***
May Britain flourish. I mean this unironically.To say this in late 2025, however, is to mark oneself out as a dangerous contrarian, or perhaps just someone whose internet service provider has been down since the Platinum Jubilee. I say this with the stubborn affection of a developer trying to run Doom on a smart fridge: the hardware is eccentric, the display is glitchy, but deep down, I believe the architecture is solid. (...)
Britain is not currently flourishing. It is a country that has suffered catastrophic forgetting of its “Industrial Strategy” while overfitting deeply on “Artisanal Sourdough” and “Risk Assessment.” I will now establish this through the standard literary method of listing increasingly dispiriting statistics until the reader either agrees or leaves.
Real wages grew by 33% per decade from 1970 to 2007. Since 2007 they have grown by approximately nothing, representing the longest wage stagnation since the Napoleonic Wars, though in fairness to the current era, Napoleon was eventually defeated and exiled to St Helena, whereas the causes of British wage stagnation remain at large and are frequently invited to speak on panels. (...)
Our industrial electricity prices are the highest in Europe. Hinkley Point C will cost £46 billion, making it the most expensive power station ever built, with a price tag suggesting that the reactor core is being hand-carved by Jony Ive. We’re SotA on cost. South Korea builds equivalent reactors for one-quarter the cost. The Fingleton Report analyses why, citing capital structures and safety frameworks across 162 pages of sober text. But the detail that reached my heart this year, concerns the fish.
Hinkley’s fish protection measures will cost approximately £700 million. This includes an acoustic fish deterrent system referred to, apparently without irony, as the “fish disco”. Based on the developer’s own modelling, this nightclub for aquatic life is expected to save 0.083 Atlantic salmon per year. At £700 million amortised over the system’s life, this values a single salmon at roughly £140 million. This is approximately 700 times the fish’s weight in cocaine.
The stagnation of British growth is a sunk cost. We cannot unstagnate the 2010s. But what I want, as a citizen, is a system going forward where the primary constraint on energy is not the acoustic preferences of 0.083 salmon.
by Samuel Albanie, Substack | Read more:
Image: uncredited
[ed. Pretty funny 2025 summary. I don't spend a lot of time thinking about Britain, its economy, or AI "compute" issues at cocktail parties, but this little factoid caught my attention.]
