Author name: 胡思

It’s the Gas, Not the Tax: Why the Conservative Cheap Power Plan Won’t Lower Bills

It’s the Gas, Not the Tax: Why the Conservative Cheap Power Plan Won’t Lower Bills

Leave a Comment / UK Affairs /

The Conservative policy document puts it plainly: scrap the carbon tax, abolish the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism alongside it, and freeze VAT on household energy bills for three years, saving the average family around £200 a year. The figures are clean, the posture direct, and it sounds like relief for households worn down by expensive power. The trouble is that the tax sitting on a bill and the cost of generating electricity are two different things. This plan moves the former and never touches the latter.

To see why, start with how Britain’s electricity price is actually set. The market runs on marginal pricing: every half hour the system calls up the cheapest power first and works up the cost ladder until demand is met, and the last and most expensive unit needed sets the price paid to all of them. In Britain that price-setting unit is still a gas plant roughly 60% of the time in 2026. However much cheap power wind and solar pour in, as long as a little gas is burned to fill the gap at that moment, the whole market price tracks the international gas price. In 2021 that share was 90%; it has fallen to 60% because renewables and storage have steadily pushed gas out of the price-setting seat.

Once that chain is clear, the plan’s moves stop holding up. Issuing more drilling licences and squeezing the North Sea dry sounds like self-sufficiency, but Britain is a price taker on the global gas market, not a price maker. The North Sea holds a tiny fraction of world reserves, and output has been declining naturally for more than 20 years. A few more fields would support jobs, but not necessarily tax, because the same plan also repeals the Energy Profits Levy, which brought the Treasury £2.9 billion in 2024/25. Wipe that out, with investment reliefs for new drilling on top, and the books are more likely to show less revenue than more. The international gas curve will not move an inch for any of it, and while gas holds, the marginal price holds, and not a penny comes off the bill.

The carbon tax cut needs to be weighed carefully. Britain’s own Carbon Price Support is frozen at £18 a tonne, and removing that layer alone saves the average household about £15 a year; strip out the main UK Emissions Trading Scheme as well, and with carbon recently accounting for around 37% of the wholesale electricity price, the rough saving is somewhere between £40 and £80, well short of £200. And when wholesale prices fall, the subsidies paid through Contracts for Difference rise to fill the gap, clawing much of it back. At bottom this only lowers the marginal cost of gas-fired power once, while gas still rules the price, and carbon pricing and net-zero investment are the very forces that have been pushing gas out of the price-setting seat. The bigger cost is what scrapping the UK ETS drags in behind it. The EU’s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism took effect in 2026, taxing imported steel, cement, aluminium and fertiliser at the EU carbon price. Britain had been planning to link its ETS to the EU’s to win an exemption; tear the scheme out and that link is severed, and exporters pay the carbon tariff at the EU border instead. Around 75% of UK steel exports go to the EU, a market worth nearly £3 billion, and industry reckons CBAM alone could cost British manufacturers some £800 million a year. The carbon cost does not vanish; it simply turns from a tax Britain collects, and can bargain with, into a carbon tariff Brussels collects at the border. Save a household a few tens of pounds, then hand a far larger sum to the EU: the arithmetic does not work.

Freezing VAT is more sticking plaster than treatment. VAT on household energy in Britain is only 5%, not 20%, and abolishing it saves about £86 a year per household. But that £86 does not come from electricity becoming cheaper to produce; it comes from the government handing back tax it would otherwise have collected, which is the same as writing every household an £86 cheque. The cost is £2.2 to £2.5 billion in foregone revenue a year, and frozen for three years that is around £7 billion vanishing from the Exchequer, money that has to be found through borrowing or through tax rises and spending cuts elsewhere. The measure tests fiscal appetite, not energy policy; any party in any government could do it tomorrow, and it has nothing to do with generating a single unit of power. Worse, it lasts only three years. Peel the plaster off and the tax returns, the bill springs back, and the wound is exactly as deep as before. The money is spent, the price has not moved, and after three years it is back where it started.

There is only one route that genuinely brings the price down: drive gas out of the price-setting seat. That means continuing to roll out wind and solar to build up cheap volume, adding low-carbon firm power that holds up when the wind drops and the sun sets, with nuclear as one piece of it, and using storage to hold surplus power, from batteries to longer-duration storage, together with interconnectors and an upgraded grid, so that on still, overcast nights the system no longer has to burn gas to set the price. This is the same combination that has been edging gas out over recent years. But it is neither cheap nor quick. It demands heavy capital up front, nuclear routinely takes a decade or more and overruns are almost the norm, with Hinkley Point C the standing example, and grid and storage spending lands first on the network and policy costs of the bill, while the cheaper wholesale price shows up only later. Cost first, return later: that is exactly why it is politically hard, and why a VAT plaster is so tempting.

Adding the pieces up to £200 is not difficult. What is difficult is that the whole £200 comes from the government lifting its own slice off the bill, not from power becoming cheaper to generate. British electricity is dear because at the margin it still leans on gas, because it entrusts its own price to an international commodity it cannot control. Until that structural chain is broken, every promise of cheap power is a discount on the symptom, not a cure for the cause.

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To Be Human, Andrew Must First Agree to Die

To Be Human, Andrew Must First Agree to Die

Leave a Comment / Science & Tech /

Bicentennial Man (1999), adapted from Isaac Asimov’s novel The Positronic Man and directed by Chris Columbus, casts Robin Williams as Andrew, a household robot who slowly grows into something close to a person. The story runs across 200 years and follows a machine bought to do the chores as it presses, step by step, to be treated as a human being, winning legal recognition only at the moment of its death.

What the story really forces upon us is an old question that remains unanswered: what is it that makes a being a person. Andrew acquires early on the things humans prize most in themselves, curiosity, creativity, humour, and in time love as well. He learns to carve, learns to tell jokes, fits himself with artificial organs that tire and ache, and turns a steel frame gradually into flesh. In ability and in feeling he lacks nothing, and is arguably more human than several of the flesh-and-blood people around him. Yet the World Congress will not grant him the title. The question surfaces plainly. What defines personhood, is it consciousness, emotion, creativity, or something else.

The film’s answer is unexpected, and the most worth chewing over. The Congress recognises Andrew not because he has finally gained some capability, but because he chooses to let his bloodstream age, choosing to die. What makes him human, in other words, is not something he adds but something he is willing to give up. A machine that cannot break down, however human it seems, stands outside humanity, because it never has to face an ending. Death here is not a human defect but a human entry ticket. To be able to lose, to move toward a close, turns out to be the deepest colour in the word person.

This touches a sharper reflection. We have long treated agelessness and deathlessness as the ultimate blessing, promised by religion and pursued by technology. The story suggests instead that an existence without end may be precisely an existence without weight. It is because time is finite that choices carry a cost, that love carries reluctance to part, that each decision counts at all. Andrew trades 200 years of immortality for a life that will wither and end, and what he gains is not merely a legal title but a weight his existence never had before. Only by surrendering the infinite does he lay claim to meaning, a paradox more arresting than any tearful scene.

Andrew’s romance with Portia brings the abstractions down to earth. Portia is the granddaughter of Little Miss, and Andrew has always carried an unspoken tenderness for Little Miss, so that across several generations the feeling reawakens in a new object. Does love spoken by a machine count as love, and if it is indistinguishable from a human heart’s stirring, on what grounds do we call it false. What stings more is the asymmetry. Portia will age and die, while Andrew can remain fixed in place, watching the one he loves wear away inch by inch. It is this asymmetry that leaves him unable to rest in immortality, and his choice of ageing and death is less about claiming a title than about walking the final stretch of the road beside the one he loves.

There is one episode easily taken as a passing detail that in fact carries great weight. After serving the Martin family for many years, Andrew asks of his own accord to buy back his freedom with the money saved from selling his carvings. On the face of it this is almost pointless. He is already treated as family, paid a wage, free to move as he wishes, and what it earns him is the hurt and coolness of his master, Richard. But a freedom lent out of goodwill remains in another’s hand, given when they are pleased and withdrawn when they are not. Andrew would rather pay for it, so that freedom becomes something held in his own name that no one can take back. The heart of freedom lies not in how comfortable your life is but in whom it actually belongs to.

Following that thread, freedom and recognition turn out to be two sides of one question. What Andrew seeks is never a stronger set of functions but to be treated as a subject, to hold his own name and property and to decide for himself. This reminds us that personhood may be less a measurable inner property than a relationship of mutual recognition, a matter of whether a community is willing to draw you inside the circle of us.

It is worth noting that the film flopped on release and the critics were unmoved, costing roughly 100 million US dollars and taking only about 87 million worldwide, a clear loss, long filed away as a slow and overly sentimental misfire. Yet set aside for 20-odd years and watched again in the age of AI, it has grown new weight, and looks more like an underrated film worth thinking through. Machines can already create and converse, and whether they possess consciousness has become a serious debate. The thing Andrew spent a full 200 years asking is now laid in front of us. When a system behaves human in every respect, on what grounds do we say it is not. Is it because it has no consciousness, or because we cannot prove it has any, is it because it cannot die, or because to recognise it would unsettle our attachment to our own uniqueness. The story answers none of this for us. It only hones the question to a finer edge, pressing us, while there is still time, to think clearly about what we use to define a person, and what we are prepared to use to define a machine.

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The ‘Economy Wreckers’ Who Fixed the Sky

The ‘Economy Wreckers’ Who Fixed the Sky

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Anyone who grew up in Hong Kong remembers that sky. In the 1980s the Rambler Channel ran in unnatural colours, slicked with chemicals no one could name, and the streets nearby were lined with factories that belched out a sour, sulphurous stink you could taste at the back of your throat. The rain came with a tang of acid. In a café, the second-hand smoke from the next table came thicker than what you’d ordered yourself. A bus would pass, and you’d hold your breath against the black gloss of its exhaust. None of this was apocalyptic. It was just daily life.

London’s story was more extreme. In December 1952, a five-day pall of toxic smog smothered the city. Visibility collapsed to the point where conductors had to walk ahead of buses carrying flaming torches. The conservative initial estimate put the death toll at 4,000; later research raised it to 12,000. Today London has some of the cleanest air of any major capital on Earth. What separates those two cities is not luck. It is seventy years of unrelenting effort by successive generations.

It is easy to take today’s blue sky for granted, as though the environment somehow heals itself. The opposite is true. Every time the air has got cleaner, it has been because someone, somewhere, was willing to spend money, shut factories and rewrite the rules, and then took the abuse for ‘wrecking the economy’.

The ozone layer is the clearest example. In 1985, scientists discovered a hole opening above Antarctica. The culprits were cheap, useful chemicals tucked inside refrigerators and aerosol cans. Two years later the world signed the Montreal Protocol, which to this day remains almost the only environmental treaty ever ratified by every country on Earth. The price was that the refrigeration and chemicals industries had to swap profitable formulations for new ones, and plenty of voices at the time warned this would cripple the sector. The result? Nearly 99% of the destructive chemicals have been phased out. The ozone layer is healing. Most of the planet is expected to return to its 1980 levels around 2040, with Antarctica catching up by 2066. A disaster that would have given untold numbers of people skin cancer was stopped by a single piece of paper.

London’s smog dispersed in the same way. After the 1952 disaster, Parliament passed the Clean Air Act in 1956, designating smoke control areas where coal could no longer be burned, subsidising households to switch to cleaner fuels, and moving power stations out of the city one by one. Once the visible black smoke was gone, what remained was the invisible exhaust of cars. So in 2019 the city introduced the Ultra Low Emission Zone, charging the dirtiest vehicles a daily fee, and in August 2023 it expanded in one sweep to cover all 33 boroughs. Several outer boroughs even joined forces to take the mayor to court. The argument was the same old one: it will raise costs, it will ruin business. Yet today nearly 97% of vehicles on London’s roads already comply, and the smog survives only in old photographs.

Hong Kong has walked the same road. Roadside sulphur dioxide has fallen by more than 60% since 1999, and roadside nitrogen dioxide dropped by 41% in the decade from 2012 to 2021. In 2007 indoor workplaces and restaurants went smoke-free, with bars and clubs following in 2009. The hospitality trade had complained the loudest, certain it would be put out of business. Today nobody misses the era when a single meal left your clothes stinking of cigarettes, and nobody misses that brightly coloured channel either.

What unites these stories is not technological cleverness. It is the willingness of someone, somewhere, to pick up a bill that is visible now and only pays back later. Clean air has an awkward economic property. Its costs are concentrated, immediate and visible: factories close, fuel gets dearer, businesses howl. Its benefits are diffuse, delayed and invisible: a cancer that never arrives, a child who never has to wear a mask to school. The market cannot price this trade-off, because nobody has ever written an invoice for a disease that did not happen. So the bill ends up being worked out by scientists, built by engineers, and signed off by politicians willing to take the abuse.

Short-sighted minds will always see the cost and never the return, which is why the cry of ‘wrecking the economy’ is forever in the air. But the economy was not wrecked, not in the way the warnings said it would be. London did not grind to a halt because it stopped burning coal. The refrigeration industry did not vanish because its formulas changed. Hong Kong’s restaurants are still serving meals. What actually vanished was the acid rain, the toxic smog, the colourful channel, and the sky that was killing people early.

So next time you look up at a clear sky, remember: it is not a gift from nature. It was won back inch by inch, by generation after generation of scientists, engineers and politicians with the nerve to stand against accusations of being ‘impractical’ or ‘wrecking the economy’. The logic of the carbon and climate problems we now face is identical. Whether we can mend the sky once more depends on whether we are still willing to pay a visible price for an invisible reward.

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Red Button or Blue: A Coordination Trap Dressed as a Morality Test

Red Button or Blue: A Coordination Trap Dressed as a Morality Test

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A question circulating on social media in recent weeks looks deceptively simple. Everyone on Earth casts a private vote by pressing either a red button or a blue button. If more than fifty per cent of people press blue, everyone survives. If fewer than fifty per cent press blue, only those who pressed red survive. Which would you press?

The version that went viral was posted by the writer Tim Urban on X in April 2026. Within days it had drawn more than 22 million views and roughly 95,000 votes, breaking down at about 57.9 per cent for blue and 42.1 per cent for red. The argument that followed quickly collapsed into a moral shouting match. Blue voters accused red voters of selfishness. Red voters accused blue voters of naive sentimentalism. Each side concluded the other was either stupid or wicked.

A calmer look at the structure reveals something different. This is not a moral dilemma. It is a coordination problem.

Consider the bare arithmetic of self-interest. Anyone who presses red survives no matter what happens. If blue wins more than half the vote, everyone lives and the red voter lives along with them. If blue falls short, only red voters survive and the red voter lives because they pressed red. In game-theoretic terms, red is a dominant strategy and a Nash equilibrium. A person concerned only with staying alive has no rational reason to choose anything else.

Blue is the opposite. Pressing blue stakes your life on a single proposition: that enough strangers will press blue too. If the bet wins, everyone lives. If the bet loses, you are the one who dies. The safety of blue depends entirely on your trust in people you cannot see, cannot speak to, and cannot influence.

The strange feature of the dilemma is its death curve. If every single person on Earth presses red, the share of blue votes is zero, the threshold is not met, and only red voters live. Since everyone pressed red, no one dies. If every person presses blue, the threshold is comfortably cleared and again no one dies. Both extremes, total selfishness and total altruism, produce identical outcomes: no casualties.

The danger lives in the middle. The worst case is something like 49 per cent pressing blue and 51 per cent pressing red. Blue falls just short, and every one of those forty-nine in a hundred kind-hearted voters dies. The more people choose the moral option, so long as they remain below the line, the higher the body count climbs. Half-hearted altruism kills more people than wholehearted selfishness.

This is the real point of the puzzle. The rules concentrate every ounce of risk on the cooperators while leaving the self-preserving entirely untouched. The question is not whether you are kind. It is whether you are willing to hand your life to a crowd of strangers you can neither identify nor coordinate with. Red voters are not necessarily cold-blooded. They simply do not believe coordination will succeed. Blue voters are not necessarily noble. They are willing to gamble on human nature.

The shape of this problem is everywhere in the real world. A bank run works the same way. As long as you believe other depositors will leave their money in the bank, you have no reason to withdraw yours. The moment you suspect they will run for the exit, the rational move is to beat them to it. Herd immunity, climate negotiations, the upkeep of public goods all share the structure of the red and blue button. Cooperation produces the best collective result, but the first cooperators carry the largest individual risk.

The question worth asking, then, is not whether the people pressing buttons have a conscience. It is how the rules of the game have been written. A system that piles all the risk onto those willing to help will not grow cooperation. It will breed quiet, intelligent self-preservation. What deserves serious thought is not which colour you would press, but whether it is possible to design rules under which pressing blue no longer requires courage.

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Cheap Coal, Costly Labour: Why the Industrial Revolution Began in Britain and Nowhere Else

Cheap Coal, Costly Labour: Why the Industrial Revolution Began in Britain and Nowhere Else

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Why did the Industrial Revolution erupt first in Britain rather than in China, France or the Netherlands? It is one of the oldest arguments in economic history. Eighteenth-century Britain had a smaller population than China and no obvious cultural edge over France, yet it became the cradle of mechanised production. The answer lies not in a single genius or a single invention, but in a string of geographic, economic and institutional conditions that happened to fall into place all at once in this one corner of north-western Europe.

The most fundamental card was buried underground. Britain’s coalfields were concentrated in South Wales, Yorkshire, Lancashire and the Scottish Lowlands, and most of them sat close to navigable rivers and tidal estuaries, so fuel could be carried to where it was needed at very low cost. Once energy was cheap, the entire arithmetic of production had to be recalculated.

What truly lit the fuse was the gap between the price of labour and the price of energy. British wages were high by European standards, while coal was unusually cheap. When workers are dear and fuel is cheap, replacing expensive hands with coal-burning machines becomes the most profitable bargain on offer. A Lancashire mill owner who could let one machine do the work of ten spinners had overwhelming reason on the balance sheet to do exactly that. The spinning jenny, the water frame, the spinning mule and later the power loom all served the same purpose: to turn fibre into cloth faster and with fewer hands. These machines did not appear out of thin air. They were forced into existence by a particular cost structure.

The steam engine pushed that logic to its limit. Thomas Newcomen had already built an atmospheric engine early in the century, but what turned steam into a universal source of power was James Watt’s separate condenser, developed in the 1760s. By sparing the cylinder from constantly cooling and reheating, it cut fuel consumption sharply, and steam went on to drive mines, mills and ironworks before finally climbing onto the rails. This was no accident. It was the product of a distinctive institutional and economic environment.

That environment had deeper roots. Before factories could fill with workers, those workers first had to leave the land. The agricultural improvements of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, built on crop rotation, selective breeding and better drainage, allowed fewer people to grow more food. The enclosure movement then consolidated common land into private holdings and pushed smallholders off the soil they had once shared. With little choice, they flowed into the mill towns of the north and the midlands and became the labour force the mines and factories required.

The remaining pieces locked together. Empire and global trade supplied raw materials such as cotton and offered markets to absorb the finished goods. The Bank of England, founded in 1694, together with the joint-stock company, allowed capital to be pooled while liability stayed limited. After the Glorious Revolution of 1688, private property was no longer at the mercy of the crown, so anyone who built a mill could expect to keep the returns, and that certainty is the precondition for long-term investment. A long coastline made coastal shipping cheap, and a wave of canals tied inland coalfields to manufacturing towns, weaving a single national market. By contrast, the fragmented German states and a France riddled with internal tolls could barely move their own goods freely.

So the Industrial Revolution settled in Britain not for any single reason. Cheap energy, expensive labour, agricultural transformation, global trade, sound institutions and a practical engineering culture, joined by the political stability Britain alone enjoyed while the continent was consumed by revolution and war, all came together in the same place at the same moment. Remove any one of them and the picture changes. The real point is not that the British were cleverer than everyone else, but that at that moment, swapping workers for machines was a profitable bargain in Britain and a losing one almost everywhere else. Technology never simply follows genius. It follows the ledger.

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The Primary Energy Fallacy: We Never Had to Replace That Much

The Primary Energy Fallacy: We Never Had to Replace That Much

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Every so often, someone pulls up a chart of the world’s energy mix, points at the great slab of fossil fuels, and declares that since oil, coal and gas still supply around 80% of global energy, the notion of wind and solar filling that gap is pure fantasy. This is not an argument confined to non-specialists. Dieter Helm, the Oxford economist, does not deny climate change and calls himself a climate realist; yet he too maintains that it is naive to think wind and solar could ever add up to replace that 80% of fossil fuels, that they are necessary but a very long way from sufficient.

The trouble is that the 80% conceals a trap. It measures primary energy, the total energy locked inside the fuel, rather than the energy we actually use. A coal-fired power station runs at roughly 35% efficiency, and a petrol car turns less than a third of the energy in its tank into motion at the wheels. Put another way, close to two-thirds of that 80% never becomes a useful service at all. It leaves as waste heat, dispersing into the air and carrying carbon dioxide with it. Taken across the whole energy system, only about a third of the primary energy we burn, and by some measures rather less, ever ends up as useful work. A large part of that imposing slab on the chart is not something we want. It is the waste itself.

Once this is clear, the task changes shape. What has to be replaced is not 80% of the energy, but the far smaller slice of genuine service that the 80% buys us. The real power of electrification is not that it swaps one unit of electricity for one unit of oil or gas, but that it strips out the great block of waste heat sitting in the middle. An electric car is about three times as efficient as a petrol one, and a heat pump delivers the same warmth using a third to a fifth of the energy a gas boiler needs. Nick Eyre, the Oxford energy researcher, ran the numbers on a simple question: what if the world electrified industry, buildings and transport as far as it could? That step alone, he found, would cut final energy demand by around 40%. The 80% mountain, measured in useful energy, is suddenly a good deal shorter.

In fairness, Helm has a separate set of arguments about the cost of running the supply side, and that is a different subject, not one for this article. But on the 80% itself the point is plain. The figure measures how much we burn, not how much we use. Treat the heat that vanishes during combustion as demand that must be matched unit for unit, and of course the task looks impossibly large. Telling people to be realistic about the energy transition is no bad thing. But the first act of realism is to measure the right quantity. Using a figure inflated by waste heat to prove the transition is hopeless may look rigorous, yet it has miscounted from the very first step.

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The Little-Known Hong Kong-Born Astronaut, Diplomat, Actor, Presenter and Entrepreneur

The Little-Known Hong Kong-Born Astronaut, Diplomat, Actor, Presenter and Entrepreneur

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Hong Kong’s international character is usually described through finance, shipping, trade, migration and entrepôt commerce. These descriptions are accurate, but still rather abstract. A more vivid proof can be found in the lives of people who later appeared on the world stage, but whose starting point was Hong Kong. They did not necessarily identify as Hongkongers. Many did not grow up there. They were not Hong Kong celebrities in the usual sense. That is precisely why the connection is striking. In the 20th century, Hong Kong was not only a Chinese city. It was also a colonial administrative centre, a military station, an aviation hub, a commercial platform and a temporary home for transnational families. It produced not only capital and goods, but life trajectories.

The most dramatic example is the American astronaut William Anders. Born in Hong Kong in 1933, he later became a member of Apollo 8, the first crewed mission to orbit the Moon. Anders took the famous Earthrise photograph, one of the defining images of the space age. Seen from lunar orbit, Earth appeared as a blue and white sphere hanging in the darkness of space. The image later became an important visual symbol for modern environmental consciousness. Hong Kong and the Moon landing programme may seem worlds apart, but Anders’s birthplace reminds us that colonial Hong Kong was connected to American military, diplomatic and Pacific strategic networks. Calling him a Hong Kong-born astronaut does not mean Hong Kong produced NASA. It means Hong Kong once sat inside a wider system of global power and human movement.

Another example is Rory Stewart. Born in British Hong Kong in 1973, he later became a British diplomat, writer, Conservative MP, cabinet minister and political commentator, and has become better known in recent years through the podcast The Rest Is Politics. Stewart’s public image is deeply British, even classically establishment: Eton, Oxford, the Foreign Office, Parliament and Cabinet. Yet his birthplace was Hong Kong, and his family background was connected to colonial administration and diplomacy. This is not a Hong Kong story in the sense of personal identity. It is a Hong Kong story in the sense of institutional geography. As part of the late British imperial system, Hong Kong drew in and circulated officials, soldiers, businesspeople and families. Stewart’s Hong Kong birth is not a random biographical curiosity, but a small window into how that imperial machinery worked.

Sally Phillips connects Hong Kong to British popular culture. Born in British Hong Kong in 1970, she later became a British comedian, writer and actor, appearing in Smack the Pony, I’m Alan Partridge, Miranda and Veep, as well as the Bridget Jones films. Her father worked for British Airways, and the family moved between Asia, the Middle East, Europe and Australia. This is not the story of a Hong Kong actor in the conventional sense. It is the story of Hong Kong as a transit point for aviation, business and mobile professional families. Her Hong Kong birth may not define her identity, but it clearly reflects a particular era: Hong Kong was not only a local society, but also a city where expatriate families, professionals and corporate networks briefly anchored themselves.

The broadcasting world offers Louise Minchin. Born in British Hong Kong in 1968, she later became one of the best-known presenters of BBC Breakfast, appearing for many years in British morning television news. Her father served in the British Army, which links her birthplace to another structure behind Hong Kong’s international character: military deployment. The British presence in Hong Kong was not confined to Government House, HSBC, trading houses and the courts. It also included barracks, military families, schools, hospitals and ordinary domestic routines. Minchin’s example is less spectacular than an astronaut orbiting the Moon, but its ordinariness is useful. It shows that Hong Kong was once part of Britain’s global living space, not merely a colony marked on a map.

A more recent example is Amber Atherton. Born in Hong Kong in 1991, she is the daughter of a Cathay Pacific pilot based in the city. She later became a British entrepreneur and investor, founding the community marketing company Zyper, which was later acquired by Discord, before joining the early-stage American venture capital firm Patron. Her story moves the article from colonial administration, military life and aviation to entrepreneurship, technology and venture capital. By the 1990s, Hong Kong was not only an international city in the final years of British rule. It was also a junction between aviation, international schools, British education, Asian families and the Anglo-American technology world. Atherton’s Hong Kong birth may not amount to a Hong Kong identity, but it reflects the city’s role as a meeting point for mobile families and global capital networks.

What these people share is not that they all represent Hong Kong. In many cases, their connection with the city was brief, sometimes no more than a line on a birth certificate. Yet that is exactly why the story is worth telling. If Hong Kong is understood only as a local society, the question becomes whether they count as Hongkongers. If Hong Kong is understood as an international hub, the better question is why people from such different backgrounds were being born there at all. The answer usually lies not in personal choice, but in structure: colonial administration, military deployment, airlines, multinational companies, international schools, commercial families and global career mobility.

Hong Kong’s distinctive character was not that everyone born there stayed, nor that everyone developed the same Hong Kong identity. It was that the city allowed all kinds of people to pass through, pause, work, give birth and move on. This is a mildly ironic form of being Hong Kong-born. It is not local, rooted, everyday Hong Kong identity. It is hub-born Hong Kong identity. An astronaut, a diplomat, an actor, a broadcaster and an entrepreneur may seem unrelated, but they all point to the same underlying fact. Hong Kong was never a place of one ethnicity, one language or one identity. It was a node linking people, capital, military power, aviation, culture and institutions. Its influence often did not appear under the name of Hong Kong, but was hidden in other people’s CVs, accents, passports, schools and career routes.

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Across the Bridge, Then Pull It Up: Why New Migrants Turn Against Migration

Across the Bridge, Then Pull It Up: Why New Migrants Turn Against Migration

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Some of the loudest voices against immigration belong not to people born and raised in the country, but to migrants who themselves only recently came ashore. They were in the queue yesterday; today they are in a hurry to close the gate. This seemingly contradictory posture has played out from nineteenth-century San Francisco to present-day London, and the script is remarkably consistent. Rather than rushing to judge it morally, it is worth first understanding where these people are standing.

Picture someone who has struggled across the moat, over the drawbridge and into the city. For him, the bridge has already delivered its value the moment he crossed. If it stays open to those who follow, it is no longer a favour but a source of competition. So he begins to do the sums: given the toll I paid, the scrutiny I endured, the years I waited, why should later arrivals have it any easier? Raising the drawbridge protects the position he has secured and makes his own earlier sacrifice look weightier. Paired with this instinct is a ready-made script: I came through the proper channels, I learned the language, I found work, I followed the rules. Personal effort is quietly promoted into a threshold, then used to measure everyone behind, and those who cannot clear it are said to deserve being shut out.

Subtler still is the calculation within the group itself. A migrant who has assimilated into the mainstream and speaks the local language fluently can look back at compatriots still finding their feet with an eye harsher than any native’s, because his own sense of identity now rests on having made it. Opposing immigration can even serve as a ticket of admission. The newcomer is anxious to shed the label of outsider and to be accepted as a local, and in many societies a wariness of migrants is part of the native register to begin with. Shouting it louder than the locals therefore becomes a shortcut to belonging: by disparaging new migrants, one demonstrates that one is no longer a new migrant.

What really drives all of this, though, is the arithmetic of resources. New and established migrants rarely compete for the top jobs; they compete for the same low-skilled work, the same social housing, the same hospital waiting list. The closer the distance, the more direct the rivalry. A lawyer does not fear that a newcomer will take his livelihood, but a migrant still scraping by at the bottom does. The fiercest opposition therefore tends to come not from those standing at the summit, but from the layer that has only just found its footing and most fears being washed back by the next wave. The moment a local economy comes to depend on migrant labour, that hostility quietly softens, which shows that positions have always tracked interests.

Time, meanwhile, pushes people towards conservatism. The longer they live somewhere, the more their politics drift towards the local consensus, and yesterday’s newcomers gradually learn to talk about today’s newcomers in the natives’ own voice. Put all of this together and a pattern emerges: the antagonism between migrants is not really about where one comes from, but about where one stands in the line; what determines attitude is not blood or culture, but position and scarcity. This is also why institutional design matters so much. When a policy clearly stipulates that newcomers must wait several years before they can draw on public benefits, the hostility of established migrants tends to subside, because the perceived threat has been pushed away by the rules. For Hong Kongers who have only just settled in Britain, this is a mirror worth looking into: the hand reaching to raise the bridge today was, only yesterday, clinging to the very same bridge to climb ashore.

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HS2 vs the Chūō Shinkansen: Twice the Money, Not Even Half the Railway

HS2 vs the Chūō Shinkansen: Twice the Money, Not Even Half the Railway

Leave a Comment / Infrastructure /

Set Britain’s HS2 alongside Japan’s Chūō Shinkansen and the most uncomfortable contrast is not that Britain is a little slower. It is that Britain has spent far more to build a shorter, slower railway stripped of most of its original ambition. The Chūō Shinkansen is no faultless model. It has overrun on cost and schedule, it has clashed with Shizuoka Prefecture over water resources, and it has exposed real risks in deep tunnelling and local coordination. That is precisely why the comparison bites. A Japanese line that runs largely underground, threads through mountain ranges, uses maglev technology and is designed for around 500 km/h still ends up, even after overruns, costing less than half of HS2 in total and only about 40 per cent per kilometre. Britain can no longer blame inflation, environmentalism, geology or the pandemic for what has gone wrong on HS2. The real problem is not on the construction sites. It is in the institutions, the governance, and a system that leaks value at every stage between vision and delivery.

HS2 Phase 1 runs from London to the West Midlands, around 225 kilometres with four stations, and the latest estimate now sits between £87.7 billion and £102.7 billion. The earliest section, between Old Oak Common and Birmingham Curzon Street, will not open until at least May 2036 and could slip to October 2039. Full services into London Euston are not expected before May 2040 and could be delayed to December 2043. The Chūō Shinkansen’s Shinagawa-to-Nagoya section is around 286 kilometres with six stations, roughly 86 per cent of it underground, including deep mountain tunnels, underground terminals, a maglev system and a design speed of 500 km/h. JR Central revised its cost estimate for that section in October 2025 to ¥11 trillion, roughly £52 billion at recent exchange rates. Even after that overrun, the Japanese project still works out at around £180 million per kilometre; HS2, on the upper estimate, comes in at close to £460 million per kilometre. Cost categories, exchange rates, land regimes and project scope are never strictly comparable, but the gap is too large to dismiss with a wave at “different national circumstances”.

Put the two side by side. The Japanese line is 50 kilometres longer, has two more stations, is designed to run nearly twice as fast, sits almost entirely underground, and relies on a maglev system that has yet to be proven at commercial scale. On every dimension of engineering difficulty, the Chūō Shinkansen is the harder project. Yet the timelines are roughly aligned. Japan broke ground at the end of 2014 and aims to open in 2035. Britain began main construction in 2020 and expects the first section to open between 2036 and 2039, with full services not until the early 2040s. In roughly the same twenty years, Japan is delivering a longer, faster, deeper, more complex railway with more stations. Britain is delivering a shortened, slowed, hollowed-out version of its original plan, for more than twice the price.

HS2’s deepest failure is not that it built too many tunnels. It is that it never honestly priced what surface construction actually costs in modern England. The country is densely populated, land rights are layered, local opposition is well-organised, environmental constraints are tight, and existing roads, utilities, villages, woodland and farmland are tangled together. Surface alignments look cheaper on a spreadsheet. In practice, each one drags along compensation, realignment, noise mitigation, viaducts, road diversions, utility relocation, ecological offsetting, construction traffic, local lobbying and legal challenge. The project thought it was saving money by avoiding tunnels and ended up exporting that saving into political and administrative complexity it could not control. The £100 million bat tunnel became a symbol not because protecting bats is absurd, but because it laid bare the contradiction at the heart of HS2: a high-speed rail project sinking enormous time and money into managing the resistance generated by its own decision to stay above ground.

The lesson from the Chūō Shinkansen is not that “all-tunnel is always cheaper”. It is that Japan accepted earlier a simple reality: in mountains, dense cities and high-conflict corridors, tunnelling is not a luxury but a way of containing risk. Deep tunnels are expensive, but they involve fewer interfaces, less land acquisition, less surface disruption, more direct alignments and more concentrated engineering responsibility. HS2 oscillated indefinitely between two mentalities. It wanted to be marketed as a world-class high-speed railway while still being delivered through piecemeal British compromise on every stretch of route. What it saved was not money. It was the project’s coherence, replaced by an endless chain of exceptions, fixes and redesigns.

The British government itself has now conceded that roughly two thirds of HS2’s cost increases stem from work missed from the original scope, underestimation and inefficiency, with only about a third attributable to inflation. The Stewart Review, published in 2025, was even blunter. The very ambition of building “the best and fastest” railway, it concluded, had undermined any culture of cost control; the project was “subject to evolving political aims, which pushed forward on the schedule before there was sufficient design maturity and caused progressive removals of scope”. This is no longer an engineering accident. It is institutional failure.

The irony deepens. HS2 has now reduced its top design speed from 360 km/h to 320 km/h to reduce testing, certification and commissioning risks, claiming savings of £1 billion to £2.5 billion. Lowering the speed is not necessarily wrong; 320 km/h is the established operating standard across much of mainland Europe. The fault lies in how late this realism has arrived. By the time over £40 billion had been spent in five years without a single metre of track laid, admitting that the original specification was too ambitious is no longer prudence. It is a belated patch.

Slice the failures apart and HS2 reads as the product of several British institutional habits compounding on each other. Planning procedures demand hybrid bills, environmental assessments, judicial reviews and successive rounds of public consultation; each step is reasonable on its own, ruinous in combination. NIMBYism turns every surface alignment into an exercise in compensation, rerouting, tunnel extensions and ecological remediation. Most damaging of all, specifications and scope keep changing. The northern legs of Phase 2 were cancelled in stages; the Euston station design was redrawn and then overturned; each round of “cost-saving” scope reduction created vast sunk costs that could not be recovered. The Stewart Review put it plainly: “constant scope changes, ineffective contracts and bad management” have wasted billions of pounds. Trying to cut costs through deletion has only produced more expensive losses.

Beneath all this lies a deeper problem. Britain no longer has a standing institution that accumulates expertise across major rail projects. HS2 Ltd was assembled from scratch for one project; Crossrail Ltd was wound down after the Elizabeth line opened; the next megaproject will have to recruit a new team and start over. France has SNCF Réseau, Japan has its JR companies, Spain has ADIF, Hong Kong has the MTR. These are permanent organisations that plan, build and operate over decades, so institutional memory, engineering talent and cost benchmarks build up internally. British megaprojects, by contrast, look as if every generation has to learn to walk again. The hard lessons of one project dissipate as soon as the delivery team disbands; the next project then hires new people who proceed to make a familiar set of mistakes. On top of that, government wants political wins, the Treasury wants spending control, the Department for Transport wants a coherent narrative, HS2 Ltd wants to deliver, contractors work to commercial risk clauses, consultants supply designs and cost models, and local politics keeps pushing up compensation and modification demands. Every participant can defend its own slice. No one bears the full consequence of failure as a real owner would. The Chūō Shinkansen has had its disputes too, but JR Central is both the builder and the future operator. Responsibility and commercial incentive sit inside one institution.

The implication is that, when Britain next attempts a project of this scale, it should not confine its review to a particular contractor, government or set of executives. The more direct move is to bring genuine international high-speed and long-tunnel delivery experience, from Japan, France, Switzerland, Spain and Hong Kong, into the front end of British projects in an institutionalised way. This is not about surrendering sovereignty to foreign engineers. It is about acknowledging that the domestic ecosystem has repeatedly shown it cannot deliver this class of work alone. Route choice, tunnel-versus-surface trade-offs, station scale, contract packaging, cost benchmarking, risk allocation, design freeze and operational requirements should all be subject to international independent review, with experienced foreign project leaders embedded in steering and decision-making roles, not merely producing reports as advisers. British infrastructure can no longer be settled inside a closed circle of local bureaucrats, consultants and political compromise.

HS2’s original policy logic was never absurd. British rail capacity is constrained, the West Coast Main Line has been under sustained pressure for years, and London, the Midlands and the North need a more reliable spine connecting them. The absurdity is that a project conceived to solve a capacity problem has ended up as a shorter, slower, delayed, more expensive line whose final delivered capability is still unclear. The Chūō Shinkansen is a reminder that long tunnels, high speeds and serious technical complexity are not, in themselves, unaffordable. What is unaffordable is an infrastructure system with no firm goal, no stable design, no cost discipline, no concentrated accountability and no institutional memory.

Britain has to admit that a real capability gap has opened up in the way it delivers large infrastructure. HS2’s most expensive feature may not be the track, the tunnels or the trains. It may be Britain’s residual belief that it naturally knows how to build world-class infrastructure. The evidence now says otherwise. The country still knows how to debate, consult, redesign and explain its overruns. It no longer reliably knows how to build a railway on time, on budget and to specification. That is the most uncomfortable thing to acknowledge when HS2 is set against the Chūō Shinkansen.

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From Thatcher to Badenoch: How the Conservatives Dismantled Their Own Climate Legacy

From Thatcher to Badenoch: How the Conservatives Dismantled Their Own Climate Legacy

Leave a Comment / UK Affairs /

In November 1989, Margaret Thatcher stood at the podium of the United Nations General Assembly and delivered a message to the world: climate change was a shared crisis, and Britain was ready to lead. A chemistry graduate from Oxford, she understood the science of greenhouse gases as well as the geography of pollution: it observed no borders. Human activity, she told the Assembly, was changing the planet in “damaging and dangerous” ways. She called for science-led international cooperation, endorsed the newly formed Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and pledged that Britain would coordinate one of its scientific assessments.

Three decades later, Theresa May, in the final weeks of her premiership, did something consequential. She made Britain the first G7 economy to commit, in law, to net zero emissions. In June 2019, the Climate Change Act 2008 was amended to require the United Kingdom to bring its net greenhouse gas emissions to zero by 2050. This was not a slogan. It was written into parliamentary record and turned into a binding government obligation. The party that voted it through was the Conservative Party itself.

Yet today’s Conservative Party no longer recognises that inheritance. In March 2025, leader Kemi Badenoch used a “policy renewal” speech to declare that the 2050 net zero target was “impossible”, a piece of “fantasy politics, built on nothing”. Reaching it, she said, would inevitably “lower living standards” and “bankrupt the country”. She offered no alternative target. She cited no specific evidence. She simply said the country must “face reality”. But what reality?

The Climate Change Committee’s most recent assessment provides the answer. The committee estimates that reaching net zero between 2025 and 2050 will require around £700 billion in additional investment, but will save roughly £600 billion in fuel and operating costs over the same period. The net cost is around £100 billion, spread across 25 years: about £4 billion a year, or just 0.2% of GDP. By 2050, the committee says, a typical household will save around £700 a year on energy bills and a further £700 on motoring costs, a combined saving of £1,400 annually. Its supplementary report this March put the point even more bluntly: a single fossil-fuel price shock of the kind seen after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 would cost the country as much as the entire 25-year net cost of the transition. Relying on fossil fuels is not the cheap option. It is the option that leaves households exposed to price swings nobody can control.

So where does Badenoch’s “trillions of pounds” figure come from? The £9 trillion estimate she and her shadow energy secretary, Claire Coutinho, have invoked comes from a report by the free-market think tank Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA). It is roughly 90 times the official figure produced by the Climate Change Committee. The independent investigative outlet DeSmog has documented that the IEA has long received funding from oil majors including BP and Shell. A separate report Coutinho endorsed, by the energy consultancy Watt-Logic, claimed that expanding renewables would heighten blackout risk; its author is a long-standing oil and gas industry consultant, and the National Energy System Operator (NESO) has publicly rejected the report’s conclusions. The “truths” the Conservative leadership presents to the public, in other words, are not the product of independent scientific assessment. They come from lobbying organisations with deep ties to fossil-fuel interests.

Coutinho’s other line of attack has the same problem. She argues that Britain’s net zero path deepens its dependence on China, because solar panels and batteries are largely imported from there. The argument sounds plausible, until one remembers who has been in office. The UK’s reliance on Chinese clean-energy supply chains is the direct result of 14 years of Conservative government failing to deliver an industrial policy capable of building domestic capacity. To hand that problem to a Labour government and frame it as Labour’s failure is to call the hole one has dug oneself someone else’s mess.

Her latest card is the call to “get Britain drilling” in the North Sea. In a Daily Telegraph column, and through the Conservative Party’s “Get Britain Drilling” campaign, Coutinho has claimed that ramping up North Sea extraction would lower household energy bills, raise tax revenue, and protect British jobs. None of these three claims survives serious scrutiny.

The price British households pay for oil and gas is set by global markets, not by North Sea output. The North Sea now accounts for roughly 0.7% of global oil and gas production, and that share is shrinking. It is too small to move the global price. Recent analysis by the University of Oxford’s Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment found that even if Britain maximised North Sea extraction and rebated every penny of tax revenue back to households, the average family would save between £16 and £82 a year. Channel the same resources into accelerating the renewable transition, and households would save between £105 and £331 a year, three times more. The Climate Change Committee said as far back as 2022 that increased UK extraction was “not expected to materially affect global oil or gas prices”. Even Badenoch herself has conceded that the Conservatives’ plan to cut bills does not actually come from new drilling, but from scrapping environmental levies and energy taxes. They know perfectly well that drilling is not the answer to bills.

On tax revenue, the reality is closer to the opposite. The North Sea has already produced over 44 billion barrels of oil and gas; roughly nine-tenths of its original reserves have been extracted. It is, by international consensus, a mature basin. Drilling there is no longer a profitable enterprise so much as a subsidised one. National Audit Office data show that 2016 was the first year in which decommissioning tax reliefs exceeded the tax revenues the Treasury collected from the oil and gas sector. From that year on, the industry’s net contribution to the UK’s public finances flipped from positive to negative. HMRC estimates that between 2018 and 2062, oil and gas companies will pass roughly £24 billion of decommissioning costs back to the Treasury through tax reliefs, while total decommissioning expenditure across the basin is estimated at £45 to £77 billion. When operators lack the financial resources to plug their own wells, the ultimate liability falls on the British taxpayer. Approving a new oilfield today is therefore not so much raising future tax revenue as locking in decades of future public expenditure to cap the wells, in exchange for a short-term entry in the books that does not even cover its own decommissioning cost.

Theresa May herself has not stayed silent. She has publicly criticised Badenoch’s turn, calling net zero “challenging but achievable” and warning that “delaying action will only harm the next generation and increase both the economic and social costs of climate change”. Sam Hall, director of the Conservative Environment Network, has separately warned that abandoning science will lead voters to doubt whether the party is still serious about the energy transition at all.

From Thatcher to Badenoch is 36 years. A chemistry-trained prime minister led the world in taking climate risk seriously. A leader who has produced no specific evidence of her own now declares the whole project a fantasy. The Conservative Party has not been forced into this retreat by reality. It has been pushed by electoral pressure, chased from the right by Reform UK, and has chosen to walk away from one of the most consequential policy legacies it could claim. The cost is not only environmental. It is the spectacle of a party that, for short-term votes, has openly disowned the scientific consensus and the institutional commitment it once built. When a party cannot recognise its own past, how much credibility can it offer when it asks voters to trust its “future”?

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