Deporting for Duty
By Adam Wren @G0ADM
A journalist friend helpfully gave me the full PDF from the press release of the reform policy announcement “Prioritising UK Citizens” which I think hasn’t been released yet but will soon(?).
The full proposals are as follows:
Immigration & Status Changes
Abolish Indefinite Leave to Remain (ILR) entirely:
No new ILR grants.
Existing ILR holders will have their status rescinded
Replace ILR with a 5-year renewable visa under stricter conditions:
Higher salary thresholds, linked to the right to bring dependants.
No access to welfare or public funds (except NHS with surcharge).
Maximum 90 days outside UK per year.
Fluent English required (C1 level, not the current B1).
Stricter “good character” tests, covering deception, finances, tax compliance, and criminality.
Biometric checks strengthened.
All current ILR holders would have to reapply under these rules.
Extend the citizenship qualifying period from 5 years to 7 years (Labour propose 10, Conservatives propose extended/revocable ILR)
Welfare Reform
Restrict welfare to UK citizens only — non-citizens will be barred from all welfare and public funds
Close all loopholes allowing access to housing, Universal Credit, disability benefits, student loans, etc.
Applicants must demonstrate near-native English.
Must renounce other citizenship
New Visa Schemes
Acute Skills Shortage Visa (ASSV)
Issued in very limited numbers, only for nationally critical roles.
Capped and temporary.
Each visa must be matched with employer-funded training of a UK worker in that occupation.
Entrepreneur & Investor Routes
Will remain and be expanded to welcome wealth creators, founders, innovators, and investors.
Implementation Plan
First 100 Days:
Immediate Immigration Rule changes by the Home Secretary.
Primary legislation to alter naturalisation and settlement laws.
Additional reforms:
Repeal the Human Rights Act.
Leave the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR).
End legal aid for immigration challenges.
Close “No Recourse to Public Funds” loopholes.
Pass an Illegal Immigration (Mass Deportation) Bill
Operation Restoring Justice:
Enforce deportations for those who refuse to leave after losing status.
Many expected to leave voluntarily once benefits are withdrawn.
Overall, it’s…pretty good? They were criticized for saying it would save the taxpayer £230 billion, a number taken from a Center for Policy studies paper that was later revised because the OBR changed their projections and then later changed their definition of a migrant.
It feels like a mostly irrelevant point, anyone that’s worked with government data knows they do this kind of frustrating stuff all the time, the policies on their own are pretty robust.
I can’t help but notice that as policy papers go, it is a little light on detail. For example “Enforce deportations for those who refuse to leave after losing status” raises the question of…how?
It’s a massive question and one the Trump administration has spent months trying to solve. But we are 4 years away from an election, in fairness to reform it would be pretty rare for any party to have all this stuff thought though yet, the tories still don’t know if they’re leaving the ECHR.
Overall, maybe the most striking thing is that it reads kind of like a Matt Goodwin tweet, it’s peppered with lines like “The Tories and Labour have turned Britain into a food bank for the world, at the expense of our own people.”
I was happy to see that like the deportation ‘paper’ that had half it’s content pictures of reform branded planes taking off, maybe 30% of the space of the paper is pictures of green rolling fields and flags, it’s unusual, but kind of charming.
The Blair Necessities
By Adam Wren @G0ADM
Gaza is ruined. Months of Israeli bombardment have flattened its cities and wrecked its infrastructure. In the past week alone, half a million people were forced out of Gaza City. While the destruction of the city isn’t total, rationally there isn’t much of a ‘city’ left.
Western leaders, feeling the pressure from their domestic left are scrambling for an end. Publicly, they talk about recognising a Palestinian state at the UN. The Economist reported this week that privately, they’re debating Gaza’s “day after”.
Since the war began in October 2023, governments and think-tanks have churned out blueprints: Macron and the Saudis tabled a joint declaration in New York; Hamas issued a 200-page manifesto; and Britain, Egypt, Israel, and America all drafted schemes of their own.
The Americans for awhile seem to have adopted the Curtis Yarvin idea of moving the gazans elswhere, and giving them some kind of cryptocurrency that would be tied to the revenue of the redeveloped gaza strip as recompense. A kind of territorial ICO.
Recently, the Americans are leaning towards another idea: Blair.
Blair never really left the Middle East, his foundation has deep links to the gulf states and has been pushing a proposal for a Gaza International Transitional Authority (GITA).
With a UN mandate, it would act as Gaza’s political and legal authority for five years, overseen by a board chaired by Blair himself.
Gulf money would pay the bills; Western officials, including powerful people in Donald Trump’s inner circle like Jared Kushner, would bless it.
Trump even floated the idea to an international coalition of Arab leaders in September, suggesting GITA might be the vehicle to “end it right now.”
Polling by Blair’s foundation suggests more Gazans would tolerate international rule than continued Hamas control, though most are simply desperate for and don’t care who is in control. The GITA model borrows from East Timor and Kosovo, where international administrations paved the way to independence.
But skepticism is warranted. The Palestinian Authority insists it alone should govern Gaza; President Mahmoud Abbas has already crushed would-be rivals. Hamas may surrender weapons under Egyptian mediation, but will not quietly accept exclusion from public life. And Israel’s hard-right ministers openly dream of annexing parts of Gaza and building a seafront riviera.
Then there is Blair himself. His record in Iraq and his eight years as Quartet envoy hardly inspire confidence. Many Palestinians view him as complicit in Gaza being blockaded and repeatedly bombed.
An unpopular foreign mandate, especially one headed by Blair risks becoming a long term occupation, and his foundation is uncomfortably close to a British government that’s already opened routes for Gazans to come here for medical treatment.
The gulf states might be open to footing the bill, but not indefinitely, and they don’t have the military expertise to manage a foreign occupation unlike certain western countries.
This story has appeared as a bit of a wacky curiosity ‘Look at what that dastardly Blair is up to now’, but I think British people should be much more skeptical, and maybe a little uncomfortable about the potential risks of being again dragged into a foreign occupation.
Stall and Chain
By Camilo @AscendedYield
The two big signals of the week point in the same direction: the UK is growing at stall speed while disinflation is proving stickier here than among peers.
The S&P Global flash PMI for September shows the composite hovering just above the 50 line that separates contraction from expansion, with manufacturing output down at 45.4, the fastest decline since March, while services remain in modest growth at around 51.
That breadth-of-activity reading is consistent with near-zero quarterly GDP growth. More tellingly for the labour market, the survey’s employment components imply roughly 50,000 private-sector job losses over the three months to September.
Diffusion indices measure the share of firms expanding rather than the size of moves, but the direction is unambiguous: hiring appetite is fading.
On prices, the same survey reports the smallest increase in output charges since the pandemic, a sign that pipeline pressures are cooling as demand softens.
Yet the headline inflation picture refuses to cooperate. CPI held at 3.8% year on year in August, unchanged from July, and the OECD now projects the UK to record the highest inflation in the G7 in 2025, at 3.5%, easing only to 2.7% in 2026, still above the Bank’s 2% target.
That forecast is not about overheating demand; it is about the arithmetic of administered prices and policy-driven labour costs. Electricity, gas, and other fuels increased by 9.3% in August, while water and sewerage charges have risen even more steeply.
Meanwhile, the rise in the National Living Wage and last year’s £25bn increase in employer National Insurance contributions have slowed the descent in unit labour costs, propping up services-sector inflation.
The UK is experiencing a configuration in which demand-side slack is accumulating, evident in weaker new orders, shakier business expectations, and nascent job shedding, while the composition of inflation keeps the headline rate uncomfortably elevated.
The OECD also notes that the share of the consumer basket experiencing price rises above 2% has increased this year in the UK, a symptom of breadth that is awkward for policymakers even as goods disinflation continues.
The normal link between weaker growth and lower inflation is not working as strongly as usual. Even if the economy slows, inflation does not fall significantly because factors such as higher energy bills and rising employer costs continue to push prices up.
That means trying to cool demand further could result in even bigger job losses without significantly reducing inflation.
This mix sharpens the policy constraint facing both Threadneedle Street and the Treasury. The Bank of England left Bank Rate at 4% last week, explicitly flagging concern over persistent price pressures even as activity cools.
The OECD’s baseline envisions two further cuts next year, bringing the Bank Rate to 3.5%, but this path is conditional. Services inflation, pay settlements, and profit-margin behaviour all need to continue trending down.
With survey price indices moderating, there is a coherent case for gradual easing. With headline inflation pinned up by regulated prices and labour-cost floors, there is no case for rapid easing.
For the Autumn Budget on 26 November, composition is everything. At stall speed, broad-based discretionary tightening has larger short-run multipliers and risks pushing the PMI composite below 50. But not all consolidation is equal.
Revenue-raising measures that minimise near-term demand damage, such as base broadening, closing avoidance, or sunsetting windfall reliefs, work very differently from measures that directly lift the price level or increase the shadow price of labour, for example, further hikes in employer NICs or quasi-taxes embedded in administered tariffs.
The former improves the medium-term fiscal anchor with modest costs, while the latter risks re-accelerating service prices and inflation, keeping the Bank cautious.
The PMI links worse expectations to higher taxes, and the OECD warns that tax hikes, trade costs, and policy uncertainty could dampen demand. The Budget must break, not reinforce, that expectations loop.
The politics and economics of this moment really matter. When businesses believe they will retain less of their profits after taxes, they tend to hold back on both investment and hiring.
You can see this first in surveys, then in weaker spending on equipment and expansion, and finally in fewer jobs being created. We are already seeing the first two signs. That is why the survey evidence pointing to job losses should not be dismissed, even if the official data ultimately provides the final word.
Over time, it is challenging to square falling employment with even modest growth unless productivity suddenly improves. And if the job market weakens while things like regulated prices and labour costs keep inflation high, people’s real incomes will feel worse than the growth numbers suggest.
Cop Out
By Adam Wren @G0ADM
The collapse at Indonesia’s Grasberg Block Cave mine has jolted both commodities markets and the technology sector. On September 25th, a mudslide sent some 800,000 tons of debris crashing into the site, killing two workers and leaving five unaccounted for.
Freeport-McMoRan, the operator, has suspended operations and declared that copper and gold shipments in the fourth quarter will be “insignificant,” a sharp reversal from earlier forecasts of 445 million pounds of copper and 345,000 ounces of gold.
Copper prices increased about three percent to roughly $10,300 per ton, compared with $8,900 at the start of the year. The rally spilled over into the share prices of rival producers, as investors braced for tighter supply.
For the technology industry, and especially the companies racing to construct artificial-intelligence data centers, it’s very unwelcome news. Copper is fundamental to AI infrastructure. Every hyperscale site requires miles of cabling, massive transformers, and high-capacity busbars, all of which consume large amounts of copper. Equally important are the copper-intensive grid connections that power these energy-hungry campuses.
Analysts already project that global copper demand will double by 2035, driven by renewables, EVs, and data center expansion. With workloads climbing and power densities rising, AI facilities are set to become some of the largest single consumers of copper on the planet.
The Grasberg disruption, even if temporary, highlights just how fragile the supply chain has become. Delays in sourcing cabling or transformers could hold up entire campuses.
Rising prices, even at a few percentage points, cascade through billion-dollar buildouts at a time where people are already questioning whether the hundreds of billions of capex given the rapid depreciation of GPUs and slow adoption of AI to corporation workflows is viable.
Telecom firms are reportedly considering re-mining old cabling to reclaim copper, a signal that secondary markets may grow in importance. For data center planners, relying on spot markets is now risky.
Long-term contracts, diversified sourcing, and in some cases aluminium substitution will become part of the toolkit to insulate projects from volatility.
The accident in Papua may seem remote, but its a reminder of how global (and fragile) our supply chains have become. For an industry that’s spent months discussing GPUs and electricity, base materials like copper are fast becoming another bottleneck.
If AI is the engine of growth for the next decade, copper is one of the key materials that will determine how quickly it can scale, and a warning that relying on the world of bits to drive growth is a risk, given that it will always be vulnerable to shocks in the world of atoms.
Interestingly the only bit of reform’s proposals that attracted a lot of criticism was rescinding existing ILR.
Everyone focuses on the scenario of someone who’s been here 10-20 years, integrated but maybe doesn’t earn enough to meet the proposed new threshold. I wonder if they will compromise here, since everyone in this situation has access to citizenship already anyway, and instead settle on tightening the rules for future.