can deploy defines its ability to defend itself.

But in a post-Hugging Face world, the hardware we need has changed again. Simply put, power in the new world will be a function of how much compute a nation has at its disposal. If every digital system is under constant attack by autonomous AI agents, we will need to have the capability to stand up to such an assault.

And, sadly, I’m just not convinced that Britain is appropriately readying itself for the battle ahead.

Protecting British interests

So how is the British government supposed to respond to the new reality?

If we want to put ourselves in a strong strategic position, there are essentially three core interventions we could make in the AI ‘stack’: on models, compute, and energy.

On models, if we had our own frontier models, it would put us in a strong position. Our AI could literally outsmart the other AI. This is how we get away with having relatively few soldiers – we rely on our missiles and our planes being better than those of our enemies.

But sadly, in the case of AI we do not have our own frontier models – and developing one would be extremely difficult.

And it’s worth dwelling on this to understand exactly how difficult it is. We’re not just one extra commitment casually thrown out by Andy Burnham away from making it happen, as catching up with the best American and Chinese models would be almost impossibly expensive.

For example, Meta – which is desperate to catch up with OpenAI and Anthropic – has reportedly already sunk over £100bn this year alone into its ‘superintelligence’ lab, and it still appears to be nowhere close to developing a similarly top-tier model. And for context, that’s equivalent to around half of the NHS’s annual operating budget. So in terms of public spending, building our own model is a non-starter for obvious political reasons.

Instead, our only option model-wise is to hope that, despite the Trump of it all, the United States continues to let Britain access the most sophisticated models. This is why having AISI is such a useful bargaining chip as America likes its credibility too.

However, assuming we have a sophisticated model, we need more than this too – we need the physical hardware to run it on. And this is where I do think we can do something useful.

If power is a function of compute, then we can simply build more data centres, and generate more energy with which to power those data centres. The more AI tokens we can crunch, the stronger our defences will be against the threats to come.

And to an extent, this is something the government is already working on. There’s no indication that Andy Burnham intends to change the AI Growth Zones plan, and there’s still a pipeline of renewables coming online (along with Sizewell C and Hinkley Point C). So in due course, we’ll certainly have more data centres and energy generation to power them.

But my concern is that given the new security paradigm I describe above, this still isn’t fast or large enough.

For a start, there’s a huge misalignment in terms of timelines – data centres and power plants currently take years to build, and yet AI progress, and the lag between the frontier and Chinese open source models can be measured in months. It will be surprising if China doesn’t have a model as powerful as GPT-5.6 or Mythos by Christmas.

And this wouldn’t be so bad if AI was just an economic nice-to-have. If we don’t have the latest technology the fastest, it merely means sluggish economic growth and a loss of competitiveness to our peers.7

But viewed from a national security perspective? Suddenly that capability gap feels a lot more urgent.

However, there is one reason for optimism here. As urgent as the need to build our AI infrastructure is, it need not be costly to the public purse. Unlike building a frontier model, which would require enormous upfront capital spending, data centres and new sources of electricity are economically useful in their own right. They can both help the economy and act in a dual-use capacity for our cyber-defences, should we require it.

So this means that new data centres can pay for themselves. In fact, given the AI boom, the private sector is pretty desperate to build out capacity. All the government needs to do is, well, let them build.

And this is why, finally, I want to end by proposing a policy that is simultaneously deeply important if we want to protect Britain’s national security, while also perhaps the single most electorally unpopular idea anyone has ever proposed.

I’m proposing that the government needs to create ‘Nightingale’ data centres.

These are, of course, named with reference to the conference centres full of hospital beds that were spun up in the early days of the pandemic. What’s remarkable wasn’t that they were not actually all that useful (we didn’t know that at the time) – what matters is that we built them quickly.8

AI data centres are more technically demanding than a room with hospital beds. And I’m not proposing we start setting up server racks in the ExCeL Centre. But we should take that same urgent spirit and apply it to the data centres we’ll need in a new world that has arguably already emerged.

At a minimum, plans for data centres and energy infrastructure should be rapidly called-in by the government and even more rapidly approved. Process should be vastly curtailed, and every official should be driven by the need for rapid delivery. Like during Covid, we correctly decided that now wasn’t the time for layers of consultation and review – the need for compute should be approached the same way.

I still believe that, ultimately, AI will do incredible things to improve our lives. But the Hugging Face incident was a warning, like the Bin Laden memo sent a few weeks before 9/11, and we should act now to avoid the inevitable security crisis once the Chinese models catch up.

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On YIMBY Pod this week:

• The government’s latest planning rules are making building near train stations easier – hurrah!

• And we speak to Nick Maini about his proposal to build a new autonomous transport system to cross the beleaguered Hammersmith Bridge.

The Sam Dumitriu post on the NPPF we talk about is here.

Barnes Hammersmith Electric Light Transit are here.

This week James wrote about principles and the death of Jason Arday.

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 tried to sort fact from fiction in the case of Dobby’s grave, and we speak to London Assembly member Neil Garratt about his fantastic London travel times map, and his work figuring out why building infrastructure is so damn expensive. Listen here, or wherever you get your pods.

ESSAY: In case you missed it, my essay this week was offering some thoughts following the death of Jason Arday. Read it here.

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

This time, I’m featuring:

• Why we’re going to get lots of new flats near train stations (hopefully)

• A new way to think about big, heavy industry

• How to have more safe, clinical innovation

• Can you help save a library under threat?

• Has there just been a ‘ChatGPT moment’ for robotics?

• How I predicted Amazon’s latest AI training trick

• Why Doomerism is bad

• And did Armando Iannucci predict the future 20 years ago?

Now let’s get started!

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This is a tragedy

It goes without saying that the death of Jason Arday is a tragedy. Though an official cause has not been revealed, the timing and unexpected nature of his death strongly suggest that he took his own life. And whatever problems there were with his scholarship or the plausibility of his story, do not make his death any less awful.

The journalistic scrutiny of his academic record and background were justified

Many commentators on social media, such as Jolyon Maugham, have already called for a public inquiry following Arday’s death. Others have advocated reigniting the “Leveson 2” inquiry – a planned, but long-shelved follow-up to the 2011 Leveson Inquiry following the phone hacking scandal. The clear implication is that an inquiry would eventually lead to stronger regulation of the press.

This would be absolutely the wrong response.

The problem is that the journalistic scrutiny that Arday received was broadly justified. He was not a random member of the public, unfairly picked out of obscurity for a punishment beating. He was a senior academic at the University of Cambridge, the author of a high-profile memoir, and a public figure who had been building his profile with numerous media appearances over the years.

Given this, no wonder the Times Higher Education (THE) originally sought to investigate claims of plagiarism. And no wonder the wider press took an interest when a high-status public figure was revealed to be a fantasist with a wildly implausible backstory.

And though his death is tragic, it does not retroactively change these underlying facts.

An uncomfortable source does not render true information invalid

What made the Arday story initially controversial was that the story of his alleged plagiarism was originally published not by THE, which had been investigating, but by Nathan Cofnas, a former academic. Cofnas describes himself as a ‘race-realist’, and he once argued that without ‘DEI’ (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) hiring policies, there wouldn’t be any black academics.

Whatever motivated Cofnas to investigate Arday’s work (I suspect it isn’t hard to guess), the evidence of plagiarism he revealed was seemingly real, or at least worthy of further investigation.

And this is a very awkward situation to be in, because what is the right thing to do when important, real information comes to light via a source we don’t like?

The closest analogue I can think of to the current situation is the Russian hack of various Democrats’ email accounts in 2016, including those of the Hillary Clinton campaign and the personal email of her campaign manager – which were subsequently released online just before the election.

In that case, the hack didn’t turn up any significant revelations beyond John Podesta’s risotto technique, and the contents were mostly just embarrassing. But imagine if the hack had exposed some genuinely noteworthy scandal that could change the election? Would it have been right to report it?

As frustrating and unfair as it is process-wise, I think that it probably would be. And I think the same is true in the Arday case – just because I don’t like the guy who alleged the plagiarism, it doesn’t make his reporting untrue.

The difficult proportionality question

This brings me to what makes the Arday story particularly complicated, because racism is clearly an important part of explaining why the story captured so much attention. As Stephen Bush wrote yesterday, there was plenty of coverage of Arday that was not just about a ‘professor accused of plagiarism’, but a ‘black professor accused of plagiarism’.

So even though I think the scrutiny of Arday was legitimate journalism, I think it is also true that he was subjected to disproportionate attention because of the colour of his skin, or what he represented in the eyes of racists.

As has been pointed out by Stephen and others, this phenomenon is perhaps best illustrated by comparison with Professor William O’Reilly, a Cambridge Professor who faced plagiarism allegations in 2023, which didn’t become a massive story.

Given this, I can totally understand why black academics, or academics from other minority backgrounds, may feel they are on the receiving end of wildly disproportionate scrutiny, relative to their white colleagues. There’s definitely a question of proportionality here.

To use another analogy with American politics, it’s a bit like how Trump has attempted to persecute his political opponents by investigating them for mortgage fraud, which has turned up real cases, by virtue of applying disproportionate attention to a specific group of people.

So this is arguably part of what happened to Arday, and more generally, I can imagine how this same problem could conceivably be weaponised against other groups too.

For example, imagine if controversial right-wing professors were to receive intense, disproportionate scrutiny from lefty activists? Would it be wrong to report on claims that they used ChatGPT to write their book?

Or to use the single most contentious hypothetical, what if pro-Israel activists carefully picked over the work of academics who are vocally on the Palestinian side of that conflict, or vice versa? What happens if real misconduct is found along the way?

However, here’s the difficult part. Though I can certainly recognise the proportionality problem as a Bad Thing, I’m not sure what we’re supposed to do about it. Like, though many people have raised the issue in the wake of Arday’s death, I’m not sure what is supposed to be done about it. What rules could be written, or norms could be developed to mitigate it? What do people actually want to happen?

If the media is to blame, so is the public

According to an organisation called NewsCord, 249 stories were published about Arday in the 22 days leading up to his death, which is supposedly more than there were about Peter Mandelson in the weeks following the publication of the Epstein files.

I’m not sure how real those numbers are,1 but what’s clear is that there were certainly a lot of Arday stories in the British press, and it isn’t hard to imagine what toll that level of negative attention can take on someone’s mental health.

But why were so many stories written? The answer isn’t just cartoon villain newspaper editors with a racist axe to grind – it’s because stories about Arday were clearly drawing significant audience attention. The news media is not a profitable business at the best of times, so when a story hits, there’s a strong incentive to cover it more.

So this is what frustrates me about the knee-jerk attacks on the media coverage. It’s not just the journalists – to a significant extent they are serving audience demands for more. The public are complicit for clicking, reading, watching and talking about it.2

Plagiarism isn’t what made the story viral

What makes the Arday story difficult to untangle is that there were essentially two different stories compounded into one.

The first was a relatively narrow story about academic misconduct and plagiarism allegations. This is where the comparison with William O’Reilly broadly holds.

But I do not think this is why the story captured so much public attention. What really propelled the story was the unravelling of the non-academic parts of Arday’s life, and the many fantastical aspects of his backstory – because the sheer volume of mad claims was objectively funny.

I made this observation myself before his death, rather unfortunately writing last week that I found the story “tremendously entertaining”.

He was a guy in a high-status position, who variously claimed to have been non-verbal until he was 11, who claimed to have suffered and recovered from numerous serious illnesses, who claimed to have run multiple back-to-back marathons to an extent that would make him one of the world’s greatest runners, and who claimed to have played football to a semi-professional level. He also claimed to have raised £5m for charity, but that his co-fundraisers had signed a non-disclosure agreement, and that a severed pig’s head was sent to his family.

This is self-evidently ludicrous – and over the last few weeks, every new story that emerged revealed that he made even more wildly implausible claims about his own life.

So this is why I don’t think citing simply racism and drawing a sober comparison with other alleged academic plagiarists fully explains the story. Though racism clearly played a part, he was still a fantasist in a high-profile role. A better model to understand why the Arday story ‘cut through’ is perhaps previous similarly bizarre stories, like ‘canoe man’ John Darwin, ‘Cat Bin Woman’, or even an incident like Dominic Cummings’s trip to Barnard Castle, where more than any technical political story about Covid policy, in that case the public could smell bullshit and it came wrapped up in a compelling story.

The organisations and institutions that elevated Arday have some difficult questions to answer

It is, of course, deeply unwise to speculate why Jason Arday appears to have taken his own life. You never know fully what else is going on inside someone’s head.

But what is clearer is that the Arday story would not have blown up if he hadn’t been failed by multiple institutions over the last few years. And these institutions should reflect on their role in elevating him.

For example, why did the University of Cambridge hire someone whose backstory is almost self-evidently absurd? Did nobody ask about the marathons during the interview?

And according to Retraction Watch, concerns about his scholarship were first raised in May 2023, two months after he was first appointed. Why wasn’t more done to scrutinise or investigate the allegations then? If Arday had lost his job back then, the story would have quickly disappeared.

Then most recently, why didn’t the publishers of his new memoir raise any questions about the wildly implausible claims he makes in the book? This was, after all, supposed to be a work of non-fiction. If there had been any scrutiny of his manuscript before publication, the book would never have been published. Given this follows not long after the Salt Path controversy, doesn’t this suggest the publishing industry needs to get better at vetting and fact-checking the authors it publishes, even if they have a great story to tell?

I also think the Good Law Project should reflect on its role in the controversy. It was quick to defend Arday after the initial coverage, launching a petition calling for people to ‘stand in solidarity’ with Arday, which was co-signed by a number of prominent people. But in effect, it was making a similar error to Cambridge – of elevating Arday. It turned Arday from an academic with questions over his record into a political fight over what he represented. Which, of course, added more fuel to the fire and drove more attention.

The ‘DEI’ angle deserves interrogation

One of the reasons Arday was seized on by the right is not just because he was black. It’s also because of how his appointment has been linked to ‘DEI’ – an Americanism that stands for ‘Diversity, Equity and Inclusion’.

Had Arday, the implication was, been elevated by Cambridge not on the merits of his scholarship, but in an act of positive discrimination? If this is the case, the fact that Arday turned out to be a fantasist and alleged plagiarist would be a serious mark against ‘DEI’3 hiring policies.

Now, to be clear, I’m extremely sympathetic to institutions proactively supporting greater diversity. We should want our universities – and our politicians, publishers and Hollywood adaptations of Ancient Greek myths – to better reflect the modern world, and we should want shared institutions in which everyone feels like they have a stake.

But it appears that good intentions may have gone badly wrong in the case of Arday, as clearly there is still a balance to be struck between someone’s personal characteristics and their actual ability to do their job.4

As things stand, the extent to which ‘DEI’ weighed on Arday’s appointment still isn’t clear. In fact, before his death, Cambridge announced plans for an independent inquiry into his appointment.

But there is some circumstantial evidence that these motivations may have played a role here. For example, Cambridge has a set of policies designed to increase the diversity of its workforce. Then when Arday was appointed, the university made his background a triumphal part of the announcement, highlighting the challenges he claims to have faced growing up, and the fact that he is the youngest black person ever appointed to a professorship at the university.

And more broadly, his appointment in 2023 was at a time when issues of race and racism were extremely culturally salient, particularly in left/liberal-ish institutions. It was still the post-George Floyd ‘woke’ moment culturally, and there was significant political energy directed towards performative diversity, particularly in academia, politics and the media.

So you can imagine why, given that context, Cambridge may have been persuaded to hire Arday – not just because he was black, but because his particular specialism was “improving the representation of Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic people in higher education”. Then add on a compelling backstory that intersects with other ‘vectors of oppression’, and it adds up to a compelling case – even though there are presumably many more eminently qualified black academics with less exciting backstories, who haven’t plagiarised, who could have been given the job instead.

Nobody knows what principles apply, or should take precedence

If there is a through-line in many of the above thoughts, it is that it is unclear on what principles many of the reactions to Arday were operating, or which principles should take precedence when there is a clash.

I was struck by reading this short reflection on the Arday story by Dmitry Grozoubinski. I agree with his frustration at what he calls the ‘grifter-right’, which uses its megaphone to amplify culture war fodder like the Arday story in bad faith – and at the frustration of trying to operate with principles when your opponents do not.

Dmitry writes:

• If we treat every allegation as credible we create incentives for terrible people to bury us in them, paralysing us with investigations the results of which will be weaponized regardless of outcome as either ‘gotchas’ or ‘conspiracies’.

• If we give a right wing outrage oxygen, the fire behind it grows, often vastly out of proportion to any alleged wrongdoing - and with consequences far beyond the formal.

• Yet if we ignore the hints of smoke and do not ever search for fire, we sacrifice doing what’s right for the sake of the broader culture war and give up our own integrity and that of our institutions.

• I suppose the answer could be that we must exist as Caesar’s wife, above reproach, but the world is vast and full of potential targets, full of humans, and full of sins.

But what’s striking about the above is that you could substitute the word “right” for “left” above, and you’d have an almost word-perfect critique of ‘cancel culture’ that could be levelled at the left over the last decade.

And I think this illustrates exactly why it’s important for good-faith operators to not give up on having principles.

A while back, I wrote about why the reason I’m not a fan of the Good Law Project is that despite what the name implies, it does not appear to be guided by any particular philosophy or doctrine on what is considered ‘good law’. Instead, it uses the law as a tool to pursue somewhat arbitrary political goals.

But the truth is, if we want to make sense of a terrible tragedy like the death of Jason Arday, we need to understand the principles on which we’re working. Only then can we design institutions, norms and rules about what allegations are considered acceptable to scrutinise, or proportionate to cover.

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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!

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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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