This article is taken from the February 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.
Like many people, I was dismayed to see the reports last November that the Telegraph columnist, Allison Pearson, was investigated by Essex Police for a post on X (Twitter).
The post — which dated from about a year earlier — had used the words “how dare they” to comment on a photograph. The photograph showed two police officers — represented on X as belonging to the London Metropolitan Police — next to two men holding a flag of a Pakistani political party. Essex Police worried that Pearson’s post might be deemed a “hate incident”, with a spokesman saying that its job was to investigate “crimes without fear or favour”.
The post had material factual errors and was undoubtedly ill-advised. For example, the photograph was taken in Manchester, and had nothing to do with London or its police force. All the same, the police investigation could be deemed both a disproportionate response, with a consequent waste of police time, and a threat to Ms. Pearson’s freedom of expression. In the end, no charges were brought against her.
These matters are evidently important to the practice and tone of British public policy, but why should an economics column pay them any attention? In fact, the Pearson X post imbroglio is illustrative of wider social and political trends which have major economic consequences.
The plain fact cannot be escaped: The woke agenda takes up resources and no obvious output is produced
Everyone wants Britain to have harmonious relations between people of different ethnic backgrounds, as well as respect for different cultures and religions. Further, many favour more equal treatment of men and women, and even of persons and animals.
These are issues which belong to a woke agenda which only a minority of politicians and journalists are prepared to question. But a plain fact cannot be escaped. The woke agenda takes up resources — here the amount of police time involved in the assessment of actual or possible “hate” — and no obvious output is produced.
Entire careers are nowadays based on trying to reduce the incidence of supposed unfairness and injustice. Although its criminal justice system is widely regarded as under-funded, the UK has a National Police Chiefs’ Council financed from the public purse and the NPCC has seen fit to appoint a Hate Crime Lead.
Indeed, Essex Police has asked the current Hate Crime Lead, Mark Hobrough, to conduct (what it termed) “an independent review” of the Pearson case. Economists may be a cynical lot, but they might wonder how or even whether Mr Hobrough’s report adds to gross domestic product.
A general rule is implied, that as legislation and regulation move further in a woke direction, the higher are the costs of delivering wokery. Whether wokery has any definite output is for debate, but the output is certainly not marketable in any obvious form and hence cannot be counted in GDP. To the extent that the state employs people in pursuit of this liberal agenda, the productivity of the public sector is reduced.
This may sound shrill and cheap. But more esteemed sources than your columnist have sounded the alarm about productivity in the UK’s public sector. In May last year the Institute of Fiscal Studies published a report on the subject.
It included a chart on “public service productivity”, with the 2019 level taking a value of 100. That was above the 1997 figure of 96.2, although not by much. But the UK’s handling of Covid had a catastrophic effect, slashing the number by almost 15 per cent. The end of the epidemic was followed by a recovery, but only a small one, and public service productivity in 2023 remained below that not just of 2019, but of 1997.
Although most UK output comes from the private sector, the lamentable performance of the public sector contributes to the productivity malaise from which the UK economy suffers. In any case the woke agenda hurts the efficiency of the private sector too.
Suppose that Essex Police had decided to press charges against Ms Pearson. A number of lawyers might then have been involved, for both the prosecution and the defence.
The UK’s adversarial system of justice does have advantages over the inquisitorial procedure more common in the rest of Europe, but — almost by definition (since one side must lose) — it wastes some resources. And could a decision, any decision, on the alleged criminality of the Pearson X post constitute part of GDP?
Readers may recall that I have pointed out the connection between wokery and productivity before. In my column (“Britain’s squid pro quo”) in the December/January 2022 issue of The Critic, I noted that the 2010 legislation on bat protection and an Animal Welfare (Sentience) Act then passing through Parliament not only created more unproductive public sector jobs, but also damaged private sector productivity.
I wondered whether “Britain exists for the benefit of its people, or of its bats, lobsters, squid and octopuses”. Further, the damage to private sector productivity implied the unsettling conclusion that “The more people are employed in negative sum activities, the lower will be the rate of productivity growth.”
Wokery may not be the only reason for the virtual cessation of productivity growth in the UK, but it is a major aspect of the problem.
