The Week | Is Britain America's Future?

I'm trying to be a little glass half full at least for a few minutes because I don't know, I'm just like fundamentally a positive person and it's kind of exhausting just talking about like every way this has gone wrong. And I think that we're now fully in a place where we just have to ignore what President Trump is saying and doing, like that it has nothing to do with the reality on the ground. Iran was going to push the envelope and they did, you know, opening closing the Strait of Hormuz, saying they'd left the talks when they were actually secretly still dealing. And if we did want to have like a little bit of rainbow news, I guess, or positive news, the Qataris and the Pakistanis issued a joint statement after yesterday's talks that had some good stuff in it. I mean, if this is true, it could all fall apart tomorrow, of course. But they established this high-level committee that agreed on a roadmap towards reaching a final deal, agreed to the creation of a deconfliction cell for Lebanon that will ensure the adherence to the termination of military operations. You know, technical talks still progressing, but the Iranians were part of that as well. So it wasn't just the Qataris and the Pakistanis. And if they're talking, that's better than bombing.

So, I think neither the IRGC or Hezbollah or Israel have gotten the memo on the memo. I think all of them see a vested interest in continuing to fight. I think Netanyahu is constantly on a war footing and I go back to the same thing. I think the world would be a much better place once Netanyahu and Trump leave the world stage. But Netanyahu is on a war footing. He sees his political survival based on his promise to annihilate or destroy his enemies. He sees this as a unique opportunity. I don't think he has any intention of stopping. I think Trump will blame him and the IRGC will blame Israel as well for continuing to bomb Hezbollah such that they have an excuse or kind of a red herring or a false flag to say the ceasefire has been violated. I don't think they have any intention of complying with half the conditions that Trump is trying to outline to save face. And they will use the ongoing conflict in Lebanon and Israeli strikes as an excuse that in fact the ceasefire that we quote-unquote, the West, Israel and America, have not lived up to their promises. I don't think Bibi has any intention of stopping. I don't think the IRGC has any intention of stopping. And the notion that Trump thinks that the IRGC are good actors and have any desire to have a ceasefire with any real agreements with any teeth, and that Netanyahu is not fighting for his political life, I just, Bibi didn't even see a copy of the memo supposedly.

There's going to be so many answers to a question like this. But certainly two big ones that I would point to immediately are: one is the sort of planning and permitting system here, which really makes countries like the US, where that's also a conversation, look like rookies. You know, the restrictions on house building in the UK are extraordinary. There are huge areas of land around London, around Manchester, around Birmingham, our major cities, where you are simply not allowed to build, called the green belt. We apply similar restrictions, or similarly severe restrictions, to building infrastructure. We have some of the highest infrastructure costs in the world and the longest delays in the world, affecting transport, affecting energy. That gives us some of the highest energy prices in the developed world. All of these make it harder for people, companies, you name it, to locate in the UK or in the most productive parts of the UK. The second factor I would say is the over-centralization of how things are done in the country. So one of the things I think the US does pretty well is state and local governments can raise their own taxes. That gives them strong incentives to build, to innovate, to try and run things better than the neighboring state. In the UK, we by and large don't have that. Overwhelmingly, things even at the local level are effectively run by the central government. That discourages one city to try to do things differently from another. Most of the tax-raising mechanisms again happen in a similar way. So local governments in the UK are similarly not incentivized to build housing to raise revenue in the way they are in the US. So I think permitting and centralization are probably the biggest two I would point to.