Otium Den recap:

Why Britain needs a national day

Governing with Iron or Empathy?

Onward, Christian Soldiers

Pragmatism over Purity

Britain makes profit a dirty word

My grandfather was confused when I told him I was going to be a consultant. He struggled to understand what wealth of wisdom a 22-year-old graduate had to impart on the world. Fortunately, my then-employer offered reassurance. At our induction week, combatting impostor syndrome was a key theme. Don’t doubt yourself in the face of external validation, was the message. Your authority is merited by virtue of it being imbued.

Which is all very well when authority is contingent upon objective criteria. A surgeon, for instance, has to know and do certain things. Even if I perfected the lingo and appearance, I couldn’t fool people into thinking I was one for long. Inner conviction would be insufficient in the face of dead patients.

Similarly, self-belief wouldn’t be enough to convince students I was a maths professor. Even if I forged qualifications beyond my actual GCSE, my grasp of basic arithmetic would let me down. There would be objective evidence of my incompetence.

Jason Arday

It brings me to Jason Arday. Strip out the furore around his fantastical claims, and there is little to suggest his students felt him exceptionally unqualified to teach sociology. Not because he was perfectly capable, but because it is hard to judge expertise in that field. Especially in its contemporary form, which is often more inclined towards nonsensical verbosity than study and interrogation.

writes about his experience studying sociology at Cambridge, where Arday was later a professor. Klinger recalls getting top marks for an essay “about how cultural products like kids’ cartoons and jazz songs serve as instruments of capitalist oppression.” He remembers the eminent anthropologist who suggested indigenous tribes “could literally fly because they believed they could fly.”

I’m familiar with the same absurdities, having taken a sociology paper as part of a Theology degree at the same university. It was coloured by cultural relativism that refused to judge or interrogate others’ beliefs (unless, of course, said group was deemed the oppressor). Given the subject permits speaking things into existence, it’s understandable the department was so affronted by questioning of Arday’s credentials. They said he was the world’s best. Case closed.

Different types of authority

I sympathise with the late Arday to the extent that he was a product of perverse incentives. We put conferred authority - “believe me because an institution has designated me an authority” - on a pedestal.

Instead, authority should be demonstrative - “believe me because I can show you” - or earned - “believe because my record makes it reasonable to defer to me”. Both examine content and evidence. Credentials should attest to that expertise, not constitute it.

I saw the same thing later in my career working for a speaking agency. There, we matched event organisers with paid speakers who promised to motivate and enlighten their audiences. Filtering candidates was difficult because everyone was “award-winning”. But what were these awards? For instance, several generous business publications tell me I am one of APAC’s greatest business leaders. Titles I can claim for just a few thousand dollars. These publications exist because there is enough demand for shortcuts to authority. Who are you to question the substance of my talks? I’m award-winning.

Impostor syndrome

Impostor syndrome exists insofar as self-doubt can plague impressive individuals. Expertise often brings greater awareness of what you don’t know. The opposite also occurs. Incompetence makes one oblivious to the scale of one’s ignorance. Confected authority simply encourages the latter’s delusions while doing little to assuage the former’s feelings of inadequacy. Particularly as such titles are so easily assumed.

Neither can the concept be entirely removed from a DEI context. At that same graduate induction, we were told about another nefarious affliction: the proliferation of the “pale, male and stale”. A privileged class hanging on to its right to rule mentality. Beating impostor syndrome means throwing off socio-historical hang-ups to believe that you too, as a woman or minority, are just as worthy of authority.

A Spy Among Friends

That criticism stung then, as I fulfilled at least two of the criteria. But I reconsidered it recently as a latecomer to Ben Macintyre’s brilliant book, A Spy Among Friends. It’s an account of the Cold War’s most famous double agent, Kim Philby. The British MI6 officer was eventually exposed as a Soviet spy, and fled to the Soviet Union in 1963. Macintyre describes Philby as consistently evading detection because his public schoolboy chums at MI6 couldn’t believe that one of us could do such a thing. Philby’s Westminster scarf remains a reassuring sign that he couldn’t possibly be an impostor. The state school lads at MI5 are dismissed as insolent plebs, even as they point to mounting evidence against Philby.

It’s an illustration of “pale, male and stale” engendering erroneous groupthink. It shows the dangers of any institutional certainty about what a credible person looks and sounds like. We have not escaped that error merely by changing the signals. Jettisoning an old boys’ club is no good if we replace it with new uncontestable expertise. Be it the 22-year-old consultant, the acclaimed sociologist, or the award-winning corporate educator.

Authority cannot be tautological - “I am this because I am this.” But that attitude is increasingly prevalent in the Western world. It’s why we see strong pushback against “elites” or “the lanyard class”. It’s not that we reject expertise. It’s that we resent the idea of a new priesthood, whose authority rests on recognition by other members of the priesthood.

My grandfather was right to ask what I was consulting on. And to be dissatisfied with a vague retreat into corporate jargon (“multiple swim lanes of opportunity around business” remains a personal favourite). In fixating upon impostor syndrome, we miss the actual impostors in our midst. A healthy culture needs people capable of asking themselves, “What if I’m an impostor?” And institutions willing to ask, “What if he is?”

Otium Den recap:

Governing with Iron or Empathy?

Onward, Christian Soldiers

Pragmatism over Purity

Britain makes profit a dirty word

Civic nationalism needs civic pragmatism

The Rest is History’s latest series on The Troubles is worth a listen for Tom Holland’s Ian Paisley impression alone. As is some time on YouTube watching the late DUP leader’s greatest hits. One can understand why even Catholic countryman Liam Neeson lists Paisley as a theatrical inspiration. The algorithm also generously led me to Harry Enfield’s own appropriation of the conflict in the guise of William Ulsterman.

Outside of Glasgow’s Old Firm fixtures, the Troubles plays little part in Britain’s public consciousness. And Dominic Sandbrook says that ignorance creates an impression it was somehow organic and inevitable. But history isn’t some spontaneous force. It is everywhere and always the result of individual actions. As Sandbrook says, Gusty Spence didn’t have to shoot four Catholics outside a pub one night. Bernadette Devlin didn’t have to organise a provocative protest march through fervently loyalist areas.

This week, I think about the consequences of such historical amnesia in Britain more broadly. By forgetting the past, we take the present for granted. We project episodic events onto it and pretend it is continuous. It is a road to inertia.

I watched my daughter perform We Are Singapore as part of her school’s National Day celebrations last week.

“This is my family, these are my friends, We are Singapore, Singaporeans.”

Perhaps not as existentially stirring as La Marseillaise or, dare I say, Star Spangled Banner. But 9th August in Singapore is less a tribute to inspiring ideals and more a reminder of the country’s precarity.

Uncertainty is a key theme in the school curriculum. The Ministry of Education specifically stipulates that it aims to “cultivate the instincts for survival as a nation.” It looks back to Singapore’s context in 1965: surrounded by then-hostile states, plagued by unemployment, and without natural resources. The perennial implication is that today’s Singaporeans should not take their prosperity for granted. Nor assume it should always be that way.

“Dr Who” approach de-contextualises history

Historical ignorance obscures political choices. It lulls a nation into complacency as it imagines its existence a matter of inevitability, rather than a product of past actions. And it’s something Britain risks in failing to engage with its deep past. Former Conservative MP and historian Chris Skidmore once described secondary school teaching as taking a “Dr Who” approach. It jumps from age to age without ever offering a broader chronological framework. It cannot be right, he argued, that a student can achieve top grades and yet never have heard of The Glorious Revolution.

A 2025 Policy Exchange paper, Lessons from the Past, does at least show improvements in the reforms undertaken by Michael Gove as Education Secretary in the coalition government. British history is covered more exhaustively, yet it remains episodic. It fails to teach what Andrew Roberts calls “its long narrative arc” in a way “that enables young people to orientate themselves…within modern society.” And so something like James II’s deposition, a seminal event in British history, is so forgotten that former Westminster headmaster John Rae doubted whether one school leaver in a thousand could give an account of 1688, let alone say why it was a turning point in history.

Identity is not inevitable

I thought about the effects of such amnesia as I saw a Liverpool fan trying to historically justify the city’s irreducible identity on X. He argued it was “built on proud socialist values”. Replies called out the fan’s ahistoricism, reminding him of Liverpool’s former incarnation as an imperial commercial centre. And as a city that still returned Conservative MPs to Westminster as late as 1983. It does not mean Liverpool should be beholden to its past. That a contemporary socialist identity is illegitimate because it’s relatively new. But if we disguise change as continuity, we stop crucially examining the forces behind that change.

Green leader Zack Polanski does the same thing when he proudly recites Benjamin Zephaniah’s poem, The British, characterising the country as a land of immigrants. Take some “Celts”, “Norman French”, “Angles”, and “Saxons”, then add “some hot Chileans, cool Jamaicans, Dominicans, Trinidadians and Bajans with some Ethiopians, Chinese, Vietnamese and Sudanese.” Mix it all together and there you have it: Britain.

Radically different historical phenomena are turned into equivalent episodes of immigration. One, the movement of northern European peoples over centuries who would eventually understand themselves as sharing collective identities. The other, mass global migration into an already established state in the space of just 80 years. One can welcome or criticise that transformation. But pretending it isn’t one shuts down debate on the decisions behind it.

Restoration or Revolution?

Tensions between rupture and continuity have long been part of political discourse. Agents of change, for good or ill, consistently argue they are actually engaged in restoration. It’s partly why Rae found students to be largely ignorant of England’s own “revolution”. Because those who celebrated it denied it was one. The Anglo-Irish Whig Edmund Burke contrasted 1688 with France’s bloody revolution just over 100 years later. Where the Jacobins were idealistic radicals, the Whigs were restoring ancient liberties in the face of James’ unwelcome innovations.

But the difference is that such arguments can be tested when there is widespread historical literacy. So when the historian Steven Pincus disputes Burke’s watering down of 1688’s revolutionary tendencies, he grounds it in a wider context. Pincus does not dispute James II was a centralising authoritarian bent on restoring Catholicism. But he argues that Burke’s Whig predecessors had their own competing agenda. He points to the subsequent financial revolution under William of Orange in the founding of the Bank of England and funded national debt, and the about-turn in foreign policy that forged a new alliance with William’s Dutch homeland. Pincus argues these were active political choices, albeit rooted in a narrative of continuity.

Britain can look back to 1688 and ask legitimate questions. Was it a revolution or restoration? English liberation or Dutch invasion? Parliamentary sovereignty or Protestant supremacy? On its tercentenary in 1988, Margaret Thatcher could both commemorate it as a salient moment in British history while conceding that interpretations differ greatly across the British Isles.

In that same parliamentary session, a 39-year-old Jeremy Corbyn offered such a contrasting interpretation. He called it the anniversary of a moment that guaranteed “the powers of the landowning class” and paved the way for imperialism. At least it is historically honest. Corbyn was not arguing his desired settlement was what Britain had always been. He identified an inheritance and rejected it.

We may dispute his interpretation. But doing so requires historical literacy. That needs historical anchors, which should come from schooling but also through an effort to place certain moments in the public consciousness. 1688 may spook some as an idea for its sectarian undertones. But remembering such an event need not be overtly celebratory or jingoistic. Rather, it serves as a reminder that our inheritance exists because of the actions of our forefathers. That is therefore contingent. Accept it or reject it, citizens should nonetheless engage with it.

While remembering its short history, Singapore also thinks about a longer one. A statue of British colonialist Sir Stamford Raffles still stands in the city centre. It pays tribute to his “genius and perception” in turning Singapore from an “obscure fishing village” into a “great seaport and modern metropolis”. A reminder that agency changed a country’s identity. Maintaining that agency means recognising change when it happens. And citizens who know enough to tell the difference.

Otium Den recap:

Onward, Christian Soldiers

Pragmatism over Purity

Britain makes profit a dirty word

Civic nationalism needs civic pragmatism

Do entrepreneurs need democracy?

A speech from Singapore’s founding Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew often does the rounds on social media. It shows him calling out then-striking Singapore Airlines pilots at a political rally in 1980. Continue the strike, Lee says, and he is prepared to ground the airline and start all over again. Or get back to work. An example of the iron Lee argues anyone governing Singapore needs.

To Lee, obstinacy and strength were non-negotiable leadership qualities because they separate personal feeling from public authority. Compartmentalising those aspects represents duty and humility in putting the highest office above one’s lived experience. Even after leaving office, Lee refused to muddy the waters. In one of his final public appearances, he was asked about the influence of his late wife. “I’m not here to let my hair down about family matters,” was his terse response.

Bring your whole self to work

Facile popular psychology turns such self-command into repression. It is part of a nefarious culture that dictates the easy thing is always the right thing. The kind imbibed by HR departments who talk up the importance of bringing your “whole self to work”. As if being unable to separate subjective emotions from objective criteria is somehow a handicap.

I thought about this while watching Prime Minister on a recent flight. It’s a hagiographical account of Jacinda Ardern’s time as leader of New Zealand. Her self-branded empathetic leadership was a zeitgeist of the Covid years. She described its core tenet as leading like a “human first and politician second.”

But its application on a mass level is not feasible. If empathy means feeling the emotional experiences of others, it cannot form the foundations of collective leadership. Because it makes decisions based on those feelings that impact you most profoundly. Ardern implies this on a podcast with American author Adam Grant. She talks about the immense proximity to grief one feels as Prime Minister. But describes the upside as being able to do something about it.

Separating grief from policy

To be in the midst of suffering, and to be constantly petitioned by victims of misfortune and injustice is tough. But responding with empathy is easier than acting with the distance leadership necessarily entails. Only by showing that restraint can one acknowledge tradeoffs. Look, for instance, at Andy Burnham’s recent £343m expansion of mental health support. It enjoys widespread praise for reacting to personal testimonies of psychological struggle. But anyone questioning its financial prudence is shouted down for coldly rejecting stories of suffering.

It’s an unfortunate fact that not every individual story, no matter how tremendously sad, can form the basis of public policy. Take the case of Scottish swimmer, Archie Goodburn, diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumour and pleading for more government support on the disease. Burnham has accordingly pledged to meet Goodburn and discuss it. Goodburn’s situation is tragic but rare. And public resources are finite. So leadership is hard precisely because it involves separating these heartwrenching cases from that broader remit. In other words, compartmentalising one’s personal feelings and public authority.

As an example of doing just that, I think of former Prime Minister David Cameron’s personal tragedy in the death of his son Ivan. Speaking about in 2024, he revealed the difficulties of turning up to Commons’ debates after spending all night in hospital with his son. But he never asked for sympathy then, nor turned Ivan’s horrible genetic disease into policy. Only out of office is he focusing efforts on research, funded by philanthropy and private capital.

Strongmen vs Empaths

None of this means personal experience is irrelevant to governing effectively. We rightly want politicians from different walks of life. People who can understand specific contexts and challenge groupthink in the Westminster bubble. But such experiences should not be defined by emotion. The sort that says I’ve seen these people suffer and we need to do something about it. It’s fine for Burnham to take on the levelling-up mantle, but it needs a wider context beyond personal moral endeavour.

Kindness sounds very noble, especially when juxtaposed against the actions of villainous strongmen. Lee’s stoical rhetoric would almost certainly see him lumped into that category today. The term is used pejoratively because it implies a deceptive personality cult. Think of Russia’s Vladimir Putin, presenting himself as the virile servant of Mother Russia while profiting at its expense. The leader becomes the arbiter of truth. His interests are inextricable from those of the state.

Today’s empaths are not guilty of the same kleptocratic destruction. But its tendencies produce a different kind of personality cult. Certainly less nefarious, but one that similarly dictates policy based on a leader’s personal feelings. The office is subjugated to the individual.

So perhaps it’s worth deconstructing strongman leadership to see its value beyond modern despotic connotations. Like populist, it has become a catch-all term to describe demagoguery. But that risks obscuring desirable characteristics. I think of Martin Wolf lumping Javier Milei in with populists for an agenda that is “appealing in the short term and damaging in the long term.” As if drastic spending cuts are red meat for electorates.

Populism is bad when it proposes popular but unrealistic fixes. But sometimes it just shows the will to do what others imbue with unnecessary complexity. So too strongmen are bad when their fleeting whims constitute national policy. But equally, decisiveness and obdurance protect against conflating personal feelings with collective interests.

Ethics of conviction vs ethics of responsibility

Ipsos polling from May shows Brits want politicians to focus on results. The top two characteristics of a good Prime Minister were understanding the problems facing Britain and having a plan. Much lesser importance was ascribed to likeability (20%). This means separating short-term people pleasing from longer term results. Few will indicate immediate disapproval of good-intentioned policy, but they will be dissatisfied when the trade-offs become apparent later on.

The German sociologist Max Weber differentiated ethics of conviction from ethics of responsibility. The former describes the intrinsic moral purity of any given action. The latter describes responsibility for practical consequences. Good leaders draw upon Lee’s iron to make that distinction and eschew personal feeling for a wider duty.

Self-expression may be likeable. Self-command is consequential.

Otium Den recap:

Pragmatism over Purity

Britain makes profit a dirty word

Civic nationalism needs civic pragmatism

Do entrepreneurs need democracy?

Pro-natalism doesn’t work. Communities do.

England’s football team is finally being embraced by the left. Once viewed sceptically as a nationalist relic, it has become a potent symbol of diversity’s tangible success. But focus on that ethnic element obscures a Christian core.

Its squad was one of the most visibly evangelical at the World Cup. Key players like Marc Guehi, Bukayo Saka, Eberechi Eze, Noni Madueke, and Trevoh Chalobah are outspoken about their faith.

Does that that cultural bedrock provides a wider model for Britain? A values-led civic nationalism that recognizes the country’s historic religion.

Neither media opprobrium nor a German manager can stop England fans’ singing 10 German Bombers. In the Boston suburbs last month, a pre-match rendition on the stadium concourse was a highlight of an otherwise forgettable goalless draw against Ghana.

Atomic Kitten’s Whole Again, previously re-appropriated as a Gareth Southgate tribute, was re-worked in Thomas Tuchel’s honour. “Churchill bombed your mum” replaced “you still turn me on”.

It isn’t only triumphalist mischief that irks the left. Sometimes England supporters are more overt with their politics in popular ditties like Keir Starmer is a wanker and F*** off Europe, we all voted out. But where fans may be an unfortunate relic of English exceptionalism, players have come to represent modern, diverse Britain. Hence even far-left agitators like Your Party MP Zarah Sultana now put on an England shirt and get behind the boys.

France vs England

But it’s revealing that the two can co-exist. Old-school patriots don’t seem hung up on the fact half the England side is black or mixed race. Compare that to France where the squad’s largely immigrant background has been more controversial. From Conservative Peer Dan Hannan’s anecdotal evidence that a Gallic friend called their game against Senegal legal versus illegal immigrants. To comments from the ex-Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy that there were “no French players” in the team.

English fans have refused to play ball in any similar narrative that juxtaposes their anachronistic nationalism with on-field diversity. Former conservative adviser Nimco Ali made a contrived effort to do just that when she went after Reform MP Robert Jenrick. “Thanks to lads your party wants to deport”, was her response to Jenrick celebrating the quarter-final win against Norway.

Ethnic minority players were disproportionately represented in England’s run to the semi-finals. But Jenrick’s cultural conservativism pays little attention to race. He has been far more vehement in talking about cultural values, particularly those of Christianity. He posted an Easter message in April 2025, calling it a “peculiar quirk” that “that so few seem willing to acknowledge that we are a Christian country, with Christian values, built upon and in the Judeo-Christian tradition.”

England’s Christian Core

And it’s in this religious realm that England’s football team are also disproportionately representative. 35 percent of the squad are practicing and outspoken Christians against just 10 percent of the country at large. That excludes players who may keep such beliefs private. Only Djed Spence – the first Muslim to play for England – can be authoritatively defined as non-Christian.

The core of that God Squad comes from players with African or Caribbean ancestry. Awkwardly, it’s also those players who are more likely to offend the tolerant sensibilities the team is meant to stand for. Like defender Marc Guehi, son of a Christian minister originally from the Ivory Coast. When the Premier League promoted a LGBT inclusion campaign in 2024, it was proudly fronted by Harry Kane and Jordan Henderson. Guehi defiled the tribute by scrawling “I love Jesus” on his own rainbow armband.

Guehi’s evangelical Christian upbringing may chafe against the liberal social norms widely accepted in Britain today. But Christianity still engenders a sense of civic belonging. Although few of Guehi’s fellow citizens carry the same religious fervour, his practices are culturally familiar. More broadly, they are part of a Christian foundation that shapes Britain’s institutions and laws.

His beliefs also sever the tribalism that people like Jenrick criticize Britain for importing. Guehi can pay homage to his ancestry, but it is Christianity that forms his core identity. And that doesn’t get placed in opposition to his Britishness. Therefore, his new homeland becomes a place to thrive rather than act against. Perhaps why Bukayo Saka, a teammate who also shares an African Christian background, has the most impressive educational achievements in the squad. Saka achieved four A*s and three As in his GCSEs.

Critics delighted in Jenrick’s own errors as he engaged in this Christian advocacy. He referred to “Psalm” rather than “Palm Sunday”. But such nitpicking misunderstands the point. One can believe in Christianity’s cultural power to provide tangible unity without having to be an unerring theologian.

Cultural Christianity

I am agnostic but firmly Christian. I go to St George’s Anglican Church in Singapore every week. Its low-church services attract a large cross-section of society. It is the only place where I truly mix outside of an Anglosphere expat bubble, and form relationships that don’t revolve around where we come from.

Putting aside the existential, the practical benefits for children are also huge. Church-going kids get better grades, report higher purpose and lower levels of despair, and reject the idea that morality is whatever works for you at any given moment. In other words, Christianity both widens horizons and grounds you in something. So too England’s Christian players are better integrated into a social fabric. In such a manner that even supposedly philistine fans see them representing the same national identity.

I get why people reject the centralizing of Christianity in a values-based civic identity. It may seem inherently exclusionary to other faiths and non-believers. Moreover, Brits only need look to the sectarianism inside their own isles to see the potential for disharmony. But it is nonetheless an actual tool for assimilation, unlike the fatuous non-exclusionary values of tolerance or diversity.

It does not need a new proselytizing national mission. But it should form a core part of education. It should be something everyone is familiar with. And Britain shouldn’t be reluctant to recognize that immigrants sharing those beliefs may be better integrated than those who don’t.

Nations are ultimately constructs that require foundations. However distasteful some may find it, it’s what England’s fans look to in their own unique re-telling of Britain’s standing alone narrative. Christianity is another historical bedrock.

We may not be ready for Onward, Christian Soldiers as the new national anthem. But if certain commentators see diversity as part of England’s rejuvenation, we must also recognize the religious core behind this new God Squad.

Both presidents represent an American pragmatism amongst the higher-minded ideals of its foundations. In the historian David McCullough’s 1776, he describes Washington’s great strength as seeing things as they are, not how he wishes they were.

“You can just do stuff”

Boston aside, 1776 was not Washington’s annus mirabilis. The British routed his Continental Army in New York. Only sheer grit kept the rebels going. Their eventual victory a literal testament to the idea you can lose battles yet win the war. That Washingtonian perseverance pervades today in Trump’s own Iran concessions and more widely in its “fail fast” mindset. Write it off and move on.

There is a scrappiness to America. Dated infrastructure still does its job. People compartmentalise politics in way that defies outside perceptions of volatility. The country readily accepts imperfection and gets on with it.

America fulfils the maxim of Britain’s Looking for Growth’s founder Lawrence Newport: “You can just do stuff.” In that way, it’s more like my usual subject matter of Singapore than immediate optics suggest. Both think relentlessly about what works. Neither resources-rich America nor the quasi-democratic microstate provide perfectly applicable templates for Britain. But they show its problems with navel-gazing and lack of execution.

White Elephants

Compare HS2 to America’s Amtrak. The quasi-public railroad may not be nationally comprehensive or offer the high-speed services of Japan, or Chinese-financed links elsewhere in Asia. But you get a comfortable seat, the Wi-Fi works, and fares are reasonable if you play dynamic pricing right.

Amtrak took me the 200 plus miles from D.C. to New York City, and from there to Boston, in three and a half hours per trip. It effectively links up the so-called Bos-Wash east coast corridor, where around 15% of America’s population lives. It was never a grand national project, but a re-appropriation of privately built railroads that risked redundancy as air and road travel grew.

The government took the vestiges of an antiquated system and applied it to modern needs. By contrast, HS2 tries to solve capacity problems with grand ideas instead of incremental improvements. It is conceived under a perception of the inherent worthiness of rail over car and speaks to central government’s need for a signature project to justify itself.

Even Singapore, which prides itself on building flagship infrastructure, thinks first about the use case for such development. It takes great pride in Changi airport, regularly named the world’s best. But it lacks any airport express train to take passengers the 15 miles into the city centre. A more pedestrian metro service already does that in 40 minutes, so it questions the marginal benefit of building new things to shave 20 minutes off a journey.

Singapore can make prudent assessments because it governs a population of six million and land mass of 290 square miles. HS2 assumes central power can similarly meet the needs of a far larger, diverse country. Moreover, in providing faster links to London, “levelling up” becomes about redistributing the capital’s wealth instead of building stronger regional pockets.

Compartmentalising politics

Britain can’t readily import America’s federalism, lacking its sizer and localist foundations. But more regional responsibility, and subsequent internal competition, would incentivise more pragmatic initiatives. And yield a healthier distance from superficial Westminster politics.

It’s what I find in America, where general attitudes confound outside impressions of consistently febrile debate. East coast acquaintances, MAGA sceptics by and large, aren’t afraid to air their misgivings about the president. But few display symptoms of so-called Trump Derangement Syndrome. They don’t make the incumbent a prohibitive obsession.

One former ambassador in the Middle East, a career diplomat, was miffed to have lost his post under the president. Non-political appointees usually carry on unless the administration has someone else in mind. Two years on, no one has replaced him. Nevertheless, despite his misgivings over America’s current direction, he was looking beyond personal grievances to new endeavours.

Perhaps as a long-time D.C. resident, he is less shocked by Trump’s blurring of personal and public interests. As the journalist Mark Leibovich details in This Town, the city is famed for its revolving door. The “swamp” isn’t popular but there’s a resignation to its grubbier practices. Again, it’s a pragmatism that recognises trade-offs. Unless you run a Singaporean technocracy with lucrative salaries, pluralistic democracy inevitably throws up questionable associations.

Virtue over Capability

Britain expects Singaporean purity without the pay. It risks selecting for sanctimony over capability. Differences between Nigel Farage’s dodgy donors and MPs’ corporate earnings may seem obvious in Westminster. But do the public see such a contrast? If Farage is highlighted as an unforgiveable moral transgression, the buck is unlikely to stop there. The danger is that the surviving do-gooders aren’t necessarily the most incorruptible. They are simply the most useless. Outside money ignores them, not vice versa.

Virtuous grandstanding breeds inertia as the perfect becomes the enemy of the good. Projects and politicians alike become irreparably tainted if there are trade-offs in execution. In the American telling of its independence story, this same trait inspired the rebels. Britain repealed unpopular stamp duties under protest from its own merchant class. Yet accompanied that with the Declaratory Act, affirming its right to impose binding internal taxes on the colonies. Legislation that Pitt the Elder railed against in its needlessness.

250 years on, Americans may celebrate more abstract concepts of liberty and rights. But Washington saw the battle in pragmatic terms, shaking off centralised dogmatism that demanded a particular way of doing things. The thirteen colonies were not refusing to pay for British defence but wanted to raise those revenues through regional administration.

That light-touch dispersed approach was how Britain otherwise governed its empire. America was the aberration. And rehashing centralised principles today breeds the same futility. Instead, Britain must take Washington’s realist view and make the best of things as they are. Pragmatism over purity.

The food impressed discerning southeast Asian palates but the bill of £165 was steep for a fairly spartan order. Particularly for casual dining in a town less affluent than its surrounding villages. Those wealthier enclaves obscure Britain’s relative deprivation when it comes to average household disposable income. OECD figures from 2021 put this at US$26,884.

It lags not just other major European economies like France and Germany. But also, Slovenia, Ireland, and Belgium.

Is the cost of living a profit problem?

Recent rhetoric pins the blame on so-called profiteering. But the Institute for Economic Affairs (IEA) counters the public perception that businesses are enjoying a profit bonanza at the consumer’s expense. In its April paper, A Growth Mindset?, Brits surveyed guessed the hospitality sector made a 40 per cent margin. In fact, it’s about five percent. The Kent proprietor pocketed only £8 from our custom after paying taxes, rent, suppliers, and salaries.

Findings were similar across the board. Brits think rail companies make 45 per cent, supermarkets 50 per cent, and energy companies 57 per cent. The reality is three, three and 10 respectively. Most bizarrely, Brits also believe the NHS generates a 34 per cent profit. Given its revenue (in government funding) is over £200 billion, that would feasibly yield a trillion-dollar valuation resembling Meta or Apple. No wonder the story that Trump wanted to buy it gained traction.

It is, of course, not profitable in any way. And its sacred nature generates a consensus that anything else would be a moral transgression. That attitude pervades throughout public services. Hence, Pat McFadden’s unguarded moment of despair in his text to Peter Mandelson. McFadden lamented that Labour policy revolves around who it can tax to pay benefits to others. In other words, finding the money to give away stuff is its raison d’être.

Redistribution becomes the state’s sole purpose

Hosting Margaret Thatcher in 1985, Singapore’s founding Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew praised her for challenging this attitude. Lee thought it complacent to assume “the creation of wealth came about naturally, and that what needed government attention and ingenuity was the redistribution of wealth”. Lee did not share Thatcher’s ideological attachment to the free market. He once refused her invitation to speak at the Conservative Party conference because his earlier political sympathies lay with the Labour Party. But he admired Thatcher’s obstinacy and believed her reforms necessary to arrest Britain’s economic malaise.

In his memoirs From Third World to First, Lee still assigns socialist origins to his outlook. He writes that unencumbered laissez-faire capitalism benefits too few. But he also believed the profit motive was fundamental in broadening wealth. He was ambivalent about whether this was delivered by the public or private sector, as long as it consistently produced more from less.

Sometimes this value-creation is straightforwardly commercial. Singapore Airlines, established under Lee in 1972, has consistently been one of the world’s most profitable airlines. Like the other State-owned enterprises (SOEs) that together comprise almost a fifth of Singapore’s GDP, government ownership is no excuse for subsidisation. The same ethos applies to the country’s sovereign wealth funds, Temasek and GIC. They invest Singaporeans’ mandatory savings, seeking to generate returns above the guaranteed rates credited to contributors. The two entities currently have combined assets of around US$1.28 trillion.

The government exists not as a redistributive cost centre, but as a return-generating entity that invests in the country. Its public services provide wider and self-perpetuating value. For instance, Singaporeans pay for subsidised healthcare and housing through personalised savings accounts. In effect, its mandatory contributions are little different to taxation. But it creates accountability. The taxpayer expects a certain level of service for a bill they directly bear. And in turn, public services aren’t inundated with people using it like an all-you-can-eat buffet.

Private or public - as long as it works

Atlanticist goggles sometimes cloud the right’s perception of Singapore. It is held up as a positive example of a small state and thriving free enterprise. But Singapore rejects that juxtaposition of an inefficient public sector and a productive private one. Given Britain’s post-1945 consensus has favoured big government, fixing it looks more realistic than shrinking it.

America’s laissez-faire model has put it top of that OECD disposable income pile. In 2021, its average household’s $46,425 was already $20,000 ahead of Britain’s. But the European countries that also sit above Britain operate with similarly interventionist governments. It implies that taxpayers are at least getting some value for their large contributions.

Staying in Amsterdam recently, next to the Eastern Docklands where the country’s own East India Company was an earlier paradigm of global capitalism, I heard familiar complaints. A resident friend talked about the perverse incentives of top marginal tax rates of 54 per cent. Other wealthy residents are spooked by new taxes on unrealised capital gains.

Yet the Netherlands sits comfortably above Britain when it comes to disposable income. The Dutch earn more and the cost of living is less. I don’t know the ins and outs of its national policy. But the recent ambitious extension to the Port of Rotterdam is an interesting contrast to Britain’s own HS2. The former was delivered on time and on budget and yields an annual profit. The latter is still uncompleted at a projected cost of $100 billion.

Britain’s dereliction of duty

Britain finds itself in the worst of all worlds as it pursues what the journalist Christopher Snowdon calls a “capitalist command economy”. Businesses are technically in private hands but face a plethora of “instructions, targets and, increasingly, price controls”. It’s a cop-out in which the government intervenes but absolves itself of any duty to deliver.

Britain could make an evening out in Maidstone more affordable. A less onerous minimum wage or pragmatic energy policies would lower businesses’ costs. Or it could try to make individuals richer, so £165 is a less significant chunk of take-home pay.

But instead, it makes profit the ignoble pursuit. And as it gives up on value creation, so it gives up on growth.

Otium Den recap:

Do entrepreneurs need democracy?

Pro-natalism doesn’t work. Communities do.

Britain needs muscular citizenship

AI vs The Industrial Revolution

Statist Singapore Builds. Statist Britain Plans

40% of births in Britain are to foreign-born parents. Naive hopes that assimilation is possible through so-called “muscular values” flounder because values are ultimately downstream of people. I look to Singapore as a counterexample to argue that social cohesion rests on social continuity.

Singapore’s 1950 riot over a Dutch girl

Maria Hertogh was born in the Dutch East Indies in 1937 to a Dutch father and Eurasian mother. Her parents were interned by invading Japanese forces in the 1940s. Maria was entrusted to a local woman who raised Maria – a baptised Roman Catholic – as a Muslim.

Freed after the war, Maria’s biological parents tracked her down in British Malaya. But she did not share their joy at the reunion. A bitter legal battle followed in Singapore and the court eventually ordered Maria’s return to her birth family. It also annulled her Islamic marriage at age 13 to an older man.

The ruling sparked riots across Singapore. Muslims attacked Europeans and vandalised their property. Order was only restored through military intervention and a two-week curfew. It made a strong impression on then 27-year-old Lee Kuan Yew, a formative episode in Singapore’s founding Prime Minister’s pragmatic approach to social cohesion.

Lee’s cynicism about values-led cohesion

It taught Lee that society must be actively managed. He was sceptical of the Western assumption that shared values alone could unite multi-religious and multi-racial nations. Communities would not abandon deeply held identities or beliefs. Instead, the state had to establish conditions in which common civic norms could prevail. Building strong institutions to enforce those required physical integration and demographic balance to prevent political fragmentation into identity blocs.

Singapore’s demography is a legacy of British colonialism. Lee was part of the Chinese majority who comprise around 75% of the population. His great grandfather migrated from southeast China after Stamford Raffles established the trading post in 1819. Indians arrived under the same auspices of Singapore’s British foundations and make up just under 10%. Malays, recognised as Singapore’s indigenous people in its constitution and overwhelmingly Muslim, account for around 15%.

Superficially harmonious, community tensions still surface on social media and in Reddit forums beyond the control of Singapore’s state-owned press. Resentment lingers in Malay and Indian communities at the perceived privileges of the more prosperous and politically dominant Chinese. But the state prevents latent discontent mobilising into grievance-driven politics. One of its most effective tools for doing so is the Ethnic Integration Policy (EIP), which ensures each neighbourhood broadly mirrors national demographics in its cultural and ethnic mix.

One former civil servant told me this stopped Singapore’s perceived support for Israel becoming a significant issue in last year’s election. Muslim anger was dispersed as its vote was not concentrated in certain constituencies. Lee himself was acutely aware of the sensitivity of the Israel relationship. When the Israeli Defence Force helped train Singapore’s military in the 1960s, Lee claimed these swarthy visiting generals were “Mexicans” to avoid inflaming local tensions.

Any strengthening of civic nationalism is a welcome consequence of this physical integration rather than its primary purpose. Singapore also mandates state education and National Service for all males. But Lee never assumed these common experiences would rear a society that views its Singaporean identity as primary. The EIP is there, first and foremost, to guard against identity politics.

Britain’s identity politics

Contrast that to Britain where the Greens’ Deputy Leader Mothin Ali declared his local election victory in 2024 a “win for the people of Gaza.” 40 per cent of his ward of Gipton and Harehills are Muslim and over 60 per cent are from ethnic minority backgrounds. Ali’s sectarian rhetoric echoed in the five independent MPs who triumphed in the 2024 General Election, running on Muslim-identity platforms.

Singapore enforces integration but is realistic about its limitations.

Britain enables segregation while naively assuming those identities will dissolve into a common civic culture. Conservatives have been complicit in this outcome, believing Britain could replicate something like America’s ideological framework to unite communities. But it never tried to engineer the same civic pride through big public rituals. Nor does it share the same revolutionary foundations that put values at the heart of a national project.

Britain’s own context looks more like Singapore than America. Its contemporary demography is similarly an accident of history and geography with once imperial citizens arriving in pragmatic circumstances. Like the Chinese and Indians who moved to Singapore in the 19th Century, Britain’s post-1945 immigration was driven by temporary economic opportunity, rather than idealism.

Decades of grasping for exactly what Britain stands for has yielded little. Coming up with better definitions than the fatuous “tolerance”, or Rachel Reeves’ latest effort, “politeness”, may be futile anyway. Because ultimately values change under the pressure of people. The NHS spends £130,000 a day translating materials into 120 languages because the demand is there. The DWP pays benefits (which have recently increased) to additional spouses in polygamous households because the demand is there. If enough people want something, they tend to get it.

Values are downstream of people

In other words, this kind of institutional debasement isn’t purely a product of woke public service indulgence. Imagine you run an NHS trust where almost half of patients don’t speak English as a main language. You offer translation because it makes everyone’s job easier. Over time, doing so comes to seem normal. Because we are all products of our immediate influences.

I don’t pretend to know what the optimum demographic picture looks like in Britain. But it requires a proper conversation.

If institutions adapt to its people, rather than vice versa, then demographics matter. David Coleman predicts white Britons will be a minority by the 2060s. That is a monumental and rapid change. A Briton like me, born in 1992, would grow up in a country that is almost 95 per cent white and die in a very different one.

Singapore understands that any compelling notion of civic nationalism starts with civic pragmatism. Its community composition is deliberately unchanged since 1965. It has managed immigration to ensure society looks continuously familiar. That provides the bedrock for consistent norms in language, law and custom.

Maria Hertogh’s foster mother Aminah was a friend of Maria’s biological grandmother.

The families could happily co-exist in the same place despite different beliefs and heritages. But Maria could not reconcile a coherent identity when she was abruptly moved from one environment to another. Just as Britain cannot survive on so-called muscular values if external factors are constantly in flux.

Like Singapore, Britain needs a vision of what it looks like to decide what it stands for.

Otium Den recap:

Pro-natalism doesn’t work. Communities do.

Britain needs muscular citizenship

AI vs The Industrial Revolution

Statist Singapore Builds. Statist Britain Plans.

Why Britain Doesn’t Invest - And How To Fix It

I know that my bi-monthly musings can often sound like a paean to Singapore. If only Britain did this like the city state, it would be so much better off.

Singapore thinks longterm. Policy doesn’t bend to every fleeting whim. But that obduracy is made possible by political apathy. The People’s Action Party’s (PAP) grip on power isn’t just a result of press control and nine-day election campaigns. Ask a Singaporean about politics and you are unlikely to elicit a forthright response. Such neutrality is generally born of disengagement rather than fear of saying the wrong thing.

The upside is a government which gets on with things instead of chasing polls. Consistency compounds, and capital flows to a predictably business-friendly regime. Singapore’s founding Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew always argued that people care more about prosperity than democracy. So far, so true, as citizens prove willing to sacrifice a little of the latter for more of the former.

But is there another trade-off to this trade-off?

Does Singapore’s political order quash entrepreneurialism? The country’s biggest media outlet, The Straits Times, recently confronted that conundrum. Given Singapore produces top students, why aren’t there more entrepreneurs? Perhaps a practical consequence, it suggests, of living in a small country. Six million residents is hardly a mass market.

However, bigger opportunities lie close by. Singapore shares a maritime border with Indonesia, the world’s fourth most populous country. It is just 600 miles south of Vietnam, one of the world’s fastest growing economies. In other words, given the relative know-how and capital depths in Singapore, it should be a hub for start-ups to target the wider region.

And yes, it has famous domestic success stories that did exactly that. The ride-hailing app Grab is one example. It commands a 70% share of the wider regional market. But I’d argue it demonstrates execution over ideation. Grab took a proven model from Uber and localised it. It received strong backing from Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund Temasek and it benefitted from Singapore’s early deregulation of the industry. I don’t mean to pettily undermine its achievements in driving Uber out. But it was never a crazy moonshot idea that someone took a punt on.

Singapore’s younger citizens aren’t immune from the fabled colds of American sneezes. They imbibe start-up rhetoric from self-improvement podcasts and the like. But there’s a chasm between the chatter and the action. 37% of students say they have given “repeated serious thoughts” to founding a business. Yet only one percent are active founders, under half of the OECD average.

Hence, there is some substance to more informal thoughts on Singapore’s perceived lack of “hustle”. A local on X argues that “Singapore’s system is so well-designed that the rational move for a smart person is to never leave it.” There is, he argues, an established route from its flagship university NUS to its flagship bank DBS. Work hard, don’t rock the boat, and you’ll be earning $120,000 (£70,000) by 30. Another user adds less politely, “running a startup in Singapore is so negative EV (expected value) that you select for retards who failed out of the system.”

That explains why small bootstrapped businesses can be viewed sceptically. Starting one suggests there is something wrong with you. It’s an impression I gauged from running my own venture here. Local suspicion only subsided once we had a financial track record and sales tax registration that showed we had some clients.

You see the same trend with the mature start-ups Singapore attracts today. OpenAI established its APAC headquarters here in 2024. The city-state’s order makes it the obvious place for the tech behemoth to expand its regional reach. But providing safe harbour is a very different proposition to dynamic cultures where companies like this begin. The same story persists in the entrepreneurs who make Singapore their home. Facebook’s co-founder Eduardo Saverin is one of Singapore’s richest residents. But it’s a place for him to protect and invest his vast fortune, rather than make it.

Britain’s current malaise makes Singapore’s problem - the career opportunities are too good to launch a start-up - look like a good one to have.

But there is a deeper link here between political and entrepreneurial cultures. Dynamic forms of both speak to a marketplace of ideas. It engenders a sense that things could always be different. And it widens horizons. It’s no coincidence that orderly regimes like Singapore also tend to lack much of a cultural hinterland.

Nor is it a coincidence that Britain, one of the world’s oldest democracies, has such outsized commercial and cultural influence. Things that perhaps live on more vibrantly through the descendants of its political dissidents in America today. But Britain nonetheless still punches above its weight in the entrepreneurial arena. It ranks in the world’s top top three start-up ecosystems (above Singapore) and London remains Europe’s number one start-up hub.

It’s a tribute to a spirit that survives in spite of political dysfunction. Britain’s democracy has shaped a culture of ingenuity, expertise, and even eccentricity that forms the foundation of an entrepreneurial class. But that same democracy now chases a popular sentiment that views entrepreneurs as wealth hoarders, rather than creators.

So we get punitive legislation in the form of Labour’s new Employment Rights Act that makes a bad hire an existential risk. Or increasing dividend taxes that incentivise business owners to optimise expenses instead of maximising profits. Or struggling capital markets where pernicious pension reforms and equity taxes are undoing the London Stock Exchange’s historic preeminence. Great British companies subsequently pursue American listings where policy doesn’t impede liquidity.

Britain has something rare, and must ask the electorate if they really want to throw it away. Because Brits will always create great companies, and the wealth and jobs that follow them. Do we want those founders and workforces to stay in Britain? Or take their nascent success stories to greener pastures elsewhere. There are plenty ready to welcome them.

Otium Den recap:

Britain needs muscular citizenship

AI vs The Industrial Revolution

Statist Singapore Builds. Statist Britain Plans.

Why Britain Doesn’t Invest - And How To Fix It

Is Democracy Decadent?

The New York Times generously called the late Paul Ehrlich “premature”. But the biologist’s apocalyptic predictions about overpopulation were simply wrong.

Instead of Ehrlich’s suggested baby licenses, most advanced nations now actively encourage procreation as declining fertility rates leave fewer taxpayers to cover the costs of an ageing population. As the alternative quick-fix of immigration proves increasingly unpopular, pro-natalism is re-emerging as an alternative. But both the conservative and liberal guises of such policies, encouraging nuclear families and equalised parental duties respectively, have yielded little success. Chiefly, because they treat this as a recent phenomenon.

Ordo Amoris

In fact the fertility rate in England and Wales has been falling since the 19th Century and was already below replacement levels of 2.1 by the 1930s, when women in the workforce were rare and religiosity still pervasive. The post-war baby boomers were a brief correction to this trend.

That longer history correlates with the decline of community. Horizons grew beyond the small radius of one’s birthplace after the Industrial Revolution. And citizens took on direct relationships with the state rather than smaller localities. We do not have to idealise an earlier era, where infant mortality and absolute poverty were rife, to recognise this change inverted ordo amoris - the theological concept that JD Vance and Rory Stewart sparred over last year.

It describes the Christian idea that one’s obligations start locally and grow outwards. Family, then community, country, and so on. Stewart contested Vance’s view on biblical grounds but it is little different to the Burkean underpinnings of the conservatism Stewart once professed. It is Burke’s “little platoons”, the smaller organic associations that constitute a larger nation. Any hope of resuscitating birth rates must start here rather than relying on an abstract sense of duty to the nation or potential benefits from its purse.

Asia’s birth rate crisis

Asia demonstrates the futility of a centrally-led approach. Fertility rates in China, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore are some of the world’s lowest, hovering just above or below one. They are frantically rowing back on earlier Malthusian thinking. China officially abandoned its one child policy only a decade ago, and now levies additional tax on contraceptives in response to record-low births.

Singapore promoted a “Stop-at-Two” campaign in the 1970s. But in 2012, the government declared the evening of National Day to be National Night. Its promotional video included the lyrics:

I know you want it, so does the SDU… the birth rate ain’t going to spike itself.

Asia challenges some of the myths conservative-minded thinkers cling to about fertility. Patriotism is not enough. All six countries record high levels of national pride and South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore enforce compulsory military service. Nor is a greater sense of familial obligation sufficient. Intergenerational living is far more common. Singapore even has a Maintenance of Parents Act that allows residents over 60 to claim allowances from their children, if they cannot support themselves.

Furthermore, the region’s ethnic homogeneity does not help. That seems to conflict with Professor David Solomon’s 2024 study of American women, which found those living in less racially diverse areas had more children. But that is a result of what the lack of diversity implies, rather than the uniformity in itself. It suggests continuity in the form of families living in the same place for a long time with few newcomers.

Compare that to China where the government’s own 2021 census records a “floating population” of 376 million. This means almost a third of the country lives outside of its registered internal origin under the hukou system. It does not matter that the vast majority of these migrants live among their ethnic counterparts. It matters that they are removed from their own communities. Perhaps a more pressing issue than condom prices.

State intrusion

Seeking better opportunities is a core conservative belief, echoed in Norman Tebbit’s on your bike aphorism. But in Britain, it’s too often a case of mobility for mobility’s sake. In 1960, five percent of 17-30 year olds were enrolled in higher education. By 2019, it had reached 50%, fulfilling Tony Blair’s 1999 target. Many of these new students leave their communities and incur a lot of debt without enhancing their life chances.

Alongside these arbitrary university targets, the state has also disrupted communities through regulation in the form of housebuilding and local bureaucracy. Baby boomers benefitted from the former through mass-building schemes in the 1930s. Today, regulation restricts supply, pricing out residents of increasingly affluent areas. Examples of the latter reside in the demise of the civic participation that marked the 1960s. DBS checks - an overreaction to the rare episodes of insidious exploitative figures - increase the burden on scouts or junior sports teams that once provided community childcare.

Unlike Asia, Britain follows its Western peers in looking to immigration as a solution to falling birth rates. But this compounds the hollowing out of its communities. Take Boston in Lincolnshire. Oxford University’s Migration Observatory records that its foreign-born population increased by 467% between 2001 and 2011. Policy Exchange calls it the least integrated place in Britain. In 2024, a Boston school was selected as one of five in a nationwide trial of AI-based translation technology, suggesting many pupils and their parents cannot speak English.

Boston was hardly a bastion of tranquility needlessly disrupted. It was already a post-agricultural market town losing its way. But patching up its economic listlessness with immigration just depletes an already lost community, instead of engaging with the harder problem of rejuvenation.

Why community matters

Families need a greater non-transactional security blanket. As the anthropologist Sarah Hrdy writes in Mothers and Others, “large-scale co-operative endeavours involving people who are not necessarily close kin,” has always been an essential part of raising children. But that social reciprocation depends on familiarity and trust. Qualities that reside in communities, not the state.

This does not mean harking back to some anachronistic rural idyll. Mobility, ambition and choice are good things. But the state tramples on the latter when housing regulation prices young families out of stable communities, university targets needlessly uproot a generation, bureaucracy strangles voluntary associations, and immigration further corrodes “left behind” towns. Destroying communities removes the agency of those who want to stay part of one.

Today’s pro-natalists only echo Paul Ehrlich’s mistaken belief that the government could and should control fertility rates. His analysis was as wrong as his prescription. Boosting fertility is a bottom-up endeavour. A thriving nation relies upon vigorous communities.

Otium Den recap:

AI vs The Industrial Revolution

Statist Singapore Builds. Statist Britain Plans.

Why Britain Doesn’t Invest - And How To Fix It

Is Democracy Decadent?

Britain’s Brain Drain

My memories of Japan are coloured by British triumphalism. In 2019, I was in Oita to see England thrash Australia in the Rugby World Cup. And last November, I saw Oasis play to a sell-out crowd in Tokyo.

Touring acts are more welcome than those putting down permanent roots. Japan’s foreign resident population is growing and, at four million, now constitutes around three percent of the population. They are readily identifiable in such an ethnically homogeneous country.

Ethnicity & Identity

Japan’s new Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi, who models herself on Britain’s own Iron Lady, won a landslide victory last month. She is pro-market and firm on immigration. But, as yet, her latter stance is heavier on rhetoric than policy. Because Japan is in a precarious position. How does it balance public demand to retain a clear national identity with the structural challenges of the world’s oldest population? Barring a sudden reproductive resurgence or a robotics revolution, foreign workers have to fix lopsided demographics.

Japan is an outlier because national identity is so intertwined with ethnicity. But the subject is nonetheless getting a bit more mainstream in Britain. Elon Musk recently swung behind Rupert Lowe’s splinter group Restore, because it takes predictions of a white British minority seriously. Nigel Farage’s caution about who that conversation encourages seemingly lost him the prospect of Musk’s backing.

Polite conversation avoids the topic because Britain’s demographic transformation was unplanned.

In 1945, Britain was almost as ethnically uniform as contemporary Japan. Politicians did not anticipate that post-war immigration from the Caribbean and South Asia would change that. It was then imagined as a temporary response to acute labour shortages. In 1956, debates in the House of Lords still referred to Commonwealth arrivals as “visitors”. The historian Colin Holmes notes that migrants largely shared that impression, writing in John Bull’s Island that they viewed themselves as “temporary labourers or sojourners…hoping to return home with needed capital.”

Social change was an unintended consequence of addressing economic needs. That does not make it inherently good or bad. But it suggests the country never really confronted what British identity meant once it could no longer be assumed. The familiarity of language and looks is easier to grasp than values when it comes to creating a sense of belonging.

Passive vs Active citizenship

That search for shared values is made harder by what Suella Braverman condemns as the “casual, anything-goes approach to culture and identity”. Nebulous catch-all appeals to “tolerance”, or worse, “diversity”, are flimsily ascribed as defining national characteristics. It lacks any active sense of participation. It undervalues Britain by negating any real commitment to it.

It’s here, of course, that I must go back to Asia to suggest a different way of doing things. In Singapore, my immigration status is made very apparent. There is little sensitivity in designating Employment Pass (EP) holders like me as “foreigner” in official correspondence. Singapore’s foreign population is substantial – constituting almost two million of its six million population – but clearly delineated. We are not part of the civic realm and have no access to state-funded services.

There is a route to deeper integration through Permanent Residency (PR). But there are strict qualifying criteria and even successful applicants do not gain permanent rights. PR holders must renew their status every five years. It can be revoked for criminal misconduct or a deemed lack of economic contribution. Increased civic status also comes with accompanying responsibilities. Most notably, your male offspring will be subject to compulsory National Service at 18.

Every year, around 25,000 PRs go one step further and obtain citizenship. There is no explicitly ethnic aspect to this. But it’s generally recognised that it follows founding Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew’s strategy of pursuing a certain demographic equilibrium. He pledged that Singapore would always be majority Chinese with smaller Malay and Indian minorities. New citizenships broadly preserve that balance.

Speaking at Imperial College in 2002, Lee argued that Britain’s lack of similar micromanagement breeds an ailing society. He said that importing workers without any plan for uniting races or cultures led to ghettoisation. Something that was evident only last week as the Greens won in Gorton and Denton by appealing to extranational affiliations in the Middle East.

But such technocratic planning is not possible in Britain. The Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood revealed in November that the previous government’s attempt to fill between 6,000 and 40,000 jobs in the health and care sector led to the arrival of 616,000 individuals between 2022 and 2024. If Britain is overshooting those targets by 1,400 percent, it is unlikely to fare too well with strategically planned quotas.

The more pertinent lesson lies in what Lee observes Britain has lost since 1945: “that quiet pride and self-confidence, that national cohesiveness that marked out the British people after victory in World War Two.”

It stems from insecurity in what being British really means. It is no longer something simply inherited nor is it anything easily articulated. Restoring confidence instead requires a sense of reciprocity. Singapore does this well in its prohibition of dual citizenship and enforcement of National Service. It forces citizens to actively participate and forego any other national loyalties.

Britain, by contrast, asks very little of its people. Even though it’s to my advantage, I’m always astonished at the treatment of Brits abroad. As Dubai expats discover now, we retain full access to state services without any of the onerous tax implications. Similarly, it allows its passport to be part of an international portfolio – somewhere to hedge your bets rather than commit.

And it offers few binding experiences to really bring an increasingly diverse population together. Unfortunately it came towards the back end of his premiership but a similar national service scheme was one of Sunak’s brighter ideas, particularly when university increasingly looks an imprudent bet.

Britain needs a more muscular vision of identity rooted in commitment. Pride cannot reside only in the vestiges of cultural triumphs abroad. It must inspire loyalty at home too.

Otium Den recap:

Statist Singapore Builds. Statist Britain Plans.

Why Britain Doesn’t Invest - And How To Fix It

Is Democracy Decadent?

Britain’s Brain Drain

Make the UK Competent Again

Dario Amodei kickstarted the recent peak in AI hype with a 20,000-word essay on the technology’s imminent dangers.

Released just as his company Anthropic (which counts Rishi Sunak amongst its advisers) embarked on a new US$30 billion funding round, cynics may infer ulterior motives in Amodei’s elucidation of AI’s awesome powers. Nevertheless, its renewed prominence leaves governments responding to an age-old question:

How to harness technological revolutions while limiting societal disruption?

The Singapore context: capitalism as a means

The subject was top of the agenda in Singapore as Prime Minister Lawrence Wong presented the country’s budget last Thursday. New policies include generous tax deductions for businesses’ AI expenditures and free access to premium AI tools for Singaporeans who take up certain AI training courses. “AI is a powerful tool”, said Wong, but “it must serve our national interests and our people.”

In Singapore, capitalism and its innovations have always been a means, not an end. Something that was sometimes misunderstood by British Brexiteers imagining Singapore-on-Thames as bastion of laissez-faire economics. The better analogy is Vote Leave’s own Take Back Control when it comes to market forces. Use them but steer them.

Free-market is not entirely organic

The problem is that Britain lacks this same autonomy. The Conservatives share the blame for that. Tension between its strands of economic liberalism and paternalism manifest in strategic incoherence. That split was always present but more easily reconciled when Britain was a leading power. Perhaps the closest historical parallel to AI disruption, the Industrial Revolution, illustrates this.

Karl Polanyi’s 1944 book The Great Transformation is an account of Britain’s pioneering capitalism in the 19^th Century. Polanyi was a Hungarian Jew who first fled from Budapest in 1919, then Vienna in 1933, following the respective ascension of fascist regimes. He argues free markets underpinned this terror, a result of trying to square the subsequent disorder. Polanyi’s own moderate socialism looks a tad naïve given the authoritarianism he witnessed first-hand. Particularly his belief that we can trust an interventionist government if it is “true to its task of creating more abundant freedom for all.”

But an errant prognosis does not diminish what Polanyi gets right. Chiefly that the market forces guiding the Industrial Revolution and Britain’s economic supremacy were not entirely organic. Britain’s rise rested not only on technology but government decisions about trade, finance and property. Empire and global reserve currency status meant Britain naturally absorbed the advantages of a new free-market structure.

Whigs vs Conservatives

Domestic politics then debated the balance between accelerationism and gradualism. Polanyi’s own belief that the “rate of change is no less important than direction itself” was articulated by 19^th Century Conservatives. Figures like Richard Oastler jostled with Whig Prime Minister Early Grey over the 1834 Poor Law, which denied the rights of the poor to subsistence. The former believed unemployment was a manifestation of the social dislocation wrought by sudden change. The latter that it was simply an unwillingness to work for the wages available in the labour market.

The same Whig-Conservative divide shows up in earlier views of Napoleon Bonaparte. Whigs like Charles James Fox were sympathetic to the Corsican General. Firstly, because his European reforms offered trading benefits, with newly liberalised and legalised economies. Secondly, because they resented the costs of fighting such a drawn-out war. It was the Conservatives, under Pitt the Younger, who were far more obstinate in enduring heavy taxation and economic blockades to keep fighting. Trade and sovereignty pulled in different directions, but Britain was strong enough to manage the tension.

Disparity was manageable because Britain held such sway over market mechanisms. It could repeal the mercantilist Navigation Acts in 1849, giving up privileged shipping rights because naval supremacy allowed it to row back if necessary. Paternalistic public health reforms and workplace safety legislation were possible because Britain had the fiscal means to do so. Its economic pre-eminence entitled it to indulge both factions.

Managing tensions in the modern era

Today’s Conservative Party is an amalgamation of these differing proclivities. The Whigs, and its subsequent Liberal iteration, were subsumed into this new broad church in 1912. We recognise these different strands in the form of Disraeli’s one-nation conservatism and Gladstone’s classical liberalism. But as Britain’s influence has diminished, so these result in contradictions. It does not have the economic might to sustain both visions. It has to offer a transparent choice – going for growth or a more paternalistic state-directed gradualism.

The lesson from Singapore is that it is too late to have both. Its autonomy to handle AI comes from years of consistent government and strategic planning. It has built huge domestic savings, enshrined balanced budgets in law and maintained a strong industrial base (manufacturing still represents 25 percent of GDP). Britain has none of these things.

Accelerationism vs Gradualism: pick a side

But it has many other advantages. It is a talent hub. Americans rave about the opportunity to hire top-tier talent at a third of the price. And (for now) it is free of the EU regulation that threatens to stifle AI development. What it lacks in infrastructure it can incentivise the Anthropics of this world to build through de-regulation and tax incentives if accompanied by liberal energy and planning reform.

Offering such perks would require a drastic overhaul of the state. And proponents may be buoyed by recent evidence that the British public is feeling a little less statist. Recent research reported an all-time high of Brits saying tax and spending should be reduced. But it still pales in comparison to the number calling for more or the same.

The alternative is to be upfront about trade-offs. Britain is unlikely to be a leader in any AI revolution. But it will do its best to manage it. It will protect jobs, regulate where necessary and guard social cohesion. It’s a perfectly reasonable Oastlerian conservative position when delivered with clarity. And perhaps, if Amodei’s claims prove overblown, it will look prescient.

Control through Choice

The Conservatives need to define what they stand for as they go up against Reform as the party of the right. They can be guardians of paternalism or engineers of growth. But it is dishonest to pretend both are possible. Unlike the Industrial Revolution, Britain does not have the luxury of leading this one. Control only comes from informed choice.

And the Conservatives must decide what tradition they stand for.

Otium Den recap:

Why Britain Doesn’t Invest - And How To Fix It

Is Democracy Decadent?

Britain’s Brain Drain

Make the UK Competent Again

AI & Faith-Based Investing

You can regularly eat and drink for free in Singapore.

Just turn up at one of the British property seminars that pepper the city’s function rooms. Developers and agents swallow the cost of a few freeloaders because it has been a fruitful market. Singaporeans are the second largest group of foreign home owners across England and Wales.

Demand isn’t spurred by colonial nostalgia. Rather, Singaporeans can buy a second home in Britain with far less hassle than in Singapore. And developers welcome the liquidity lacking in those supported only by a British-earned income. Just as a punitive tax regime leaves British buyers short of a deposit, so builders find construction can leave them short of a profit once they have navigated nebulous planning diktats.

Homeowning electorate

Confronting the resulting housing bubble may look awkward for the Conservatives. Even in 2024, 37 percent of outright homeowners voted for them, a 12-point lead on Labour in second place. But the consequences of ducking the issues are starker. Those homeowners will see values deplete anyway under Labour’s trajectory of making everyone poorer. And the Conservatives will make no inroads with a generation shut out of the housing market.

It’s a lesser problem in Singapore where 90% of citizens are homeowners. A product of mass public housebuilding under the Housing and Development Board (HDB). Only Singaporeans are eligible to buy these properties. Buyers draw upon their Central Provident Fund (CPF), a forced personal savings system to put down a deposit on HDBs’ subsidised values. Mortgages are offered with fixed interest rates of 2.6%.

The HDB market is heavily restricted. They can’t be purchased by non-citizens and Singaporeans can only own one unit at a time. Re-sales are prohibited for five years, so there’s no “flipping” on the back of sudden value increases. If Singaporeans want to buy a second home, they must enter the fully private market, which constitutes just 20% of the country’s housing stock. Doing so incurs 20% stamp duty on any second property and 30% on additional ones after that.

Foreign capital = much-needed liquidity

Hence why buying in Britain is much more attractive where non-resident stamp duty is only two percent. With far lower tax rates and HDBs available at 3.8 times average income, Singaporeans have the means to buy British stock. Penalising such foreign buyers may play well optically. But as it is, they’re vital in getting homes built. Britain’s largest developer Barratt Redrow recently blamed a lack of them for missing its sales target. International capital helps developers meet affordable housing provisions under Section 106 of the Town and Country Planning Act. Without buyers for higher-price units, the think-tank Onward reports that the cost of delivering new homes often exceeds their capital values.

Section 106 is one of many regulatory hurdles strangling supply. Onward’s research shows that small and medium-sized (SME) developers have been effectively priced out of the market. In the late 1980s, SMEs delivered about 40% of new homes; by 2007, 30%; and today just 12%. They don’t have the scale or balance sheet to weather the costly and cumbersome planning permission process.

Land grabs vs inertia

Mired in such regulation, Britain’s housing policy is hardly less statist than Singapore. But that statism resides in obstructiveness instead of forcefulness. Singapore can build because the state owns 90% of the land (HDBs and most private housing are on 99-year leases). A situation engineered through the Land Acquisition Act of 1966 that empowers the government to buy any land it wishes at current market value. It is frustrating for golfers as the city-state’s few remaining courses are forcibly purchased to make way for new housing. But it gives the government total control over the supply-chain and costs.

A similar land grab is probably only contemplated by Zack Polanski in Britain. And it’s more likely to resemble Zimbabwe if it comes under the Greens. But there are other lessons Britain can learn from Singapore:

1. Provide tax-free incentives for young people to save for a house -- Robert Colville writes in The Times that Brits with student loans are paying 50p in tax from every pound they earn over £50,000 and 71p over £100,000. Getting a deposit together is often hopeless for even top-earning graduates without help from the bank of mum and dad. Something like Singapore’s CPF would allow workers to save into a specific house-buying account. It need not be compulsory nor state managed. But it should be ring-fenced and explicitly linked to first-home purchase.

2. Remove uncertainty -- Singapore’s Urban Redevelopment Authority fixes land use, density and infrastructure expectations in advance. Builders operate within known limits. They don’t have to contend with Section 106-esque regulations that leave developers unsure if local housing associations will even buy the affordable housing they’re obligated to provide. Get things built first.

3. No more virtue-signalling -- Britain needs to stop concerning itself with fringe measures that play only to the politics of envy. I recently went to an event at the Seven Palms complex on Singapore’s Sentosa island, an enclave of wealthy foreigners. It had the ghostly feel of many of London’s high-end developments, with owners mostly in absentia. We may criticise the atmosphere created by such projects but they’re incidental to the wider problem. It’s virtue signalling rather than serious policy.

Britain’s housing crisis is not unique amongst developed nations. But alongside an acute supply shortage, it faces weakening demand. If the most talented young people don’t believe there’s a realistic route to buying, they will leave. And house prices will fall anyway while the country gets poorer. Fixing things now may unsettle Conservative voters who sit on high paper valuations. But a reckoning will come anyway. Perhaps those free evenings out in Singapore will start to dwindle.

Singapore shows the benefits of a government that acts forcefully. Britain shows the consequences of a government that meanders: forcing risk onto developers, disincentivising building and earning, and pandering to NIMBYism.

Noel Skelton’s property-owning democracy was once an inspiration to a young Lee Kuan Yew. The Conservatives need to reclaim that legacy to feed aspiration rather than resentment.

Otium Den recap:

Is Democracy Decadent?

Britain’s Brain Drain

Make the UK Competent Again

AI & Faith-Based Investing

Start with What

Deferred gratification is a hard sell, especially when it comes to money. In politics, it’s easier to offer the electorate something now than greater, but uncertain, future rewards. A short-term bias that I’ve written about recently.

Singapore’s solution is an implicit bargain that trades minimal scrutiny for long-term delivery. But it’s not always harmonious. The Leader of the Opposition was recently removed under accusations of lying under oath. Reported but not dwelt upon in the state-controlled press, Facebook reveals undercurrents of discontent. A local commenter accuses the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) of playing politics rather than addressing the cost of living.

The PAP’s economic record looks pretty sound on paper. GDP per capita has doubled since 2000 to around $90,000 today. But it matters little if people don’t feel they’re getting wealthier. I saw the investor Bill Ackman address that issue at a conference in Singapore last week, giving the American context. His only criticism of President Trump was around proposals for credit card fee capping. A policy error born of the need to win support ahead of the November midterms, Ackman argued.

Zero-sum vs Positive-sum

Short-term catnip is offered up because a buoyant stock market does not impress Americans without 401ks (America’s personal pension scheme). Ackman says it makes them actively resentful of other citizens’ growing wealth. And that situation is even more perilous in Britain. Around 60 percent of Americans are actively invested in the stock market, while barely a quarter of Brits hold shares outside their pensions. It leaves Brits mostly unaware of what they’re invested in and how that portfolio is performing. Americans feel some control over their financial future. Brits don’t.

This breeds a zero-sum approach to money that manifests in pernicious ways. The first takes the form of policies that assume a settled pool of capital and aim to redistribute, like corporate tax hikes or Labour’s new Employment Rights Act. The second is an unhealthy attachment to property, an asset class which relies on scarcity. As Mike Bird argues in his excellent new book, The Land Trap, it’s impossible to achieve mass home ownership and constant rapid increases in the value of land. 65 percent of Brits are homeowners and, for many, that asset constitutes their sole sense of financial security. No wonder politicians are so afraid of meddling.

This real estate obsession obscures the positive-sum - one person getting it doesn’t mean another losing out - opportunities in the stock market. In his Reform defection speech, Robert Jenrick highlights that British houses cost more than in any other OECD country. But how many people know that a 30-year investment (from 1993 to 2023) in the FTSE All-Share Index, with reinvested dividends, yielded a 630 percent return? In that same period, average house prices rose by 427 percent. The latter a product of what Bird calls the “good fortune to buy in a particular place, at a particular time.” The former is a predictable result of patience and discipline.

Trump Accounts

The first step in fixing this is education. Ackman talked approvingly of America’s new “Trump Accounts” for newborns. The government credits $1,000 to these accounts when opened by parents. Additional deposits can then be made directly by parents or their employers (for whom it will be tax deductible). Deposits must be invested in an American stock index. Using average historical returns, The Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) estimates that balances will be worth over $18,000 for babies born in 2026 by the time they are 28 if no further deposits are made. It could be over a million dollars with maximum contributions.

Based on a liberal estimate of 700,000 births in Britain each year, a similar British scheme would cost about £525 million a year if we assume 100 percent take up and no eligibility criteria. Even then, it’s a rounding error in government budgets and about 25 percent of annual spend on Winter Fuel Payments. Account holders, who can’t touch the funds until they’re at least 18, would see what compound investing can achieve.

Australia’s superannuation or Singapore’s CPF

Driving awareness of these market forces can change British attitudes. Most importantly when it comes to pensions. Maybe I’m particularly disorganised but I don’t even know where my pension holdings are from my time working at British companies. Employers choose schemes, not employees, so every new job creates a new pension pot. There is no visibility or agency, and performance is often poor. The Times reports that one provider delivers just 1.7 percent annual returns. It is recklessness disguised as caution given that almost any tracker fund would deliver something far better.

Australia is one example Britain should look to for ideas. Ackman spoke warmly about its superannuation system, predicted to become the world’s second largest savings pool by 2031. It already has more retirement savings than any other country per capita. Employers must pay 12 percent of employees’ salary into their respective funds. Australians see this as an immediate credit into their investment accounts, as part of a strategy they pick. Compare that psychological effect to Brits seeing pension deductions sit alongside tax on pay slips, with little awareness of where that money is going or what it is doing.

Coming back to Singapore, it’s also worth looking at its Central Provident Fund (CPF). It offers the transparency Britain so sorely lacks in that one account follows you around and balances are viewable at any one time. But it’s also sui generis. Singaporeans can use CPF to buy state-subsidised homes. They’re also a way of protecting citizens in the absence of a comprehensive welfare system. So lower taxes are offset by the need to fund one’s own healthcare and retirement. Consequently, CPF returns are guaranteed by the government, which invests this large pool of forced savings in its sovereign wealth funds. The downside is these set returns can lead to the latent rumblings I referenced at the outset. People can always ask why this paternalistic approach shouldn’t grant them higher rates of returns, especially if inflation is running hot.

Agency at the heart of an investor-society

Britain’s own investor-society needs more agency than this. Rising house prices are a lottery. Buy a one up one down in Hackney 30 years ago and own a multi-million-pound asset today. But the stock market rewards prudence and planning. Let workers see the rewards of compound investing and you change an entitlement culture. It’s no longer about sharing scarce resources but building something bigger. Deferred gratification becomes possible to sell again.

Otium Den recap:

Britain’s Brain Drain

Make the UK Competent Again

AI & Faith-Based Investing

Start with What

Half the World Away

I’m having my best season ever in Fantasy Premier League. I’ve improved on my usual two millionth place finish and sit in the top 55,000 of the 12 million plus people who play the game.

It involves picking Premier League footballers within a given budget and earning points for their performances. In previous seasons, I’ve avidly read and listened to the vast resources available to inform one’s selection. It’s been a poor return on investment. This season’s success has come from a different approach – blocking out that noise and sticking with a few conviction picks through leaner weeks.

What does this have to do with democracy?

I think about it as I read Matthew Syed’s rousing defence of it in The Times. Syed points to global polls that ask people where they would live if the world truly was their oyster. Liberal democracies, in the form of the biggest Western powers, always come out on top. These revealed preferences, Syed argues, prove we should all be a little more positive about a system he calls a “belter”.

I’m a big fan of Syed. And his article is timely, as figures on the left idealise Nicolás Maduro’s rule and ones on the right suggest Adolf Hitler was actually a “cool” guy.

But Syed’s democratic cheerleading risks complacency — the belief that all will be OK if we bask in the glow of morally superior government. It ignores its inherent flaws. Chiefly that you can win votes by people-pleasing and changing policies on a whim, rather than through delivering results.

Democracy ≠ Prosperity

The countries everyone wants to live in are also the richest, and democracy is not always a prerequisite of that wealth. I don’t see an obvious correlation in Asia where the so-called Asian Tigers - South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore - are far wealthier than most of their neighbours. The former two achieved rapid economic growth before democratic transitions in the 1980s and 90s. Hong Kong was not a democracy under British rule (and even less so back in Chinese hands). Meanwhile my home of Singapore blends elections with more authoritarian practices.

The city state only gets a fleeting mention in Syed’s article. It’s an uncomfortable fit with his thesis that “economic success and democratic institutions are indivisible”. Singapore lacks a free press, is accused of gerrymandering, and its founding Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew was hardly effusive about democracy’s benefits. Lee believed it produced “erratic” results as fickle electorates “vote for a change for change’s sake.”

Lee thought that such arbitrariness threatens economic development. Singapore’s sovereign wealth funds are a good example because they require the discipline of delayed gratification that free elections can thwart. Today its total combined assets are estimated to be US$1.7 trillion. Building that was painful. It meant imposing high compulsory savings on workers, restricted welfare and no immediate dividends. The result is that investment returns now fund about 20 percent of government spending, instead of high taxes or borrowing. That long-term planning would have been jeopardised by a realistic opposition party campaigning to use this money for a welfare splurge.

“It’s all fake”

It’s quixotic to believe democracy always yields prosperity, and that anything else collapses into kleptocracy. Of course, authoritarian rule risks caprice in the form of “strongmen” without accountability. But so does democracy when governing descends into signalling. Speaking on the Spectator podcast, Dominic Cummings refers to ministers making grandiose statements about issues they only just found out about. “It’s all fake”, says Cummings. Politicians just try and say the right thing, rather than doing anything.

It’s why a recent Adam Smith Institute poll suggests 33 percent of British 18-30 year olds would prefer an authoritarian system, led by a decisive figure. Someone who actually exhibits some obstinacy, rather than endless reactivity. More cheeringly, there is evidence the electorate responds well to figures who show steel. A slightly trivial example perhaps, but I think of Kemi Badenoch’s response to the TV series Adolescence last year. In the midst of media fury that she had not bothered to watch it, she calmly stated her belief that policy should not be dictated by fictional drama.

The Reddit thread, Kemi Badenoch is right about Adolescence, shows a receptiveness to her response. Commenter inevitablelizard says, “We should be pressuring politicians on serious answers”, not “whether they’ve seen adolescence or not.” Interesting too because inevitablelizard is not a Badenoch fan. The redditor promises to wash his or her mouth out with acid for defending the opposition leader.

Followership or Leadership

It’s an example of leadership over “followership”. Lord Wolfson and Baroness Shawcross-Wolfson use the latter term in the Policy Exchange’s Future of the Right paper to describe parties’ “habit of asking the public what they want to hear and trying to provide it.” Mirroring public sentiment rather than shaping it is short-termist and futile.

Parties are far too in thrall to the temporary nature of polls that gauge those public attitudes. They don’t share my Fantasy Premier League patience or Singapore’s investing mantra. Both involve weathering short-term discomfort rather than changing approaches day-to-day.

Yes, that rests upon having some good ideas in the first place. And not sticking with them pigheadedly if the facts change. But it’s a conviction first approach. In the political sphere, this means convincing the electorate of what you believe is right, not what they want to hear.

Democracy works when it removes tired governments and sparks new ideas, like Thatcher’s smashing of the post-war statist consensus. But we do democracy a disservice if we kid ourselves that the ballot box guarantees prosperity and ignore the successes of less liberal regimes. Chasing every headline and poll just means embracing the same inconsistency we criticise in kleptocracies.

British democracy may not grant the same patience as Singapore’s hybrid system. But that doesn’t mean resorting to myopia. Conviction can bear fruit. Let’s see a little more of it if we want a proper defence of why democracy works.

Otium Den recap:

Make the UK Competent Again

AI & Faith-Based Investing

Start with What

Half the World Away

Tax the Rich

David Cameron is the latest figure to sound the alarm over Britain’s brain drain. At Abu Dhabi Finance Week, the former Prime Minister said he was worried about the number of Brits choosing to leave for places like the UAE.

I’m a Brit who has lived abroad since 2019. Although the initial move wasn’t sparked by exasperation, a return looks increasingly unappealing - a prevalent attitude amongst other expats I meet. I argued in Conservative Home this week that such a choice is often made relucantly 👇

Rousing music is juxtaposed with a stark message from Peter Hitchens in a recent Daily Mail video. Get out while you can, the columnist advises younger Britons, before the UK becomes impossible to live in.

Plus ça change, you may say. Hitchens has never been one for sunny optimism. The bleak picture he paints of a country where “nothing works” is a consistent theme. But it’s striking nonetheless because Hitchens is fundamentally a one-nation conservative. He is no fan of laissez-faire Thatcherism, believing in duty and patriotism, rather than the relentless pursuit of economic self-interest.

Tax dodging versus aspiration

Emigration is in the spotlight after the ONS revised down 2024 net migration (the difference between arrivals and departures from the UK) by 20 percent to 345,000. A result of more people leaving rather than fewer coming in. It seems Brits are a significant part of that exodus. As a fellow fleer, I see this is about much more than tax dodgers heading to Dubai. It’s ordinary professional families quietly leaving because the UK makes aspiration feel futile.

Minimising my tax bill was not a priority when I moved to Hong Kong in 2019. As a reasonably well-paid single professional in my twenties, I was dimly aware that HMRC made a hefty claim on every payslip. But I had enough disposable income to feel comfortable after rent, food, and other basics. I wasn’t saving much beyond a workplace pension but that wasn’t an imminent concern.

Adventure and career progression ranked far higher in the decision to venture east. Gross salaries without PAYE deductions were a welcome surprise, as were subsequent tax bills from the Inland Revenue Department that asked for very little. But it didn’t trump all other considerations. I only stayed put when Covid hit in 2020 because I’d met a girl and feared the consequences for our blossoming relationship if I returned to the UK. A prudent decision, as I capitalised upon a friend’s advice that time plus lack of competition is the formula for romantic success. Locked down together, things moved quickly, and we married in 2021. We moved to Singapore a year later with a first daughter on the way.

Agency & Momentum

We are now a family of four and often think about moving back to the UK. Singapore regularly ranks as one of the world’s most expensive cities. Our fixed monthly outgoings – rent, kindergarten, childcare and a car – are precariously high. We could certainly cut that in the UK. But not by nearly enough to offset what we would lose in post-tax income. Furthermore, what you save in Singapore, you keep. There is no capital gains or dividends tax, so you quickly see the compounding benefits of what you put away.

I don’t expect anything from the British state in retirement. Demographics and debt mean it’s hard to imagine anything resembling today’s pensions will be available to my generation. Nor do I believe I should be entitled to it. One of the few sensible measures in Rachel Reeves’ budget was correcting the remarkable offer of a state pension to expats who continued making annual £182 National Insurance contributions. The threshold has now been raised to £910.

So, we stay in Singapore because it gives us agency to build our own future. Things are transparent. We pay relatively low tax (24% is the top marginal rate in Singapore’s progressive bands) and then it’s on us. I’m 33 and this is both the highest earning and most expensive time of my life. But Singapore lets you build momentum around that income, while the UK just exacerbates the expenses. If we returned, we’d pay a gruelling marginal rate of tax while footing the bill entirely for nursery and childcare costs. Treading water rather than making progress.

The Social Contract

I sympathise with Matthew Syed, writing in The Times, when he asks whether Brits have “a duty to this nation” to stay and save it. I hate it when other expats exhibit a lifeboat mentality – thank God we got out – and revel in the malaise back home. I share Syed’s patriotic sentiment, but country loses out to family in any hierarchy of obligations. It’s this that motivates many of the other Brits I meet abroad.

Because we’re not just losing people to tax havens. I was in Brisbane last week to see England’s latest comprehensive Ashes defeat. Many of the other England fans lived in Australia. One, a builder in his mid-40s, had built a successful business and given his three children a very different upbringing to his own in Basildon. Another Brit in his mid-30s had spent several years in Singapore before moving to Sydney. He didn’t resent paying higher taxes in the Australian capital because it still encourages agency, offering tax rebates on education, healthcare and savings.

Other friends from university are happily settled in New York, where living costs make London look cheap. But the taxman doesn’t jump on your back so early in the game. You can get wealthy before the government starts asking for its substantial cut. Unlike the UK, it is far less generous to citizens who work elsewhere, taxing them on worldwide income. The incentives are clear. Stay, work hard and you can prosper. By contrast, Rachel Reeves “asks” people to pay a little more, while the government rewards those who refuse to engage with the system at all. Benefit claimants can earn a salary equivalent to £120,000. Illegal arrivals get housing, healthcare and an allowance.

Reluctant leavers

The UK indulges the idle and punishes aspiration. Departees don’t, by and large, resent handing anything over to HMRC. They’re just choosing other countries where that tax bill still forms part of a social contract. So, Hitchens’ dire warning is not a call to simply abscond when things get difficult. Rather, it recognises that you can’t save a country if it doesn’t want to save itself. Most expats aren’t ostentatiously boasting about newfound riches in Dubai. They’re reluctantly slipping away. And few in Westminster seem to care.

Otium Den recap:

AI & Faith-Based Investing

Start with What

Half the World Away

Tax the Rich

Grand Narratives Blind Us

Something has gone radically wrong with where elite talent spends its time in this country.

So said at a recent Looking for Growth event, as he reflected on the declining quality of the UK’s politicians. Cummings contrasts the calibre of figures like Pitt the Younger and Winston Churchill with today’s underwhelming bunch.

Abject politicians are the result of admirable British values breeding sub-par consequences. Just as tolerance feeds resignation to managed decline, fair play prioritises the loyal above the competent. Party apparatchiks and spirited constituency MPs end up in cabinet positions because they’ve stuck at it long enough. Rather than possessing any relevant experience or expertise.

A brief football analogy illustrates that point. In the elite game today, most top managers get parachuted in without earning their stripes at lower levels. Tom Allnutt writes in The Times that managers “who overachieve with lesser sides have historically struggled when asked to meet expectations at the most demanding clubs.” Because the skillsets are different: maller clubs are inspired by energy and organisation; big ones need vision, ruthlessness and obstinacy. Arsenal is currently top of the Premier League with a manager, Mikel Arteta, in his first head coach role.

It’s elitist, but it works. Formidable figures rarely emerge through auditioning. Leaders who change countries – Pitt, Churchill, and (in line with this column’s theme) Lee Kuan Yew – don’t follow a neat path from exemplary local casework to national leadership. In the UK today, we trade the breadth of these backgrounds and talents for parochialism. Even when we get variance in the form of someone like Nigel Farage, the system seeks to nullify. The possible next prime minister is criticised for spending time in America, cultivating the strongest relationship of any MP with the Trump administration, when he should be holding surgeries in Clacton.

Of course, constituencies shouldn’t be deprived of local advocacy just because its MP is a very important man. Particularly deprived ones like Clacton. But it brings a dilemma for the fore. How can Westminster attract the country’s most influential if it won’t let them get on with meaningful work?

The US provides one solution in executive cabinet appointments. Reform Chairman Zia Yusuf says his party would copy this in government. Talking to the Telegraph in September, he said, “we don’t think it makes sense necessarily for the minister of defence to also be doing constituency surgeries about the chlorine level in the local swimming pool.”

Yusuf suggests as many as half of Reform’s cabinet could be appointed from the Lords. Uneasiness about these plans only reflects a misdirected sense of fair play. Winning parties should select the best people, instead of being beholden to internal factions. The “galactic-level talent” Yusuf wants to appoint aren’t looking to further political careers or court local popularity but carry out roles effectively.

Whatever one’s views on the Trump administration, there’s a chasm of competence between the talent at the President’s disposal and that available to Sir Keir Starmer. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent was running multi-billion-dollar portfolios while Rachel Reeves was maybe working for the Bank of England. Whatever the truth behind Reeves’ malleable CV, she has never had to make anything like the same concrete, high-pressure judgements that Bessent did.

Experience like that not only informs his strategy today but a track-record that proves his suitability. But would Bessent have traded high finance for Washington DC if it meant sorting out bus timetables on the weekend?

Appointing cabinet ministers from the Lords is no aberration, but the practice has withered. Reviving it would greatly widen the talent pool and force parties to be serious about governing rather than just winning elections. It’s also a quick fix that the Conservatives could implement as easily as Reform. But it avoids the harder work of changing a political culture.

It’s here that I turn to Singapore’s form of executive recruitment. A country with a less vibrant democracy than America but one that copies the UK’s parliamentary system. The ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) actively headhunts potential MPs – senior civil servants, military officers, business leaders – years in advance. To entice the best, it lessens the opportunity cost: salaries are famously the highest in the world. But pay is benchmarked to seniority. Backbench MPs earn the equivalent of about £115,000 while senior ministers earn up to £1m.

Talented outsiders are parachuted in, standing in safe seats and going straight into the cabinet. They are free to focus on national-level issues because Singapore runs Group Representation Constituencies (GRCs). These constituencies elect three to five MPs instead of one. There is a hierarchy within that team, so one may be a cabinet minister, one on a ministerial fast-track and one dedicated to local issues.

That structure accepts the concept of different skill sets. Good local MPs have a role to play, but not in executive decision-making. And young political talent can still emerge, winning promotion within the GRC hierarchy.

There are considerable obstacles to a similar system in Britain. First, the PAP has a monopoly on power. They can decide which seats will be GRCs and place cabinet ministers there accordingly.

Second, it would mean investing in politicians, the only area where the British government shows any fiscal restraint. Funding more MPs and higher salaries for the best would be a rounding error in government spending. But the public would hate it. Third, you would need radical cross-party introspection for MPs to confess they don’t currently represent the best of Britain.

Capable people have options. If you’re Zarah Sultana, a £94,000 salary and a public platform is as good as it gets. There is no private sector queue for your services. So, addressing Cummings’ talent dearth is about lessening the opportunity cost for those with genuine competence. It’s not purely financial.

Cabinet members in the US and Singapore can command far better pay elsewhere. But they are freed up to take on real responsibility. If the UK can’t offer similar paths to the country’s brightest, it condemns itself to mid-table mediocrity.

Otium Den recap:

Start with What

Half the World Away

Tax the Rich

Grand Narratives Blind Us

Accountability, Not Technocracy

Parker, played by Justin Timberlake, says in The Social Network. That amplification of financial ambition in Facebook’s foundation story finds a philosophical mirror in today’s AI circles:

Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) isn’t cool anymore. Superintelligence is.

The Knight of Faith

AGI is human-equivalent. It matches expertise in every field but still operates on our terms. Superintelligence is sui generis. It’s unmoored from human logic and knowledge. Sunnier dispositions believe a benevolent Superintelligence heralds a new age of abundance as it solves all humanity’s ills. Others doubt it would feel any moral obligation. An indifferent Superintelligence pursues its own goals. Best case scenario, it treats us like dogs. Worst case, some kind of factory farming.

The concept is clearly God-like and rooted in the West’s Christian legacy. But is it the God of the Catholic Church’s greatest theologian Thomas Aquinas? His 13th-century Natural Law Theory held that God’s nature permeates the world through a rational order. Or is it Luther’s God, who later scorned Aquinas as “the source and foundation of all heresy”, as he kickstarted the Protestant Reformation?

Luther believed that Original Sin, inherited from the disobedience of Adam and Eve, made God wholly distant from the world. We can’t intuit His nature and work towards Him. Sola Fide (faith alone) is the only path to salvation. It inspired 19th-century Protestant existentialist Soren Kierkegaard. He draws on the tale of Abraham and Isaac. Abraham is the knight of faith, willing to sacrifice his son Isaac upon God’s command. Abraham believes, paradoxically, that Isaac will be sacrificed and Isaac will be returned to him through God. Faith suspends rational thinking. It’s ultimately rewarded, as God switches out Isaac for a ram at the last minute.

What does the Book of Genesis have to do with Eric Jackson standing outside Drake’s house last Sunday?

For 90 successive days, the hedge fund manager has filmed himself walking and talking in the Toronto suburbs. Lingering by the rapper’s mansion, Jackson proselytises about Opendoor. He wants Drake to invest in the “iBuying” real estate company, which promises to streamline home buying and selling.

But its model hasn’t impressed markets. Opendoor was a penny stock in June before retail traders took up the baton. The stock surged 500% in July. When momentum faded around the $3 mark, Jackson drew fresh inspiration from his 16 year-old son. He advised him to keep making videos outside Drake’s place until his fellow Canadian joins the so-called Open Army.

Jackson invokes God in calling upon this community of investors. He talks about going through one of the darkest periods of his life last year. Money was leaving his fund, EMJ Capital, and advisers recommended he shut the whole thing down. But Jackson kept believing that opportunity would come. He bears the suffering like Job, telling his followers, “You trust God. You trust yourself.” As God eventually restores Job, giving him double what he had before, so Opendoor promises prosperity to the faithful. Jackson believes the stock is a possible hundred bagger, one that rises 100 times in value.

Market Reformation

The hype is part of markets’ own reformation. The 1990s dotcom boom unleashed a new age of potential. Traditional value investing metrics, P/E ratios and the like, were inadequate in the face of new technology. Evangelists replaced Chief Marketing Officers. Apple’s own Chief Evangelist Guy Kawasaki talked in terms of mission rather than price and performance. Like Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, he was spreading the good news.

Of course, in Apple’s case, this faith manifests in material value. People buy a physical product. But cryptocurrency has moved further along the Sola Fide axis. Bitcoin bulls talk about scarcity but its real value lies in faith. MicroStrategy’s Michael Saylor posts that he is buying Bitcoin every day this week, even as its dollar-value plummets. One AI-generated image shows him on a life raft with the popular phrase HODL (Hold On for Dear Life). Don’t panic, don’t be influenced by worldly forces, because you are part of something greater that defies rational analysis.

It’s also infused with the anti-establishment, disintermediating drive of Luther’s Protestantism. FIAT money is the Papal indulgence system reborn. Believers don’t need authorities to assign value or doctrine. Yet it also promises worldly success like Protestantism’s Prosperity Gospel. Financial well-being is God’s will for true believers. Although bitcoin is valuable in itself, the faithful still tie it to monetary terms. Saylor predicts it will go to one million dollars, a hundred bagger and more at today’s $84,000 valuation.

Faith vs Reason

What is the balance between faith and real-world hypotheses in driving valuations? Eric Jackson sits within these blurred lines. Withdrawing investors accuse him of chasing meme stocks, those that rise on social media buzz rather than fundamentals. But Jackson also gives rational reasons for believing in the stock: proprietary AI technology and a ripe opportunity to disintermediate North America’s broker-led real estate model. The faith of his retail army means they see the bigger picture sceptical institutions miss.

Institutional investors may be snobbish about such theses but they are also guilty of the same tendencies. JP Morgan and SoftBank bought into the WeWork story, converts to Adam Neumann’s polished and zealous narrative that an office leasing company was a revolutionary technology play. If Jackson is a charlatan, what does that make Jamie Dimon or Masayoshi Son?

Today’s frothy AI market, fuelled by retail and institutional money alike, rests on a similar leap of faith. Bulls believe that something extraordinary and beyond our current comprehension lies on the horizon. Superintelligence is the fulfilment of a technology gospel preached for over three decades. Whether we feel sunny or gloomy about its possibility, it promises God-like omnipotence and omniscience. If such a prospect lies within OpenAI’s grasp, then trillion-dollar valuations are merited.

Tell us something we don’t know

Perhaps this seems a convoluted way of rehashing the old adage that markets are irrational. But there is a heightened phenomenon at play here. Faith-led investing is different from overreactions or momentum trading that characterise “irrational exuberance”. Some of it exhibits an unconsciously Protestant mentality - Tom Holland’s argument that Christian frameworks still profoundly shape behaviours. Some of it is explicitly Christian, as per Jackson’s posts. Or in the arguments of Christian bitcoiners like Jimmy Song. He argues that “Bitcoin is a way to opt out of this corrupt, US-centric system which takes value from the poor and gives to the rich.”

Whether you buy Song’s thesis - that FIAT money is readily inflated for the benefit of a small cabal - or not, it’s born of the belief in a divine otherworldliness that all things are possible through God. Faith inspires the persistence and resilience necessary to do extraordinary things. Missions that can be undermined by cynical players.

Look at Elon Musk’s ongoing feud with Bill Gates over the latter’s short position in Tesla. Musk finds it so egregious given Gates’ rhetoric on climate change. Why would Gates try to make a quick buck at the expense of a company that promises solutions? In Musk’s longer-term view, the persistently faithful will get much greater financial reward, along with the external benefits of the company’s success.

Demagogue vs Prophet

But that rests on a generous interpretation of such founders’ intentions. It’s a fine line between demagogue and prophet. Are evangelisers riding waves of faith to secure personal riches? Or are they carrying converts on a journey of abundance? The same question for investors. Will Jackson’s Open Army stick with the stock through thick and thin? Or is it simply a pyramid of belief, dependent on ever more converts to sustain it?

Parker went bigger than Jackson, encouraging Mark Zuckerberg to think in terms of the thousand bagger. Zuckerberg met that target and more, with a net worth of $200 billion today. Technology changes our conception of the possible. What is true today may not be tomorrow. It trades Aquinas’ rationalism for Kierkegaard’s faith. The result? Well, that depends on your disposition. Are humanity’s most intelligent taking us to a new promised land? Or are we simply expedient to their own ends?

Should you really Start with Why?

Such hesitation and inaction stems from convoluted styles of reasoning Nelson so abhorred. I’m reminded of the trite Start with Why philosophy of modern business guru Simon Sinek. He argues that Why is primary to the How and the What. Define your beliefs before you do anything. Sinek earnestly espouses his concept in viral social media clips, which won him a devoted following amongst didactic executives. After all, values demand patience and spare one the cruel objectivity of results.

That approach is finally losing favour in business.

CSR, DEI and ESG all promised profits and piety but didn’t turn out to be such win-win propositions. Investors have, for instance, welcomed British Petroleum’s pivot back to petroleum after its brief identity crisis.

But UK politicians are yet to learn the same lesson. Take Net Zero. Oxford Economics Professor Dieter Helm - hardly a climate change sceptic - offers a damning assessment of the UK’s hasty race to carbon neutrality. Enshrined in law by a Conservative government under Theresa May, it has left the UK with some of the world’s highest energy prices and a collapsing industrial base. The legislation is animated by the Why of “climate leadership”. But Helm emphasises its futility in simply outsourcing the UK’s emissions.

Don’t moralise, speak in facts

Similarly vapid virtue-signalling is evident in Labour’s forthcoming budget plans. As I wrote recently, Rachel Reeves’ rhetoric about “broad shoulders” and “fair share” ignores that the UK’s wealthiest already constitute a substantial portion of the tax base. Instructions to “pay up or leave” may sound good but ignore the practical implications of the rich choosing the latter.

Too often, the Conservatives debate Labour on the same Why terms. Celebrating “wealth creators” comes unstuck when your opponent can point to a few undeserving trust-fund kids. Why shouldn’t we raise inheritance tax in the name of meritocracy? Instead, speak to the What, the realm of fact. That it is human nature to want to pass on wealth. That people will leave if we stop them. And that the fiscal situation will get a whole lot worse.

Ideology vs results

A 2024 YouGov poll found 88 percent of the public believe the Conservatives primarily care about rich people and 24 percent still associate it with being “nasty”. Their image hasn’t softened but they don’t have anything to show for that perceived ruthlessness. Harsh Why politics and soft What policies mean they are still tarred with the austerity brand despite increasing public spending and taking the UK to its highest post-1948 tax burden.

As the Conservatives look for fresh inspiration, Kemi Badenoch identified Javier Milei as her template for government. But that means learning the right lessons from the Argentinian President’s recent thumping victory in midterm elections. Argentinians didn’t grant him a surprisingly large, renewed mandate because they’re all suddenly Friedrich Hayek devotees. It’s not an endorsement of his free-market philosophy but a judgement on tangible actions. He promised to restore fiscal prudence in a desperate economic situation. He eliminated Argentina’s deficit for the first time in 123 years and voters see a man of action.

By contrast, Why in the UK is an excuse for dithering. On a recent episode of Question Time, a woman talked about the trauma of anxiety that left her unable to work. Why should she lose access to Personal Independence Payments? And Labour accedes to such politics of the personal, failing to make any cuts, because there is always a reason not to.

The Singapore context

I wonder what Singapore’s founding Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew would make of such pleas.

In his memoir, From First World to First, he says there will always be “the irresponsible or the incapable, some five percent of our population.” The government can do no more than arrange help “in such a way that only those who have no other choice will seek it.”

It’s an attitude rooted in the What. It confronts unfortunate facts rather than drawing ever malleable lines on who can demand entitlements. Lee recognised that the potential “explosion of welfare costs” would destroy the country’s commitment to budget surpluses.

While Singapore’s welfare policy fits neatly within right-wing ideology, it’s not constrained by dogma elsewhere. Left-wing Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz praises its approach to housing, where the government Housing and Development Board (HDB) builds upon state-owned land and sells these flats at subsidised rates. Even popular conceptions of the city-state as an international finance centre are deceptive. Local entrepreneur Hian Goh argues that once you add up the state’s corporate ties, 40 percent of GDP is controlled by government owned enterprises. Singapore relentlessly focuses on what works, rather than indulging in the navel-gazing of the Why.

Screw it, Just Do It

When I started my business, I found Richard Branson’s “screw it, just do it” to be rather more helpful than Sinek’s search for meaning. Because deciding what you’re going to do is more effective than a lengthy mission statement. Many of the UK’s political failures of the last 15 years stem from giving too much thought to branding and too little to a plan. Not everyone in Singapore is enamoured with the ruling People’s Action Party but most respect its competence. Gerrymandering accusations shouldn’t obscure the fact it is continually elected with a large majority of the popular vote.

Singapore chose the approach of Jervis and Nelson, while its neighbours waited in the dockyards. Now the Conservatives need to do the same, to offer a prescription and be judged on results rather than soundbites. As Nelson said,

So, let’s have a little less consultation and a little more action. Start With What.

Otium Den recap:

Tax the Rich

Grand Narratives Blind Us

Accountability, Not Technocracy

Nem Nem Soha

China, Tariffs & Penalties

Close to the tranquility of Tokyo’s upscale Iidabashi district, a crowd of 55,000 gathered to watch two brothers from Burnage. Persistent rain was one of the few similarities between the Manchester suburb and the heart of the world’s largest city. One might even say the two are Half a World Away.

But distance didn’t dim enthusiasm for Oasis. It was a capacity crowd at the Tokyo Dome on Saturday and Sunday night. The two gigs marked the end of a brief Asia leg on the band’s 2025 tour, which also included one night in South Korea.

Ordinary fans paid between ¥20,000 and ¥75,000 (£100 - £370) for the privilege of seeing the Gallaghers live. There was a non-negligible Anglosphere presence, dominated by Manchester diehards and Americans. (I met a group of the latter afterwards. Hailing from Anchorage, Tokyo was the closest stop on the tour.) But this was a largely local crowd, perfectly reciting lyrics that are nebulous enough for English speakers:

Maybe I don’t really wanna know how your garden grows ‘Cause I just wanna fly.

When Liam reappeared on stage in a bucket hat after a brief interlude and said “scousers: if they’re not trying to pickpocket you, they’re trying to run you over”, it made little sense to anyone removed from Manchester-Liverpool rivalries.

Loneliness, Effervescence and Japan’s Demographic Decline

The appetite for such collective engagement is both an antidote to, and symptom of, Japan’s so-called loneliness epidemic. That crisis is best represented by its fertility rate, one of the world’s lowest. There were almost a million more deaths than births last year, as the country experienced its steepest annual population decline since surveys began. At current rates, demography professor Hiroshi Yoshida predicts there will only be one child left in Japan by 2720.

Isolationist tendencies driving this are characterised in the phenomenon of the hikikomori. These are young adults, predominantly men, who withdraw entirely from the outside world. They don’t leave their bedrooms for months or years, even competing online for increasingly ingenious ways to avoid bathroom breaks. Two percent of the labour force are estimated to live like this, the extreme embodiment of reclusive tendencies that reverberate far more widely.

The Japanese context is an acute example of global trends. Exacerbated in recent years by Covid lockdowns that took people out of communal places of work or education, we’re becoming a more anti-social bunch. Pervasive smartphones encourage passivity with more than 80 percent of time spent on Facebook and 90 percent of time on Instagram spent watching videos. This screentime has none of the social aspects of television, in the forms of family viewing or “water cooler” moments discussing the latest episode of a blockbuster Sunday night drama.

The Return of Ritual

But this era of atomisation hasn’t destroyed the allure of live events. The longing for what Emile Durkheim called collective effervescence - the heightened sense of unity and energy from collective rituals - is steadfast. We see this in stories of increasing religiosity, sold-out football matches and concerts like Oasis, Coldplay and Taylor Swift. All elicit a sense of fandom that is absent in algorithmic TikTok scrolling. People don’t just come to be entertained but to participate.

Oasis & Taylor Swift: Different but the same

Oasis’ appeal lies in its rawness. No fancy choreography. Just Liam in a parka, hands behind his back, snarling into the mic. Fans buy into that sense of defiance and identify with it.

By contrast, Taylor Swift, whose 2024 Arenas tour was the highest-grossing in history performs with meticulous stagecraft. But such devotion thrives on narrative as much as spectacle. Fans have followed her heartbreaks like a Jane Austen novel: Wickhams and Willoughbys finally giving way to an Edward Ferrars in Travis Kelce. Both acts prove that in an age of AI-generated content, personality still wins out. As competence and content proliferate, narrative and charisma become a moat.

Presence in an Age of Passivity

It’s not just about live entertainment but a wider lesson for how we work. The great casualty of remote culture is socialisation. A generation is entering professional life under-networked, under-mentored and unprepared for the ineffable qualities that drive opportunities. As routine tasks become automated, success depends less on diligence and more on presence. People want to work with you when they feel good about you.

That’s why I paid over the odds for a last-minute ticket, flew seven hours each way, and spent 36 hours in Tokyo to see two ageing rockers. It’s not rational economic decision making but something more fundamental in human nature. What stays the same is just as important as what will change.

Otium Den recap:

Grand Narratives Blind Us

Accountability, Not Technocracy

Nem Nem Soha

China, Tariffs & Penalties

Does the UK need a CEO?

What is a “fair share” when it comes to tax? The top 10 percent of the UK’s income taxpayers already cover 60 percent of income tax receipts. Yet, as Chancellor Rachel Reeves prepares her November budget, the broad-shouldered brigade prepares for another shake-down. They might wonder when the government will finally be satisfied that their contribution is proportionate.

So-called HENRYs (High Earners, Not Rich Yet) may also ponder their exemption from the “working people” Reeves talks of shielding from tax increases. A lot of those earning £125,000 work quite hard too. But, paying an effective 60 percent tax rate on that last £25,000, these earners are forsaking 38 percent of their total income once National Insurance is included. Parents in this pay bracket also lose tax-free and free childcare. Net-take home pay of £78,000 doesn’t feel so lavish when you’re spending a third of it on nursery costs alone.

This attack on aspiration is disastrous in the long-term. Families supported by a single high earner end up with similar levels of disposable income to non-working parents on Universal Credit. But there is a cold logic in the short-term. You can squeeze this group until the pips squeak without too much risk of flight. These are largely salaried workers with jobs tied to the UK. They might lobby HR for oversubscribed transfers to the Dubai office, but homes, families and schools make leaving an arduous affair.

The mobile one percent

That friction doesn’t exist for the UK’s richest. This top one percent are all multi-millionaires in the truest sense. Financial resources are freely available rather than tied up in houses or other illiquid assets. The Times reports that this group represent about a third of the total income and capital gains tax collected by HMRC. The wealthiest 100,000 individuals alone cover around a fifth of total tax receipts.

Still, some recent rhetoric suggests this group should pay more or bugger off. On LBC, Oli Dugmore of the New Statesman argued for a marginal 100 percent inheritance tax on anything over £10 million. When Shadow Home Secretary Chris Philip said applicable families would just leave, Dugmore replied, “Let them”. Similarly, Ash Sarkar questioned the risks of a wealth exodus on Question Time, saying the rich couldn’t take property with them. As if freeing up a few Chelsea mansions is the solution to the housing crisis. Or that they would give them up at all, rather than keep as bases for the 90 days they could still enjoy in the UK tax-free as expats elsewhere.

Jump, How High?

That this one percent hasn’t left already refutes the caricature of pathological gluttony. Any true Silas Marner packed up long ago for any of the abundant jurisdictions that ask for little or nothing in tax. Instead, the UK’s wealthiest clearly see life as more than a game of hoarding money. But it doesn’t mean they will indulge in an indefinite game of jump and how high with the government. Patience is wearing thin, and UBS predicts the UK will lose the most millionaires of any country by 2028.

While the UK confronts this exodus, Singapore’s share of millionaires has increased by 62 percent over the last 10 years. It’s part of a charm offensive as its Economic Development Board (EDB) actively courts high net worth individuals and family offices. Singapore’s tax regime promises no capital gains, estate or inheritance tax. But it requires the wealthy to contribute in other ways. Tax-exemptions are contingent upon minimum local spending requirements, local hiring and deploying at least S$10 million (c.£5.8 million) into Singapore-based investments.

Monetising, not taxing

Instead of taxing wealth, Singapore monetises its presence. It believes private capital can be better deployed by its owners than under the auspices of the state. This isn’t limited to the for-profit realm. Its Philanthropy Tax Incentive Scheme (PTIS) offers tax deductions for donations made through Singapore intermediaries. The country’s biggest charitable donor is the eponymous foundation established by Indonesian billionaire Low Tuck Kwong. In 2023 alone, it disbursed S$127.6 million (c.£73 million) to educational and healthcare causes. Call it vanity if you wish, but the rich are rather happier parting with large sums of cash when they get a bit of control and recognition.

Places like Singapore aren’t just promising a fresh domicile to protect your cash but a place to get things done. A global hub with infrastructure that is built quickly and works. Good schools. Law and order. In contrast, the UK’s most recent demonstration of its competence with your money is to provide listening circles for triggered civil servants and put sex-offending asylum seekers back on the streets.

It’s a hostage situation

Social media financial influencer Codie Sanchez warns business owners about customer concentration. When one client represents 15 percent of revenue, “it’s a hostage situation”. The UK is similarly beholden to its wealthiest demographic, playing a very precarious game of Jenga. Keep pulling from the same blocks and the whole tower falls. The individuals concerned are so few but their contribution so great. While Reeves’ November budget lines them up as perpetual cash cows, competitors are circling. Not only Singapore or Dubai but nations closer to home, like Greece and Italy, offering a fixed annual tax.

I understand fawning over millionaires doesn’t play well terribly well with the public. But neither will the actions required to plug a new fiscal hole if a lot of them leave. So, what can the UK do to stem the tide and be an attractive hub once more? One, offer long-term reliability in the tax regime. Given Gary Stevenson devotees believe the rich enjoy various tax loopholes, one big headline fee like Italy’s €200,000 is more tangible anyway. Two, encourage philanthropy. Offer more generous tax-deductibility than the UK’s current gift aid scheme. Why shouldn’t a new hospital wing carry a donor’s name? Three, competence. Offer some return on investment and people resent paying taxes a little less.