This week brought fresh proof. Mississippi now ranks third in the entire United States for jobs created through reshoring and foreign investment — behind only Texas and South Carolina, and up from seventh just a year ago. First-quarter figures point to more than 12,000 new jobs from firms bringing production back to America and choosing to put it right here.

So why are all these industries flocking in?

One reason above all: energy — affordable, reliable energy. Data centres, factories and chemical plants shop the world for cheap, dependable power. Mississippi has it. Britain, increasingly, does not.

For readers back home, the gap is worth seeing in hard numbers. To make it plain, we built a web tool, CompareMyPower.com. Punch in a few details and it shows what a household pays here versus elsewhere. The findings are striking:

Mississippi runs at about 16.8¢ a kilowatt-hour — roughly 13p in your money. The British household, by contrast, is paying something closer to 25–27p, two to three times as much for the very same electricity.

Almost every penny on a Mississippi bill still buys actual electricity — generation and delivery — rather than a stack of levies, subsidy schemes and programme surcharges of the sort that now pad out a British bill.

Where the wrong road ends

You need only look across the Atlantic — at Britain, my native country — to see where the wrong road leads. UK energy now costs three to four times what Americans pay, the direct result of restricting oil and gas drilling, banning shale gas, and betting the grid on intermittent wind and solar. Mississippi has quietly overtaken Britain in economic output per person. California went down the same path — cap-and-trade, forced closures of reliable power stations, mandate piled upon mandate — and its families pay for it every single month.

An advantage easy to lose

The lesson is simple, and Britain is living proof of it: an energy advantage is easy to squander and very hard to rebuild. Mississippi’s job now is to protect cheap, reliable power, welcome new generation, and refuse to copy the mandates that made California — and Britain — so dear.

Protect it, and the data centres, the factories and the jobs keep coming. Follow Britain and California down the mandate road, and it all slips away.

Have a look at CompareMyPower.com and see for yourself what an energy advantage is really worth — and what its absence is costing you.

There are, after all, plenty of places once ruled by Britain — Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Belize — that gradually acquired their independence over time. What if the thirteen colonies had done the same: not broken with the motherland, but gradually drifted from her, becoming a collection of Canadas?

Some historians think that, had George III possessed a different temperament, that is almost certainly what would have happened. Instead of a Congress and a President, we might have a parliament and a prime minister, as they do in Ottawa.

Thank goodness America did declare independence. Had she not, the world would be a much worse place.

It’s not that I have anything against Canada, or Australia — or indeed my own country, Britain. It’s that the moment Jefferson and co asserted the supremacy of natural rights over pre-modern claims of authority, the American model was born. The United States was conceived in the Declaration of Independence, delivered at the Constitutional Convention in 1787, and grew to become the pinnacle of human achievement. The Declaration was the essential moment — the assertion that natural rights come first, and that power flows from We the People.

The longer I live in America, the more I appreciate being here — and the more I realize just how precious and distinctive this country really is. America is the indispensable country. Founded 250 years ago on a document proclaiming the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, today she underwrites those things across much of the planet

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We all know about Elon Musk — a titanic figure of our times, who has built one world-changing technology and industry after another. He is part pioneering engineer in the mold of Nikola Tesla, part businessman in the mold of Vanderbilt, and part hero of liberty in the mold of John Wilkes. But stop and ask a basic question: could Elon have done any of it had he stayed in one of the countries he passed through before he came to America?

Had Musk remained in South Africa, or Canada — or, heaven forbid, moved to Europe — would he have achieved a single one of his achievements?

You only have to ask the question to see the genius of America. The laws of physics are no different here; nor is the air, or the water. It is what Jefferson and co set in motion with their signatures 250 years ago today.

My only regret about America declaring her independence from Britain? That I missed so much of the first 245 years, having moved here only five years ago.

Let me introduce you to three letters you are going to hear a great deal about in the months ahead: SGO.

If they mean nothing to you today, they soon will. SGO stands for Scholarship Granting Organization — and thanks to a change in federal law, Mississippi is about to see a whole network of them spring up, channeling tens of millions of dollars into Mississippi schools

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This is about to become a big deal. Here is how it works.

Every year, you — like millions of Mississippi taxpayers — send a chunk of your income to the IRS.

Thanks to the new federal tax credit, you can choose to redirect $1,700 of it to a local SGO, rather than give it to Washington. You get to decide where that slice of your own tax dollars go.

The SGO then uses the money you give it to fund places at local schools.

Yesterday I sat and listened to the inspirational T. Mac Howard, Founder and Head of School for Delta Streets Academy in Greenwood talking about the work his team is doing to extend education opportunities in the Delta. As I did so, I was struck by a simple thought: would you rather give $1,700 of your tax dollars to the federal government, or give it to provide a classical or Christian education to young people in our state?

This ought not to be a hard sell.

Mississippi is well placed to seize it. It’s not just Delta Streets, but Redeemer’s, Vineyard — in fact, we have dozens of other non-government schools spread across our state.

I think we are about to see a flurry of activity to set up SGOs — and rightly so. And it will be the Governor, Tate Reeves, who decides which organizations that apply to become SGOs get designation. Choosing a strong slate of SGOs could prove to be one of the most consequential decisions of Gov Reeves’ entire time in office, if it helps lay the foundations for change.

Here at MCPP, our job is to make sure Mississippians understand this opportunity — and seize it. So at our education freedom website, CompareMySchool.com, we have a plain-English guide to the tax credit — and a fact sheet you can download, print, and share.

We will even host the definitive Mississippi SGO Index: a register of every approved local SGO, rated against key metrics, so taxpayers can act with confidence and parents can see their options at a glance.

We’ve built the definitive guide to SGOs: CompareMySchool.com/sgos

This is a rare opportunity. Let us make the most of it.

When crypto went mainstream, people who had never owned so much as a share were suddenly holding forth on bitcoin. When Ozempic arrived, people who had never once expressed a view on weight loss were just as eager to share the very same thoughts. Now it is AI’s turn. No conversation about it seems complete until someone has solemnly used the word “hallucination.”

AI is utterly transformative. A vastly bigger deal than almost any innovation that came before. As big as the invention of writing, or the industrial revolution — only all at once.

Whether you run a business, a club, a school — or a think tank, as I do — it is going to upend a great deal of what we take for granted. Who you hire. How you delegate. What outcomes we should even expect from our employees. It lets you work almost at the speed you can think — fast enough that knowing when to stop becomes a discipline in its own right.

My own journey with AI started where everyone’s does — marveling at how my newly opened account acts as such an awesome search engine. Call it the “Does anyone still use Google anymore?” stage: you put your new tool to work running glorified Google searches. Great fun — but if that is as far as you get, you could be forgiven for thinking the whole thing overhyped.

The second stage of AI is when you start using AI as a writing tool. This is where those who talk about hallucinations tend to be. And it is, frankly, the least interesting thing about AI. Sure, it is excellent for editing and polishing what you have written — but not the other way round, with you editing what it writes. That is the surefire route to slop.

The third is the realization that you can do things techies spent years learning to do. Figure out how to program an agent to perform one complex task, and it can then perform that same task again and again — at a scale, and a speed, no human team could match. Information and expertise that once belonged only to those at the top of society are coming within reach of everyone else. The social implications of that are at least as large as the economic ones.

Perhaps my all-time favorite TV show is Young Sheldon. The running joke throughout every episode is that Sheldon, the brilliant boy genius, is able to figure out extraordinary things, yet is forever tripped up by the mundane. Treat AI as you might Sheldon: super smart, but dumb enough to misread the obvious.

The fourth stage of AI comes when you realize an agent can handle a great deal of your existing workflow. Instead of getting you or your team to do the donkey work, you farm it out to your new AI employee — one who never tires, and shows up on time, every time, ready to put in a full day’s work.

The fifth stage arrives once you start asking what you might automate that you never imagined could be automated at all. At MCPP we are beginning to do precisely this, in all sorts of weird and wonderful ways.

This week it was reported that AI software built by Palantir has saved hundreds of lives at a hospital in Florida by catching the signs of sepsis before doctors could. No miracle cure: the system simply reads the data already flowing through the hospital and prompts preemptive action.

Now picture the same logic applied more widely. Imagine AI scanning the records of every American over a certain age, picking out each one whose cholesterol sits in the danger zone, and ensuring they are offered statins — a few dollars a day — to bring it down. AI need not conjure something out of nothing to be transformative, but to merely take the knowledge already sitting in front of us, ignored, and put it to work.

The sixth stage of AI follows when you work out how to automate the autonomous agents themselves, so that they more or less manage one another. Ask me how that is going in a few weeks…

So where might all this lead?

I am an optimist. I think Jeff Bezos is right. Far from causing mass unemployment, AI could leave us with a shortage of workers.

Yes, there will be disruption. Anyone who fails to adapt could lose out. It may not be much fun for those whose only skill is coding. But there will also be an enormous increase in output. Every one of us has some sort of comparative advantage, and AI lets us do far more with what we have than ever before.

The result could be far greater prosperity for all — provided we let energy producers produce, rather than strangle them in red tape, and provided we steer well clear of European Union-style control from the top down. (The EU’s GDPR goes a long way to explaining why so much AI innovation is happening on this side of the Atlantic, and so little on the other.)

One final thought. Energy policy is about to matter more than almost anything else. AI runs on power — vast and growing amounts of it — and the states and nations that produce energy cheaply and abundantly are the ones that will get to build the future. Those that hobble their energy producers will be left watching from the sidelines.

Three decades of dismal governance have brought us close to ruin. We have changed governments and prime ministers. But the underlying policies that landed us in this mess have remained the same.

Why? Because our system of government is dysfunctional. The machinery of the British state is hopelessly ineffective. The problem is not an overconcentration of power in Downing Street, but the reality that those at the centre cannot get things done.

This is why Danny Kruger’s plan to abolish the Cabinet Office matters. Britain does not just need a change of government. We need to change the way we are governed.

Kruger’s paper, Fixing the Centre, sets out how. Abolish the Cabinet Office. Replace it with an Office of the Prime Minister, run by a political Chief of Staff. Empower ministers to hire and fire. Scrap most quangos. Run government on charter letters, Australian-style.

Danny is right on pretty much every count.

Last March, in an extended essay for The Telegraph, I set out detailed plans to do all this. Before tax cuts, before border control, before any substantive reform a conservative government might want, the first thing it must do is establish control over the machinery of the state.

The Cabinet, I argued, is no longer an effective instrument of government, but a Potemkin charade. Cabinet meetings are scripted, with officials making many of the key decisions beforehand. Real power increasingly lies at the weekly meeting of permanent secretaries. Chaired by the Cabinet Secretary, it coordinates and decides public policy to all practical purposes, without ministerial oversight.

Worse, the system of administration centred around the Cabinet Office is dysfunctional. The triumvirate of departments at the centre of government — the Cabinet Office, No. 10 and the Treasury — lack strategic coherence. We need a more coherent centre, not unlike Australia’s Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet.

The centrepiece of reform, then, had to be a Department of the Prime Minister, consolidating most Cabinet Office functions (policy coordination, national security) and select Treasury responsibilities (strategic budget oversight). The DPM would serve as a unified command centre, aligning public administration with the government’s electoral mandate.

That piece drew on a much longer internal paper I had written previously with the great Rado Tylecote, Getting a grip on government. It set out the architecture in detail. A Chief of Staff at the helm, not a civil servant. A Civil Service Unit responsible for skills and accountability. A Public Expenditure and Performance Unit taking budget allocation from the Treasury. An Appointments Unit for the quangocracy. A Legal Counsel Unit to reduce reliance on the Attorney General. Charter letters. Extended Ministerial Offices. Specific amendments to the Constitutional Reform and Governance Act 2010 to give ministers the power to hire and fire.

The irony is that the paper this blueprint draws from was actually prepared and presented to Team Boris shortly after he became Prime Minister.

They were noncommittal. It would, suggested one, take up too much bandwidth at the start of a first term.

Without these reforms, they didn’t make it to the end of the first term.

The fate of Boris Johnson’s government shows why these reforms are so vital. Without reforming the centre, a reforming government cannot reform anything else. Nothing will change.

The convergences between Kruger’s paper and the architecture set out in our blueprint are striking.

Kruger calls for abolishing the Cabinet Office. The blueprint called for “merging Downing Street, the Cabinet Office, and some budget management functions in the Treasury into a single, new Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet.”

Kruger would create an Office of the Prime Minister “under a powerful political Chief of Staff.” The blueprint argued the DPMC should be “run day-to-day by the Prime Minister’s Chief of Staff,” who “would not sit in the House of Commons, nor would they be a civil servant.”

Kruger proposes a new Department of the Civil Service. The blueprint proposed a Civil Service Unit within the DPMC, responsible for skills, training and accountability across Whitehall.

Kruger would give ministers “real powers to hire and fire civil servants.” The blueprint set out the same powers in detail, in sections titled “Replacing Permanent Secretaries” and “Ministerial choice over appointments.”

Kruger wants ministers to enter their departments on day one with a clear programme of action and clear expectations for delivery. The blueprint proposed exactly this, by name — Charter Letters, modelled on the Australian system. Same name. Same source.

Kruger wants to scrap most quangos and bring their functions back into departments. The blueprint proposed an Appointments Unit to oversee the entire “quangocracy,” ensuring appointments aligned with the government’s strategic priorities.

Kruger wants to replace the Constitutional Reform and Governance Act 2010 to give ministers these new powers. The blueprint identified the same statute by name, calling for “a series of changes to the Constitutional Reform and Governance Act 2010, as well as changes to the Civil Service Code and other relevant codes and guidelines.”

Kruger cites Australia and Japan as comparators. The blueprint cited Australia, Singapore, New Zealand, Ireland and the United States — drawing on the Australian DPMC, Singapore’s Public Service Division, New Zealand’s State Services Commission, Ireland’s Department of Public Expenditure, and the US Office of Management and Budget.

Danny has done something important. He has consulted civil servants, done the legal work, and identified the statutes that need replacing. He has taken these ideas and turned them into a transformative programme for an incoming administration.

Britain cannot recover without this.

Well, that is exactly what the federal government has been doing.

For the past 25 years — ever since Bill Clinton left the White House — Washington has spent more than it has taken in. Every single year. The result is a national debt that now stands at $39 trillion.

In 2001, the United States owed less than $6 trillion. Today we owe nearly $39 trillion. That means the federal debt has grown by $33 trillion in just 25 years.

Here is the worrying part. In the entire 212 years from George Washington’s first inauguration through Bill Clinton’s last day in office — through the Civil War, the Great Depression, two World Wars, and the Cold War — the United States ran up $5.8 trillion in debt.

In the 25 years since, we have added $33 trillion more. More than four-fifths of the total debt has been acquired in the past quarter-century.

Millions, billions, trillions. Our brains are not wired to grasp numbers this large, so let me put it another way.

A million seconds ago was about 11 days ago. Late April. A billion seconds ago was 32 years ago — 1994 — when something called the World Wide Web was just getting started.

A trillion seconds ago? That was around 32,000 years ago. Woolly mammoths still roamed Europe, farming had not yet been invented, and no one (we think) had yet made it to North America.

That is what a trillion looks like. And we owe almost forty of them.

And the rate at which we acquire new debt is accelerating. Of that $39 trillion, $2.7 trillion was added in just the past year. A staggering $10 trillion — more than 27 percent of every dollar America has ever borrowed — has been piled on in the past five years alone.

The federal government now adds roughly $8 billion of new debt every single day.

Great nations are rarely destroyed by external enemies. They are more often destroyed by debt.

The historian Niall Ferguson has warned that when the crushing cost of servicing old debts begins to crowd out the essential investments that sustain national strength — especially defense — decline becomes almost inevitable.

History is littered with cautionary tales. Habsburg Spain. Bourbon France. The Ottoman Empire. Each was once the greatest power on earth. Each was overstretched by debt.

Ferguson identifies a critical threshold — sometimes called the Ferguson limit — beyond which a great power cannot long survive: the moment a nation spends more on debt interest than on defense. At that point, fiscal arithmetic begins to dismantle geopolitical power.

The United States is now flirting with that threshold.

A few months ago, I was at the Ole Miss game in Oxford when a B-2 stealth bomber flew over the stadium. The crowd went wild. It was one of the most thrilling sights I have ever seen — a symbol of American strength, the kind of demonstration of raw power that not only keeps the United States secure but keeps the bad guys across the globe in line

Each B-2 cost over $2 billion to build, which is why only 21 were ever produced. Keeping one in the air costs about $150,000 per hour.

The risk is that one day the United States — like Habsburg Spain — will simply not be able to afford the things that make us strong. And it isn’t just the defense budget at stake. Will America be able to pay its Medicaid bills? Its pensions? Its Social Security obligations?

We pour enormous attention into elections and congressional redistricting. But unless we get the debt under control, none of that will matter.

At the start of President Trump’s second term, I had high hopes. Elon Musk and DOGE talked seriously about reducing public spending. I hoped Congress might finally wake up and do its job.

But cutting spending alone will not be enough. We also need economic growth — and I am confident we are on the cusp of a massive AI-driven productivity boom that could deliver it. Spending restraint and growth, working together, could narrow the deficit over a decade or so. Eventually we could even begin to pay the debt itself down.

This — not the midterms, not the game of musical chairs over congressional districts — is what really matters.

Controlling the deficit will decide whether our children’s children live better lives than we do, or whether we follow Europe down the path of higher taxes, rising costs, and demographic decay.

Gad is one of the most important conservative thinkers writing today. His new book — Suicidal Empathy: Dying to Be Kind — is published in a few days, and I am the proud owner of a signed copy.

Gad Saad’s new book is an instant bestseller!

Host of the Saad Truth podcast, Gad is now connected to the University of Mississippi’s Declaration of Independence Center — one of the emerging citadels of excellence in American higher education today.

Gad is not just another academic. His work really matters to the future of the West.

For several decades, postmodern ideas hatched in the seminar rooms of 1960s France have been percolating through American academia — and from there into the corporate world, the public sector, the press, the courts, and the schools.

Postmodernism teaches that there is no objective truth and no shared moral order, only competing perspectives shaped by power. From that follows cultural relativism: no culture, no tradition, no inheritance can be judged superior to any other. By the time the rest of us noticed, these strange ideas had quietly become the unofficial creed of the Western managerial class.

This is how so much of America went “woke.” These ideas encouraged a generation of young Americans to embrace identity politics — to stop seeing themselves as free individuals in charge of their own destinies, and instead to define themselves by where they sit in a hierarchy of victimhood based on race and sex.

The result is profoundly demoralizing — in two senses of the word. It has stripped us of confidence in our country and our culture. And it has made it literally harder for people in positions of authority to exercise moral judgement at all.

Allan Bloom warned us of this forty years ago in The Closing of the American Mind. Until now, however, the conservative movement did little to stop it.

Signed by the author…..

Gad has dissected the way postmodernism turns empathy with the marginalized into the supreme moral test. He calls it suicidal empathy — an irrational form of altruism that hijacks our moral judgement. The result is a society that protects criminals over their victims, privileges illegal migrants over citizens, condemns self-defense as toxic, and lets feelings outrank facts. Aimed at the wrong target, in the wrong dose, empathy does not save a civilization. It dismantles one.

What Gad is doing aligns with what we are doing here at MCPP, where we run programs that teach young Mississippians about American exceptionalism and the moral case for the free market. Our illustrated children’s book, What Makes America Special, aims to teach seven- to ten-year-olds truths that will protect them from the woke mind virus in later life.

As Mississippi’s economy flourishes, it is increasingly clear that our state has led the way on free-market reform. Perhaps now we need to lead the way on an even more important mission: the recovery of the American mind — and the defeat of divisive, “woke” ideology.

Something remarkable has happened here in Mississippi. The state that for most of the last century sat at the bottom of nearly every American economic table has, quietly, pulled ahead of the United Kingdom in GDP per capita. Last week, Governor Tate Reeves highlighted the fact on X in his characteristically Southern style — and the tweet went viral.

It is a moment worth pausing over. What Mississippi has achieved over the past five years is not an accident or down to luck. It is the product of a deliberate, sustained program of free-market reform that few governments successfully deliver.

I first noticed that Mississippi was overtaking Britain in output per person back in 2023, and wrote about it for both The Atlantic and The Sunday Times. The reaction from British commentators then was a familiar scramble for excuses — purchasing power parity adjustments, Ukraine, Covid — anything, in fact, other than the policy choices Britain itself had been making for thirty years.

Now the claim is no longer disputed. A new report from the Institute of Economic Affairs last week asked British voters to guess where the UK would rank among America’s fifty states on GDP per capita. On average, they placed their country seventh. In reality, the UK ranks fifty-first — dead last, below every single U.S. state, including Mississippi. More than a quarter of respondents said they felt “shocked” when shown the truth. Alas, facts do not care about British feelings.

I am glad Governor Reeves has put the spotlight on this again. But to me the more interesting question is not how far Britain has fallen. It is how far Mississippi has climbed.

For most of the last hundred years, the Magnolia State always seemed to be last. Our per capita income was the lowest in the Union. Serious investment passed us by. But recent years have seen a decisive shift.

In 2021, Mississippi passed meaningful labor market reform, making it easier for people to work, train, and switch careers. In 2022, we replaced an old tax code with flat tax reform — a clear signal that Mississippi had stopped apologising for letting people keep more of what they earn.

Year after year, we have kept our energy among the most affordable in the country — a quiet advantage that every family and every employer benefits from. As other parts of the world that embraced aggressive renewable energy policies grapple with rising costs, Mississippi’s more measured approach is looking increasingly wise.

In 2024, we passed education funding reform that finally lets the money follow the child, putting more of it into the classroom. In 2025, we took the historic step of passing legislation to eliminate the state income tax altogether — a policy that only a few years earlier had been dismissed as impossible. And in 2026, we have begun cutting through the thicket of red tape that has held back our healthcare sector for too long.

No single one of these reforms was enough by itself to turn the state around. But together, this package of free-market reforms is enough to lift the trajectory of an entire state. And these reforms compound. Labor market liberalisation makes tax reform more potent. Lower taxes make affordable energy more valuable. Better schools raise the human capital on which all of it depends. This is what a real politics of growth looks like — not a single heroic leap, but a steady accumulation of practical wins, year after year.

This is why our numbers have moved. It is why they will keep moving.

If you want to know why Britain is floundering, imagine what Mississippi might look like if we had had Bernie Sanders in charge for the past twenty years. Taxes too high. Regulation intrusive. Immigration out of control. Energy costs sky-high. Britain has been run by a succession of Bernies, and it has been a disaster.

Mississippi shows the alternative. The policies that lifted this state from the bottom of the American table are not secret. They are practical, proven, and available to any government willing to pursue them with the courage and patience they require.

The world is starting to notice Mississippi’s success. So should we.

A recent JL Partners poll captures a shift in perception: 36 percent of Americans now expect the South to lead economic growth over the next decade - far ahead of the West Coast (23 percent), Northeast (21 percent), and Midwest (19 percent).

This is quite a transformation. For as long as anyone can remember, the South seemed to be a by word for backwardness.

Since the late nineteenth century, American commerce and industry centered on the traditional business hubs of New York, Chicago, and California. Each successive wave of innovation - automobile manufacturing and aerospace, chemicals and consumer goods, financial services and digital startups - seemed to happen outside the South.

Starting in the 1980s an initial wave of ‘Sun belt’ states, like Texas, Georgia, Florida and North Carolina, began to prosper. But what you might call the ‘core’ southern states, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, Tennessee and South Carolina, remain resolutely stuck in the slow lane. Until now.

Over the past decade, economic growth in the South has exceeded the national average, and in states like Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee, Arkansas, and South Carolina, significantly so. Real GDP in 2024 rose 4.2% in Mississippi and South Carolina, 3.8% in Alabama and Arkansas, and 3.0% in Tennessee, surpassing the national rate of 2.8%.

Manufacturing jobs might have disappeared in the Rust Belt, but many of those jobs went South, not to China. U.S. industrial output has roughly doubled since the Reagan era, and much of that expansion happened in states like Alabama which has added over 50,000 auto jobs since 2000 while Michigan lost them.

Combined, Alabama and Mississippi now produce more vehicles annually than Italy or the United Kingdom.

The South is not just a manufacturing powerhouse - it’s rapidly emerging as a major financial service center. Think “Y’all Street” rather than Wall Street. Cities like Charlotte, Dallas, Miami, and even Nashville have become financial hubs in ways that once seemed unimaginable. This shift is so pronounced that JPMorgan Chase now employs more people in Texas (around 31,000) than in New York.

So strong has southern growth been that between 2020 and 2024, 78 percent of all US jobs added to the economy have been located in the South.

The population of the South has increased by seven million since 2020.

If anything, this shift in population to the South seems to be accelerating. According to the 2026 HireAHelper Moving Migration Report, for every 10,000 residents, in 2025 South Carolina gained 79 more people, Tennessee 47, Alabama 36 and Mississippi 18. New York, by contrast, lost 28, California lost 25 and Washington state lost 10.

Even as America’s college-age population shrinks due to lower birth rates, Southeastern Conference (SEC) universities are bucking the trend with rising applications, especially from out-of-state Northeastern students. Between 2014 and 2023, SEC schools saw a 91 percent surge in undergraduates from out of state. These students aren’t just chasing sunshine and football; many seek a campus culture that is the antithesis of northeastern or Westcoast woke.

Unsurprisingly, the JL Partners survey found young graduates particularly bullish on the South’s prospects, with nearly four in ten naming it the region most likely to grow fastest in the coming decade.

What explains this southern success? Southern states are not just more friendly. They are business friendly.

Taxes tend to be lower. Some southern states have no income tax (such as Texas, Florida, Tennessee), or like Mississippi and South Carolina, are on the road to income tax elimination. State income taxes are higher elsewhere, with Washington state, for example, about to introduce an income-tax for the first time.

Southern states tend to have less red tape. South Carolina recently repealed a lot of the so-called Certificate of Need red tape that held back the healthcare economy. Contrast that to California, now one of the most stringent regulatory environments in the U.S with onerous compliance requirements of companies for example on climate disclosure and environmental standards.

Southern states have more flexible labor laws, and most are right-to-work states, meaning workers cannot be required to join unions. Southern states, like Mississippi, have begun to remove restrictive occupational licensing rules, too, making it easier for people to find work.

The South has significantly lower electricity costs on average largely because the South never really took the Biden era inducements to take up renewable energy. Ironically, given that the sun belt is where the sunshine is, the South avoids prescriptive renewable mandates, while making practical use of solar power. In contrast, the Northeast and California have stringent renewable mandates and face higher prices as a consequence.

The secret of America’s success is having fifty different states trying out different policy solutions side by side. The southern states seem to have found a winning formula.

Douglas Carswell is the President & CEO of the Mississippi Center for Public Policy. He was previously a Member of the British Parliament.

“What’s all this, then?” - British police arresting parents

Of course, not all those arrested are sent to prison. But plenty are. Lucy Connolly received a 31-month jail sentence after posting online, including a call for “mass deportation now.”

Lucy Connolly and others have received “exemplary” sentences - in other words, instead of the British courts dispensing justice dispassionately, they have handed down arbitrary sentences designed to make an example of people, as one might expect in a third-world country.

For most people arrested in these cases, the process itself - months of uncertainty, reputational damage, family stress and the inability to earn a living - is intended to be the punishment. Again, this is redolent of what you might find in a third world country, rather than the home of Magna Carta.

Is Britain today still a free country? Twenty or thirty years ago that would have been a ridiculous question. Today, it really isn’t. Free countries don’t behave this way.

England, the country that gave the world common law no longer applies the law equally to all. Indeed, there have been cases of individuals receiving longer prison sentences for things they said online than some of those convicted in child grooming gang cases.

Only last week, Luke Yarwood was sent to jail for one and a half years for what he said online. That same week, Demiesh Williams, who literally beat a man to death in a supermarket queue, was sent to jail for three years. This is not what happens in a civilized Western society.

Why should any of this matter to Americans? Because Britain is a bleak warning of what can happen to a formerly free society.

Britain’s descent into anarcho-tyranny - where authorities are lax with serial offenders yet draconian toward those who strive to live law-abiding lives – has happened incredibly quickly.

To understand why the British state has turned against its own people, consider what occurred just last week on the other side of the world in Australia.

During a Hanukkah celebration on Bondi Beach, two Pakistani men - one an immigrant to Australia, the other his son - massacred 16 people for being Jewish.

Now reflect for a moment on how the Australian authorities responded.

Did the Aussie government announce that they’d be reviewing how such fanatics were allowed into the country? I didn’t hear it. Did the Canberra government question how it could be that a man born and raised in Australia might live in such a parallel culture inside Australia that he was willing to shoot children on a beach? No sign yet.

What I did hear is the Aussie Prime Minister insisting that diversity is Australia’s strength, followed by plans to further restrict gun ownership and curb free speech.

Rather than curb Muslim immigration to Australia, the lanyard wearing classes in Australia prefer to limit Australians’ access to firearms.

The stated aim of the new free speech restrictions, apparently, is to prevent mobs chanting antisemitic messages - as occurred in the aftermath of Hamas’ October 7 atrocity near Sydney Opera House.

You don’t need powers of prophecy to grasp that Australia’s new free speech restrictions will end up being used to lock up those that complain about Muslim migration more than they’ll ever be used to tackle extremist Islam.

Instead of acknowledging and facing up to the problem of radical Islam, the authorities in Australia are trying to make it as much about tackling “hate” and “Islamophobia”.

Now do you begin to see why the authorities over in Britain have turned Soviet on their own citizens?

The British public now sees the consequences of mass immigration from the third world – and they don’t like what they see. In the five years since I left Britain, something like 4 million immigrants from third-world countries have arrived gross.

Before Elon Musk bought X, the British authorities were able to rely on algorithms to try to suppress all sorts of dissent.

Now they can’t. Instead, they appear to be intentionally suppressing dissent through targeted prosecutions and prison sentences. The situation in Britain really is that grim now.

How should America respond as Britain, and other Western states, descend into autocracy? What might the United States do to try to ensure that what is happening in formerly free countries is just a spasm, and not a collapse?

1. Cherish the First Amendment: I know it’s fashionable to claim that America has lost its way. Trust me, thanks to the Founders, the United States is looking far better than anywhere else on earth right now. Value the Constitution, defend liberty ever more aggressively at home and never abandon the principle that in America you should be free to say things even if others find them offensive or foolish.

1. Stop treating allies as America’s equals if they mistreat their own citizens: If Britain, Australia, and others start behaving like banana republics, treat their governments accordingly. Why should the United States provide defense subsidies and a diplomatic premium to a regime that fall so far short of Western standards of behavior?

1. End mass immigration: Control your country’s borders, or your government will end up trying to control you to prevent complaints about the consequences of uncontrolled borders.

1. Support dissidents: During the Cold War, Ronald Reagan made it clear that the United States stood with Soviet dissidents like Natan Sharansky. As Sharansky explained in his brilliant book, that moral support was crucial in the fight against tyranny. The US State Department should proactively identify and assist dissidents in Britain and elsewhere, in some cases offering asylum to those persecuted by their own governments.

A year or so ago, I facetiously suggested that if things got really bad in Britain, Donald Trump could apply the ultimate pressure by offering every Brit under the age of 30 the right to work in America. If he did so, there would be a mass exodus and the government in London would collapse. That idea no longer seems quite so absurd.

I love the USA

Most nations have a national day, and like America’s July 4^th, they’re often about celebrating independence.

France’s Bastille Day marks the occasion a mob stormed the Bastille (and committed all manner of atrocities). Japan’s marks the ascension of an emperor. England, Ireland and Scotland have national days for their patron saints – with the Scots sneaking in an extra national occasion, Burns Night, when they raise a glass or three to the poet Robert Burns.

Yet, I can’t think of any country besides America that dedicates a national holiday purely to gratitude. That, to me, says something beautiful about America.

Thanksgiving may have started as an English-style harvest festival - when getting the crops in before winter was literally a matter of life and death - but it has become something uniquely American: a day to gather with loved ones, count our blessings, and say thank you for the privilege of living in this country. As a relatively recent arrival, I find the tradition uplifting.

Here are just a few of the things I found myself especially grateful for this year:

1. For America itself
   Every single day feels like Thanksgiving to me. I’ve now been in this country for 1,794 days, and I still don’t think I’ve woken up once without a quiet “Wow! I’m in America!”

2. For the astonishing welcome my family has received
   Five years ago this week, I was starting to pack up in London, about to move to Mississippi - with my family to follow later. I arrived with only two suitcases, but we’ve been so warmly embraced since stepping off the ‘plane. People here didn’t just tolerate us - they opened their arms, their homes, and their hearts.

3. For Mississippi
   This state is on the rise. In the five years I’ve lived here, there’s been more economic growth than in the previous fifteen combined. Drive around nearly any corner of Mississippi today and you’ll see good things happening.

4. For the Mississippi Center for Public Policy
   We’re a small team, but we’re happy warriors who punch way above our weight. Team MCPP has helped deliver a string of major free-market reforms that are making life better for families across the state. I’m proud to be part of it.

5. For American football
   I regret the decades I spent not knowing this sport existed. From high school Friday night lights to college games to even the NFL, no other game I know is as exhilarating. No other game I know can turn in an instant.

6. For you
   If you’re reading this, you’re one of the more than 80,000 people who subscribe to our newsletter. None of the wins we celebrate would be possible without your encouragement, your ideas, and your support. So, from the bottom of my heart: thank you. You make everything we do worthwhile.

Happy Thanksgiving, from a very grateful immigrant in a very grateful state in the greatest republic on earth.

A generation or two ago, what it meant to be conservative tended to be defined by a small circle of influential thinkers. Figures like William F. Buckley Jr. and Russell Kirk articulated what it meant to be one of us.

Today, of course, it’s more complicated. One of the consequences of the digital revolution we’re living through is that anyone can define (and brand) themselves however they like.

If a small but loud group of groypers - whose ideas are as ugly as the green frog meme they inexplicably rally around - insist on calling themselves “conservative,” there’s a real risk that they end up shaping, in the public mind, what conservatism actually means.

Things aren’t helped by the fact that as in the early days of the printing press, when pamphleteers produced all sorts of scurrilous tracts, the digital revolution is still in the phase of rewarding all sorts of attention-seeking drivel.

Look at the mess that the left has got into in recent years, as it has been forced into taking indefensible positions. From denying basic biology (no, a man cannot become a woman) to calls for defunding the police, progressive politics in both America and Britain has increasingly been shaped by its most extreme and unrepresentative activists.

The groypers might turn out to be little more than a passing meme, but here’s why I worry about the long term direction of politics in America and the wider West.

The world we live in is the product of the idea that all people are created equal.

That’s not to say that we are all the same. But it does mean that we are all of equal worth, and that we should be treated equally under the law.

When Thomas Jefferson penned the Declaration of Independence, the principle that “all men are created equal” was a radical, revolutionary idea.

By the time Martin Luther King Jr. dreamed of a color-blind society where people are judged “not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character,” that same principle had become the established moral orthodoxy.

Somewhere between Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1963 speech and the present day, the political left abandoned the ideal of equality before the law. In its place emerged a new framework: one that measures a person’s intrinsic worth by their position in an ever-shifting hierarchy of victimhood. Under this neo-Marxist lens, immutable characteristics - race, sex, sexuality - now determine moral value, assigning guilt to the so-called oppressors and virtue to the so-called oppressed.

This is what spawned leftwing ‘woke’ ideology. Critical race theory, critical gender theory, and related doctrines took root in academia, then seeped into corporate HR departments, government bureaucracies, and the public sector at large.

That is why, for years, American university admissions offices and major corporations have openly discriminated on the basis of race - often under the banner of “diversity” or “equity.” It is also why, in my native England - the country that gave the world the ideal of common law (a law that is genuinely common to all) - the legal system now explicitly grants preferential treatment to individuals with certain “protected characteristics.”

What if we are now witnessing the emergence of a mirror-image, right-wing “woke” ideology? What if voices on the right begin to say, “Very well - if we are no longer permitted to believe that all are created equal, then let’s not”?

The progressive left has spent decades attributing unequal outcomes to systemic oppression. What happens when the right stops arguing about the fairness of the system altogether and instead attributes those same unequal outcomes to inherent differences?

I fear the left may one day soon come to regret ever abandoning the principle that all of us, without exception, are created equal.

A few years ago, Joseph Henrich’s book The WEIRDest People in the World made a compelling case that Western exceptionalism is real. Westerners, he argued, are genuinely psychological outliers: markedly more individualistic, analytical, guilt-oriented, and trusting of strangers than the rest of humanity. These peculiar traits, Henrich contends, are what turned the West into the primary engine of modern science, innovation, and prosperity.

I happen to agree with much of Henrich’s analysis, although I am not convinced of his explanation.

The danger is that if the universalist view of human nature is abandoned - if the left’s hierarchy of victimhood is answered by a right-wing hierarchy - much of the traditional conservative narrative collapses with it.

We conservatives must be more ruthless in policing our own boundaries. We cannot flirt with ideas that are as big a threat to conservatism as socialism, and pretend they are our ideas.

The future for Mississippi, where I live, looks bright. In just the past five years, Mississippi has seen more economic growth than in the entire fifteen years before that combined.

My state is now on track to phase out the state income tax entirely, thanks to the tax reforms that the Mississippi Center for Public Policy and others, have fought for. This will allow families to keep more of what they earn. Mississippi has attracted a surge of new investment, and for the first time in years, our workforce participation rate is finally heading in the right direction.

Zoom out, and the picture gets even better. Contrary to the endless gloom from the pundits, the American economy has consistently outperformed expectations for decades. Since the late 1990s, the U.S. has delivered strong, steady growth that few forecasters saw coming.

But there is one dark cloud on all our horizons that we cannot forever ignore; US national debt.

As of today, US national debt stands at $38 trillion (with a capital T).

To grasp how enormous a single trillion really is, try this:

• One million seconds ago was just last week, right before Halloween.

• One billion seconds ago was early 1994, when Clinton was president and the internet was dial-up.

• One trillion seconds ago was roughly 30,000 BC, deep in the Stone Age, when humans were still chasing mammoths.

Now here’s the gut-punch: that $38 trillion mountain of debt has roughly doubled in just the past ten years.

Costly foreign wars, mega bailouts, COVID giveaways and all those federal entitlement programs LBJ said would “end poverty”, eventually add up. (Incidentally, living standards for America’s poorest citizens are light-years higher than when those programs launched in the 1960s (indoor plumbing, air conditioning, smartphones, modern medicine), but the number of people dependent on government assistance is larger than ever).

Rather than pay for all that using tax receipts, the US government has borrowed, issuing IOUs. Today we spend more money servicing all those IOUs than we do on defense.

As my fellow Brit, the historian Niall Ferguson, likes to point out, any great power that spends more on debt servicing than on defense risks ceasing to be a great power. That was true of the Romans and the British, the Habsburgs and the Dutch.

What must America do to avoid a similar fate?

When President Trump was first elected, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy launched the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) with an ambitious target: to reduce annual federal spending by $2 trillion.

Because mandatory entitlement programs - Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid - remained largely untouched, DOGE hasn’t come close to achieving that yet. The federal deficit has barely budged.

Where, one might ask, are all those Tea Party types that railed against federal overspending ten years ago as the debt to GDP ratio went from 90 percent in 2010 to 125 percent today?

If the US cannot rein in the growth of the debt, the only other way to avoid going the way of the Romans is to try to make the GDP part of the equation rise faster. In other words, to try to grow our way out of the debt.

In order to stabilize debt-to-GDP at the current 125 percent of GDP, America will need to achieve real GDP growth of about 4 - 5 percent for the next 10 to 20 years. With the advent of AI and robotics, as Elon Musk suggests, it could be done.

Put it another way; without an AI / Robotics induced growth surge, US debt will hit 150 – 170 percent of GDP by 2050. Mamdani-economics would then become the least of our worries, as inflation and tax rises became inevitable whoever held office.

The older I get, the more I think that there are two fundamental things that the federal government needs to get under control: mass immigration and the deficit. Do that, and states like Mississippi have a bright future. Don’t, and all the good that we might do will only matter at the margins.

Mahmood, like Noem, faces significant opposition from progressive judges to deporting illegal immigrants. In the UK, the courts recently blocked a migrant from being deported under the new “one in, one out” agreement with France, marking another instance of judicial obstruction of efforts to control Britain’s borders.

Although the problem is less acute than in the UK, Noem must also contend with activist judges, who have issued numerous injunctions and stays to thwart deportations.

But at least she can count on ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement), a federal agency responsible for detecting and removing illegal immigrants, which by most measures seems to be far more effective than the equivalent British body.

ICE’s budget is being increased substantially over the next few years, allowing the agency to hire thousands of new officers and detain more than 100,000 people at a time, with the goal of a million deportations a year. Deportation numbers have risen strongly under President Trump, while Britain has struggled to achieve a few thousand enforced removals a year.

And ICE has other support, too. Via an ICE partnership programme, state and local law enforcement can serve alongside the agency to tackle illegal immigrants, while receiving the relevant training. This means that ICE, even before hiring thousands of new officers, can rely on an army of sheriffs, local police departments and state governors across the country, amplifying the efforts of the federal authorities.

Republican state governors have entered a form of competition on who can be seen to be most supportive of efforts to control the borders. In Florida, Ron DeSantis used emergency powers to seize the land on which to build “Alligator Alcatraz”, one of America’s most eye-catching new immigrant detention facilities. He also signed an order instructing Florida’s law enforcement to cooperate with ICE. In Indiana, the “Speedway Slammer”, another partnership between ICE and a state government, received its first migrants this week. The likes of Texas are fast-tracking laws to require cooperation with ICE statewide.

Some state and local leaders have been actively hostile, including California governor Gavin Newsom, Chicago mayor Brandon Johnson, Boston’s Michelle Wu and Los Angeles’s mayor Karen Bass. So-called “sanctuary cities” ban their local police from cooperating with ICE agents.

But others have been bending to political reality and outgoing New York mayor Eric Adams is a case in point. His volte-face on illegal migration, and his recent moves to support federal deportation efforts, spoke to public disquiet about the vast numbers who came in under the Biden administration even in Democrat cities.

Indeed, even in notionally progressive leaning parts of the country, state and local government officials can end up doing surprisingly conservative things. I say surprising, because we Britons are so inured to the idea that local government always leans Left, even when nominally run by Right-wingers. The striking thing about America is how often it does the opposite.

Twenty years ago, Daniel Hannan and I agitated (with some success) to make localism a core part of the British Conservative Party’s platform. The idea that we might seek to push power outward and downwards away from remote institutions was partly a way of preparing the ground to extricate Britain from the European Union. Leaving the European Union was localism.

Even back then, we could see a growing mood of anti-politics anger, and we wanted to channel it towards Euroscepticism. We feared distrust of national politicians might do the opposite (as it had in Italy, where I spent much of my 20s) and strengthen the case for giving more control to Brussels.

In office from 2010, the Conservatives replaced appointed police authorities with directly-elected police and crime commissioners (sadly they never took up our idea of calling them by the Old English name of sheriffs). Tory ministers certainly paid lots of lip service to localism.

But overall, British localism has been a failure. Yes, we might have elected police commissioners, but they lack the power to take action that truly accords with what voters want, including cracking down on illegal immigration. The guidelines set by national bodies like the College of Policing, meanwhile, seem to make policing less locally accountable than ever before. Worse, those elected to represent local people often appear to end up parroting instead whatever their chief constable tells them.

Creating another level of elected officialdom has not led to more conservative outcomes. During Covid, for example, rather than stand up for local liberties, the devolved administrations in Scotland and Wales demanded ever more draconian lockdowns.

It is inconceivable that, if local councils today had responsibility for detecting and detaining illegal immigrants, they would do so. Many of them would be more likely to obstruct the Home Office. And in the rare examples where local authorities have sought to stand up for residents (such as in Epping, over the presence of a hotel full of asylum seekers), their efforts have been thwarted.

The architecture of British “localism” is not making leaders politically accountable, incentivised to deliver what local people want. But the precise opposite. It is little wonder that public fury is building.

And a key factor in the divergence of the two countries is energy – the oxygen of any economy.

Since 2005, US primary energy production has increased by around 50 per cent, energy consumption has remained relatively stable, and although energy prices have risen, they have not done so by anything like the same extent as in the UK. The US, once the world’s largest energy importer, became a net energy exporter in 2019.

Britain was once a net energy exporter, too. Since 2004, however, UK primary energy production has fallen, while a recent report found that British industry was paying the highest electricity prices in the developed world.

Why does the US manage to produce cheaper energy? It’s not as though the laws of physics are any different on the other side of the Atlantic. Nor has there been any shortage of US leaders determined to adopt the kind of renewable energy targets that have done so much to disrupt UK energy markets.

Federal agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission set national standards, while Congress has passed a series of laws to determine the overall national approach. Joe Biden’s dubiously-labelled Inflation Reduction Actunleashed vast amounts of federal subsidies to incentivise “clean” energy production.

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But states retain significant control over their own energy mix and there is no single “net zero” law that must be followed across the nation. This has allowed, in the words of Louis Brandeis, a Supreme Court justice in the early 20th century, the US states to act as laboratories, trying out different approaches. It has also meant that the US has not followed Europe and the UK, locking itself into a single, economically calamitous energy policy.

According to the Clean Energy States Alliance, about half of all statesare pursuing some sort of net zero or “clean” energy goal, mostly in the Northeast or on the West Coast. The other half, especially some Southern states but also the likes of Pennsylvania, have chosen a different approach, tending to prioritise energy production over emissions reductions.

The effects of this difference in approach are stark. Many of the states that are committed to phasing out oil, gas and coal are discovering that the so-called energy “transition” is not as easy as it’s been made out. Like Britain, some have ended up having to rely on imports to fulfil their energy needs. They are not importing energy from hostile foreign states, however. They are getting it from the likes of Pennsylvania, which was by far the top exporter of electricity to other states in 2023.

Differences in policy have, unsurprisingly, begun to show up in prices. According to official figures, in July, the average price of electricity for households was 26.18 cents per kilowatt hour (KWh) in New York (which is rushing to approve new renewable projects), 30.07c per KWh in Massachusetts (a net zero by 2050 state) and 32.58c per KWh in California (one of the nation’s so-called leaders in green policy). It was only 19.52c per KWh in Pennsylvania (rich in natural gas), 15.12c in Florida (which has been repealing renewable goals), and 13.46c in my home state of Mississippi (which is prioritising overall energy security to drive growth).

This cannot help but to influence decisions on where people want to live and where corporations want to do business. Yes, parts of the United States have suffered from deindustrialisation. But those jobs and factories have not necessarily moved to Mexico or China. Many have shifted South. In July, average industrial electricity prices were 18.06c per KWh in New England, but only 6.60c per KWh in Texas and 7.47c in Mississippi.

It is not just traditional heavy industry that stands to lose when energy costs are inflated in the pursuit of emissions targets. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is extremely energy-intensive, and it is hard to see how places without affordable energy will be able to build the AI infrastructure needed to remain competitive. In the US, Arizona has emerged as a leading location for data centres, and for good reason. Even the Left-wing media admits that the industry is booming in the state thanks to lower energy costs.

This doesn’t mean that renewables are entirely inappropriate forms of energy everywhere. A state like Texas, for example, has become among the nation’s leading producers of solar and wind, although questions remain about how much is sustainable without taxpayer subsidy. But it has done so without sacrificing other, more reliable forms of energy. Texas remains America’s largest oil-producing state.

To quote Justice Brandeis fully, he spoke about states being laboratories that would allow ideas to be tested “without risk to the rest of the country”. When it comes to energy policy, we can see precisely this.

America allows the iron-clad certainties of the renewable lobby to be tested by reality. Indeed, the country works so well because it has been built on the assumption that we cannot know for certain what approach will prove best. America is, to borrow the ungainly phrase coined by Friedrich Hayek, built on “evolutionary rationalism”, the idea that the right answer emerges through trial and error.

Europe and Britain have worse policies on energy and much else because they are governed by what Hayek called constructive rationalism, the assumption that we can build the best by deliberate design. Perhaps if they are to prosper, they need not only an American style of energy policy. They need a system of governance that allows trial and error. The alternative will be perpetual mistakes.

How different things are on the other side of the Atlantic.

In the US, the overall tax burden has held relatively steady at just under the level it was in Britain when Margaret Thatcher left office. Some might attribute this to differences in leadership. And it’s true that the UK has tragically failed to produce any leader like Thatcher in the 35 years since she left office.

The country has been led by a succession of prime ministers who have believed that higher taxation is harmless, inevitable, or politically popular. The results, in anaemic economic growth, in stagnant or even declining productivity, and in an increasingly bitter debate about redistributing the proceeds of other people’s work, are now plain to see.

Yet, America hasn’t exactly been led by a string of Thatcher-like figures over the past three decades, either. Republican efforts to bear down on taxation at the federal level have repeatedly been countered by attempts under Democrats to do the precise opposite. Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill might well have baked in tax cuts for millions of Americans, but the Left has already started its work to reverse them.

Maybe Britain has a higher tax burden than America because of its enormous expenditure on the NHS and welfare. But both Britain and the US have been overspending for decades, with neither running a surplus at the national level since 2001. The UK has run deficits to fund the NHS, bank bailouts, stimulus packages, Covid-recovery schemes, and welfare benefits. However, the US has also overspent, accumulating even larger deficits relative to GDP, thanks to its own profligate spending on so-called entitlements and taxpayer-subsidised healthcare. If excessive public spending were the sole driver of tax burdens, the US might well face an even heavier tax load than Britain.

So what accounts for the difference?

It might seem like a technical matter, but America has a lower overall tax burden in part because of the way taxes are collected. While the federal government raises the majority of tax revenues, a very high proportion is still raised by state and local governments, all operating under a patchwork of different and competing tax systems.

To the European bureaucratic mind, this must look like an unholy mess, a license for inefficiency that ought to be rationalised under a single “coherent” system. The EU has spent decades trying to force European countries to standardise their taxation systems, particularly for VAT, while the UK has one of the most centralised tax systems in the world, with an estimated 95 per cent of tax revenue collected by central government.

But the bureaucrat’s nightmare is the taxpayer’s dream. That patchwork of different rates and systems helps ensure that the tax system is not merely seen as a means of raising however much money politicians decide the state requires. It turns taxation into a matter of political and economic choice.

So while states like New York and Illinois tax as though they had British politicians in charge, others have taken a dramatically different approach. Wisconsin has slashed both income and property taxes, transforming itself from one of the highest-taxed states a decade ago to one of the lowest. Many other states, including North Carolina, Georgia, Missouri, Utah, and Idaho, have also reduced their tax burdens in recent years.

Iowa and Louisiana have recently adopted flat income tax systems. My home state of Mississippi passed a flat income tax in 2022 and, this year, enacted legislation to phase out the state income tax entirely. Meanwhile, Texas, Tennessee, and Florida – three of the fastest-growing southern states – have no state income tax for individuals at all.

It is true that some of these states levy taxation via other means. Florida, for example, relies more heavily on sales taxes, taking advantage of its position as a major tourism destination.

But people living in high-tax states such as New York or Illinois only have to look across state borders to see that an alternative is possible. You can choose to live in a state with higher taxes, but you are likely to pay a price in slower economic growth and lower economic dynamism. The evidence of the past few years is that huge numbers of Americans do not want to make that sacrifice, with millions fleeing higher-tax areas in the North East for lower-tax states, often in the South.

This creates a powerful feedback loop that punishes high-tax politicians. Zohran Mamdani might well want to soak the rich and abolish billionaires in New York City. But he is likely to face a rapid political reckoning when they abandon Manhattan for the likes of Florida or Texas, taking their tax payments with them. The result is that politicians like Mamdani are the exception. State and local leaders more often vie for office promising to make their states more competitive by reducing tax rates. At the municipal level, pressure to keep property and other taxes low can be even more intense.

With different states competing, Americans are also able to see which tax reforms work best. A flat tax system, which ensures all voters have skin in the game, is rightly recognised as a crucial step toward eventual tax elimination. Learning from Kansas’s overly ambitious attempt to move towards abolishing the income tax, states like Mississippi have embraced tax triggers to facilitate a gradual phase-out of taxes.

Ever since David Cameron’s Conservatives made the disastrous decision to ditch tax cuts and embrace “sharing the proceeds of growth”, Britain has not had a lower tax option on offer. Instead of politicians competing to reduce the cost of government, for the past 15 years the UK has had the ridiculously misnamed Office for Budget Responsibility overseeing a succession of ever more irresponsible budgets, all the while implying that tax rates can’t go down.

It took Margaret Thatcher years of budgetary discipline to save Britain from the precarious financial position we were in 50 years ago. It then took a decade of careful stewardship to reduce the tax burden to the level it needs to be for society to prosper.

The time for Britain to look across the Atlantic and see how tax cuts might be done is rapidly approaching. But it is likely to take more than just a change of political leadership or reductions to unaffordable welfare spending to make that happen.

Ever since Milton Friedman in the 1950s, US conservatives have talked about giving parents the power to allocate their child’s share of taxpayer education-funding to a school of their choice – even a private school. For decades, no one did much about it.

Ronald Reagan, as president, was happy to leave in place the newly-created federal Department of Education. Instead of extending parent power, President George W Bush increased the role of the federal government with his No Child Left Behind initiative.

Conservative reformers thought in terms of improving education provision and outcomes, rather than parent power. That meant pushing for more publicly-funded, but independently-operated charter schools. More than three million American children are now in such schools.

In some states, like my own Mississippi, conservatives focused on how children were taught, insisting on the use of phonics for reading. As an antidote to decades of progressive “whole language” teaching, it worked, with improvements in literacy.

But as for school choice, little actually happened. Then Covid hit.

One of the unforeseen effects of shutting down schools was to force parents to think about the way their children were being taught. Deference to teachers and the local school board evaporated. Suddenly, millions of families that had never bought into the idea of school choice wanted to be in the driver’s seat.

Shortly afterwards, Arizona, which already had a limited school-choice programme, and West Virginia decided to give families control over their child’s share of state education funds. Families could request to have the money paid into a dedicated Education Savings Account for their child and then allocate the funds to approved providers.

Despite teething problems and legal challenges, the programmes have proved popular, especially with low-income households. Suddenly, they had alternatives to a failing local school and could make choices that previously only middle-class Americans could afford.

Now more than a dozen states have followed suit, with some, such as Louisiana and Texas, only recently passing the legislation.

As you would expect in America, each state does it differently. Many school-choice states have opted for the Education Savings Account approach, giving families that want one a dedicated account into which their education funds are paid. Others, such as Oklahoma and Idaho, have achieved something similar by giving families a tax credit. Five years on from the pandemic, millions of American children now have access to school choice.

It is striking how many school-choice states are Southern – Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Louisiana, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas.

But the effect is likely to be enormous. In a state like Arkansas, ordinary families can now apply to have about $6,000 a year to spend on their child’s education. According to the Private School Review, the average annual private school tuition fee in the state is around $10,000. We could therefore well start to see many families that could never previously afford it go private.

That may well prompt public schools to improve their offerings. If families start to switch, public schools, for the first time in years, might have to raise their game. Some local education officials might even start to run things for the benefit of students, rather than for those on the school superintendent’s payroll or for the powerful teaching unions.

Interestingly, there is evidence that parents are embracing school choice not necessarily because of concern about standards, but because of culture. There is an appetite to change the content of the education that children receive, with millions of Americans fed up with “woke” ideology in the classrooms. Rather than making futile complaints to the local school board, parents can now switch schools. The Classic Learning Test is also already emerging as a credible alternative to the “woke” ACT as a gold standard of testing in US education.

Parent power, in other words, is starting to steer American education in a conservative direction in all sorts of ways.

Like their cousins on the other side of the Atlantic, British conservatives, too, thought of education reform in terms of changing outcomes and provision. As a Member of Parliament when David Cameron was leader of the opposition, I vividly remember trying to persuade Michael Gove, his shadow education secretary, of the need to give parents control over their child’s share of education spending.

Instead, in government, the Conservatives preferred to build upon the Blair government’s reforms, expanding the number of autonomous academies. Like so many American conservatives pre-Covid, ministers focused on provision, creating a British version of American charter schools, the so-called free schools. They were more excited about ensuring phonics were used in the classroom than they were about the idea of giving parents control.

Of course, without parent power to sustain the change, once Gove and his colleagues left office, things fizzled out. Ministers who followed him, such as Nicky Morgan, appeared to be bamboozled by an education “Blob”, allergic to rigour. Then, of course, came a Labour government. In a single year, they have started to reverse many of the improvements Gove and others spent years advancing.

If only, like America, British conservatives had realised that the key to improved outcomes in education is not ministerial fiat, but families having control over their share of the money. And school choice has the added benefit of challenging the dominant progressive culture in the education system. It could well be making America inherently more conservative.

Twenty years ago, the giant southern states of Texas and Florida were swing states. George Bush only won the latter by a hair’s breadth. Today? Texas and Florida are solidly conservative. Hispanic voters in those states, once seen as Left-leaning, have moved to the Right. One of the factors behind this is a desire among parents to access better educational opportunities for their children via school choice.

When Margaret Thatcher gave working people the right to buy their council house in the 1980s, she was not just making them middle class. She was creating a new constituency of support. School choice in states like Florida is starting to do something remarkably similar. As Hispanic voters benefit from school choice, they have started to become a core part of the conservative coalition.

If only British conservatives had done something similar, they and the education system might both be in better shape today. It’s not too late for them to learn the lessons from the school-choice movement sweeping America.

From 2019 to 2023, the Rust Belt lost roughly 60,000 manufacturing jobs, while Texas alone gained almost 50,000. Jobs that disappeared from Pennsylvania, Indiana, and Ohio didn’t necessarily cross oceans – many of them relocated to states like Texas, Georgia, Tennessee, and South Carolina.

The real story of the American Rust Belt is not about cheap foreign competition taking American jobs. It is a story of states with increasingly rigid labour laws losing out to states – often in the South – that have made their labour markets more flexible.

Take Michigan. It has been the leading car manufacturing state since Henry Ford pioneered mass production. But production there has stalled.

It’s not really China that is to blame but Michigan’s ever more prescriptive labour laws, among other domestic factors. Over the past couple of decades, Michigan has adopted a raft of laws governing health and safety, wage payment schedules, and an array of entitlements. A couple of years ago, Michigan repealed so-called right-to-work laws, restoring mandatory union membership in some workplaces.

In contrast, states like Alabama, Texas, Tennessee and my own Mississippi have far more flexible labour markets. Employers can terminate the contracts of employees for almost any reason (or no reason) without notice, and employees can resign at any time. They obviously have to comply with minimum standards set by the federal government, but they don’t, for the most part, embellish upon them.

The result? Auto manufacturing in such states is booming. Michigan might still be number one, but since 2000 the number of auto manufacturing jobs in the state is down by around 40 per cent. In Alabama alone, the number of auto jobs has now surpassed 50,000, up from just a few thousand in 1997.

Despite all the talk of deindustrialisation in America, the US economy overall produces more manufactured goods today than ever before. Industrial output in the US today is approximately twice what it was when Ronald Reagan was in the White House, and three times greater than when Lyndon Johnson was president.

In Britain, however, labour laws over the past two decades have become increasingly restrictive. Instead of freeing employers to make the decisions for their businesses, the onus is on employers to justify letting staff go. Workers have enhanced protections. EU-era working time regulations remain in place and anti-discrimination laws are stringent. Employment tribunals often seem to side with employees. Resolving employment disputes costs employers billions each year.

This is surely one of the reasons industrial output has grown sclerotically over the past two decades. In 2023, UK manufacturing output was $279bn (8 per cent of GDP) compared to $237bn (12 per cent of GDP) in 2003.

Of course, labour markets are important not only for industrial jobs, but for every sort of employment.

Flexible employment laws generally mean more employment – which is partly why America has been so good at creating jobs in the first place. And those jobs seem to have been disproportionately created in states with more flexible labour laws.

Industrial jobs might have moved South in America, but so have many other types of employment. Since 2020, more than 150 financial firms, managing trillions of dollars, have relocated operations from the likes of New York and moved South, notably to Florida and North Carolina. JP Morgan Chase, one of America’s largest banks, now has a larger work force in Texas than in New York state.

Light touch labour laws also mean more jobs that can sustain a higher living standard. American workers are so much more productive that they are able to earn significantly more. By 2021, a British study estimated that a UK worker produced on average £46.92 per hour worked. Their American equivalent generated £58.88, approximately 20 per cent more value.

Since 2010, the productivity of American workers has improved by about 23 per cent. That essentially means for each hour worked, they are generating almost a quarter more. In the UK, by contrast, productivity has risen by less than 10 per cent. In large public sector organisations like the NHS, productivity has actually fallen in recent years.

Britain’s productivity performance over the past two decades has been dire, and all sorts of efforts have been made to address this, from Boris Johnson’s Levelling Up initiative to building high speed rail networks.

If Britain really wanted to boost productivity, a good place to start would be labour market reform. Having a flexible workforce allows firms to quickly adjust staffing to match demand, reducing idle labour and boosting output per worker.

When productivity increases, this also tends to push up wages. British wages were roughly on a par with those in the US 20 years ago. Factoring in lower US taxes, net wages in America may now be 40-50 per cent higher than in Britain.

And while the Left might expect workers to be fleeing states it considers to engage in exploitative labour practices, better living standards are a key reason why the opposite is occurring. States with more flexible markets have been among those enjoying the strongest population growth in recent years, as families leave tightly-regulated areas in the Northeast and Midwest for better opportunities in the South.

Britain desperately needs to learn the lessons of what works in America, and introduce, among other changes, a 90-day “at-will” dismissal period for new hires, allowing termination without cause, modelled on US employment law. Like Mississippi, and other southern states, it needs to make a concerted effort to remove many of the occupational licencing rules that, according to the Social Mobility Commission in 2024, mean some sort of licencing is required for 29 per cent of occupations, impacting almost a quarter of the workforce.

Post-Brexit Britain should stop comparing itself to the European Union, whose labour markets are even more inflexible, and deindustrialisation even more pronounced. Instead, British policy-makers should look to Texas, Tennessee and Mississippi labour reforms if it wants to have an industrial future.

Mississippi and her neighbour Alabama, two states with a combined population of about nine million that have regularly been dismissed as economically “backward”, are now estimated to produce more cars each year than the whole of the UK, with a population of 69 million. Perhaps instead of ignoring their lessons, British politicians should accept the evidence staring them in the face.

In 2008, per capita economic output in the US and UK was roughly comparable. Since, US output per person has surged ahead, and now exceeds the UK’s equivalent figure by nearly 50 per cent. A decade ago, wages in the US and UK were closely aligned. In 2023, full-time annual earnings in the US averaged $80,000 in 2023, significantly higher than the £43,000 UK equivalent.

And Britain is a relative success story when compared to its European peers. Growth in major economies like Germany, France, and Italy has been slower still, highlighting an even starker contrast with the US.

Nobody can deny the painful reality that the US has economically outpaced Europe and the UK over a period of nearly two decades. Perhaps less obvious to those outside the US are the reasons for this success. The United States has not outperformed because of massive federal spending under Joe Biden or Barack Obama’s reforms to Wall Street, both policy areas within the Left’s comfort zone. Its success is deeply rooted in the achievements of a series of largely conservative states.

Unlike the European Union, which often speaks of federalism but operates with a centralised approach, the United States embodies true decentralisation. Powers not explicitly granted to the federal government are held by the states. Understanding this dynamic is crucial to grasping why America is thriving.

Having been a Member of Parliament for 12 years in the UK before moving to America to run a state-based think tank, it came as a shock to discover quite how decentralised the US actually is. States set their own taxes and labour laws. Unlike in Britain, there is no national curriculum in the US. Education policy is largely a matter for each state.

The federal government might set overarching goals for energy policy and enforce national standards, but states still have enormous authority. California might go all in for renewables, but states like Mississippi have largely ignored them.

In America, there is a federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour, but it is up to each state to decide if they want to raise it above that. Some like California and Washington state have raised it to more than $16 an hour. In Britain, the minimum wage is set at about the same level as it is in California, but it is applied everywhere from London to the Isle of Lewes.

Even though states are largely free to set their own policies, at the same time broad regional patterns emerge. New England, the Midwest, and the West Coast often mirror Europe, with higher taxes and more interventionist governments. In contrast, the Mountain States and the South are typically more conservative, favouring lower taxes and limited government involvement.

Guess where much of the growth is?

In recent years, many of America’s fastest-growing states have been found in the South. Consider the snapshot of the first quarter of 2025, a period during which the US economy as a whole struggled, contracting slightly. Not so in many of the Southern powerhouses. South Carolina led the pack, with real GDP growing at 1.7 per cent annualised, followed by Florida, Alabama, Arkansas and North Carolina. Even my home state of Mississippi, often viewed as an economic underperformer, outcompeted all the states usually associated with US prosperity: California, New York, Illinois. This has been a consistent picture since at least the pandemic, and in many cases from well before that. And those US states run like European countries have growth rates closer to Europe, too.

This is, of course, a difficult point for some to accept. Each time I’ve noted that Mississippi’s per capita output has surpassed the UK’s, the reaction online is often visceral, even from otherwise reasoned individuals.

Why? The progressive worldview tends to caricature economically and culturally conservative states – derisively labelled the “Bible Belt” – as backward. Yet states that are supposed to be all about God, Guns and Grits routinely outperform their “progressive” counterparts. This upends Left-wing assumptions about how the world works, which may help explain why many in Europe and the UK have never really delved too deeply into America’s growth story.

America’s economic success demands attention. From increased labour market flexibility to lower taxes, from the school choice revolution sweeping the country to energy and housing policy, the world needs to understand that America is not flourishing because the laws of physics are different over here. America is outperforming Europe and Britain because of better public policy.

Consider this: in London, the average full-time worker earns around $50,000 annually. Meanwhile, at my local Buc-ee’s, a car wash manager (no experience required) can earn $125,000 a year. In the UK, a professional earning over £50,270 faces a 40 per cent income tax rate on any additional money they make, whereas that Buc-ee’s manager pays an effective tax rate of around 22 per cent on a far higher salary. Oh, and before you ask how Buc-ee employees cope without Britain’s socialist healthcare system, a car wash manager could expect the kind of employer-covered private health insurance that only fund managers get in Britain. Nothing illustrates better the way in which the UK risks slipping into middle-income status.

If Europeans want their children and grandchildren to enjoy a higher standard of living, they need to pay attention to some of the policy innovations driving growth in America – and learn from them.

Over the next few days, I will be looking in detail at some of the key policy changes that have made America’s workforce so productive. I will examine the school choice revolution. Having just spearheaded efforts to eliminate the income tax in my own Mississippi, I will explain how taxes are being reformed to encourage innovation and enterprise. I will look, too, at how housing and energy policy in particular areas are allowing America to grow. And I will begin by examining how flexible labour markets in certain US states are the key to understanding America’s recent manufacturing success.

America is thriving because her states are free to thrive. Before they slip any further into economic immiseration, Europeans might want to understand some of the changes happening at a state level in America.