Let Northern Ireland do its own thing

Brussels thinks the UK should be grateful that they are allowing Northern Ireland to be an honorary member of the EU. It certainly helps Northern Irish trade with the south of the island and the rest of the EU. But self-centred as Brussels is, they cannot, or pretend not to, grasp that the word “union” is just as important for the United Kingdom. Under the Northern Ireland Protocol, which Boris Johnson signed allegedly to get the rest of the deal done, Northern Ireland is more united with the EU than it is with the UK. How anyone who actually read it could think it would get a positive deal for the UK is beyond me.

The UK negotiators concede bits and pieces, such as allowing the EU full, but unreciprocated, access to UK trade IT systems but the reality is that the Westminster amateurs are playing the Brussels professionals and making no progress whatsoever. That suits Brussels and they may be waiting for Sir Keir Starmer’s even more amateurish team to take Westminster’s seats. Vain hope: the civil servants will be the same and so will their certainty that Westminster knows best.

The DUP have made it clear that they will not allow Stormont to function unless the new protocol complies with the DUP’s “seven tests”:

• No new checks of any sort on goods being traded between GB and NI, excluding pre-Brexit checks on livestock and goods moving onwards from NI;

• Compatibility with the Act of Union which says all parts of the UK should be on equal footing when it comes to trade;

• Avoiding any diversion of trade where NI customers are forced to switch to non-GB suppliers;

• No border in the Irish Sea;

• NI citizens to have a role in any new regulations which impact them;

• No new regulatory barriers between GB and NI unless agreed by the NI Assembly, and

• Honouring the 'letter and spirit' of NI's constitutional position as set out in the Good Friday Agreement by requiring upfront consent of any diminution in constitutional status.

You  might think that, being aware of that, the Westminster negotiating team would include the DUP, or at the very least consult with them as negotiations proceeded. Oh dear me no! Mr Cleverly and his team are only concerned with how to “sell” whatever deal they do to Belfast politicians once the deal is done.

It is common sense that the home side playing against top class professionals should muster the best team it can. Conceding dribs and drabs without reciprocal concessions is simply weakness and so is failing to include your toughest players.  No matter how good the deal Messrs Sunak and Cleverly bring home, Northern Irish politicians are not going to welcome something they had no part in.

John Major may not have involved the rebels in his 1991 Maastricht’s negotiations but his was such a brilliant performance that the other EU leaders applauded. No signs that anyone will be applauding the Sunak/Cleverly performance.

In one respect, delay may help the DUP but only if they can maintain a political majority in Stormont. The protocol is up for renegotiation anyway in 2025 under Protocol Article 18(5), if there is a democratic majority for that, but it would clearly be better to conclude something sooner.

The way forward should be for Westminster to stop fantasising that they are making progress and making unreciprocated small concessions, which the DUP will not recognise anyway, but invite the DUP, or a Stormont cross-party team of MLAs, to come up with a joint solution.  Ultimate authority would remain with London and Brussels but, frankly, if all Ireland is happy with the outcome, why should anyone else care?

Britishvolt, such a bad idea government really must fund it

A number of things amuse us about the Britishvolt story. The first is this insistence from all around that the administration and bankruptcy of the project is a disaster. Well, no, because it’s not, in fact, the bankruptcy of the project at all. No one has dropped a bomb, wiping out the physical infrastructure, actually destroying something. What has gone, what is in administration, is the specific legal wrapper - for that’s what a company is, a legal wrapper - for the project.

The idea still exists, the site does, whatever planning permissions have been gained are still there. The project, as and whatever it is, still exists. In fact, the administrators will be selling it off as fast as they can. Anyone who wants it will be able to buy it.

What is gone is that legal wrapper along with the management who didn’t make a success of it. So, it’s not in fact a disaster at all. Whatever value was there is there.

A second amusement is the varied insistences that this was going to be something cutting edge. Not so much really.

The company had been seeking to develop a version of cylindrical 21700 battery cells — an existing product in the market — with better performance and charging speed.

Well, yes, except:

Tesla gave an update on the progress of ramping up 4680 battery cell production.

Leave aside the technological details there and what is being said is that Britishvolt would produce, at some indeterminate time in the future, something well behind the technological curve of what is being trialled and piloted right now.

This is akin to getting that mass production line for the Bristol Brabazon really and properly expanded as the de Havilland Comet takes to the skies.

But by far our greatest amusement is the general insistence that really, government must invest!

The Observer view on the free market thinking that failed Britishvolt

That free market thinking apparently being to allow an idea to be tested, when it doesn’t work then doing nothing about it.

Not for this government, nor any of its predecessors since 2010, the careful planning and collaboration with industry that propels investment in Japan, South Korea, China, Germany and the US. Ministers prefer to keep their hands by their sides and wallets firmly closed, in case they might be accused of a return to 1970s corporatism.

Well, yes, seems sensible to us if we’re honest about it.

For there is no one, absolutely no one at all, in the business of cars, batteries, lithium or even transport who does not know about Britishvolt. The entirety of the global industry of any and all of them will have run their slide rules - conservative lot, accountants and engineers - over the value of the offer and idea. There were a few profferings of minor amounts of seedcorn but no one was willing to step up and commit to financing the idea properly. On the grounds that it’s not a good idea perhaps.

When the experts tell us something is a bad idea we really should listen to said experts, no? When no one will open their wallet for an idea or project much the same is true. Even, that if it can’t be privately financed - in the middle of a roaring mania for the sector under discussion, with global corporations committing billion upon billion to the general field - then perhaps it shouldn’t be financed at all?

Which does leave us with that headline as the lesson to be learned. Some - as with The Observer here - think that Britishvolt is simply just such a bad idea that government must fund it.

Which isn’t we submit, the way to run a railroad. And on the subject of railroads about HS2…….

Please, do make up your minds

The green revolution is going to require much more mining of minerals to make the metals that will drive the green energy revolution. OK. At which point we get this:

Even further into the future, he says scientists could develop chemical solutions that are harmless for the environment and even methods to extract ore that require circulating liquid through the ground rather than disturbing large amounts of earth.

We already do this, it’s called “in-situ leaching” and is a reasonably standard method of uranium mining and we can think of at least one copper experiment being tried. Extraction from brines and geothermal waters is very much the same thing, logically, it’s just that the circulating liquid is the water already there rather than something injected.

So, yes, entirely possible to the point of already being done. At which point we get this:

There, violent militias - with the blessing of the military junta that usurped Aung San Suu Kyi’s government in 2021 - have set up a string of illegal rare earth mines, pock-marking the landscape with bright blue chemical pools, an investigation by the charity Global Witness found.

In a crude and ecologically devastating process, they remove vegetation, drill holes into mountains and inject an acidic solution to effectively liquidate the earth. This is then drained into chemical pools where the liquid evaporates, leaving behind the minerals.

Once the process is finished, the site is abandoned and the militias simply move on, starting all over again in a new location.

Just a few years ago, there were only a handful of these mines. But since then, satellite imagery has revealed hundreds of them - with nearly 3,000 pools recorded across an area the size of Singapore as recently as five months ago.

That is in-situ leaching of ionic adsorption clays. Once thought to be specific to South China and environs such clays are now known to be a common result of the weathering of granite in subtropical climes. There’s even a certain muttering that China Clay pits could be a possibly - do note the possibly - useful source.

At which point, well, is in-situ leaching something we should all be hoping for or not? That it is polluting is undoubtedly true. But that’s not the point at all - it’s how polluting is it?

For as that most basic finding of economics tells us there is no such thing as a solution, there are only trade offs. We can pollute the atmosphere with fossil fuels, pollute the land by mining or shiver in the dark until we all die. Choices do have to be made, d’ye see?

How gloriously better Britain is becoming

It is a standard delusion over to the left of us - which is, we agree, on some matters rather a large part of the spectrum, that lefter than us - that what really ails society is inequality. If only that could be reduced then just everything would improve.

That this contention is nonsense has been ably shown by Chris Snowdon in his The Spirit Level Delusion where he picks apart the foundational document of the error.

However, let us take it seriously, the contention, just for a moment. What should be the reaction of those who claim to believe this to these two stories?

Britain is fast losing its reputation as a hub for wealthy investors and businesspeople, with hundreds more millionaires leaving last year.

In 2022 a further 1,400 high-net-worth individuals, defined as those with wealth in excess of $1 million, left Britain, according to data from Henley & Partners, the citizenship advisory firm. There are thought to be about 737,000 such millionaires in the UK currently.

And:

A Brussels raid on the City of London has pushed the number of millionaire bankers in the European Union to a record high.

The European Banking Authority (EBA), the bloc’s industry watchdog, said Brexit-related relocations increased the number of bankers earning more than €1m (£900,000) in the EU by two fifths in 2021.

Both high wealth and high income people are leaving our verdant and silver girt shores for other places. This must, by definition, mean that Britain is becoming less unequal by both income and wealth measures.

If it is true that lowering inequality makes things better then Britain is better as as result of both of these movements of people. Further, both of these should be welcomed by those inequality mitherers as being the good news that the country is improving.

As and when you see anyone doing so - high fiving over the productive and wealthy leaving the country - let us know. For that would mean we have found at least the one person who really does believe this theory that inequality is all that matters. The corollary also holds: the lack of such celebrations would indicate either a lack of true belief or, possibly, an ignorance of their own theory. And it simply cannot be true that so much noise about policy is driven by those who do not understand, or possibly believe, the theory being advanced, can it? Therefore there must be those mass celebrations happening. But where?

Right to Buy… but Flexible

1) The UK’s Housing Crisis is making us all collectively poorer.

2) Right to Buy was successful but somewhat flawed.

3) A slightly modified ‘Flexible’ Right to Buy circumvents these flaws and provides a meaningful weapon against the Housing Crisis.

So what is Right to Buy?

The UK’s Right to Buy (RTB) policy allows a social tenant to buy the property in which they dwell. Buyers are provided with a 35-70% discount off the market price of their new home. In London, the maximum discount amount is £116,200. Outside of the capital (who knew such a place existed?) it’s £87,200. And herein lies the problem…

Because the tenant is only offered a discount on the house they’re living in, the inflexibility of RTB has (as a first-order effect) stopped many from being able to buy their own homes. Why? Despite the huge discount - many tenants still cannot afford to buy their own social home. Especially in London where over 200,000 social houses are in areas where median house prices exceed £500,000. Even if you get 70% off a £500,000 home, this still prices out most of those in social housing. Surely we need something more… flexible?

What is ‘Flexible’ Right to Buy?

Where ‘Flexible’ Right to Buy (FRTB) differs from RTB is that it allows those in social housing to choose to buy a house outside the one in which they were living and still redeem their RTB discount. Making their purchase potentially cheaper and in any area (with social housing) they might prefer. Consumer surplus is sure to increase.

FRTB also allows for a more efficient distribution of housing. When you give people more money and more choice when buying their home, they’re more likely to buy where they are happier, where they can earn more, and even where their families are based.

The tenant’s old home would then be sold, funding the FRTB discount and raising additional revenue for the local councils:

‘A conservative estimate of the impact would see 21,000 tenants take advantage of the scheme with £2 billion of discounts on £9 billion of stock and net receipts of £7 billion.’

RTB has been around for 40+ years, which means modest reforms to the existing infrastructure to allow for FRTB should be relatively simple. FRTB should also be politically palatable than other radical housing solutions because you can increase the available homes in areas of high demand without having to fight with a single council or planner. Hopefully.

FRTB does have a few drawbacks, though. Albeit solvable ones.

FRTB is primarily a demand-side measure. Without implementing complementary supply-side measures to increase the housing supply, increasing demand for houses by making them relatively cheaper can end up worsening the Housing Crisis. More people will demand housing when it is cheaper. And if supply stays the same, this means more people are clamouring for the same amount of houses. Not good.

It seems obvious that a policy such as this needs to be used in tandem with sensible and significant supply-side policies. And where do we find these? Look no further than the Adam Smith Institute’s housing policies: 

• Let residents in each street vote to allow existing houses to be extended upwards or outwards.

• Allow development on small areas of the green belt within walking distance of train stations, whilst preserving areas of exceptional beauty.

• Liberalise a range of design regulations, including rules on space requirements, height restrictions, window size, corridor width, stair steepness, and minimum lift numbers; Simplify the developer contribution process by replacing section 106 agreements with a single infrastructure levy.

• Legalise subletting for social tenants to make better use of existing social housing stock.

Taking stock…

As our Senior Fellow, Sam Bowman, notes in his Housing Theory of Everything - the Housing Crisis might just be the single most damaging and far-reaching ailment the UK is suffering with. FRTB is but one right step on a long road to housing recovery.

Increasing taxes on profits from investment will reduce investing

It’s a simple enough construction - you get less of whatever you tax. So, if you increase the taxes on profits from investment there will be less investing done:

Britain’s largest North Sea producer has blamed the new windfall tax as it prepares to cut hundreds of jobs and shift attention to outside of the UK.

Harbour Energy says it is reviewing its UK organisation “to align with lower future activity levels” after the tax rate on North Sea drillers was increased from 40pc to 75pc following months of soaring gas and oil prices.

The FTSE 250 company told staff of the planned job cuts on Wednesday. It has not revealed how many jobs will be lost. Industry sources believe it is in the hundreds. It employs around 1,500 in the UK.

The move is likely to ring alarm bells in Whitehall, which has been trying to boost North Sea oil and gas production even as it raids producers’ profits to try and help households facing record energy bills.

One possible reaction here is a shrug and a “Well, that’s how it works”. It’s also possible to mutter that perhaps, as we all insist that Britain invests too little, we should lower the tax rates on the profits from investing.

A much more interesting idea - interesting because it’s obviously wrong - is to insist that people don’t, in fact, consider the taxation of future profits when making investment decisions. Folk are just happy to make any return so those profits can be lifted without affecting the volume of the original investing.

We can even prove that this idea is wrong. A simple consideration of two of the largest financial markets in the world show that it is. US Treasuries pay Federal income tax upon the interest received. US municipal bonds do not pay that Federal income tax. Risk-adjusted - for all observations in this field must be so adjusted - munis pay a lower interest rate than Treasuries. The only possible explanation for this being that people look at the post-tax yield, not the pre-tax one, when making their decision over which to invest in.

It’s possible to go into more detail. Holdings of munis are heavily concentrated among higher rate income tax payers for that’s who the tax-relief is worth most to. Coroporations, who are taxed on interest in an entirely different way, hold near no munis. The only useful, or indeed possible, explanation for these behaviours being that people look at the post-tax income, or profit, from their investments not the pre-tax ones when making their investment decisions.

Anyone saying different has to overcome that evidence from the Treasury and municipal bonds markets in the US. Good luck with that one.

Taxing something reduces the amount of that thing done. So, if we desire more investment, something that large parts of the Establishment are insisting we must have, we should reduce the taxation of profits from having invested.

Jeremy in Nuclear Wonderland

MPs on the Commons’ science and technology select committee heard yesterday that the establishment of Great British Nuclear has been delayed due to friction between the business department and the Treasury over the budget for new projects. Given we know that all of the UK’s eight nuclear power plants are due to shut by 2028, apart from Sizewell B, which is closing in 2035, the need for new nuclear power is imperative. Especially when five of these are still providing about 13% of the UK’s electricity.

A new one (Hinkley Point C) is under construction but “reports surfaced this week suggesting that the nuclear power station in Somerset will not be operational until 2036, 11 years after its original 2025 completion date.” The other new one (Sizewell C) is a replica of Hinkley Point C and has been under consideration for 12 years and the government hopes to make a final decision by 2025. Being a replica should make Sizewell C easier and cheaper to build but, unfortunately Hinkley Point C has technical problems and duplicating Sizewell B would have been a better bet.

Britain’s chaotic approach to nuclear energy can all be laid at the door of HM Treasury. Prime Minister Johnson recognised the need to action and, in March 2022, grabbed a target of 24GW for nuclear out of the air which, he claimed, would be 25% of electricity demand – a not unreasonable baseload given the volatility of renewables. Unfortunately, then-Chancellor Sunak forgot to mention that electricity met only 20% of our energy demands and would have to supply nearly 100% by 2050.  So 25% of demand needs more like 56GW than 24GW and, furthermore, someone seems now to have cunningly inserted “up to” before the 24GW.

Johnson also announced that a new organisation would take charge of delivering this nuclear programme pronto, Great British Nuclear (GBN). Apparently GBN has a shopping list of what it needs to get going but the public are not allowed to see it. HM Treasury is concerned that GBN wants to spend money.

So the current plans are to decide (maybe) to add two more Sizewell Bs or Cs in the next Parliament, i.e. by 2030, and hope they are up and running by 2050.  So we’ll have four operational 2.3GW plants by 2050, i.e. 13.2 GW – well they only said “up to”. Note that the plans only encompass when decisions might be made – not when the plants might be generating electricity.

Of course, we could have a fleet of small or advanced modular reactors which are far better value for money but HM Treasury regards them as unfamiliar and therefore unacceptable. Never mind their being introduced today into Canada, the USA and China or that they are more welcomed by the French.

The Treasury nuclear wonderland has two stand-out features: delaying the commissioning of nuclear generators, ostensibly to save taxes, as discussed above, and ensuring users pay twice as much as the French or Americans to restrain our enthusiasm for buying electricity at all.  It does that in three ways. The first is fixing the way wholesale electricity prices are set so that everyone pays the most expensive tender price to the National Grid rather than (as other auctions work) the lowest.

Then it adds the “Green Levy” alongside other taxes so that today’s consumers pay for the electricity used by the next generation of consumers. Never mind renewables being cheaper, today’s consumers have to pay a premium for it.

The third way today’s consumers are hit with future costs is the “Regulated Asset Base” (RAB) model HM Treasury will use to finance Sizewell C and all future nuclear power plants. This is the successor to the Private Finance Initiative which financed £12 billion of English hospital building at a cost to the taxpayer, by the time the idea was dropped in 2018, of £79 billion in repayments. Only it is worse. The idea, like the Green Levy, is that today’s electricity user pays for tomorrow’s consumption inflated by City profits. Someone seems to have conceived the idea that if we all pay a lot more for our electricity today, it won’t hurt when the zero carbon costs hit us in 2050.

The bottom line of all this is that the Treasury’s ducking and diving is hugely damaging for today’s and future electricity users and preventing any sane nuclear policy being implemented.

Abolishing clinical leadership is no way to improve GP services

Ever since the NHS was created in 1948, GP services have remained privately run. They are typically partnerships of General Practitioners who employ a Practice Manager to look after the smooth running of the admin. The virtue of the model is that doctors themselves are in charge and, despite (in England) the deluge of diktats from their local Integrated Care Board and from NHS England, they feel empowered by the fact that they decide how their practice is run.

Now Keir Starmer has floated the idea of taking away their clinical leadership and turning them into paid employees of the NHS. Instead of the administration reporting to them, they’ll report to the administration. Supposedly, this move will allow “GPs to focus on caring for patients rather than the admin that comes with effectively running a small business” and work “much more closely with other parts of the system”.

Mr Starmer points out that many GPs already are salaried rather than acting as partners. Of course different GPs have different preferences. Some like to act as locums receiving a day rate. Some are keener on a salary than a partnership. But the beauty of the existing system is that it allows GPs to choose what sort of career they want. Nationalising GP practices would narrow those options and, ultimately, make GP careers a less attractive option.

There are two problems with NHS GP services right now. The first is that there is a shortage of doctors. There is a perception that, in the golden age, GPs were highly responsive and worked hard, and that now they’re all part-time and won’t lift a finger. In fact, the average GP is working 38.4 hours – a full-time job – even though in the way the NHS counts it they are only officially working part-time. Regardless, it's hard to see that making GPs employees would encourage more hours to be worked.

So why are there too few doctors? Well, it’s because, in our state-controlled system, the government artificially caps the number of medical students. Farcically, a new medical school at the University of Worcester isn’t allowed to take any English students because of the limit. Simon Trickett, who leads the local NHS commissioners in Herefordshire and Worcestershire, expects to spend over £70 million in locum and agency staff because of the shortage of doctors. He told The Observer: “It is really frustrating. The local system is 100% behind this medical school. The GP surgeries, the hospitals, the community services and the local councils all really want it. But it is being blocked from entering the market.”

The second problem with NHS GP services is that the incentives are set wrongly. GP practices are paid principally on the number of patients they have in their database, and not for actually seeing a patient. Is it any surprise, then, when patients of some practices find it difficult to get an appointment?

The solution is to cut public sector pensions

There is always a well-known solution to every human problem—neat, plausible, and politically impossible. This should not stop us, as with the laddie and the new clothes, pointing it out.

No doubt nurses and teachers will be even more determined to strike later this week when they see how the pay gap between the public and private sectors persists in the latest official figures.

The Office for National Statistics said private sector pay increased by 7.2%, before adjusting for inflation, while the equivalent figure for the public sector was a meagre rise of 3.3% in the three months to the end of November.

With inflation running at 10.7% in the penultimate month of the year, it is not difficult to see why so many nurses and teachers have found themselves struggling to pay food and energy bills, while an increasing number queue at a food bank.

It’s possible to go back and have a look at the numbers for public versus private sector pay. ASHE at the ONS is the source, open to anyone who can wrestle a spreadsheet. In 1997 public sector pay was some 101% of private. In 2010 115.8%, Last year, 2022, 115%. So forgive us if we don’t weep too much for the downtrodden public servants.

Of course, these numbers do not take account of the different skills, seniority and responsibility mixes in the jobs done - but all those figures suffer from that same problem so they are still comparable. The other thing they don’t account for - because they are the raw wages figures - are the details of further compensation. Job security, differences in sick and maternity pay perhaps and the biggie, pensions.

Meanwhile, other public sector staff are taking industrial action – ambulance drivers, nurses and rail workers – with others also threatening to walk out.

The NEU argues strikes are about maintaining teachers’ real pay against the background of double-digit inflation. It calculates teachers have suffered a 23pc pay cut in real terms since 2010. The union says: “This is not about a pay rise but correcting historic real-terms pay cuts”.

But the NEU’s headline figures do not tell the whole story, because they ignore the value of the “deferred salary” teachers earn through their generous defined benefit pensions, a guaranteed inflation-linked pension for life, based on salary and years worked – a major part of total public sector pay.

The annual cost to taxpayers of new public sector pensions – calculated just like private sector pensions – are published in individual pension scheme accounts.

The Teachers Pension Scheme accounts show that from 2010 to 2022 the annual cost to taxpayers of pensions, after teachers’ own contributions, shot up from 15.5pc to 67pc of salary – two thirds of salary – largely because of lower real interest rates.

Adding pensions to salary to get total pay paints a very different picture – rather than a 23pc fall in real terms, teachers' total pay and pensions has gone up by 10pc.

At which point a little theory. The aim of a pension is to accord with the lifetime income hypothesis, which assumes that we’d like to smooth our incomes. We work for 30 to 40 years, we live for perhaps 80. Rather than feast in our working years then starve we save some of that working life income to pay for the Golden Years. The theory can be extended to our borrowing before working wages arrive then paying off the loans when they do. We smooth that total working compensation over all of our living years that is.

This is true whether we call it paying taxes to gain access to welfare, making pension contributions to gain an annuity or taking out student loans. We smooth a working life’s income over all of life. It’s possible to argue with the details of this, but the base idea is obviously true.

One of those details is that an assumption is made - we’d like to have largely the same consumption possibilities over that lifetime which the working years must pay for. That might not be wholly true - consumption desires among the over-90s might be rather lower than among the sprightly 70 year olds. Fewer cruises and skydiving adventures desired perhaps - possibly offset by care costs, possibly not. But details - the base idea of smoothing is clearly true.

So, what actually is the complaint being made here? Among those teachers, public servants in general, too much of their working compensation is in delayed wages - those pensions - and not enough in current wages. The solution is therefore obvious. Cut the pensions to pay more in current wages.

Neat, plausible, and politically impossible.

In a well accounted for world those future pensions would be part of the national debt. For they are promises of future bounty from the nation’s government. For near all of them there is no fund, no pot of capital - they are simply a claim upon future tax revenues, where there is a notional fund the fallback is still tax revenues. We are not in a well accounted for world. Those pension liabilities are off the books in a manner that a corporation would be closed down and bankrupted for trying.

Therefore, while raising wages now and lowering wages then should have no effect upon the government accounts - if they were properly kept - they would in fact have an effect - because those government accounts are not properly kept.

It is still the correct solution though. Cut public sector pensions to raise public sector pay. Unless, of course, once we’ve included the value of those pensions into those public sector pay packets we just decide to cut them anyway.

Why Existential Risks are really really bad

Imagine what a catastrophe looks like to you. Running out of toilet paper mid-bathroom visit? Stubbing your toe? Making a bad investment? Losing a key election? Or even being forced to watch Love Island by your housemates?

Now think bigger. When we talk about Global Catastrophic Risks (GCRs), we mean world wars, huge forest fires, single (or double as in the case of the attack on Japan in 1945) nuclear bomb attacks, cyber hacks that take out continental energy systems, and more. 

Now think even bigger. An event that kills or impedes so many people (perhaps 99 per cent or more) that humanity as it once was may never, ever recover. Types of X-risk include:

• Climate Disaster – an event so destabilising it obliterates agricultural supply chains, forces mass migration, and induces extreme floods, droughts, and other weather events. This may be caused by man-made climate change, or by an asteroid hitting Earth, or even a nuclear winter.

• Nuclear War – as we saw in 1945, the firing of 1 or 2 nuclear weapons is indiscriminate and a huge loss of life. But it wasn't quite a GCR nor anywhere near an X-risk. However, a nuclear war between, say, the US and Russia - with a combined 11,405 warheads between them - may bring about a nuclear winter from which there is no coming back.

• Biological Risks – both naturally occurring and man-made pathogens could prove much deadlier than the COVID-19 pandemic we just suffered. Some in the field of Biotechnology are more fearful of artificial pathogens which could be created as a weapon. The Government Office for Science report expresses similar worries. With genetic advancements, it is becoming easier and thus more likely that a rogue terrorist group (or state) might seek such a destructive power.

• Artificial Intelligence – what’s AI going to do? Is ChatGPT going to take over the world? Not quite. But some fear that this increasingly more powerful technology could one day be as smart if not smarter than people. And at such a point, how do we ensure they are acting in our interests? How do we ensure they don’t turn us into paperclips…
  
  

These are all examples of X-risks. I know, they sound like they’re straight out of a science-fiction book… but they’re not. And they’re more likely to happen than we think.

Professor Toby Ord, a Senior Research Fellow in Philosophy at Oxford University — whose work focuses on the big picture questions facing humanity — puts the likelihood of an X-risk event at a 1-in-6 chance of happening this century. Other academics in the fields are less conservative.

Scary, right? If there was a 1-in-6 chance of you dying today in your car journey, would you drive? An X-risk event would be so bad for the UK and for the rest of the world because it is virtually irrecoverable. So one would hope we are doing a lot to prevent it? Not enough, I’d argue.

A charitable explanation as to why the UK does not seem as prepared against X-risk as it could be has something to do with both 1) the inherent ‘short-termism’ we see in our Governments, and 2) the relative unlikelihood of an X-risk occurring. It seems (politically) more rational to use extra funding to bring about services that will win votes at the next election. But, as the pioneering AI Professor Stuart Russell said:

“You can’t fetch the coffee if you’re dead.”

In other words, we cannot even think about making the world a better place through policy if we’re all… dead. An X-risk will destroy not just our economy, but might also mean the end of the human race as we know it. This sounds bad to me!

What kind of policies might be helpful here? The Centre for Long Term Resilience (CLTR) has an idea which includes the implementation of a government Chief Risk Officer (CRO). A ‘three lines of defence’ model will introduce less siloed risk management with clearer accountabilities across government. And on AI, our work at the Adam Smith Institute has rightly focussed on how AI might or might not steal our jobs.

But we should probably start thinking a little harder and a little longer about how we might avoid X-risks.