The folly of a British Silicon Valley Starmerism is suffocating its progress

Will Britain’s future be decided in Milton Keynes? The New Town lies at the heart of what’s now being called the Oxford-Cambridge Growth Corridor: an amiable stretch of the English countryside on which the Government hopes to build a new Silicon Valley.

Recent events have given this project a global significance. Keir Starmer is now the last anti-populist standing. His bet is that a sustained rise in living standards can halt the illiberal tide. A major part of this will be the growth of new industries in Britain, such as technology.

Much, then, is at stake. If a British tech sector does emerge here, the material rewards will be huge. “Starmerism” will generate enough wealth to become a model for establishment forces everywhere — an aid and comfort to both the US Democrats and the continental centre-left. Fail, and anti-populism will start to finally lose what has always been its rhetorical trump card: that it is, allegedly, the side of economic modernity and material progress.

Really, Britain should already have a Silicon Valley, and it was only by a lunatic turn of the wheel that it never acquired one. The United Kingdom has some of the world’s finest universities, its first or second financial centre, and enough oil and shale for energy abundance. What’s meant to be a country of handwaving generalists is in fact the fourth largest producer of “unicorn” companies (technology startups valued at more than $1 billion). It was an early leader in personal computers, and has latterly given the world the maglev, graphene, mammal cloning, and the internet.

All the ingredients, then, for a British Microsoft. Or at least a British Novo Nordisk. Indeed, under remotely normal conditions, one almost certainly would have emerged. So why hasn’t it? According to the recent paper “Foundations” — written by a trio of YIMBYish think tankers — the problem is threefold. In short, Britain has a planning permission system that makes physical investment next to impossible, a ludicrously complicated environmental compliance process, and the highest energy costs in the developed world. We can invent new technologies, but can’t build the factories or the laboratories where they might be brought to commercial maturity. And so, without the ability to “scale” in the UK, inventors are floating their companies elsewhere or selling them to overseas buyers. In the words of the authors, “at some point it becomes impossible to grow when investment is banned”.

This state of affairs has a number of causes — but they all stem from the decentralised nature of power in the UK. “Process” is not quite the word for it. Instead, what we have is a complete legal free-for-all in which local and devolved authorities, public bodies, NGOs and courts have a virtually unlimited right of judicial review and audit against central government. Courts that can halt North Sea drilling at a stroke; regional economic planning that killed off the burgeoning industry of the West Midlands; judicial reviews that have made public procurement ruinously expensive; the need for local consent even for things like reservoirs. The vast majority of Britain’s governing classes have an almost pre-modern view of state and society, in which the elected power is something to be glazed over.

The result is a society in which it’s generally agreed that a body like the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds has an almost constitutional role, and where attempts to sidestep the OBR are seen as a prelude to dictatorship. Today, this system of decentralised power, always a major block on growth, has manifestly started to consume the host. Not only has it deprived Britain of a technology industry, but it may actually cause it to run out of drinking water by the middle of the next decade.

Economic liberalism in Britain has always been associated with political centralisation. Things like Enclosure were carried out by act of Parliament, and Canary Wharf was built by the fiat of the Docklands Development corporation — which was given almost dictatorial powers over the Isle of Dogs peninsula. Thatcherism, among other things, meant revoking the trade unions’ right to be consulted on economic policy. We now require something similar — a revival of executive and parliamentary authority against the courts, the quangos and the NGOs.

We’re unlikely to get one anytime soon. More than anything else, Starmerism is a defence of this decentralised Britain. What Starmerism represents is the vulgar anti-politics that has been gestating in Britain since the years of New Labour, which wanted to defend a particular set of moral bigotries about human rights from voting majorities, and so devolved substantial powers away from Westminster. They did not trust power, in case someone misused it, and so set up a system where no one could exercise it; the result was a headless oligarchy in which the buck stopped nowhere. The consequence of this general depoliticisation meant that, in 2016, England’s governing classes got the shock of its life with Brexit, which aimed to concentrate authority in Westminster. The experience has given them a lasting horror of any kind of centralisation, which they now see as simply a populistic attack on liberal democracy and the rule of law. The brush with populism has made them despair of politics altogether, and Starmerism is now their instrument to substantially abolish it. Rachel Reeves, for example, has made a parade of trying to promote growth — but has now largely given up control of her own fiscal policy to the OBR.

These anti-populist commitments will dog the steps of the British Silicon Valley. It can be built, but not without an attack on those same institutions — the courts, the quangos, the local authorities — that Starmer has made it his life’s mission to defend. Starmer and Reeves have announced changes to judicial review, loosened rules around development near railway stations, and railed against projects like the £100 million bat tunnel. What should be remembered, though, is that every government in living memory has criticised civil servants, meddling lawyers, the planning system and green excess. They may limit some of its more visible excesses, but the overriding aim of Team Keir is to preserve this system intact.

Aside from these planned measures, everything else about Starmerism is running in the opposite direction, towards the even greater diffusion of power. It is hiving off more of Downing Street’s prerogatives to bodies like the OBR and Great British Energy. It is strengthening the power of Whitehall legal advice over ministers, and is resolute in its defence of international law — including things like the Aarhus Convention, which sets environmental regulation at a global level. It has made no attempt to rein in the judiciary over energy; and it has already assented to a judicial review of the Heathrow third runway — the other centrepiece of its growth strategy. It is devolving powers to the same local authorities that block development, and is beefing up the metro mayors. The latter are already flexing their muscles, opposing the new growth plans on environmental and regionalist grounds. It is very difficult to imagine Starmerism, a narrow defence of “Blob” privilege, ever really committing itself to the sustained, years-long exercise of executive powers that would be needed to make the Corridor succeed.

For all the talk of taking on the “blockers” there are already signs of backsliding. Reeves has refused to revive the planned Oxford-Cambridge motorway, which foundered on local opposition in 2021, despite the fact that 81% of freight in the UK is moved by road.

Starmer, then, is in a bind. He has to achieve growth, but he can only do so through a revival of executive powers — the exact thing that Starmerism was meant to forestall. A new Silicon Valley is certainly achievable, but it demands an act of stakeholder fratricide that Starmer will never commit to.  A British Microsoft will have to wait. Starmerism is forcing people to choose between economic growth and postwar liberal institutions. It will not like their answer.

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