Welcome to the 22nd instalment of the Liberal Digest. The eyes of the world are on Anchorage, Alaska as Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin get ready for a one-on-one sitdown about the future of the war in Ukraine. Back in Europe, Volodymyr Zelensky met with Sir Keir Starmer – with the Ukrainian leader posting afterwards that the pair “discussed in considerable detail the security guarantees that can make peace truly durable.” Elsewhere, Rachel Reeves was met with more mixed economic data – growth is up, but slowing, and still meagre; and the unemployment rate hit its highest level since 2021.
In this week’s edition: ideas on infrastructure, tax chatter, a playbook for AI progress, and telling the truth on public spending.
Did we miss something? Let us know.
Stop the Press!
Best op eds, interviews, news and analysis of the week in the old-school media
Ryan Bourne explains why Labour’s Renters’ Rights gets landlords wrong:
“[M]arkets aren’t zero-sum morality plays. Landlords are unpopular largely because our housing supply is sclerotic, resulting in high rents and fierce competition for dwellings as the population has grown. In a healthy market, landlords would compete fiercely on price and quality to attract tenants. Given the fundamentals, they don’t need to Labour’s instinct, then, is to regulate these symptoms. To show they care. The beneficiaries will become an interest group fighting to entrench the regulations. Yet the overall consequence, as new losers are created, will be disappointment.”
John Harris writes about why claims that Britain is a “tinderbox” are at least a little overblown:
“All this noise is part of a much bigger political development: a ballooning narrative about complete social breakdown. Just as people on the left have been predicting for at least 150 years that capitalism is about to chaotically implode under the weight of its own contradictions, so some of the loudest voices on the post-Brexit right have come up with their own version of a similarly historic meltdown: a vision of the immediate future in which rampant wokery, crime, failed immigration policy, weak policing and general establishment decay and corruption will lead inexorably to what Nigel Farage calls “societal collapse”.”
Robert Colvile argues that it’s high time politicians told the truth on what the state can, and cannot, afford to pay for:
“[W]e need politicians to have a brutally honest conversation with the public — one that they’ve been shying away from for years. To stop pretending that we can solve all our problems with a crackdown on waste, or scroungers, and instead accept that we simply cannot continue to increase the main drivers of expenditure at a faster rate than income. What does that mean? It means no more triple lock. Raising the state pension age. Caps on working-age welfare spending. Zero tolerance, and zero support, for those who can work, but don’t. Asking people to pay for their social care out of their housing wealth, not the public purse. Cutting the public payroll and automating public services at speed. Curtailing the system of legal rights and duties that commits the state to spend whatever it takes on any given good, whatever the costs or trade-offs.”
Rachel Reeves is reportedly keen to introduce further planning reforms that would speed up the delivery of critical infrastructure projects:
“Only a single judicial review could be brought against any one decision under the envisaged reforms, according to the person. This would aim to ensure projects do not face several legal challenges on different issues, such as potential environmental damage and the rules around compulsory purchase of homes to be demolished. There would also be an effort to create narrower criteria for who can bring a review, to avoid what the government regards as time-wasting challenges.”
Hong Kong exile Chloe Cheung warned that plans for a new Chinese ‘mega-embassy’ should not get the green light:
“The Labour Party describes its approach to China as “compete, cooperate, and challenge.” On paper, that sounds reasonable. But in practice, where is the “challenge"? Raising human rights concerns behind closed doors is not sufficient. Take, for example, China’s proposal to build a mega-embassy in central London. This site would include over 200 residential units, giving diplomatic immunity to an unusually large number of staff. Intelligence officials, local residents, and activists have raised concerns that the embassy could be used as a surveillance hub. And yet, the proposal has been taken out of the hands of the local council and backed by government ministers.”
The Nuclear Taskforce published its interim report, setting out its topline thinking on what holds back the construction of new nuclear energy in Britain:
“We have clear evidence that regulation in the nuclear sector has become unnecessarily complex and inconsistent. This creates problems for both established and new participants in the sector, ultimately limiting potential to deliver projects on time and within budget, or even deliver them at all. Increased complexity and duplication of processes has become commonplace, with multiple regulators across civil and defence. The overlap in processes increases the delay and costs to existing developers and operators, and to potential new market participants. Not only is there inconsistency between different regulators, but there also appear to be examples of inconsistency between different personnel within the same regulatory body.”
Matthew Lesh argues that heavy handedness from the Competition and Markets Authority risks putting the AI revolution on hold in Britain:
“They are on the verge of leveraging new digital competition powers to ‘fix’ markets just as technological advancements and increasing investment are reshaping their competitive landscape. In doing so, the CMA risks hampering the very innovation and infrastructure that the UK needs to thrive in the AI era. To start, the CMA is on the cusp of declaring ‘strategic market status’ for Google’s search product, which would mean heavy-handed interventions in how the product operates. This is an ironic move, coming just as Google is facing an existential threat from AI chatbots, the heaviest competitive pressure in decades. In response, Google has warned that the CMA’s broad interference could result in British users losing early access to new features. Google has already been forced to delay rolling out AI tools in the European Union due to regulatory uncertainty created by the EU’s competition regime.”
The Guardian carried reports that HM Treasury is contemplating further hikes to Capital Gains Tax:
“Another possible revenue stream being looked at is whether to increase capital gains tax rates by a few percentage points. However, this would be accompanied by some kind of CGT allowance for investors who put money into British businesses, as the Treasury tries to strike a balance between tapping into wealth to fund public services without deterring investment into the UK. There is growing anecdotal evidence that some wealthy people and company directors may have already left the UK following recent tax changes, including the end of the “non-dom” status, though no official data is yet available.”
The Telegraph: Police in free speech row over ‘shoplifters are scumbags’ sign
BBC: Palestine Action protest arrests rise to more than 500
Sky News: UK quarterly GDP slows as economy feels effect of higher business costs
Stacks of Freedom
Highlights from our fellow Substackers
Tim Leuing argues that Britain needs to address its motorway scarcity:
Joe Hill outlines the case – and blueprint – for pedestrianising Soho:
Sam Dumitriu and Michael Hill say Labour’s 1.5 million homes target is drifting out of reach:
Noah Smith dismantles the idea that corporations are to blame for high rents:
Wonk World
Ideas and analysis from the think tanks, academia and other clever sorts
Institute for Progress published The Launch Sequence, a collection of essays detailing how to accelerate AI progress for science and security:
“What is the right sequence of technologies that we need to develop as we transition to a world of intelligence too cheap to meter? The goal of this collection is to start piecing together the answer to this question. We’ve pulled together concrete but ambitious proposals from some of the sharpest people thinking about how to use AI to proactively shape progress for both science and security. The collection features projects that are unlikely to occur by default given existing commercial incentives, that can be achieved or fully set up by 2030, and are particularly important to achieve in light of the rapid advances of AI.”
Hear Hear
Podcasts for weekend listening
Tim Lomas joins Chelsea Follett to explore global trends in happiness, meaning, mental health, and more:
Posting to Policy
Best of social media this week
James Graham: Nice in theory
James Wilson: A new low water mark in seriousness
David Pegg: Do as I (vaguely) say
Nicholas Decker: Why support capitalism?
Samuel Hughes: Did rent control cause urban decay in 20C London?
Further Afield
Interesting stuff from around the world
Tariffs on Chinese goods coming into the United States will remain at ‘only’ 30%, after President Trump agreed to extend the trade truce between the two nations:
“President Trump signed an executive order on Monday extending a trade truce between the United States and China for another three months, providing a reprieve from the threat of escalating tariffs and export controls that have rocked the global economy. The extension, until Nov. 10, provides the two countries more time to work out their differences and set the stage for a potential summit between Mr. Trump and President Xi Jinping, China’s leader, later this year. Mr. Trump suggested on Monday that negotiations were making progress. “They’ve been dealing quite nicely — the relationship is very good with President Xi and myself,” Mr. Trump said at the White House.”
Nick Paton Walsh analyses what’s at stake and the possible outcome of President Trump and Vladimir Putin’s summit in Alaska:
“There is a risk we see bonhomie between Trump and Putin that allows the US president to tolerate more technical meetings between their staffers on the what and when of any ceasefire deal. A plan about land swaps or grabs that is wholly in Moscow’s favor, might then be presented to Kyiv, with the old US ultimatums about aid and intelligence sharing being contingent on their accepting the deal that we have seen before. Cue French President Emmanuel Macron on the phone to Trump again, and around we go. Putin needs more time to continue to conquer and he is about to get it.”
The Economist takes a look at the vote in Uruguay to legalise assisted dying:
“Pablo Cánepa was a normal, healthy 35-year-old Uruguayan. Handsome and extroverted, he was a talented graphic designer who loved to host barbecues with his girlfriend and was fanatical about Nacional, a local football team. Taking a shower in March 2022, he suddenly felt dizzy. He thought little of it. But within four months he was trapped in his own body; his brain had lost almost all control of his muscles. As a kid, he loved to draw. Now he cannot sit, feed himself or control his bladder and bowels, let alone hold a pencil. His 75-year-old mother must change his sodden nappies. His mind is lucid. He knows exactly what has happened—what he has lost—but even his eyes do not work; he sees double. Speaking is exhausting. For three years he has been lying staring at the ceiling, unable to move his limbs to relieve the stiffness and pain, his muscles withering. Trapped, he suffers panic attacks. He has been denied even a clear diagnosis. All the doctors can tell him with certainty is that he has irreversible brain damage with no known cause. Pablo wants to die. He has said so repeatedly since early 2023. But under Uruguayan law no one can help him to do so. That could soon change. On August 13th Uruguay’s lower house passed a law with a thumping majority to legalise assisted dying. The Senate, where a similar bill got stuck in 2022, is widely expected this time to follow suit. Legal assisted dying would continue Uruguay’s long liberal tradition and put it among a handful of countries in the world to have legal marijuana, gay marriage and assisted dying. For Pablo, the law cannot come soon enough.”
BBC: European leaders tentatively hopeful after call with Trump ahead of Putin summit
Financial Times: Nvidia and AMD to pay 15% of China chip sale revenues to US government
Financial Times: DeepSeek’s next AI model delayed by attempt to use Chinese chips
Politico: Far-right AfD tops German popularity ranking in bombshell new survey
Graph of the Week
