James Price | Why Everything Feels Broken

Timothy Allen: What I really wanted to talk about, because James Price has a lot of experience as an adviser to government, is not so much what is happening in the United Kingdom specifically. I think it is fair to say that what is happening in the United Kingdom is happening in a lot of places, roughly speaking, or at least in a lot of places we care about.

I would quite like to pull out a little bit and take a macro view of this whole thing. I would like to know what James Price thinks in three parts: what James Price thinks the problem is, why it is happening, and how we fix it from James Price’s perspective. Then we will see where it goes from there.

By problem, I mean the thing everyone can feel right now. I do not know whether that is just me. I do not think it is just me. I was surprised listening to everyone this morning. The questions and the general sentiment were: yes, there is a big problem. I do not necessarily mean just conservatism. I mean government, governing, and governance. Since James Price has been on the inside, I would love to know, first of all, what is the major problem? Why does everyone feel so despondent at the moment?

James Price: Okay. I think the explosion of technological change since the Industrial Revolution means that people have experienced all these wonders and lifestyle increases. Then people get the feeling that something must be done to help other people. So all this stuff builds up into the creation of a welfare state in around the same places at around the same time, alongside a concomitant philosophical set of opinions that comes from people like Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Francis Bacon, maybe, and these sorts of early people who were not necessarily rationalists themselves but were precursors of that.

Michael Oakeshott has the great essay, “Rationalism in Politics,” which people should read to get the early strains of this. It is something that Adam Smith later calls the “man of system,” someone who thinks that he can order the world like the pieces of a chessboard without realising that the pieces themselves have their own viewpoints.

There is a philosophical side to this: that you can try to order the world and understand it. That goes along with the Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment, and then the Industrial Revolution with the material consequences. Karl Marx came along, thought all these things were terrible and bourgeois and all the rest of it, and thought he could order things because he understood the currents and where all this stuff was going.

So you have that interesting intellectual background where all this stuff foments from. Then everyone thinks, “Oh, we are jolly smart.” Then the First World War happens. I think European civilisation in particular, and this is probably not an original thing to say, has not fully recovered. We were also jolly smart, and yet we got into this problem. We were so desperate for this not to happen again that we fell into the Second World War.

At that point you have all these interesting currents going around that are best described by James Burnham, who wrote a book called The Managerial Revolution. James Burnham came along and said that, as you go into the Industrial Revolution, the capitalists take over. That is the same prognosis as the Marxist idea, but maybe a bit more value-neutral. I obviously think the capitalists taking over is a great thing and led to the wonderful explosion in life expectancy, freedom, and all the rest of it.

James Burnham then said, well, what replaces that? Because the state grows, more money, more complication. Is this the man of system, or the rationalists, or the managerial class? James Burnham wrote this in 1941. He was American and was seeing what was going on in the war at the time from a bit of distance. It is shocking how prescient that is now.

It was happening at the same time that Franklin D. Roosevelt, over in the United States, was massively expanding the size of the state in line with a lot of these historical, intellectual, and economic trends. You get this explosion of executive agencies in Washington, D.C.

At the same time, in Europe, and specifically in Britain, you have this happening in response to the Second World War. That leads someone like Friedrich Hayek to write The Road to Serfdom, where Friedrich Hayek says that if you continue doing all this total war, complete command-economy stuff that you need to do to build enough Spitfires, to fight the war, and to beat the Nazis, and if you keep doing this in peacetime afterwards because you think, “Oh, we are going to have all the control,” you will snuff out freedom, economic freedom, enterprise, and all the rest of it. You will be on the road to serfdom, as the title of the book says.

That came out at about the same time, and that was also incredibly prophetic. So you had all that, which led, certainly in Britain, to the post-war consensus. We had gone from being one of the most industrial, enterprising, and free societies to one that was completely command and control.

The Clement Attlee government nationalised everything. As we heard at this conference today, the Clement Attlee government kept rationing going for longer than was needed. Great swathes of industry were nationalised in a parliament and a bit. The Conservative Party never went back on this, and we wondered why, by the 1970s, everything had fallen apart.

It took the Margaret Thatcher revolution, and this is my hagiography of all this, to understand the need for classical liberalism to come back: the freedom of economic activity and choice, along with the other bit that I think is necessary, which is behaving responsibly. That is the other part of a kind of conservatism, I would say, that needs to go alongside that. We could probably go all the way back to the French Revolution, but let us not bog down in any of that.

Margaret Thatcher manages to do that with the economy, but Margaret Thatcher never really wrestles with the other bit of it, which is the large bureaucracy. The man of system is still in place. It is obviously the case in Europe as well, where the European project was always designed to prevent future wars happening, which meant more control out of the hands of the people. The European Union eventually comes out of all of that as well.

In the United States, likewise, the massive executive authority of these agencies and all the rest of it has grown. So you see the same thing happening from largely similar intellectual, economic, political, and militaristic reasons, to a point where the unelected bureaucracy, the deep state, the managerial class, the man of system, the rationalists, whatever you want to call them, have got all this power.

That invalidates and breaks what I think we have learned works from political philosophy more broadly. I will use a British example and then I will shut up.

The Glorious Revolution that comes along in 1688 gives Britain this amazing constitutional settlement that makes Britain the top nation in short order afterwards. It ought to make some of the great English political theorists very happy. Parliamentary sovereignty means that you have enough power to actually do things, so Thomas Hobbes ought to be happy to some extent with the idea of Leviathan, the sovereign that can protect people.

John Locke ought to be happy with Two Treatises of Government, because you have the consent of the governed and you have the feedback mechanism that comes in from the people with regular elections. Edmund Burke should be broadly happy because, in our system, you are still thinking about the wisdom of the ages, tradition, and all that sort of stuff.

Actually, if you wanted to say you have the Crown in Parliament, that is the technical thing that sovereign is. So there is a sort of religious dimension that should appease and appeal to people there as well. In that sort of settlement, you should have a great system for getting things done and for avoiding civil wars, which is obviously what Thomas Hobbes wanted in the first place.

In Britain, all of those things have been eroded, if not all mostly completely destroyed, by the first set of processes that I talked about. You no longer have power to act as a sovereign parliament in the way that Thomas Hobbes would want, in order to address problems that come along, because you have this sort of blob, this administrative state, deep state, whatever you want to call it, with people who have all this power in the quangos, the civil service, and all the rest of it.

You do not really have John Locke’s consent of the governed anymore, because elections do not matter very much anymore. When Keir Starmer came in in England in 2024, how many people across the entire British state changed jobs? Two hundred. One hundred ministers, most of whom are members of Parliament as well, so they are working four days a week at most. On Friday, they go off to their constituencies. Then there are one hundred special advisers, of whom I was one, who constitutionally are not allowed to tell civil servants what to do and have no power. Special advisers are limited to saying, “Boss, please do not sign that, because I have read it and they are lying to you, and I will only have to say I told you so when it all goes wrong,” which I got bored of saying.

That is it. Everybody else in that deep state stayed exactly the same. So the consent mechanism is gone. The rationalist worldview is very year-zero, blank-slate liberal in the sense that it thinks the wisdom of the ages, or the wisdom of unlettered men, and all these things that Edmund Burke talked about, and tradition, or when Michael Oakeshott talks about traditional knowledge and Roger Scruton talks about this accretive sense of knowledge that does not necessarily need to be written down, all get ignored as well.

So the great strengths of the British constitution are gone, and they have gone because of these big processes that we have in place now. Until you get politicians who realise that, and of course Europe has the same thing with the European Union, and the United States would be a bit different, but there are still very powerful forces in the central bureaucracy and all the rest of it there, you will not fix it.

That is a very rough canter through quite a lot of big ideas about why we got to the point that we are in now, where in Britain, certainly, and I think in Europe, you have this kind of stasis. That allows entrenched interests to take over and to ruin the sense of legitimacy that is supposed to be garnered from some of those big ideas of Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and all the rest of it. We can see the material results of that now, when nothing works anymore, we are in masses of debt, nobody is happy, and all the rest of it.

Timothy Allen: Loosely speaking, then, it is derived from people believing they know what is best for other people. What James Price mentioned there is something the average person on the street has no idea about: when a government changes, a lot of the civil service remains exactly the same.

James Price: It is wild, is it not?

Timothy Allen: I only really discovered it in the last few years because I have been forced to think about things like this. Correct me if I am wrong, but a civil servant is supposed to be apolitical. I used to work at the BBC. The BBC is supposed to be apolitical, but the BBC is not apolitical at all. All of my friends thought a certain way, and whether they outwardly expressed it or not, it seeps into the culture, obviously.

I think civil servants tend not to be conservatives. Is that fair to say?

James Price: Short answer: yes. Slightly longer answer, and I will not take as much time as in my previous answer.

Timothy Allen: I love it when James Price speaks. Please carry on. Very eloquent.

James Price: Was it Robert Conquest who had these three laws of politics? One of them is that everybody is conservative about that which he knows. Even the person who thinks brutalist architecture is great, and that it is great to knock down castles to put up horrible concrete carbuncles, will then become very defensive about them if you wanted to pull them down to put something else up, for example.

So in their ways, I think a lot of the civil servants get small-c conservative because they think they know best and they do not like change coming along because they are suspicious of it. There are small-c principles there. But by and large, I think civil servants think that they are the legitimate, real power in the country, whose job it is to keep things going the way they were taught that it was, and that elected ministers and special advisers, of whom there are a very small number, are broadly viruses in a system to which civil servants are the antibodies.

Because there are so many civil servants, and because civil servants can stay as long as they want, there are no parliamentary term limits for civil servants. Civil servants are always going to outlast elected ministers and special advisers, and civil servants are always going to outnumber elected ministers and special advisers. That is the mindset as well.

Then you have, I think, left-wing people, because by and large it is a left-wing idea to think that the state can do good, whereas on the right people are more sceptical, without the price mechanism or the profit motive, of getting stuff done. There are a few small exceptions in the secret-squirrel bits where they are probably all quite sound. The people who work in immigration in the Home Office are probably all quite sound because they spend all day dealing with paedophiles, rapists, terrorists, criminals, and all the rest of it. I think that probably has quite a dampening effect on sympathy for wrong ‘uns.

Timothy Allen: I wondered whether the idea of working as a civil servant appealed more to people who do not like taking risks. It is probably a long-term, pretty secure job, I would imagine. I do not really know.

James Price: Massively. It is almost impossible to get fired. I think a study came out a few weeks ago in England that said you are more likely to die in the job than to be fired from the civil service. The pension is obviously phenomenally good, so people are incentivised to stick around.

It is hard to get into the civil service at mid-rank and almost impossible at higher ranks because the civil service basically promotes internally. That is unlike the American system, where you do four years or whatever and then, if your party loses, you probably have to go and do something else, learn how the world has changed, gain some more skills, and then perhaps go back in at a higher level four years or eight years later.

In the British civil service, you just stay where you are. Extraordinary advances bypass the civil service completely.

A quick example is COVID-19. My old boss, Nadhim Zahawi, did the vaccine rollout, which I think in the United States was called Operation Warp Speed. Nadhim Zahawi did the equivalent in Britain. Nadhim Zahawi founded a business that now has a market capitalisation of billions called YouGov, and Nadhim Zahawi is a very successful businessman.

Nadhim Zahawi was so shocked by some of the stories. Nadhim Zahawi would tell civil servants, “The plan is obviously to get these vaccines delivered to the country. What experience has the civil service got? What experience have the medical approval board, or the health bits, got of moving vaccines at scale at sub-zero temperatures?”

The answer was, “Well, none, Minister, but…”

Nadhim Zahawi would say, “Okay. What experience have you got of moving vaccines at all at sub-zero temperatures?”

“Well, none.”

“What experience have you got of moving anything anywhere?”

“Well, none, but we are going to…”

Nadhim Zahawi said, “Okay, can you just Google the logistics industry?”

Then people go, “Oh, yes, look at that. That is really useful.” It turns out you can move ice cream or whatever, and you can reverse-engineer it from that.

The civil servants had not thought about that because the world of risk-taking, the business world, is not just alien to civil servants. It is something civil servants are suspicious of. Because of the fear of corruption, there is all sorts of stuff put in place, at least in the British system and I think in others as well, to be seen to be avoiding any kind of whiff of corruption. Therefore, that turns into a suspicion that any business interacting with the state just wants to get something off you, wants to gain an advantage, or wants to weaken protections for the little guy because businesses are rapacious profit-mongers. That is a very widespread feeling in the civil service.

Timothy Allen: Going back to the macro view of this, which is people thinking they know what is best for everyone, is that cyclical? Is that a glitch in the human psyche? Do we have a renaissance out of that type of thinking, or does this cyclical thing keep happening?

Obviously, in my world, the world of the free market makes so much sense. It negates any thoughts I might have, apart from with my children, of course. But the average person I meet, of course I have absolutely no idea what is good for them necessarily, and I want them to decide anyway. I want to see the results of all this input from different people.

It does seem a little bit less evolved to think that you know what is better for other people. It is a bit patronising. Do we evolve out of it, or does this cyclical thing keep happening? What we see now is probably very deep in the cycle of telling people what to do. Government is massive, bureaucracy is huge, and as far as I can tell, there are no business people in the government. We have gone right to that end. Does this ever change?

James Price: I like Timothy Allen’s idea of things feeling cyclical. I think that is a good way to think about it. I do not think people can evolve out of it. The Bible talks about wanting to recognise the mote or the splinter in our neighbour’s eye, but not the log in our own eye, or the classic “judge not, lest ye be judged.” I think that tendency is always there.

Friedrich Hayek is good on this. In The Fatal Conceit, I think Friedrich Hayek’s last book, Friedrich Hayek talks about this idea. Friedrich Hayek is really charitable about the man of system, or the lefties, or whatever you want to call them, because Friedrich Hayek thinks they are actually quite smart people and compassionate people. I am not always sure I agree with Friedrich Hayek on that bit.

Because they are smart, they think, “There is still suffering in the world and there are still some bad things. I am smart and I care, so if I change this system, I am going to make it better for people.” Friedrich Hayek ascribes that nice, well-meaning, well-intentioned mindset as a big problem that ends up, when you have the power of the state, corrupting everything and all the rest of it.

I think that is more likely. One of the geniuses, I guess, in the federal system in the United States is that those laboratories of democracy can play off against each other. You can see what works. If school choice works in Mississippi, other states might start adopting it. Being pro-tech in California, and so on.

Whereas Britain, and massively now the European Union, tries to standardise everything because one size fits all, we know best, best practice, all that stuff. That smashes away human flourishing.

I also like Timothy Allen’s cyclical point because I think left-wing governments, wherever they are, always spend too much money, always over-regulate, and all the rest of it. Eventually economic reality sets in and forces a change. You see that, I guess, in the beautiful fact that Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher were in power at the same time and were able to lead that once. We have to hope that will happen again.

Timothy Allen: I think we are seeing a version of that in Central America at the moment.

James Price: Yes.

Timothy Allen: They had a long road to serfdom and socialism. One by one, although Venezuela is slightly different, they are dropping now. Venezuela is at the control, is it not? You see this happening in Argentina. El Salvador is, again, a bit different, but very interesting. El Salvador can maybe move on to the economic-freedom bits now, all the while Venezuela has been this corrupt command economy with more oil than any other country in the world, and people have been reduced to eating pets and zoo animals. So I think James Price is right.

If it is cyclical, what do we do? Do we just play our hand and watch it happen? A lot of people believe there is an outcome that favours everyone, and that would imply that there are always going to be people. I am with James Price on that one. I do not believe the world is fair. There is complete randomness in the world. As a result, if you are lucky, you have a certain type of life. If you are unlucky, you have a different type of life.

But the centralising force, where we are at the moment, must exist for some good, even though it tends to end in mayhem, death, and destruction. When you talk about the decentralising force, it is easier to argue that it does not end badly. Can you get too decentralised? I suppose you can. You could get hedonism, maybe, or no one caring about anything. There could be a lot of infighting at that point, maybe.

James Price: The example some people would give is Somalia, where there is a total breakdown of law and order, no respect of property rights, and all the rest of it. It becomes the Hobbesian war of all against all. Again, there is an interesting natural experiment to some extent with Somaliland as a breakaway state that is doing better because Somaliland tries to respect more of these things.

I think Timothy Allen is right that the decentralising thing probably has less risk to it, because every time it gets tried, it is starting from a very high base. Think about where Britain had got to in the 1970s. Margaret Thatcher had an awful lot of decentralising, devolving, and reforming to do. Then you can do only so much of it in the political world before a lefty comes in again and says, “Things are so nice now, you do not need to worry about this. We can go back to being nice and sweet,” and all the rest of it.

That is why there has to be constant vigilance. As the blessed Margaret Thatcher did say, you have to fight a battle more than once in order to win it. If you can bring state interference down, tax burdens down, and spending down as much as possible, that will be a kind of buffer against the re-encroachment of these ideas, burdens, and all the rest of it.

I am trying to think of good examples where that has not happened because governance has been so good. Singapore is a great example in all sorts of ways. Singapore does not have some of the freedoms in terms of being able to speak your mind or leave chewing gum on the floor, which is not a great freedom anyway, but Singapore has gone from third world to first in a generation, as Lee Kuan Yew said, and has basically stayed amazing ever since because Singapore has got a broad set of things right, which is really impressive.

Timothy Allen: I think people misunderstand freedom as always being freedom from rules. I think the most important freedom is the freedom to opt in or out of something, which with Singapore, you can. You can choose to live there. You can choose not to. It is up to you.

I do not know how much James Price knows about the free cities movement that we are part of, but we advocate for this exact thing: governance competition between governments. The more, the merrier. The United States is a great example of an experiment that goes further down that line than most and appears to be super successful.

By the way, the American system helps ward against all these federal centralising powers, which I suppose is what the Founding Fathers were warning against. If it is going terribly in New York, as it has been for a while and will get much worse now, and California, the beneficiaries will be Tennessee, Texas, and all the rest of it. It is a great system.

James Price: If we had a federal system here, I would move to Buckingham. This is a wonderful little place. I have never been here before. It is an amazing little place.

Timothy Allen: It is.

James Price: I do not know what the politics are like here, but walking around…

Timothy Allen: To some extent, it does not matter, does it? Because the United Kingdom is so centralised.

James Price: I think Britain is the most centralised economy in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development in terms of the amount of tax that is raised at the centre. London is so overpowering in terms of the model in the United Kingdom. Smart kids, or academically smart kids, are told to go off to university somewhere, Oxford, Cambridge, Durham, Exeter, or whatever other places, and then by and large move to London because that is where all the jobs are.

London becomes the cultural capital, the economic capital, the political capital, and all the rest of it. That is great if London is doing great, but London has been run by a bloke for so long now who has let crime go and all the rest of it. It is horrendous. I left London not because I think I get any more political freedom, but just to get out to a small village somewhere where I am free of the effects that people have been voting for in that way.

Timothy Allen: We did it a number of years ago as well. I live on a farm now. I have gone right to the very extreme. We live about half a mile down a track.

James Price: Amazing.

Timothy Allen: It sounds not strange, at least not where we live anyway, but it is real. I have really gone down the philosophical road of “leave me alone, leave me alone, leave me alone,” to the point now where I live down the end of a track.

We have minimal contact with the government, it has to be said. You really feel that you have minimal contact. Every now and then I have to dip my toes into the bureaucratic world, and I realise how fortunate we are. But it still annoys me. It should not be like that.

It was not like that when I lived in London. I worked out of London for seven years. Even there, only twenty years ago, it felt completely different. My freedoms were much more evident. I never thought about freedom of speech until the last few years. Never. I never thought about it at all. Now that you do think about it, you realise that the United Kingdom has a terrible system for freedom of speech compared to, say, the United States federal system.

James Price: Massively. My wife is from the United States. My wife is a Hoosier from the great state of Indiana. My wife said to me recently, “I never appreciated what the First Amendment gave me, in terms of enshrining my right to say what I want without fear and all the rest of it, until the last few years of living here.” My wife has lived here for a while now, and she feels the way that has turned.

Again, I think the man of system, the rationalist, whatever you want to call it, genuinely has never had the philosophical groundings of freedom explained to them. Ordered liberty, as Timothy Allen says, is not just about licence to become hedonists or whatever. It is about the ability to act independently because you want to tinker and come up with new things and new ideas and all these sorts of things. Those ideas never come into any of this stuff.

I do not think freedom is taught very well in school. We do not teach the benefits of it. It is easy to be mocked.

For an example inside government, I was in the Department for Education during some of the COVID-19 issues, and the Omicron wave was coming in. I sat in a meeting, and people said, “Right, partly because the trade unions want us to, we are going to insist that every child, including children in primary schools, wears a mask during the wave of this all day long, even when the children are sitting down at their desks. That is okay because it is a zero-cost intervention.”

I was the one person in that room, because obviously I am the only political person in there and the rest are all civil servants, who said, “What about their freedom? What about their personal experience?” You would have assumed that I had called their mother a whore or something. It was that kind of reaction. Then it was more like, “Oh, you have just said that grass is blue.” They just could not get their heads around this idea.

They kept saying, “But it is zero cost.” So I forced the civil servants to go away and do a study that reported back and said, actually, no, it is not zero cost, and here are the problems. Because there is no mechanism for saying, “You are encroaching on their freedom,” and all the rest of it.

Some people will say, “Yes, but what about the freedom not to catch COVID-19?” We are talking about primary-school children here and mostly young teachers and all the rest of it. COVID-19 is an interesting example, I think, of people going, “Wait a minute. My liberty really can be taken away from me at the drop of a hat.”

Timothy Allen: In my case, I had never really contemplated liberty until 2020. Not in a tangible way. Is that at the heart of it? James Price’s wife is American, so James Price can speak to this. When you go to the United States, liberty is in the DNA. There is even a liberty movement. I have been to conferences with five thousand people who are just there for liberty. It is all kinds of people: young, old, whatever.

Why do we not get that bit? What is it about living on this little island that means we do not seem to care about liberty unless it is thrust into our faces, like when we were told not to come out of our houses? I said, “No, I am coming out of my house.” It was hard to see all those people with dagger eyes, looking at you doing things they did not want you to do.

In the United States, you feel the power of this abstract constitution. It is like an abstract power that you have because you know, at the end of the day, it is there. In the case of freedom of speech, you know that the Bill of Rights is there for you, and it is a force.

I know we do not have that, but why do we not even think about it much? It is not in our DNA. Arguably, the English were first, were we not? In the 1600s, people started thinking about individualism, liberty, freedom of speech, freedom of expression, and all this kind of stuff. Why did we not adopt it properly?

James Price: I think we did adopt it, and I think we adopted it much earlier than that, before people were consciously putting it into philosophies. There is an amazing book called The Origins of English Individualism by Alan Macfarlane. I have a young Padawan called Sam Bidwell, who some people might know from X, who is obsessed with this book and goes on about it all the time.

Alan Macfarlane points out that England, and England in particular, is different in the deepest ways possible, even compared with continental neighbours quite similar to us, like the Dutch and the Danes. The English used to, and still would, marry relatively late, for example, much later than you would assume when looking at church records, and move into very nuclear families very early on. I will build up and answer Timothy Allen’s question in a second.

That does not happen even in the southern bits of the European continent. So there would be a very small family unit: mother, father, children. Then the children would grow up and go off and all the rest of it. You would not have big multi-generational families. You would move place to place based on where the work was. Therefore, you do not build up the cousin-marriage, clannish networks that you get in other places.

Because you do not have blood ties with these people you have moved near for work, you develop a kind of oikophilia, as Roger Scruton called it, a love of place, and these other ties that bind. Those ties make you act as if the people around you are a kind of blood relation, because you are trusting them and all the rest of it, but you are not having to bind these things in with marriage, which obviously has consanguinity issues and all the rest of it.

That allows you to develop more individual characteristics. It allows you to hire the best person for a job, and so meritocracy comes along, with more freedom that way, freedom to move, freedom to tinker, and freedom to get away from the cloying embrace of parents if you want to. These things all come from very deep roots.

I think Alan Macfarlane can take it back even further and say that it is because we followed sheep around more, or whatever. Alan Macfarlane does all that sociology much better than I would be able to do justice to here.

That stuff was in the DNA, certainly from the Norman Conquest, and actually Alan Macfarlane would argue from before that. The Anglo-Saxons had a different kind of conception. The king did not automatically just get to become king again. The Witan had to meet, and all these deep currents, influenced, I would say, by bits of Christianity and all the rest of it, and some other great books we can talk about if Timothy Allen wants to, built up into a different system than we had.

The earlier wranglings about how that manifests itself in a power sense, the English Civil War, the constitutional settlement that I opened with, and all the rest of it, get exported to the New World. It definitely gets exported to what became the United States, to the point that Edmund Burke was very, very sympathetic to the American revolutionaries.

I had a cry in the church in Boston where Paul Revere did the whole “one if by land, and two if by sea” thing. The heartbreak that we are no longer officially one civilisation still, because it is a shared inheritance. You get some slightly sniffy Americans who go, “You are just the ancestors of the people who were not brave enough to leave the island, and we were the pioneers,” and all that stuff, which I think is rot, by the way.

After losing the colonies, this island sent people out and conquered the world, and sent common law and all these ideas to other places as well, like Australia, India, great swathes of Africa, the Middle East, and all the rest of it. So I think we did have all this stuff and that sense of English liberty, versus the absolutism of Louis XIV, or then the horrors of the French Revolution and the reaction to all this stuff. We have this great history of liberty and freedom, and the mother of parliaments and all these things.

I think we lose it to some extent after the Second World War for exactly the reasons Friedrich Hayek talks about, in combination with that managerial revolution. The Clement Attlee government, which came after Winston Churchill, had one parliament of five years and then another year afterwards. The Labour Party did not get back into power again for ages, and even then, the Labour Party has never been as revolutionary or radical because it did not need to be. The Clement Attlee government changed everything so fast: nationalising health, industry, and all the rest of it.

We are still stuck with that now. People think, perhaps because we have the Americans as a very similar but very different example, that Americans are all gun-toting and talking about freedom, and therefore that is not the English way. Margaret Thatcher proved that was not true either. Margaret Thatcher said that when people are free to choose, they choose freedom. I think we can do that again, and I think we need to do that again.

Timothy Allen: I am just thinking about after the war. Did we ever have that freedom, if it could be taken away that easily? When you look at the American version of freedom, you realise it is the people enforcing it, and guns are a huge part of that. Taking away freedom in the United Kingdom is very easy.

By the sound of the way James Price described it, after the war it was probably framed as, correct me if I am wrong, “We need to do this because it is important for the country.” In the United States, that does not cut as well because people really do want to defend that right. We do not really have a good way of defending it other than saying something. And when it is free speech that is being quelled anyway, that does not really work, does it?

James Price: I guess the Americans are lucky and unlucky with the United States Constitution being as sovereign and powerful as it is. Obviously, the United States Constitution is not infallible because there are a bunch of amendments to it. The idea that there will never be another amendment again seems odd to me.

Our system is actually very different. We have the same history, the same sort of philosophical roots, and all the rest of it, but our political systems are shockingly different. In Britain, no parliament can tie the hands of its successor. There is no law, with a few exceptions that I think are legitimate, that is any stronger than any other law and that could not just be repealed with a simple majority in Parliament, essentially.

I think Clement Attlee, or someone, basically said that all the power Vladimir Lenin sought with the bullet, the British constitution gives you with the ballot. So you have, as I said at the start, this parliamentary system that does allow you to do great things very quickly. If people do not like it, the idea is that people should be able to vote against it at a general election and change course again. You should be able to do a similar version over four-year cycles to what the United States can do in that experimenting.

I think the problem probably was that Britain got whacked in the First World War and lost a lot of great people and quality men. Britain was still shaken by that in the run-up to the Second World War. The effort of winning the Second World War totally expended huge amounts of will in Britain: standing alone against the Luftwaffe, all these sorts of national stories that are largely true, and we should still be proud of our ancestors for doing it.

Britain loses the empire in the course of it. Britain loses a lot more great people. Britain loses a lot more ideas about itself. Then the well-meaning Clement Attlee, all sweet and modest, comes along and says, “We have won the war, now let us win the peace.” You end up with socialism, which has been a cancer ever since. It has not been rowed back fast enough.

Winston Churchill did not manage to row it back when Winston Churchill came back in, because so much of it had been done. Then Winston Churchill was poorly. The economic malaise that grips Britain was so difficult. The old thing is that you can vote yourself into socialism, but you have to shoot your way out. Britain got halfway out again with Margaret Thatcher, and then I think Britain squandered it again. Britain could have done it again after Brexit, and Britain has not done it again now.

I think there may be materialist reasons why not. There is nothing constitutionally that says British people are any less free, particularly nothing that could not be got rid of with a stroke of a few pens and a few bills in a new Parliament.

Timothy Allen: What is James Price’s stance, and this is going to sound a bit odd, but what does James Price think about democracy? A lot of people on this podcast, perhaps fifty percent, are not really in favour of democracy, and for many reasons. A lot of people believe democracy always leads to socialism, that it is the democratic system itself that results in socialism. What is James Price’s view? James Price has been on the inside. James Price does not have to be diplomatic either.

James Price: I probably do if I ever want to get voted into anything. Winston Churchill said democracy is the worst form of government apart from all the others. I am sure Timothy Allen has heard other people say that. Then there is the old line, “The people have spoken, the bastards.”

I think the alternative to having that mechanism of changing course is not obvious to me. It is not obvious to me what a better alternative is. You are not going to get an Aristotelian, Platonic philosopher king anytime soon. If you cannot change course, you cannot correct for big problems, which we are seeing in China now.

It was always all going so well because China can just do what China wants and all the rest of it. Well, China’s economy would be much, much bigger and stronger than it currently is because of a load of decisions that Xi Jinping has made since Xi Jinping has been in office, and no one is brave enough to correct Xi Jinping.

Ditto Russia. Russia would be in a much stronger, better place if Russia had not been this massive kleptocracy and all the rest of it. A proper democracy would be able to fix that.

Yes, my contention in Britain at least is that Britain does not have as proper a democracy as Britain could, partly for this reason that so much of the apparatus of state does not change when people do. It is not just that only two hundred people change jobs. When you are in a department, I will use the Department for Education as an example, there are four advisers, four or five ministers, and eight thousand civil servants. That is just one department, for example. It is not one of the biggest.

I think the other problem, and this will be controversial, is that democracies work when there is a collective and cohesive national story to tell and everybody buys into it. That does not need to be, and ideally is not, an ethnic-based thing. The whole blood-and-soil stuff does not really work very nicely at all, obviously. I see why people get tempted by it, because they think it is the only way to make people cohere together.

But when you have academic studies saying that in multi-ethnic societies the crucial thing is to push those differences down and have a collective idea of what binds us, and the more-in-common stuff, what does Britain do with woke, diversity, equity, and inclusion, and all the rest of it? Britain does the opposite. Britain highlights all the differences.

When you import lots of people and you do not forcibly integrate them into understanding our system, and you end up with the multicultural system or society that Britain now is, then democracy does not work because parties are going to go after different groups. I think the United States has this to a large extent, where both parties will go, “Right, we need to say these things to appeal to African-American voters, these things to Hispanic voters, these things to Vietnamese-American voters,” and whatever else.

Britain is rapidly moving towards that. You saw the Muslim Vote as an organisation that was founded. There was a Hindu manifesto, a Yoruba manifesto for ethnic Yoruba people from Nigeria, and all these other groups and people starting to appeal to them in Britain. When that happens, I think Britain has a real problem. So I think democracy works if everybody is in on the collective consciousness, and that idea that everyone is one people and has the same love of the same place.

Timothy Allen: Talking of exactly that, I was surprised. This is the first time I have been to this kind of conference in the United Kingdom. The panel I watched this morning, which James Price was on, was about whether the Conservative Party is dead.

What I noticed immediately in the first few hours of listening to people talk and ask questions was that a lot of people were mentioning Reform UK. This is very United Kingdom-specific, but I want to know James Price’s take on this. People were talking about Reform UK, Reform UK, Reform UK, and no one was mentioning Restore Britain.

In my world, when we look at Restore Britain, we see the real threat to conservatism, because Restore Britain is saying what people often are thinking quietly. Going back to what James Price was saying about what happens when you do not have a national identity, things arise and people try to create that identity again. I think what Restore Britain is doing is exactly that. Restore Britain is basically saying, “Hold on a minute. This is what we were. Let us be that again.”

A lot of people who have been in this country a long time agree with that. I can see that down the pub in my local village. People are listening to that and thinking, “Yes, that is what I really like.”

I just wanted to know why no one seemed to be taking Restore Britain seriously. From my outside view, I am not in the political sphere at all. I talk to lots of people and I listen to what is said down the pub. People will think Restore Britain is a really good alternative. Are people taking Restore Britain seriously here or not? If we are talking about conservatives and conservatism, I would say Restore Britain is the threat, because what Restore Britain is talking about, and what Restore Britain is actually saying, whether or not Restore Britain does it, is about a national identity again.

James Price: I am all for a national identity. Given where Britain is, where Britain has always been, and where Britain was with the British Empire and all these sorts of things, the idea that a new right-of-centre government would waste time working out who was actually “ethnically English” and deciding to send back, wherever “back” is, a load of people who just happened to be born with black skin or whatever else, which I will come to defend in a second, is completely wrong.

It is a waste of time. It is morally wrong. It is a total misconception of how a lot of this country has developed. It comes from this: the start of this Restore Britain movement is a guy called Rupert Lowe, who was elected as a member of Reform UK. Rupert Lowe was great on X, and Rupert Lowe was also great in the Public Accounts Committee in the British Parliament. The Conservative Party actually gave Rupert Lowe a slot there later on. Rupert Lowe was very good at using the powers of a member of Parliament to write questions and all this sort of stuff.

Rupert Lowe then gets kicked out of Reform UK. I do not think Reform UK did it in a very nice way. There were all sorts of accusations and it was all deeply unpleasant. Rupert Lowe sets up this thing called Restore Britain, which I joined as a pressure group, I guess, and I thought it was a great idea.

Then Restore Britain pops up as a political party, as yet another political party to sluice more votes away from whatever inevitable wranglings there will need to be at the next election on the right. Whether Reform UK cannibalises the Conservative Party, or the Conservative Party recovers, Restore Britain now makes it more difficult with these guys coming along.

The structural problem I have is that Rupert Lowe, whom I like very much, I have had dinner with Rupert Lowe and Rupert Lowe is a very sound guy, is basically a classic Thatcherite Conservative. It looked like Rupert Lowe might join the Conservatives if Robert Jenrick had taken over from Kemi Badenoch, for example. Rupert Lowe talks a good, sound game on all this kind of stuff.

Rupert Lowe is not writing Rupert Lowe’s own tweets. What Rupert Lowe says in person, with a camera in front of Rupert Lowe, when Rupert Lowe is doing an X live or whatever it is called, is different in both the tone and the content from what Rupert Lowe is tweeting. There are demonstrable differences that people on X have highlighted.

When Rupert Lowe is speaking himself, Rupert Lowe says things like, “No, I have never said I would take passports away from anybody.” In which case, the Restore Britain platform, if that is what Restore Britain’s actual platform is, is no different from Reform UK’s or now from the Conservatives’ platform. Yet on X, Rupert Lowe is a lot punchier. The accusations are that there are some young, smart, if slightly over-enthusiastic people around Rupert Lowe who are pushing some of this stuff.

I think there is a problem there if you have young, enthusiastic people who can take a rationalist, man-of-system, almost year-zero approach of going, “I do not like this. I am going to make this all clean and nice,” and all the rest of it, which leads to one of these guys popping up on GB News and telling a black woman who is a host on GB News, even though the woman was born in Newcastle and is really right-wing, that she is not really English.

I get that people can talk about not being ethnically English. Fine, I agree with that. Rishi Sunak is not ethnically English. But in Rishi Sunak’s mannerisms, and I do not like Rishi Sunak at all, I think Rishi Sunak was a rubbish prime minister and all the rest of it, Rishi Sunak is almost painfully English. Rishi Sunak is awkward, Rishi Sunak likes cricket, and Rishi Sunak is clearly being slightly browbeaten by Rishi Sunak’s wife, and all those sorts of deep tropes.

But the obsession with going, “Well, Rishi Sunak is not really English though, is Rishi Sunak?” Who is that helping? Who is that turning on? Who is that turning off? When it comes to the horrendous problems that we all know there are in the country, of debt, and of Boris Johnson-wave migrants who have come over here who are totally culturally incompatible and do need to go, and the rest of it, you are drawing away support from average, normal people who know there is a problem but do not like it when people are a bit too bombastic about it.

That is why I have a problem, and I think others do too, with Restore Britain, in terms of the optics of all this. Just like the article on the immigration point, there will be some people who want that kind of bombastic approach. Many others want the issue to be sorted, but will just get squeamish if they see the stuff on British streets that we saw in Minneapolis.

However right I think it is to have only people who are legally here, and however right I think it is that there is a conversation to be had about people who were given passports in Britain who should not have been given them, and who will only be a drain on state resources forever, along with their children and families coming over, those people are only administratively British.

The guy who was Egyptian, who had never been here, and who was given a passport to get him out of an Egyptian jail, is not British. I do not think that guy ever will be British, given all the stuff that guy said about wanting to kill whites, Americans, and whatever else.

What is actually necessary is a Katie Lam-type approach from the Conservative Party. Katie Lam is a backbench member of Parliament who put forward what the Conservative policy was for a little bit, at least until I think Kemi Badenoch got scared of it, which was saying, “I am ever so sorry. It is a pity that you are here. You should not have been given that passport, and we are just going to take it back.”

That is what the Swedes have started to do after decades of letting in so many Somali gangsters that there is a Wikipedia page for grenade attacks in Malmo. Sweden has started paying to say, “Right, here is five thousand kronor, we will take the passport back, off you go.” That kind of more administrative, bureaucratic approach is the only way that will work at any scale. But that does not do so well on X retweets.

Timothy Allen: Funnily enough, what I know about Rupert Lowe has come from long-form interviews that Rupert Lowe has been on. That is why I think Restore Britain, at least on paper, is a major force. A lot of people are not necessarily saying it.

I was at my local pub, and we were talking about politics, as people do in a pub. It is a very small pub, and you can walk in, sit down, and become part of the conversation. It is one of those pubs.

The subject of Rupert Lowe came up, and someone mentioned that Rupert Lowe, or maybe someone on Rupert Lowe’s behalf, by the sound of it if that is true, had recently said that Restore Britain would ban halal and kosher slaughter. Everyone in the pub piped up and said, “Brilliant. Brilliant idea.”

Obviously, we are a rural community. A lot of farmers do not like the idea of caring for their animals and then shipping their animals off to that kind of situation. Plus, the British are a nation of animal lovers. I often think that something as simple as that statement could get a nation of animal lovers to rise up and vote in a particular direction.

I had never heard it before, so I Googled it, and lo and behold, yes, Rupert Lowe had said that Restore Britain would ban it. But when I thought it through, and I ended up being the only one arguing that side of the story, I thought, “Wait a minute. Imagine the process of banning halal slaughter.” A lot of the farmers and slaughterhouses around where I live have consolidated in the Birmingham area because the lamb trade goes in a certain direction to a certain demographic in society, and there is this whole economic part of the story.

When I thought it through, I thought, “How can you do that?” Let alone the religious connotations, which really we should not care about if we say, “In the United Kingdom, we are animal lovers, and as a result, halal slaughter is something we do not agree with. You can do it anywhere else, but in our country we would like it not to happen.” I can understand that.

I was just thinking about the logistics of trying to do it and thinking it is almost impossible to enforce. How would you do that? There is a whole economy there. There are large swathes of communities that revolve around this. Even if I agree, and I think I probably do, I do not like the idea of halal slaughter at all, and I would probably vote for that, the thought of it actually happening seems an impossibility.

Is that the kind of thing James Price is saying? Is this rhetoric that sounds good, but when it comes to it, and this is what we so often see in politics now, people will say anything to get into power and then do the opposite? It is almost like a joke now. People are so disenfranchised and disappointed that they do not care anymore. Is that one of those things?

James Price: Let me start by saying that this is often a tactic the civil service will use on ministers: “It is too hard to do. It is very complicated, Minister. It will take us years to work up the plans,” and all the rest of it. I think there is even an internet line called having a Cheems mindset, where there is no point trying to do difficult things because someone would have done it already otherwise, and all the rest of it.

So let us play out what it would actually look like. Halal and kosher are different, by the way.

Timothy Allen: That is exactly part of my point.

James Price: Halal can be as simple as someone standing in an otherwise perfectly ethical slaughterhouse saying a little prayer, and then the animal is humanely stunned and killed. I think, in the majority of cases in Britain, that is how it is supposed to work.

Timothy Allen: I did not know that.

James Price: There are other interpretations of the theology that say that does not count, and that the animal has to be still alive and awake. We have seen the most disgraceful images in some of these Muslim-run slaughterhouses where people have played the sounds of wolves very loudly to terrify the animals before they kill the animals.

Timothy Allen: Why?

James Price: Because they are evil people and they think nothing of the sanctity of animal life.

Timothy Allen: Is that really true?

James Price: I know I now sound like a complete nutter for saying it, but it is completely true. It is one of those things, like the grooming gangs or whatever, that is so evil and so awful to any decent person’s English sensibility that you think it must not be possible to be true.

That is the other end of the spectrum. My understanding is that in the kosher method for observant Jewish people, shechita, theologically the animal has to be alive and as conscious as possible, and therefore kosher food can only really be prepared in what we would consider quite a cruel way.

Jewish people have been back in England since Oliver Cromwell let Jewish people back in the 1600s. So if you are an observant Jewish family, and your family has been here for four hundred years, and you are suddenly told that you cannot access any of this food that you need and that you are going to have to leave, is that right? I do not know. It does not seem right to me. But it also does not seem right to me that an animal should be killed in a cruel way.

Then to Dale Vince, the mad eco-lefty guy who funds the Labour Party, eating animals at all is wrong. So this is a complicated, interesting conversation that we could delve deeper into. Can you do one without the other? Can you say, as some people might say, “Jewish people have been here for four hundred years and Jewish contributions to society are enormous, look at the Nobel Prizes, and so on, so we will make an exception for Jewish people but not for halal because the people who use halal arrived more recently and are less likely to be net contributors”? Someone might make that argument, which is very tricky.

Others would have to say that in a liberal approach, you have to ban everything equally or not at all. These are interesting conversations. Is a government going to focus all of its resources and energy on working this out, rather than on all the low-hanging fruit of an insane energy policy, insane immigration policy, insane regulatory policy, insane education system, insane health care, no military, and so on?

There is a problem there in terms of being reasonable. The other bit is whether you are just creating a hostile environment for groups of people you do not like. I do not like lots of people who have come to this country recently, who are probably likely to eat halal food and probably want it in the most unpleasant way, because I have seen the problems of political Islamism and lack of cultural assimilation.

The school I used to live near in North London had five-year-old girls wearing hijabs. I would ban that in a heartbeat. It is totally un-British. The thing we have seen this last week with the adhan, the call to prayer, in Trafalgar Square, again with all the men at the front and the women in hijabs at the back, is an issue. Are we really talking about integration here? Is it actually about animal welfare?

These are really interesting, deep, difficult conversations. I have my knee-jerk opinions on it that I would have to think through and that, legitimately, people would probably have to consult on. Is that what a first government trying to save the country from the doldrums it is in is going to spend its time doing? I am not trying to be defeatist about it, but that is a big conversation.

If you are going to say, “I do not care. It is awful. It is just bloody wrong. I am going to get it done,” is that the same slapdash approach that you are going to take to the economy? Because that is kind of where the Liz Truss programme went to: “Just get it done.” Governing is actually really hard.

The Labour Party fell for this where the Labour Party thought, “The Conservatives are evil. Our theory of change is just to get the evil Conservatives out and everything will be fine.” Now the newspapers are full of Labour ministers and special advisers going, “Christ, actually it is really hard to do this. Britain is in such a pickle. It is very difficult.” So Timothy Allen tells me. I do not know what Timothy Allen thinks.

Timothy Allen: I was just thinking it through then. This is how I assume it happened. With regards to halal and kosher, the United Kingdom invented a rule that said, to be humane with an animal, you must pre-stun the animal before killing the animal. That makes sense. But there are these exceptions on religious grounds.

I would come at it from that stance. I would say, “No, let us have no exceptions, because the idea is that it is bad enough that the animal is getting killed anyway. Why do it in a painful way?” That is not something that I think anyone, well, that is not true, obviously plenty of people do not care, but I would say that if the law was passed to say this, but there are exceptions, then it is not a real law. Especially if the exceptions are on religious grounds.

James Price: That is a very liberal take in general, right? With the stuff we have seen from the prayer controversy in Trafalgar Square, Ed Davey from the Liberal Democrats said it is so un-British to suggest that people cannot pray the way they want to, and so on.

Britain had Test Acts on the statute book for hundreds of years that forbade Catholic worship, or fined people if they did not go to church a number of times. Is that un-British? Because Britain did it for hundreds of years, longer than Britain has been doing lots of other things that people now consider to be British.

Without trying to be a cop-out on it, I think a lot of this stuff is really difficult to be morally, ethically, and politically consistent about. If what people are actually saying is that they acknowledge there is a problem with cultural assimilation, okay, then let us talk about it like that. If people think it is a problem about animal welfare, okay, let us talk about that. Then we get into a very intractable, messy problem of competing rights and balancing rights.

It has always been a difficult thing. It is not just enough to have John Stuart Mill’s harm principle balancing how people behave towards one another. You have the right of an animal not to be killed in a nasty way versus the right of someone who has lived here for four hundred years to do what he thinks his God tells him he has to do in order to be a good person. I might think that is silly. I might care more about the animal. How are we going to balance these things out?

If it is done in the spirit of, “Actually, I just want to get rid of these people I do not like,” that seems concerning, as much as I do not want a lot of those people to be here if those people are forcing five-year-old girls to wear hijabs and doing political Islamism and horrible stuff from the pulpit and all the rest of it.

Timothy Allen: The reason I brought up that particular one is because I think animal cruelty is a cross-party issue. It is a really interesting one because it makes everyone think, especially, I would say, the left side of the aisle, who might say, “Well, that person should be able to do what that person wants to do.” But hold on a minute: that person wants to hurt an animal.

I think it is a phenomenal issue. It is a bit like the abortion debate in a way. It is our version of it because people in Britain do not really care about abortion in the same way, but we love animals. We really love animals. I would say that is part of at least my culture.

James Price: The love of animals is a British sentiment. Almost certainly one of the reasons why my wife and I ended up leaving London was that we got a cocker spaniel called Tennyson, because I thought “Tennyson” was the silliest thing to shout in a field: “Come here, Tennyson.”

The way Tennyson was perceived by people who arrived recently was that Tennyson got kicked, Tennyson got spat on, people were terrified because there is a hadith that says dog saliva cancels prayers and things. It does not seem right to me. Human beings have been domesticating dogs, and dogs have been domesticating human beings back, for what, thirty or forty thousand years? Some of these ideas are much more recent than that.

I hate that too, so I am totally with Timothy Allen on that front. And yet, is this what Britain is going to prioritise? Is Britain going to not have an economy that is fixed and a stupid energy policy because Parliament is going to spend all its time debating this stuff? Maybe. I would like this to be a country where people are really pro-dogs, really pro-animal welfare, really well integrated, not forcing five-year-old girls to wear hijabs, not marrying cousins, and all these things.

But just to go, “Do you know what will be a banger tweet that will stick it to Nigel Farage because Nigel Farage is a wet? Done.” That is not how it works. That is not me being a merely mad civil servant saying, “Minister, it is too difficult because I do not want you to do it.” There are difficult considerations to work out. God, I sound like a centrist dad. I thought I was meant to be a radical.

Timothy Allen: We will wrap it up in a second. Going on from that, James Price is asking, “Are we going to prioritise this?” James Price can prioritise whatever James Price wants. How would James Price fix what is going on now, personally, based on everything James Price knows from inside government and outside government?

James Price: I think there needs to be another year or so of the parties of the right and the left knocking seven shades out of each other. I think that is actually quite healthy. My broad take is that there will be a Darwinian survival of the fittest, or survival of the most able to change, approach, and that one party might just cannibalise the others. Maybe that is Restore Britain, maybe that is Reform UK, maybe that is the Conservative Party.

Then you hopefully end up with some of the best quality of all of them in there. Then you have a reasonable prospect to give to the public. The fact that Reform UK and the Conservative Party have pretty similar policies in lots of areas is encouraging for that. So then you vote for the most robust right-wing party that can win.

If you get into power with that, the things that ought to be prioritised are an acknowledgement that the hour is even later than most people think. The economy will be so bad, unfortunately, by 2029, that the government will not be able to do a lot of stuff straight away. The government is going to have to ruthlessly prioritise massive deregulation on energy and business in general, trying to attract investment here, trying to attract people back again.

Maybe there could be no income tax for someone moving back from Dubai for a year or two, something like that, to try to get some of the United Kingdom’s best people back and rebuild things.

Alongside that, I think there is a very serious policy on immigration that needs to happen, which is to turn back at least all the people who are in the country illegally, foreign criminals, and all the rest of it. There should be a conversation about people who were given passports in the last few years, who are not contributing in any way and actively seem to be failing to integrate.

That is very difficult to do, and it is probably not something that can be done during all the fighting between the parties right now. Maybe it is, because you do not want to set precedents that say, “Hang on a minute, in 2040 you do not subscribe to what Prime Minister Zack Polanski thinks a British person believes, therefore we are going to send you to the penal colony.” If there is one thing we have seen in the last few years, it is that slippery slopes are really real.

In the first instance, you do the low-hanging fruit. Then I think what you do, to be a bit more sneaky-Sneakison about it, is look at the benefits and welfare system. Britain is paying huge amounts of money for people to sit on their arses and do nothing. I am not talking about people who are poorly or anything like that, but people who have recently arrived. Maybe those people have now got indefinite leave to remain or passports, but those people do not contribute in any meaningful way and send money home and all the rest of it.

Let us have a look at eligibility criteria there. I imagine there is probably an awful lot that government could quite quietly do in order to encourage some of these people to no longer do it when they cannot just sit on the taxpayer teat.

The last bit of that, I think, is to cut off all the funding to all these non-governmental organisations, charities, and all the rest of it as well. That would get you an awful lot of the way there.

On the political Islamism front, I think there is work to be done cutting off funding and looking at what some of Britain’s friends in the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia have done. In Saudi Arabia, the state has to approve what speeches are given by imams in mosques. When Donald Trump did that first appearance in Saudi Arabia, when Donald Trump was touching that weird orb, music was illegal in Saudi Arabia. When Donald Trump spoke last year, Donald Trump ended the speech with “Y.M.C.A.” by Village People.

There are big cultural changes happening in that part of the world that Britain should look at, including how those countries deal with extremism. Banning the Muslim Brotherhood would be a great start, and all that that would entail as well.

That would be a start. Then let us see after five years, when the government has fixed the economy, got some military back again, fixed welfare payments, sent back all the illegal immigrants, stopped the boats, dealt with the foreign criminals, and all the rest of it. Then let us see. The country would be in a better way, and then Britain could start having thornier conversations about how much more needs to be done to force people to integrate, while at the same time promoting the best appreciation and all the rest of it.

Timothy Allen: One thing James Price did not mention there, sorry, one last question: reducing the size of government. That would always be my issue. The government is too big. There are too many civil servants. Too many people are working there. That is costing too much. Too many people are deciding how people live their lives.

Is reducing the size of government something James Price thinks is even possible? We saw a version of this in the United States, and the richest man in the world just walked away and was obviously not going to achieve anything anyway. I do not expect the size of the United Kingdom government to get any smaller, but I would even accept one percent smaller, not one percent bigger.

James Price: I did not mention it because I have been banging on about it in my own head for so long that I have taken it as a fait accompli now. Britain absolutely does need to shrink the size of government. Shrinking headcount is really important. When you try to do that in government, civil servants will say, “No, no, we will find savings in other ways,” because civil servants know that having more people means civil servants can do more bad stuff.

Actually, I think headcount, even if it is expensive to pay people off, is going to be worth it in the long run, because then you do not have an overworked special adviser going around trying to stop all the mad projects that are happening everywhere.

One of the things Elon Musk had to deal with with DOGE and all the rest of it is that all the senators, congressmen, and governors had the pork that they liked from the bad spending, because that is, I guess, the downside of the federal system. Therefore, Elon Musk could not touch this waste of money here because Senator so-and-so was going to be up for re-election.

If you have a plan for all this stuff and do it really early on in the Parliament, everyone’s hands are dipped in that blood early on. The way the British constitution works means you can cut a lot of that spending much more quickly. I think economic reality will also force Britain to reduce headcount and spending and that kind of stuff.

Crucially, when it comes again to the welfare bill, that is how government can massively cut the size of this. There is stuff that is trickier to touch, like pensions and all the rest of it, which government can make more efficient. But cutting away a lot of these people, I think government will find astonishing amounts where people are being paid who should not be being paid just to sit around and do nothing but bring in family members and all the rest of it.

Timothy Allen: What about reducing the workforce? Does that ever get talked about inside government?

James Price: Oh, yes. Boris Johnson tried to push this for a while. You would ask the civil servants, and the civil servants would come up with the classic bleeding-stump strategy of, “Well, I suppose we could manage four percent, but you have said twenty percent. We are going to calculate how many children die when that happens, how many farms will suddenly explode, and this, that, and the other.” Civil servants really lay it on thick. I do not believe that happens at all.

What you do need to have is an understanding that where some of the welfare teat, whether for business or people or whatever else, has been removed, there is short-term pain and dislocation, and then things get much better. I think New Zealand had this in the agricultural sector, where all the subsidies were taken away and everything collapsed very briefly. Now people can get New Zealand lamb everywhere. It is a major export because New Zealand farmers learned to be market-leading and all the rest of it.

So you have to have a level of comfort with that sort of creative destruction that free marketeers talk about. That is scary. But I suspect Britain has to use the crisis of how bad the economy is going to be to get to that point.

What Thatcherism showed is that you can turn this stuff around so quickly. Just a bit of economic freedom can cause absolute miracles. I will end with this. The criticisms of Margaret Thatcher in those first few years were, “God, the economy is so bad and unemployment is so high. It is so terrible. Margaret Thatcher does not know what she is doing.” A few years later, it was the Harry Enfield sketch, “Loadsamoney,” where they know the price of everything and the value of nothing, and all they care about is being filthy rich and all the rest of it.

Suddenly everything turned around like that. That is what a little bit of economic freedom can do. It did in the past, and it can do so again. Then Britain can start affording all this other stuff as well. The problem of no growth means everything becomes zero-sum, and then people get mean about things. If government can get people onto that prosperity agenda, wonderful things can flow from it. If government does not, nothing can.

Timothy Allen: Bravo. Well, let us keep our fingers crossed. It sounds like a lovely future. I am not sure I can see it at the moment, but who knows? Anyway, James Price, thanks for coming in.

James Price: Thank you, mate. I really enjoyed speaking to Timothy Allen.

Timothy Allen: Likewise. Thank you.