Freddy Soames

Global competition policy @netflix. Ex @Freshfields @qikipedia. Views own &c.

[Andrew Bennett @andrewjb_]

Today we launch @ukdynamism, a new philanthropic fund to back the believers and builders in UK dynamism

I am delighted to be leading the fund, which is anchor funded by @xtxmarkets and is being incubated by @RenPhilanthropy

https://t.co/I9RTNYdaOy

[Freddy Soames @FSoames]

@bswud @cosmorxn Surely

[Robert Colvile @rcolvile]

We talk a lot about the housing crisis. But in many ways, it's a London crisis. Last year, its population went up by almost 100,000 - but work started on just 4,170 homes.

In fact, from 2021/2 to 2023/4, other regions built 94% of their housing targets. London? Just 36%.

[Freddy Soames @FSoames]

@s8mb Policy seems popular with a generation of people who I assume have scheme pensions vs defined contribution with all the risk assumed by the saver..

[City of London @cityoflondon]

We’ve responded to a ministerial direction on the City Plan 2040.

The issue of tall buildings and the Tower of London World Heritage Site was fully examined over a year ago. We strongly believe further hearings are unnecessary.

Read more here: https://t.co/cY4DrCB3li

[Sam Bowman @s8mb]

I think Andy Burnham should champion the idea of 'municipal socialism': having utilities owned by local governments, primarily combined authorities, rather than the national monopoly that nationalisation usually entails. This may already be what he is planning, but he hasn't really said so yet.

Nationalised monopoly fails for many reasons:

- It creates entities that are too big to fail, so they can waste large amounts of money while being subsidised from public funds.

- It gives people no comparison point to see if a certain industry is being well-run, so bad outcomes end up being treated like bad weather.

- It prevents the public companies themselves from learning from other companies, because they only have other countries to learn from where circumstances might be very different.

- It creates very weak political feedback mechanisms, because your vote on whether the trains are being run well is bundled with your vote on, eg, tax policy and foreign policy.

- It engenders short-termism, because voters are less forward looking than private investors, so there is more scope to take long-term degradation of service for short-term benefits. (This is happening with TfL's fare freeze right now.)

Municipal ownership does not solve all these problems, but it can maintain more accountability and some of the elements of competition that national monopoly does not have.

There is more room for experimentation and learning because different municipalities try different policies, and can copy the successes from each other. The Oyster Card and contactless card payments were a good example of this by TfL. Manchester's bus privatisation scheme was scrapped in part by looking at the success of London's approach to buses, where delivery is outsourced to multiple private companies but services are designed by a single authority and provided under one brand.

The 'too big to fail' problem is smaller, because municipal governments can face a harder budget constraint than national government, though bailouts undermine this. Those that want to subsidise services have to draw on a narrower tax base. In fact, well-run services can raise revenues for local governments, as many locally-owned tramways did in the 19th and early 20th Centuries. Local authorities are more accountable for failures and get more credit for successes than national governments would be.

Internationally, successful examples of public ownership of utilities are often owned by municipalities. This is true in much of the United States, where water is mostly municipally owned rather than private, and in France, where most public services are owned by local governments, who then offer contracts to companies to handle the actual delivery. The Bee network and London buses operate on the same basis.

Historically in Britain, trams, electricity and gas were all mostly run by small local companies and local governments before the 1940s–70s. Municipally-owned gas networks were highly profitable for Birmingham under Joseph Chamberlain. There were still nearly 200 different water boards across England by 1970!

We use 'nationalisation' as a byword for 'public ownership', but there is little reason for most of these things to be nationalised monopolies. Much of the drive towards nationalised monopoly in the 20th Century was inspired by a mistaken belief that economies of scale would drive the biggest improvements in productivity, inspired by the apparent success of the USSR and large conglomerates in Germany and the USA. It is clear today that experimentation via trial and error is extremely valuable, and losing it is one of the big costs of monopoly.

'Municipalisation' would, for example, mean overhauling the Great British Railways policy which by default puts commuter lines in Surrey into the same administration that runs the West Midlands Cross-City Line, the East Coast Main Line, and commuter networks in Manchester, Leeds and Liverpool. There are some provisions for lines going into municipal control, but the default is to stop the next Mayor of Greater Manchester from running the region's commuter trains and London from absorbing more lines into the Overground.

Public ownership has many flaws, but some of them are avoidable by looking beyond the 1940s and 1970s for how to do it. 'Municipal socialism' allows for much greater learning and feedback loops, and would hugely strengthen devolution by making local government responsible for things that directly matter to their electorates rather than having them run by a single inert national monopoly.

[Patrick Collison @patrickc]

I think the pity and mockery stems from so many Europeans (usually institutions/"experts") dismissing AC's utility. The vast majority of the debate is not over the mechanics and logistics of deployment, but whether widespread AC is in principle desirable in the first place. I think it garners so much attention from Americans (and Europeans such as myself) because it's a vivid distillation of the self-destructive "degrowth" hysteria that is so prevalent and harmful in many European policy matters. It is the same impulse that led to Germany decommissioning its nuclear capacity, and it is a substantial contributor to the broader economic challenges of the continent.

[Sam Dumitriu @Sam_Dumitriu]

Reminder: Hinkley Point C (7% of Britain's electricity needs) is at risk of delay due to Natural England's view that the £700m on fish mitigations isn't enough.

https://t.co/xnH9jma4xV

[Trung Phan @TrungTPhan]

Lee Kuan Yew:

“Air conditioning was a most important invention for us, perhaps one of the signal inventions of history. It changed the nature of civilization by making development possible in the tropics. Without air conditioning you can work only in the cool early-morning hours or at dusk. The first thing I did upon becoming prime minister was to install air conditioners in buildings where the civil service worked. This was key to public efficiency."

[Ben Southwood @bswud]

The entire modern world, including capitalism and industrialisation, happened because we beat NIMBYism and vetocracy in 18th-century England.

Today, the vetocracy, the stakeholder state, the NIMBYs stop us building the nuclear power plants, railways, houses, towers, bridges, roads, gas turbines, solar panels, and powerlines that we need for growth.

Then, they stopped people from consolidating their land, transporting goods freely, investing in irrigation, and mortgaging their property to invest. The events that led to their downfall are called the Glorious Revolution. I think we can repeat what they did and have another Glorious Revolution of our own.

https://t.co/5PrKLK1nah

Early modern Europe was sclerotic, stifled by NIMBYs of its own: the aristocrats, guilds, and clergy who stood against the reforms that were necessary for 18th-century progress. Everyone knew that inheritance rules split land up too much, everyone knew that common land was overgrazed, everyone knew that property rights restricted making best use of land, labour, and capital.

Each one of them decided the answer was consolidating power in an absolute monarch. Each one of them failed completely. They didn't crush the NIMBYs: the NIMBYs crushed them.

One country launched itself into rapid growth, creating the industrial modernity we live under today: England. It did this, as everyone agreed was necessary, by overriding the tangle of landowner property rights that prevented best use of land. But it tried something almost unbelievable: to get the landowner NIMBYs to crush themselves.

England did not attempt to set up an absolutist state: quite the opposite. It gave landowners supreme power, and they used it to crush their fellows: the minority of landowners who were opposed to progress.

There are lessons for today. Many modern reformers think that the answer to NIMBYs is demonising them, trying to build an angry coalition of forces who hate homeowners or boomers or Republicans or environmentalists. But many of the most successful reform schemes operating around the world today try a different tack: bring a majority of homeowners onside, and it is much, much easier to crush the remaining NIMBYs.

We can still learn from England's Glorious Revolution.

Read my latest article, with historian Kara Dimitruk, in @WorksInProgMag.

[Freddy Soames @FSoames]

More great stuff from LFG

[Looking for Growth @lfg_uk]

Britain is in an Energy Emergency.

But the Government is FAILING TO ACT. They have no plan, no idea what to do, and they’re leaving us exposed.

So today we’re launching The LFG Emergency Energy Bill to SAVE OUR INDUSTRIES and GET BILLS DOWN

Here’s how it would get bills down IMMEDIATELY:

1️⃣ SCRAP all levies on energy bills. These stealth taxes on the British people are unnecessarily hiking up their bills by hundreds of pounds.

2️⃣ REOPEN THE NORTH SEA, and directly deploy the tax revenue generated to GET BILLS DOWN.

3️⃣ Stop new CfD contracts and launch an investigation into the system that signed them off. Last year, billpayers paid £1.5 billion for big renewable corporations to THROW ENERGY AWAY. By 2030, it’ll be £8 billion. The existing settlement is a national scandal.

4️⃣ Scrap Clean Power 2030 targets. These needless constraints have pushed civil servants to procure wind at any cost – and at huge expense to the British people.

5️⃣ DITCH the duties of energy regulators, NESO and Ofgem, towards Net Zero goals, so their only focus is to MINIMISE ENERGY COSTS, subject to security of supply.

6️⃣ Hold auctions for connecting to the grid, and directly deploy the revenue generated to GET BILLS DOWN

Our Emergency Energy Bill has cross-party support. It is ready to PASS IMMEDIATELY. It does what governments for the past 20 years didn’t – it takes RADICAL ACTION to SAVE OUR INDUSTRIES and GET BILLS DOWN.

There’s no excuse. Last week, the US suspended access to some of the world’s leading frontier AI models. Britain is vulnerable - and our energy prices are strangling our national security. We cannot afford to be at the mercy of other countries or events beyond our control any longer.

The Government needs to GET BILLS DOWN NOW or explain why they’re still letting this emergency destroy our future.

Force Westminster to ACT. Send our Bill to your local MP and sign our letter to the Prime Minister and Ed Miliband. GET BILLS DOWN, NOW!

[Kanishka Narayan MP @KanishkaNarayan]

Access to @AnthropicAI’s latest models has been paused for all customers, including in the US and UK.

The main lesson: as we debate the future of national security and technological sovereignty, access to AI capabilities is crucial.

That's why this Govt is the first to set up dedicated funding for our AI industry through @UKSovereignAI unit. And just this week, we announced £1.1bn for our AI chip industry.

[Dario Amodei @DarioAmodei]

Today I'm publishing a new essay, Policy on the AI Exponential. AI is progressing extremely fast—much faster than the policy process was built to handle. The essay lays out where I think the technology is now, and the action needed to close the gap: https://t.co/Lh6PWae178

[Sam Bowman @s8mb]

A plausible and frightening vision of Europe's near future, ending in economic collapse and vassal status under the US or China. Enjoyed reading it, although I feel a little depressed now.

https://t.co/Pe3ddlUBtS

[Michiel Bakker @bakkermichiel]

"What will happen to Europe if it keeps ignoring AI?"

Three American labs each (!!) operate more AI compute than all of Europe combined. Today we're launching Europe 2031: a story of what might happen if that doesn't change.

[etn. @etnshow]

BREAKING: The UK AI Minister has announced a Best Designed Data Centre Prize to reward beautiful and well designed data centres, which The Royal Institute of British Architects and The Department for Science, Innovation and Technology will collaborate on.

[Sam Bowman @s8mb]

Europe has one of the most essential and irreplaceable companies in the global AI supply chain: ASML, which produces the machines that TSMC uses to make its chips.

These machines are roughly the size of double-decker buses. To ship one requires 40 freight containers, three cargo planes, and 20 trucks. They are the world’s most complex objects. Each contains over one hundred thousand components, all of which have to be perfectly calibrated for the machine to produce light consistently at the right wavelength.

ASML was once seen as an also-ran compared to its arch-rivals Nikon and Canon. It succeeded thanks to involvement in a US program to develop extreme ultraviolet lithography, which only happened because the Americans were so worried about losing to Japan. ASML also outsourced much of its R&D instead of trying to do it all in house, which allowed it to spread its bets across many different companies.

Today, the entire global AI industry depends on ASML. Understanding its success is crucial to understanding Europe's position in AI today, and how it can leverage that to avoid being left behind tomorrow.

https://t.co/zURr1xlgMx

[Sam Bowman @s8mb]

The Campaign to Protect Rural England contends that the housing crisis is driven by high rents, not building too few houses.

[Rolls-Royce Press @RollsRoycePress]

Rolls-Royce welcomes landmark contract with UK Government for delivery of Small Modular Reactors https://t.co/6y480QUPhj

[Matt Clifford @matthewclifford]

This is correct. Extraordinary that we have this game changing moment unfolding in front of us and most elite discourse is still fake news about AI water usage or three-year-old angst about hallucinations.