The PVI's 2024
+ a preview of paywalled articles.
I hope you’re all had a wonderful Christmas and are set for a prosperous New Year. I’m sure none of your presents will have topped the set of screwdrivers my father gave me; after I unwrapped them he said ‘I can have mine back now.’
But if you don’t have sorting your toolbox to look forward to (NOT A EUPHEMISM), why not meander gently through as brief round up of my favourite articles I wrote in 2024;
The Critic - The follies of human quantitative easing
Con Home - Voters, not the commentariat, define the ‘centre ground’
CapX - The NHS’s immigration addiction is bad for our health
Adam Smith Institute - Selecting the Best
Con Home - Britain needs us to succeed. Under Jenrick, we will.
The Critic - Procedural Man
The Telegraph - Another immigration betrayal will destroy the Tories for good
CapX - Sadiq Khan, the Overground and the reification of ‘the Blob’
The Critic - The grand Budapest hotel
As announced last week, the PVI is going paid in the new year. Subs are currently 20% off, but ahead of the final brick being put into the paywall, I thought I’d give a preview of the articles that are coming up for subscribers only…
Hungarian governance
First up I have a postscript to an article I wrote for The Critic on Hungarian governance. I came away from Hungary thinking that their model of governance had plenty of lessons for the UK – particularly in creating room at the top for leaders to engage in and think about long-term strategy. In this postscript I put some more flesh on the bones of what this might look like, with some thoughts on both structure and staffing;
Structure
Part of Britain’s problem is that Ministers – as shown by the Cummings quotes – are being swamped by the lower levels of strategy. Ministers are being asked to deal with operational and tactical-level decisions, preventing them focusing on strategic-level thinking.
The only way to prevent this swamping and to get Ministers back thinking about the strategic level is to copy Hungary’s model. What that means in practice, to pick up the military metaphor again, is adding more people to the General Staff of the Minister. This means more people in the operational and tactical level to take decisions on behalf of their minister; that means bigger central officers for Ministers and more spads. Although the Ministerial Code stated that Cabinet Ministers may appoint 'up to two' Spads, the majority (in 2021) employed three, whilst three Secretaries of State employed four or five. That’s simply not enough…
Staffing
Any programme to build up new leadership cadres must overcome three problems. The first is being prepared to be expressly right wing, and work towards right wing goals. The second is a problem of scale; we are talking about finding hundreds of people here, not ten a year. Finally, perhaps most problematically, is selecting from a much broader base of people than we have been.
I am talking about selecting people based on certain traits - and this would essentially mark a radical shift away from how the right-wing informal talent selection network works right now.
Fascism = right wing politics
The potential for a Trump Presidency - just like it did at the last two elections - was inevitably going to draw comparisons between him and fascists, particularly after Kamala Harris (remember her?) said that she believed Donald Trump “is a fascist”. Ahead of his inauguration, I’ve written on why this shows the left is out of ideas.
They continue this line of argument because the Left is completely rhetorically exhausted. They have no great ideas to communicate, and no great communicators to do it; the best they can offer is negation (opposition to the right) or an attempted co-opting of right wing culture (see; Dark Brandon, Aaron BASEDtani). No one - unless the government has been so bad that the negative position works - is listening anymore.
Will they try and give people a positive reason to vote for them, or carry on calling people fascists and wondering why it doesn’t have the affect they think it should? The bovine intellectual incuriosity that marks much of the modern Left means it will, almost certainly, be the latter.
The enemy of the Civil Service is my friend
Another postscript, again to an article in The Critic, this time on Starmer’s abortive attempts to do something about Civil Service reform. Since I published the article, Starmer has caved to the blob. He wrote a letter to all Civil Servants, which you can read in full here and in my postscript I argue this capitulation makes the case for reform, if anything, even more pressing.
‘An end to the chopping and changing of political priorities’ is, in essence, a repudiation of the idea of democratically elected governments that are responsive to either political events or the shifting interests of the electorate. Starmer has previously been described to me as ‘an institutionalist who governs with the default impulses of the institutions’; ultimately he is a creature of the Blob, who - like the Blob - thinks policy is best made in a protected sphere in which policy-making can evade the constraints imposed by representative democracy. His caving confirms both that, and that he is running a government ‘bovine, feeble and naïve enough’ to retreat at the first sign of a determined opponent. He has delivered nothing; and yet, poured out was all his labour.
Grab the chainsaw
Last year, the Argentines elected for radical change and the unorthodox style of Javier Milei. The country had been relying on unsustainable borrowing to maintain a standard of living it could no longer afford, propped up by outdated and inefficient industries. In this piece, I ask; how long before Britain needs a Milei? It’s not that daft a question.
For years, Argentina’s economic strategy revolved around developmentalism. Leaders took on massive debt to fund modernization efforts without clear plans for repayment, maintaining a developed-world façade by borrowing heavily and shielding inefficient local industries rather than fostering competitiveness in the global market. This cycle of overpromising to maintain living standards—and overextending fiscally to deliver—left the economy increasingly fragile, and masked financial problems rather than solving them.
Milei's rise was thanks to public exhaustion with these policies. He repeatedly highlighted Argentina's unsustainable spending habits, such as massive subsidies and bloated government programs. In 2014, energy subsidies alone accounted for 3.5% of GDP, and by 2022, they had ballooned to $12 billion annually. To fund this, the government resorted to printing money, fuelling inflation and undermining private industries that struggled to compete against subsidized services. These conditions created a distorted job market where skilled workers gravitated toward stable but inefficient government jobs, exacerbating a brain drain away from the private sector.