π₯³ NEW π BOWMAN π POST π₯³
"Coasean democracy" β empowering locals to decide on new housing, infrastructure, energy, prisons, and more near them β is the alternative to vetocracy, and the solution to Britain's sclerosis.
Conversation
The UK industrial price of energy tripled between 2004β21.
UK energy output per person is below France, Germany & the US.
Weβre producing LESS electricity per capita than we have at any time since at least the 1980s.
The causes of our economic sclerosis are not hard to find.
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We think of France as being highly taxed & regulated compared to Britain. But itβs quite rich despite all that. How come?
France has much cheaper housing, energy and childcare, and better infrastructure. It gets the big things right, so it can afford to get other things βwrongβ.
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I wonβt get into housing again here, but the cost of office space in Birmingham is 44% higher than it is in Manhattan.
London has 90,000 square feet of available lab space, and Manchester 360,000sq ft, whereas New York has 1.36 million sq ft, and Boston 14.6 million sq ft.
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The vetocracy doesnβt just block housing.
Penny Mordaunt led a campaign that managed to block an electricity interconnector with France. It could have supplied *5%* of the entire UKβs energy use β for context, the new Sizewell C nuclear reactor will supply an extra 7%.
Quote Tweet
Delivered the views of thousands of my constituents today to @beisgovuk regarding Aquind. It will:
Make the UK less resilient
Politicise energy supply
Disrupt #Portsmouthβs recovery
Damage our environment.
For no benefit to energy consumers. #StopAquind
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Anton's thread below is a great chronicle of how the awful, lame attempt to appease vetocracy β public consultations β work in practice to slow down and block transport projects.
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The UK today: a major announcement on nuclear energy is actually just "we'll be doing lots of consultations".
We're a Consultation Nation. So we never actually get anything built. The Lower Thames Crossing had FIVE consultations 2017-22, still doesn't have planning permission.
Show this thread
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There is v little cost to challenging projects. The Aarhus Convention caps your legal costs at Β£10k, so thereβs little risk to challenging huge projects on spurious grounds.
BTW β Theresa May extended these caps to *more* kinds of challenges in 2017 π
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The βsmash the NIMBYsβ approach, where you just take away everyoneβs right to object, is tempting but it doesnβt work in Britain. This is a brilliant history of the failed attempts to do this, again and again, in postwar Britain.
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The hypothesis of my piece is that there are two kinds of NIMBYs for a given project β people whoβll object if they have the chance, but will move on if they donβt because it doesnβt actually affect them that much; and people who *are* significantly harmed by the project.
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I think the *solution* is to try to draw a line between these groups, and let the genuinely adversely affected group make the decision about whether the project goes ahead or not.
That smaller groupβs consent can then be won, eg by sharing some of the benefits of the project.
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The current system stops this kind of bargaining, because in effect anyone can pretend to be someone βharmedβ by a project and demand compensation, making it unviable to do so. If we can correctly identify the (much smaller) truly harmed group, their objections become tractable.
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Effectively, if we can identify the people significantly harmed by a project, we are saying that they are joint owners of the right to stop or allow the project, and that they may βalienateβ their collective right if they wish to.
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So we might say that the residents of a council estate can choose to allow the estate to be redeveloped more densely β if they get to capture enough of the gains to make it worth their while. There is precedent for this sort of mechanism around the world.
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This is exactly the scenario I describe at the start of the post.
The residents of a Poplar estate voted 93% in favour of a scheme to replace their 330 homes with 1,582 new ones, inc an extra 40% socially rented homes. But the local council blocked it.
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I suggest we take this approach and try it out in more areas, to see if we can get more housing, lab space, tunnels, railways, wind turbines, interconnectors, nuclear plants, and more, by using this kind of local democracy as an alternative to vetocracy.
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A price is a signal wrapped up in an incentive, as & say.
The high cost of housing, childcare, energy & transport are signals of how valuable they are. They tell us that Britain *could* be fabulously wealthy β if we can learn how to build what we need.
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