‘Space: the final frontier.’ Six decades since Captain James T. Kirk first uttered those words, American enthusiasm for star-trekking is stronger than ever. Artemis II’s voyage presages future Nasa trips to the Moon, Mars and beyond; SpaceX’s successful initial public offering and Starship rocket launches confirm continuing enthusiasm for Elon Musk’s interplanetary initiatives. But, on this side of the Atlantic, our ambitions are far less stellar; rather than reach for the heavens, we fiddle with the price of bus tickets.
The potential closure of the Jodrell Bank Observatory – home to the UK’s largest telescope for almost 70 years – for lack of funding is a tragedy. Its annual operational cost is £2.8 million; by contrast, Andy Burnham’s £2 bus fares cap is expected to cost well over £500 million next year. With the news about Jodrell Bank coming only days after Downing Street announced the closure of the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, discerning Burnham’s priorities does not require a deep-space telescope. He does not want a nation that strives mightily to achieve great things but a sweet shop Britain where the state pays for our treats. This is infantilisation not innovation.
Our watchword should be enterprise – not the starship, but the private spirit of innovation
Undoubtedly, voters are worried about living costs. For two decades, household incomes have stagnated, barely creeping above pre-financial crisis levels. Food, energy and housing costs have risen rapidly, eating away at people’s pay. But trying to ameliorate the deep economic woes of the nation with bribes paid for using citizens’ own taxes is simply continuity Starmerism: an ever larger state intervening to ever smaller effect.
One of Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves’s last acts was to announce the ‘Great British Summer Savings’ scheme, a series of interventions designed to help families over the holidays: a pause in fuel duty hikes, free bus travel for children, a cut to tariffs on various foods and a VAT reduction for tourist attractions. All attempts to ease the pain of inflation – the last two only possible due to Brexit – but all missing the point: we are collectively poorer as a country because we are less competitive as an economy.
These were all policies designed to generate headlines for a day or two, not to address the high taxes, excessive regulation and punitive energy costs which make the country a fiscal sinkhole. In a Labour party where MPs consider their time best used campaigning for Club Penguin’s return, promoting a ‘summer of sex’ or misidentifying parakeets, this is perhaps the best we can expect.
Ministers now draw inspiration not from Keynes or Friedman, Churchill or Lawson, but daytime TV’s Martin Lewis – the self-styled ‘Money Saving Expert’ whose advice on how to get cheaper car insurance is regarded as enriched intellectual uranium by politicians. There is no shame in Lewis earning a crust helping consumers save money on their utility bills. But for ministers to involve themselves so intimately in the average shopping basket demonstrates a staggering and embarrassing paucity of national ambition.
William Gladstone once suggested that a minister who does not preoccupy themselves with the ‘candle-ends and cheese-parings’ of public expenditure was ‘not worth their salt’. But he was suggesting they had to keep a rigorous handle on wasteful spending, not preoccupy themselves with trivialities. Today, governments are keen to make small interventions while allowing the welfare bill to balloon by £50 billion in half a decade. Prime ministers once governed a quarter of the world; now they pride themselves on reducing the price of days out – more Brittas Empire than British Empire.
Rising living costs are a direct consequence of an economy which no longer adequately incentivises and rewards risk. According to the Adam Smith Institute, the number of millionaires in Britain has fallen to its lowest in two decades. Reversing that would be far more helpful than capping the price of zoo trips but this requires a government as keen on wealth creation as extraction. Unlike the Americans, we often disdain success rather than encourage it. Our watchword should be enterprise – not the starship, but the private spirit of innovation that underpins our national prosperity and pays for ministerial largesse.
When Burnham entered Downing Street, he pledged to ‘bring back hope’. So far, his way of doing this has been a flurry of new policies, a social media blitz and the installation of a replica ‘No. 10 door’ above a Slug and Lettuce in Manchester. Being truly transformative requires something other than seeming more active and affable than Starmer. Britain’s greatness has never relied solely on the comfort of her people, but on her world standing and ambitions. To content ourselves with merely being a mildly dysfunctional social democracy is selling ourselves short. Why shouldn’t we aspire to explore the stars? If we have indirectly funded India’s space programme through our aid, John Healey can find £2.8 million for a telescope.
For all his stylistic differences, Burnham has largely imitated his predecessors in his first few days: reiterating support for Ukraine, announcing a social care plan and tinkering with the curriculum based on his educational prejudices. He has still to reckon with those barriers to our prosperity that successive governments have failed to overcome – our sclerotic planning system, punishing energy costs and sprawling welfare system, to name but three.
Beyond policy, he must also change our national culture and give Britain her ambition back. Until he does so, he will be boldly going nowhere new.
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