Rafe Fletcher is the founder of CWG.

Dario Amodei kickstarted the recent peak in AI hype with a 20,000-word essay on the technology’s imminent dangers.

Released just as his company Anthropic (which counts Rishi Sunak amongst its advisers) embarked on a new US$30 billion funding round, cynics may infer ulterior motives in Amodei’s elucidation of AI’s awesome powers. Nevertheless, its renewed prominence leaves governments responding to an age-old question: how to harness technological revolutions while limiting societal disruption?

The subject was top of the agenda in Singapore as Prime Minister Lawrence Wong presented the country’s budget last Thursday. New policies include generous tax deductions for businesses’ AI expenditures and free access to premium AI tools for Singaporeans who take up certain AI training courses. “AI is a powerful tool”, said Wong, but “it must serve our national interests and our people.”

In Singapore, capitalism and its innovations have always been a means, not an end. Something that was sometimes misunderstood by British Brexiteers imagining Singapore-on-Thames as bastion of laissez-faire economics. The better analogy is Vote Leave’s own Take Back Control when it comes to market forces. Use them but steer them.

The problem is that Britain lacks this same autonomy. The Conservatives share the blame for that. Tension between its strands of economic liberalism and paternalism manifest in strategic incoherence. That split was always present but more easily reconciled when Britain was a leading power. Perhaps the closest historical parallel to AI disruption, the Industrial Revolution, illustrates this.

Karl Polanyi’s 1944 book The Great Transformation is an account of Britain’s pioneering capitalism in the 19^th Century. Polanyi was a Hungarian Jew who first fled from Budapest in 1919, then Vienna in 1933, following the respective ascension of fascist regimes. He argues free markets underpinned this terror, a result of trying to square the subsequent disorder. Polanyi’s own moderate socialism looks a tad naïve given the authoritarianism he witnessed first-hand. Particularly his belief that we can trust an interventionist government if it is “true to its task of creating more abundant freedom for all.”

But an errant prognosis does not diminish what Polanyi gets right. Chiefly that the market forces guiding the Industrial Revolution and Britain’s economic supremacy were not entirely organic. Britain’s rise rested not only on technology but government decisions about trade, finance and property. Empire and global reserve currency status meant Britain naturally absorbed the advantages of a new free-market structure.

Domestic politics then debated the balance between accelerationism and gradualism. Polanyi’s own belief that the “rate of change is no less important than direction itself” was articulated by 19^th Century Conservatives. Figures like Richard Oastler jostled with Whig Prime Minister Early Grey over the 1834 Poor Law, which denied the rights of the poor to subsistence. The former believed unemployment was a manifestation of the social dislocation wrought by sudden change. The latter that it was simply an unwillingness to work for the wages available in the labour market.

The same Whig-Conservative divide shows up in earlier views of Napoleon Bonaparte. Whigs like Charles James Fox were sympathetic to the Corsican General. Firstly, because his European reforms offered trading benefits, with newly liberalised and legalised economies. Secondly, because they resented the costs of fighting such a drawn-out war. It was the Conservatives, under Pitt the Younger, who were far more obstinate in enduring heavy taxation and economic blockades to keep fighting. Trade and sovereignty pulled in different directions, but Britain was strong enough to manage the tension.

Disparity was manageable because Britain held such sway over market mechanisms. It could repeal the mercantilist Navigation Acts in 1849, giving up privileged shipping rights because naval supremacy allowed it to row back if necessary. Paternalistic public health reforms and workplace safety legislation were possible because Britain had the fiscal means to do so. Its economic pre-eminence entitled it to indulge both factions.

Today’s Conservative Party is an amalgamation of these differing proclivities. The Whigs, and its subsequent Liberal iteration, were subsumed into this new broad church in 1912. We recognise these different strands in the form of Disraeli’s one-nation conservatism and Gladstone’s classical liberalism. But as Britain’s influence has diminished, so these result in contradictions. It does not have the economic might to sustain both visions. It has to offer a transparent choice – going for growth or a more paternalistic state-directed gradualism.

The lesson from Singapore is that it is too late to have both. Its autonomy to handle AI comes from years of consistent government and strategic planning. It has built huge domestic savings, enshrined balanced budgets in law and maintained a strong industrial base (manufacturing still represents 25 percent of GDP). Britain has none of these things.

But it has many other advantages. It is a talent hub. Americans rave about the opportunity to hire top-tier talent at a third of the price. And (for now) it is free of the EU regulation that threatens to stifle AI development. What it lacks in infrastructure it can incentivise the Anthropics of this world to build through de-regulation and tax incentives if accompanied by liberal energy and planning reform.

Offering such perks would require a drastic overhaul of the state. And proponents may be buoyed by recent evidence that the British public is feeling a little less statist. Recent research reported an all-time high of Brits saying tax and spending should be reduced. But it still pales in comparison to the number calling for more or the same.

The alternative is to be upfront about trade-offs. Britain is unlikely to be a leader in any AI revolution. But it will do its best to manage it. It will protect jobs, regulate where necessary and guard social cohesion. It’s a perfectly reasonable Oastlerian conservative position when delivered with clarity. And perhaps, if Amodei’s claims prove overblown, it will look prescient.

The Conservatives need to define what they stand for as they go up against Reform as the party of the right. They can be guardians of paternalism or engineers of growth. But it is dishonest to pretend both are possible. Unlike the Industrial Revolution, Britain does not have the luxury of leading this one. Control only comes from informed choice.

And the Conservatives must decide what tradition they stand for.

Yellow weather warnings for England, Wales and Northern Ireland

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Should you drive when there is a yellow weather warning?

Madeleine Sumption looks at immigration policy and the surrounding debate and explains the inherent competing policy objectives and trade-offs.

At Ellis Island in the early 20th century, doctors inspected prospective immigrants for signs of contagious diseases before admitting them to the United States. In Singapore today, migrant domestic workers must show a negative pregnancy test every six months if they want to stay in the country. In many European countries, wealthy investors can secure residence permits with a sufficiently large cheque.

These are all examples of immigration policy. What is it all for? In my forthcoming book—to be published in March by Bristol University Press—I answer this question.

At the risk of stating the obvious, the purpose of immigration policy is to keep people out. Many people more people want to migrate to wealthy countries than will ever gain admission. Governments and their electorates use immigration policies to separate “us” from “them” – to decide who should join their societies and who should not.

This is difficult. To start with, many immigration policies don’t work even half as well as expected. For example, in the book I explain the curious case of an ‘investor visa’ that was supposed to attract venture capitalists and entrepreneurs and ended up admitting well-heeled Russian housewives who liked the London social scene.

But perhaps the bigger problem governments face is that they have to achieve several goals with the same set of policies. Economic impacts, social impacts, fairness, national security, foreign policy… The objectives compete. This presents politicians and the public with difficult trade-offs. Here are just a few examples.

1. Economic and humanitarian goals often conflict

“How much migration does the economy need” is a question I am often asked. It has no answer. One reason is that different migration routes—for family, workers, or refugees—have different purposes and impacts. Who migrates is more important for many economic measures than how many.

Skilled work migration will generally benefit public finances, for example, while humanitarian migration will usually bring costs. As a result, a decline in migration could be positive for the Exchequer if it meant fewer refugees, but costly if it meant fewer highly paid workers.

It is not surprising that immigration routes introduced primarily for ethical, legal or humanitarian reasons—e.g. for partners of citizens or for refugees—are not particularly beneficial economically. That was not the point. It does mean that governments face a trade-off between economic and humanitarian goals.

2. Immigration policy is a blunt tool for dealing with social and cultural impacts

Policy debates often focus on economic impacts, but research suggests that what people care about most is the social and cultural impacts.

The challenge for policymakers is that it is easier to select potential migrants on economic characteristics than on values and attitudes. Attempts to do the latter are usually blunt.

For example, Donald Trump opted for banning entire nationalities his administration perceived to be culturally threatening, often but not always from countries with Muslim majorities. This affected everyone, regardless of their actual beliefs or attitudes.

At the other end of the spectrum, many attempts to select for cultural ‘fit’ feel trivial. For example, the UK’s ‘Life in the UK’ test checks that people applying for permanent status know that the statement, “Britain encourages people to have extreme views and act upon them” is false.

The immigration system is not well equipped to judge people’s views.

3. Different types of fairness conflict

People on different sides of the debate generally agree that fairness matters, but they disagree on what counts as fair.

Take the question of unauthorised migration, and particularly whether and when people without legal status should be deported.

Ethical arguments depend a lot on how the issue is framed. Humanitarian framing presents migrants as victims of an overly restrictive system. Integrity arguments present migrants as rule-breakers who should have complied with the law.

Public debates often present the ethical issue as black and white, relying exclusively on one of these two frames. In reality, elements of both may be true. Unauthorized migrants are vulnerable to exploitation and the process and consequences of being forcibly removed can be brutal. At the same time, it is difficult to imagine a functioning immigration system without any enforcement, and it is not surprising publics expect compliance with the rules.

The bottom line

The life of immigration policymakers is harder than many people expect. Immigration ministers are ruthlessly lobbied by their own colleagues in other departments with competing interests. They manage a sprawling bureaucracy that governs the lives of millions of people, and they get the blame when an individual case they had no idea existed goes wrong.

That’s not to say politicians are innocent victims. Many also over-promise, exaggerate the evidence, and deny the trade-offs.

They are not alone. People on all sides of the debate present the answers as obvious – if only governments had the ‘political will’ to follow their guidance. But the inevitable trade-offs immigration policy presents mean that the reality is messier and more complicated than it might initially seem.

By Madeleine Sumption, Director of the Migration Observatory at the University of Oxford and author of forthcoming book Bristol University Press | What Is Immigration Policy For?

Hollywood actors Tilda Swinton, Javier Bardem and Brian Cox are among more than 80 leading film industry figures to sign an open letter, titled “We Are Dismayed”, condemning the silence of the Berlin Film Festival (Berlinale) on Israel’s genocide in Gaza and its censoring of artists who speak out.

The letter comes on the same day as Booker Prize winning author Arundhati Roy announced her withdrawal from the festival over the same issue amidst comments by German director Wim Wenders against artists bringing up Gaza.

Berliale maintain silence

Other notable signatories include actors Angeliki Papoulia, Saleh Bakri, Tatiana Maslany, Peter Mullan and Tobias Menzies, and directors Mike Leigh, Lukas Dhont, Nan Goldin, Miguel Gomes, Adam McKay and Avi Mograbi. They say that they “expect the institutions in our industry to refuse complicity” in Israel’s slaughter of the Palestinian people.

The 2026 festival is currently underway. Festival head Tricia Tuttle put out a statement in which she backed Wenders:

Artists should not be expected to comment on all broader debates about a festival’s previous or current practices over which they have no control.

The signatories of the open letter “fervently disagree” and insist that the “tide is changing across the international film world”. They also point out that the Berlinale has commented strongly about earlier “atrocities” in Iran and Ukraine and call for the festival to “fulfil its moral duty” to oppose Israel’s genocide and other crimes against the Palestinians. The full text reads:

Open Letter to the Berlinale — Feb. 17, 2026

We write as film workers, all of us past and current Berlinale participants, who expect the institutions in our industry to refuse complicity in the terrible violence that continues to be waged against Palestinians. We are dismayed at the Berlinale’s involvement in censoring artists who oppose Israel’s ongoing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza and the German state’s key role in enabling it. As the Palestine Film Institute has stated, the festival has been “policing filmmakers alongside a continued commitment to collaborate with Federal Police on their investigations”.

Last year, filmmakers who spoke out for Palestinian life and liberty from the Berlinale stage reported being aggressively reprimanded by senior festival programmers. One filmmaker was reported to have been investigated by police, and Berlinale leadership falsely implied that the filmmaker’s moving speech – rooted in international law and solidarity – was “discriminatory”. As another filmmaker told Film Workers for Palestine about last year’s festival: “there was a feeling of paranoia in the air, of not being protected and of being persecuted, which I had never felt before at a film festival”. We stand with our colleagues in rejecting this institutional repression and anti-Palestinian racism.

We fervently disagree with the statement made by Berlinale 2026 jury president Wim Wenders that filmmaking is “the opposite of politics”. You cannot separate one from the other. We are deeply concerned that the German state-funded Berlinale is helping put into practice what Irene Khan, the UN Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Expression and Opinion recently condemned as Germany’s misuse of draconian legislation “to restrict advocacy for Palestinian rights, chilling public participation and shrinking discourse in academia and the arts”. This is also what Ai Weiwei recently described as Germany “doing what they did in the 1930s” (agreeing with his interviewer who suggested to him that “it’s the same fascist impulse, just a different target”).

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All of this at a time when we are learning horrifying new details about the 2,842 Palestinians “evaporated” by Israeli forces using internationally prohibited, U.S.-made thermal and thermobaric weapons. Despite abundant evidence of Israel’s genocidal intent, systematic atrocity crimes and ethnic cleansing, Germany continues to supply Israel with weapons used to exterminate Palestinians in Gaza.

In September 2025, more than 5,000 film workers, including major Hollywood stars, refused to work with industry organisations “implicated in genocide and apartheid against the Palestinian people”.

Featured image via the Canary