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Notes -
Has there been a UK election post yet? I suppose there's not much room for culture war when all the main parties are slightly different flavours of neoliberal Blairites, but still
The News
Rishi Sunak, leader of the Conservatives, announced a general election a few weeks ago, to take place on July 4th. A slightly odd date for a party with plenty of nationalist sentiment, but probably meaningless. The Tories were coming to the end of their maximum term, so an election was guaranteed within the year, but this still came as a surprise to most. Quite simply, Sunak's Tories are on a path to certain doom electorally, and most expected them to cling on to power until the bitter end. Speculation was that Sunak was seeking to take advantage of some rare positive economic news, with others suggesting he wanted to jump before he was pushed out by his own party. Who knows? The end result is Britain is going to the polls.
The Candidates
And when I say the candidates, I mean the important ones, not the Lib Dems or the Greens.
Sunak and the Tories:
The right-wing conservative party has been in power for 14 years at this point, moving through Cameron, May, Johnson, Truss, and now Sunak as leaders. And what do they have to show for it? An economy in ruins. Legal immigration at record levels, and no control over illegal channel crossings. Total breakdown of law and order, while police most concern themselves with mean tweets. Other public services mostly in shambles, chronically underfunded despite the highest tax burden in generations. Housing is completely unaffordable. Planning is a disaster and every attempt at big infrastructure has been a complete fiasco. Internally, the party has been beset by scandal after scandal.
In short, not good. Polls put the Tories on course for their worst result ever. Their natural right wing support base is enthusiastically lining up behind "Zero Seats" hoping for even greater destruction of the main right wing party.
Sunak himself is fairly hopeless as leader, with little sign of even slight recovery. He's a charisma vacuum, especially compared to Boris Johnson, already lost to the dumbest woman alive in Truss, and can't even deliver on policy. At least, that's how his detractors would put it. For me, I think analysis is a bit harsh; he reminds me of John Major. Boring, but competent enough, he's mostly brought down by his own party's failings, by time, and by external events. He probably should never have been made PM and stuck to being a perfectly fine cabinet minister, but once Johnson imploded he was still the best available.
Starmer and Labour
Kier Starmer has led the working class, left-wing labour party since 2020 when they finally dumped the useless Jeremy Corbyn. After 5 years of unpopular and often deranged far left management, Starmer moved Labour back towards the centre and now looks certain to be the next British leader, likely with an unassailable majority.
Does this mean that Starmer is the greatest political prodigy since Blair? Probably not. If anything, I'd argue the closest parallel to Starmer is none other than Rishi Sunak. Both are dull, but have an air of competence. Both are neoliberal centrists. And both came to power in largely the same way - keeping their heads in difficult positions while everyone around lost theirs. Sunak was the only sane voice during the disastrous lockdowns. For Starmer, it was brexit that propelled him forwards. But apart from that, neither really has anything to offer.
The Labour party itself remains an uneasy alliance between Corbynite communists and Blairite centrists, though Starmer has at least wrested control away from the Corbyinistas. While things are going well, there are few problems, but even in this procession of an election the party is at risk of derailment by the likes of Diane Abbott.
Nigel Farage
The biggest development in the race so far has been the return of Farage to frontline politics. He had attached himself to the Trump campaign, seemingly abandoning his old party Reform to irrelevance. However, the news of Trump's conviction must have had an impact on him, as he very quickly made his announcement of returning to lead Reform and campaigning for a seat in Clacton, a former UKIP stronghold. Farage's opportunism doesn't reflect particularly well on him, but right-wing supporters probably don't care; he is the only real hope they have.
Reform itself doesn't really matter. The party was a vehicle for Farage to push brexit through, and once he left they became a joke. Should Farage succeed in gathering a handful of seats for them, he'll probably use it as a springboard to take over the Tory party, rather than pushing Reform.
The Issues
Just read any post about Canada, Australia, Western Europe, and in many cases the US. Yes, the UK suffers all the familiar problems: housing, productivity, immigration, infrastructure, etc. But let's go through them anyway.
Once the world's richest nation now looks set to be overtaken by Poland within the decade, at least on a per capita basis. There has always been a lot of focus on why Britain seems to struggle so much since the financial crisis - see MR, for example - but the end result is a nation is increasingly poor, unable to fund key services and with little sign of any wage growth or wealth generation amongst the general populace. How much of this is the Tories fault? A fair amount, sure, particularly after the government shot both feet off with lockdowns, but a lot is out of their control. Still, the general public won't care.
Compounding the problem of a weak economy is our old friend unaffordable housing. A bonkers planning system has combined with mass immigration to leave houses in major cities unaffordable for middle class workers, while London is increasingly the playground of the global super rich. And like most nations, the political blob refuses to do anything lest they risk the wrath of the pensioner vote.
Brexit, more than anything, can be understood as a protest vote against high levels of immigration, not just from the EU. After Johnson completed Britain's exit in 2019, the conservative government then decided to pump up immigration to record levels for no apparent reason. As with Canada, the government appears addicted to cheap labour and international students, even as the apparent economic benefits disappear. Left wing Labour is pushing the right wing Tories on their unacceptably high levels of immigration; the Tories respond by promising, yet again, that they will do something. Few believe them this time.
One of Blair's most remembered soundbites is "Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime". Starmer would probably do well to imitate him. A feeling of lawlessness pervades Britain's cities, and the average Brit will tell you that petty crime has become basically legal such is the uselessness of the police force. It's not clear what the cause is - too many third-world migrants? Breakdown of trust? Lack of frontline police? Mismanagement of the police force? Overflowing prisons? General economic trouble? - but it's fair to say a return to more active policing and harsher sentencing would be a big vote winner.
The beloved national health service is on its knees. Claims of austerity abound, but the NHS was always protected by the Tories and has more money than ever. The effect of lockdowns is still being felt, and an aging society will demand more and more, but these don't fully explain what has gone wrong. Labour prescripts yet more government funding. A bigger impact will probably come from the unions suddenly deciding they don't need to strike anymore.
Not really an issue. Britain does not have a big Schelling point for culture war like abortion rights in the US. People just don't care that much about trans rights or LGBT. The black population is simply too small for racial animus to play much of a part, outside of the dreams of Guardian journalists. Certainly, a growing Muslim block is troubling Labour, who have remained committed to Israel so far, but it's not going to make a difference here.
Anyway, last night saw the first TV debate between Sunak and Starmer. I didn't watch it, but it seems that Sunak performed well. I predict it won't make any difference to the final result. Labour will seize power with a huge majority, and then do pretty much nothing to address the biggest issues plaguing the UK.
Can you elaborate on the impact of Sunak's National Service policy? Is might be irrelevant if the Tories won't get another term, but why was it proposed in the first place?
hydroacetylene probably has it right. Facing extinction, Sunak has circled the wagons around the one group that still reliably votes Tory - old people. Though few are old enough to actually have taken part, aged 60+ Britons still look back fondly on the original national service and it apparently polls well with them. Similarly, he's pushing the "quadruple lock", another boost to pensions. If Sunak can fortify the old vote enough, they reason, he will maybe claw 25% of the vote and maintain 100+ seats, which is the best they can hope for.
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Probably because boomers like the sound of it and he needs a Hail Mary badly enough to try something high-risk-high-reward.
That's probably it, but it could be a lack of national cohesion/patriotism resulting in recruitment failures.
Moving to a non-volunteer armed forces is a bad move. I can see if they'd like to give young people a taste of the military in the reserves for a year, hopefully encouraging them to enlist formally in the regulars, but still.
Also the way this national service was formulated allows
children of the richconscientious objectors the opportunity to do non-military civil service instead which kind of defeats the purpose (except for red meat for the boomers like you say). Also it seems the civil service option seems to be only one weekend a month for the year, while the military option is a year full time? Great incentives there.The Finnish non-military civil service option is pretty rare (about 7 % of males in each age-class choose it, another 20 % get deferments or are released from service due to health issues) and not particularly oriented towards the children of the rich, if anything there's probably fair amount of pressure in traditional bourg families to go to the military and not be an unmanly hippie. Then again, due to history, conscription is a part of Finnish culture in ways that would be unlikely to be achieved in UK even if there were decades of conscription.
Finland is one of the few western countries that maintains a functional conscription system. That said, I would venture that they aren't multicultural in the way that the UK is and that national cohesion is probably higher due to less diversity.
Phrased another way, I don't think fresh immigrants are as willing to fight for the defense of a nation. It's 'military as a job for the state' vs 'defending the homeland'. This isn't a clear cut divide, because clearly most people (including legacy citizens) join the military for the paycheck, but I can't see many recent migrants hanging around if there was a Battle of Britain 2. On top of that, many UK immigrants come from backgrounds where the military is a low status, working class career.
One of the precise arguments for conscription locally is that the option is, indeed, "military as a job for the state". In Finnish that's referred to as "palkka-armeija" ("wage army"), with a strong undertone of a "mercenary army".
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I think you’re significantly understating the potential impact of Reform, and the amplifying effect of Farage’s return to leadership. Polling today puts them just two points behind the Tories.
A key point I’d emphasise is that Brexit hasn’t gone away. A majority voted to leave the EU, and while it’s not so well regarded now, most Leave voters blame the politicians (specifically the Conservatives) for failing to deliver on its opportunities rather than regarding it as a bad idea in the first place. For many of these voters, just as the Tories are irredeemably tainted, Farage is innocent — blaming him for Brexit would mean blaming themselves. Better to believe it’s the Tory traitors’ fault.
Anecdotally, I can add that of the people I knew who voted Tory at the last election and Leave in 2016, all of them are intent on voting for Reform this time. While of course they’re not going to be the next government, and they’re unlikely to pick up many seats, I think there’s a decent (25%ish) chance that they get a greater share of the national vote than the Tories.
Right, polling done after the announcement of Farage's return. Prior to that, they were at ~10% and led by the hopeless Tice, who was sure to drag that figure down.
edit: just to underline this, a poll done mostly pre-Farage has them at 9% with the Lib Dems and Greens https://x.com/keiranpedley/status/1798624495546302937?t=1SonhIjy1dbqjEdpE6BCng
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If you are a typical Motte-poster (i.e. under 50 and educated), the people you knew who voted Tory at the last election are likely to be highly atypical of the people across the country who voted Tory. The only person I know who falls into that category and is happy to discuss politics is my mother-in-law who is a more stereotypical Leave/Tory voter (non-graduate Boomer, self-identifies as working class despite enjoying an affluent retirement due to Boomer privilege). She is also voting Reform, but for the rather more straightforward reason that the Tories are a bunch of lying incompetent expletive deleteds who need to be thrown out.
The tl;dr version of any discussion of the issues in this election is the shockingly bad record of the current Conservative government that even the columnists at conservativehome.com are struggling to defend. Rishi Sunak's problem isn't that he is losing votes to Reform by being a closet Lib Dem or losing votes to the Lib Dems by being a closet Faragite, it is that he is so bad at governing that he hasn't delivered any agenda at all, and so bad at comms that the electorate can't tell if the agenda he failed to deliver is a Lib Dem one or a Faragite one.
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I enjoyed your analysis, and this is a minor nitpick, but isn't this figure based on PPP (which will probably become less favorable to Poland as it becomes wealthier in absolute terms)?
You are correct, but I don't blame @sohois one bit for getting that wrong (great post btw)
Polish PM Donald Tusk said that GDP per capita was $35k in Poland and $45k in the UK. He estimated that at current trends the polish figure would overtake the British by 2029.
The British press, being full of credulous fools that wouldn't know journalism if it kicked them in the face, didn't bother to do even rudimentary fact checking, and simply reported the figures as Tusk had given. That factoid was absolutely everywhere. It seems obvious that Tusk was referring to PPP figures, though he never said so, and in fact probably doesn't even know what PPP means. In absolute figures the UK GDP per capita is about $45k but the Polish figure is $18k. No way Poland catches up this decade. Probably not in my lifetime.
I could see Poland getting close if they had ideal policies and conditions and pulled of something similar to the east Asian tigers. I doubt they would but I'd give it maybe a 1% chance. Especially since they, and their neighbors the Baltics, appear to have had some pretty good economic policies post-communism and are growing pretty fast.
I mean... They would have to grow by more than 15% per year, which is well above the growth rate of any Asian tiger, never mind at Polands current gdp. It's also more than twice the growth rate than Poland has ever had...
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And so I followed the parade of fools by repeating the figure. It did always seem a bit extreme but not something I ever bothered to check
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Will labour make things worse? Will it just float a bunch of debt to make it look like they’re doing something?
I’m taking for granted that nobody is going to actually improve Britain’s problems. I’m legitimately not sure what the move of the British left is to; will they import even more immigrants, get slightly softer or harder on crime, make housing regulations even worse, build more council housing(probably funded by debt)?
Labour will naturally benefit from external events. Unless China invades Taiwan, we'll probably see peace deals in Ukraine and Israel, inflation will slowly but surely return to normal, the economy will gradually rebound into 1-2% growth, and the strikes which have plagued a lot of the country will magically clear up.
A strong criticism of the way the Tory party governed over the past decade is that they spent a huge amount of time tinkering at the margins, constantly passing new laws over the most meaningless things, and never really made any big changes aside from a Brexit that was forced on them. I expect Labour will be quite similar
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The likelihood is that they will not do anything significant about migration, as all the migrants by and large vote for them anyways. Or will up until the muslim vote bloc becomes strong enough to support its own party. It just solidifies their demographic victory. They may be cajoled by the hard left part of the party into profound acts of self harm such as taking masses of Gazan refugees; a mass amnesty for already existing asylum seekers is exceedingly likely too (and then they will crow about having "cleared the backlog" where Sunak did not).
Crime is tough to say... they're unlikely to end the draconian speech laws we have nor tell the police to stop wasting time on them. They may well push non-prison alternative sentences for the scant few serious crimes that do get solved, since we have no prison space, apparently.
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Housing regulations at least are probably likelier to loosen up under labour (though not necessarily likely in absolute terms) as their base consists less of older homeowners who are against new building for house price/aesthetic purposes.
Labour have a public commitment to building more houses, a policy which will allow them to do it (namely removing protection from low-value land in greenbelts) that isn't motherhood and apple pie (the Conservatives are promising to protect greenbelts), a coalition that supports it (as @RegularlyExpressed points out) and a golden opportunity to do something that everyone knows is necessary but is unpopular with swing voters (a likely majority in the stratosphere).
If, like most people who are paying attention, you think that the housing shortage is the most pressing problem facing the UK, then things will get better, albeit slowly.
The other thing that is going to get better regardless of the election result is that the headline net migration number is going to drop (unless Ukraine collapses). Net migration in 2022 and 2023 is inflated by the Hong Kong and Ukraine resettlement schemes and by the post-COVID rebound in the stock of foreign students in the UK (which implies a temporarily high net inflow). An incoming Labour government will, of course, claim credit.
I have modest hopes that a Starmer government will be more competent on crime. Starmer was both competent and (given his other political views) surprisingly based as Director of Public Prosecutions (among other things, he was responsible for the decision to throw the book at the 2011 rioters, and issued guidance to reduce the number of people being prosecuted for offensive tweets). The pozzing of the Crown Prosecution Service happened under his successor Alison Saunders.
I assume you meant to reply directly to @hydroacetylene with this comment?
I was responding to both of you - I wanted to explicitly agree with you that Labour's coalition makes them likely to get housing right.
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There is a reason it’s called Build Nothing Britain.
When comparing London to top tier cities in the US it looks like a terrible value. High housings costs but without the comparable salaries (obviously there are people killing it in London but speaking generally).
I have always loved visiting London. It is truly an impressive city with easy access to Europe but hard for me to justify living there vs top US cities.
Salaries in finance (including fintech) are only slightly lower in London compared to New York. For FAANG SWEs the difference is probably a factor of three between London and the Bay area.
NYC also has a PMC status competition thing going on which makes the perceived cost of living for upper-middle-class people high relative to the actual cost of living. "$250k in NYC is barely middle class given the cost of living" gets sympathetic nods. "£150k in London is barely middle class given house prices nowadays" gets you laughed at.
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Hmm. I’d say £100k is equivalent to $200k in NYC. Sure, housing in London is 60-70% as expensive (still substantially cheaper), but groceries are less than half the price (Manhattan grocery store prices are often double midwestern suburb prices ime, in the UK You pay the same in London for groceries as someone in a town in Lancashire), restaurants and bars are half the price, many services and goods from private healthcare to personal trainers to piano tutors are much less expensive due to lower labor costs, Uber is less expensive, haircuts and cosmetic services are half the price, culture from museums to the opera, ballet and theater is so much less expensive. The only stuff that costs the same are consumer goods sold at identical prices internationally like iPhones and high end makeup.
There are certainly parts of London that have Manhattan prices, but they tend to be those parts where people are either independently wealthy or making ‘Manhattan rich’ salaries anyway.
These are all great points. TBH my view on London prices is based on when I’m there as a tourist so I’m likely doing all the things that are on the higher end of the cost spectrum and then comparing to more “normal” day to day activities in the US.
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I found it dismal.
Dirty, full of CCTV, brown people.
Little to be impressed by except a little old architecture and the sheer novelty of the city being occupied by seemingly everyone but British.
Really? I had the opposite experience last fall. It was clean, very british, tons of great architecture and history. Easy cheap transport. We had a blast. Cheaper food and beer than where I live. I didn't feel the CCTV eyes on me, although I'm sure they were there.
I had a game how many CCTV I could get onto a single photograph. Think I managed 23 in one photo.
I was there in '13. On a low budget though. The transport was abysmal - buses slow and very full, not even in rush hour, underground cramped and hot. I'm used to the spacious, echoing and chilly Prague metro, which was, next to old buildings with metre thick walls the only refuge from the summer heat before AC became common... not so in London.
Didn't even think to buy food at a restaurant, just bought groceries and fixed some food for myself. Met a few locals who were staying at the same hostel because they couldn't afford rent in London while working. Had to deal with pretty nice French staff and one surly, incompetent black woman.
One of the places I went to visit was the artillery museum in Woolwich. Surreal. You go on a bus, endure the long ride and the mildly worrying schizo black guy talking to himself half the way. Disembark, see maybe one or two white people around, but the buildings look like Europe.
And of course, as I was taking long exposure photos of the pieces in there and some fucking kids were running around about and maybe 1-2 got into the viewframe when I wasn't taking pictures I was gently reminded to "not take photo of the children".
I mean if you're staying in shit places with weird people and have a bad attitude it is going to suck, you can have a bad time anywhere in the world by chance or by design. If you don't have the money to eat out a few times you can hardly fault London for that. It is a world city. To experience it you need at least a bit of a budget. I've been to Prague as well. I enjoyed it.
No, I specifically excluded the hostel from my judgement
What I meant by being dirty was lots of places being grimy, somewhat dirty, a little trash lying around etc. I don't give a rat's ass about whether pricey restaurants are any good or whether the very rich can find nice places somewhere. That's a given everywhere.
If streets, publicly used infrastructure looks mostly meh to bad it says a lot. Means the state is breaking down. You wouldn't see that in e.g. Austria or Germany outside of places with lots of migrants.
I've been to many German Cities. Some are grimy, Stuttgart and Erfurt come to mind as places that had noticeable bad parts. I didn't see any of that while in London really. While in london I saw a grand total of one old school hard luck guy silently begging outside of a classic pub down by the river, it added to atmosphere if anything, much cleaner and less bum filled than any day I've spent in Boston or NYC. We didn't do any big 5 star meals, or stay at any place above a Marriott, just pub food and one or 2 nice dinners.
Subway was on time and clean, sure the older subway tunnels and cars were a bit small and a tad warm, but that is because they are some of the first in the world and they only could build the tunnels a certain diameter back in 1863 as opposed to the Prague subway, built over 100 years later in the 1970s. We bought the "london pass" for a few days, it gives you discounted access to all the big attractions. I had no problem getting anywhere in the city for only 8.20 pounds a day! I had low expectations (in line with what you seem to have experienced, and from reading about dystopian policies online for 2 decades) for London, and was very impressed and surprised to have a great time! I would go back any time!
Maybe you just don't enjoy visiting a large metro.
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The part of (very central) London I live in is impeccably clean. The streets are swept daily by machine operators, there is no trash on the street except in the early morning on pickup days, in the early hours briefly from restaurants, and occasionally during big sports events or concerts nearby from crowds, which I think is reasonable. It’s much cleaner than any comparable major tier 1 Western city. There are bad parts, but there’s no need to visit them unless you’re unfortunate enough to live there.
There isn’t one major North American city that comes remotely close in cleanliness, and big European cities like Paris, Berlin, Milan, Barcelona, arguably (still) even Madrid are worse. The only 4m+ inhabitant cities I’ve seen much cleaner than London are in Asia. Prague and Warsaw are clean but not noticeably moreso.
When it comes to the proportion of rich people, is there any borough of London that has more than the one you live in ?
Borough? Westminster is a very diverse borough with 250,000 people. It’s possible that Kensington and Chelsea has a higher proportion of rich people. Both Boroughs contain very rich and very poor neighborhoods, though.
Is there a smaller subdivision in use than that?
Politically, there are wards (each ward elects councillors to the borough government), but the borough (as ‘local council’) is the smallest non-ceremonial unit of local government in the UK. There are neighborhoods of course.
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Dirty? Compared to what? Of the comparably sized cities I've been to (NY, Paris, Berlin), I'd say London generally holds up pretty well on this front. There are horrendous areas, granted, but that's the same everywhere.
Yes, London is overall pretty clean (although due to urban planning failures in some neighborhoods they put trash bags on the sidewalk for pickup). I was shocked by how dirty Berlin is in comparison.
It's Germany's San Francisco, left-wing lunatic central, with city police getting infiltrated by ethnic mafias.
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Berlin is relatively poor after all - something I think surprised a lot of people who assume by default that it's the national center of wealth generation akin to London, Paris, Madrid etc.
Indeed it seems Berlin is only slightly richer than Germany overall, which I didn't know.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_German_states_by_GRP_per_capita
I wonder if the partition had something to do with that, Berlin had to prop-up East Berlin after reunification and even before it there was a certain instability about West Berlin being deep in enemy territory that probably heavily discouraged investment. Just guessing.
I think it is more that Frankfurt is the commercial capital of Germany, whereas London and Paris are the commercial capitals as well as the political capitals. Rome is poorer than you expect (about 15% richer than Italy as a whole, but below the northern Italian average) for the same reason - Milan is the commercial capital. Greater DC (the District itself is notoriously dirt poor) being as rich as it is (about 20% above the US average) is the unusual thing by international standards.
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Almost certainly. And that it's in the poorer, ex-communist eastern half of the country.
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I'd take umbridge with the idea that the closest parallel to Starmer is Rishi Sunak, or that he is a neoliberal centrist. Whilst Starmer is fundamentally a manager rather than a leader, and is very comfortable with the grey bureaucratic blob of the civil service, Starmer has been deeply ideological since his younger days, where he was a Eurocommunist/Left-Green. Whilst I'm not quite as convinced as Peter Hitchens that Starmer is secretly an ultra-leftist waiting to pounce (he has certainly moved to the centre) his instincts are deeply "woke", for lack of a better term.
For those who don't know, Eurocommunism was that strain of non-USSR aligned leftism that started the whole intersectionality craze, where various oppressed/marginal groups could become objects for the revolution now that the industrial working class had either been co-opted or ceased to exist in the affluent west. And this wasn't just a university debate club phase! Starmer wrote for Trotsykist adjacent magazines well into his 20s, and was chair of the Society of Labour Lawyers, which was well on the left of the party, well into the 2000s.
Now this isn't to deny that he is a 'centrist' figure, or has moved the party to the right. He abandoned various left wing policies and commitments pretty quickly, and I think his economic views are certainly well to the right of Corbyn. But his political instincts and ideological basis are certainly on the left in a cultural/social sense (read: woke) in a way that they very much aren't for investment banker Sunak. Perhaps the best description of Starmer would be as a "cultural" or post-68 Leftist. Starmer spent decades advocating as a lawyer for migrant rights, environmental activists, civil liberty organisations and so on.
This is all to say that whilst Sunak and the Conservatives have let the country drift to the left on social views, and presided over massive overhauls, Starmer would not only allow this for political reasons but positively embrace it.
Also worth noting for those not in the know, that despite the frothing allegations that Reform and Farage are neo-fascists, they are in fact basically Thatcherite. Farage is a classical liberal- his anti immigration commitment is getting net migration down to ~0, and if outflows were in the hundreds of thousands he'd bite the bullet and allow inflows of a similar amount. This is not the same kind of politics as the Identitarians over the channel. Having said that, the voter base is pretty similar, and sits firmly in the socially conservative, economically left wing corner of the political compass. Farage is very much a top-righter. From the social media content they are putting out I suspect that many of the Reform activists/staff lean toward the redpilled side of things, but seeing as the party has little to no chance of being in power, it is most likely a marriage of convenience. Farage's play is presumably to try and destroy the Conservatives even further to lead whatever remains of the right in 10 years time (or to set up someone else to do so).
For those who haven't seen it.
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