Tom Tugendhat on Modernizing the UK and Political Reform

Tom Tugendhat — Conservative MP for Tonbridge, former UK Security Minister, and former chair of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee — talks with Tyler Cowen about why Britain’s over-centralised state leaves London and the regions under-governed, the deep Kentish roots of English industry and revolt, why Parliament’s forced partnerships outlast short-term politics, the broken incentives behind devolution, why he would keep the House of Lords, and a wide-ranging foreign-policy read of Iran, the Houthis, Russia, and China.

Key ideas

1. Britain’s central problem is too much centralisation, not too little state. London’s mayor has far less planning and fiscal power than a US city mayor or state governor; decades of underinvestment, not weak institutions, explain both London’s housing shortage and a national growth shortfall Tugendhat puts at 18 to 25 percent below the pre-2008 trend.
2. Devolution fails because it breaks the link between authority, responsibility, and accountability. Devolved representatives can promise spending they lack the tax base to fund, then blame Westminster when it doesn’t appear — a dynamic Tugendhat traces partly to the 1947–48 Town and Country Planning Act’s centralisation of local business rates.
3. Parliament’s forced, ongoing partnerships are a feature, not a bug. Roughly 650 MPs — and, at the time, four rival Conservative leadership contenders — must keep working together after any vote, which Tugendhat credits with preserving long-term interest over short-term point-scoring; the exception that proves the rule is the Fixed-term Parliaments Act, which let a government occupy office without a Commons majority and produced the paralysis widely blamed on Brexit.
4. The House of Lords’ hereditary randomness is a feature worth keeping, reformed rather than abolished. Because peers do not depend on the next election, the chamber is structurally free to think generationally; Tugendhat would convert the hereditary lottery into a jury-style temporary one rather than scrap the mechanism.
5. State actors are rational within their own frame, even when their behaviour looks self-defeating from outside. The Houthis attack Red Sea shipping less to damage Israel than to win tribal legitimacy in Yemen’s civil war and secure Iranian arms; Iran’s regime pursues an explicitly messianic agenda; and years of classified access left Tugendhat convinced that ‘cock-up’, not conspiracy, explains most state behaviour.

Content

On London: governing an over-concentrated capital

Cowen opens on governance rather than culture: how does London’s outsized wealth and scale square with the UK’s weak federalism? Tugendhat’s answer is that it doesn’t — the mayor of London controls transport and shares Metropolitan Police oversight with the Home Secretary, but has nothing resembling the planning or fiscal authority of a US big-city mayor or state governor. The deeper cause of London’s dysfunction, he argues, is decades of national underinvestment: Crossrail is already nearing break-even within five or six years of opening, which he reads not as a triumph but as evidence of how little else has been built to compete with it. He blames the housing shortage substantially on the mayor’s reluctance to build and on rent-control proposals, calling rent control ‘a complete disaster of a policy that’s been tried 100 times and failed 100 times’. On architecture, he defends ‘pastiche’ — repeating proven traditional forms rather than reinventing them — and argues that restricting land supply, not aesthetic taste, is what pushes developers toward cheaper, lower-quality design; when Cowen raises the demolitions of the 1960s and 70s (invoking New York’s Penn Station and London’s near-loss of St Pancras), Tugendhat points to Nicholas Boys Smith’s Create Streets project as evidence that well-designed beauty, not less building, defuses local objection to new housing.

On Kent: land, industry, and the politics of smallholding

Asked what makes Kent distinctive, Tugendhat traces its character to deep settlement history: Kent was colonised by Jutes rather than Angles or Saxons and inherited Frankish partible inheritance — land split among all male heirs — rather than primogeniture, producing far smaller landholdings than the rest of England. Because smallholders could not simply live off tenant rents, he argues, Kent industrialised earlier than its neighbours; his example is Kentish ironworks supplying the arrows used at the Battle of Crécy. Kent’s position on the medieval Channel sea lanes made it a repeated point of entry for new ideas from the continent — Roman invasion, Augustine’s reintroduction of Christianity under Queen Bertha, later Protestantism, and the Peasants’ Revolt under Wat Tyler, whom Tugendhat calls Kent’s own ‘land of revolution and ideas’. Pressed on Tonbridge School, in his own constituency, he resists the idea that private schools are self-contained institutions: it awards substantial bursaries, and its sports and theatre facilities, along with the Combined Cadet Force, are shared with the wider town.

Great unselected prime ministers and the resilience of Parliament

Asked to name the great ‘unselected’ prime minister in British history, Tugendhat picks George Osborne, arguing Osborne would likely have become prime minister within weeks of Theresa May’s reduced 2017 majority had he remained in Parliament. He defends the British parliamentary system’s capacity to sustain genuinely liberal government even without a written liberal-individualist constitution, arguing it works precisely because it forces continuous partnership: roughly 650 MPs, and at the time four rival contenders (including Tugendhat) for the Conservative leadership, all have to keep working together regardless of the outcome of any single contest. Cowen presses him on the common outside reading of Brexit as evidence of a structural defect — that Parliament got ‘stuck’ with no mechanism to force resolution. Tugendhat accepts the criticism but locates its specific cause in the Fixed-term Parliaments Act, introduced during the coalition years, which let a government occupy office without commanding a Commons majority, breaking the normal rule that a British government is, by definition, whoever can command that majority; only the Liberal Democrats’ miscalculated push for an election broke the resulting deadlock. On the UK’s unusually lopsided election outcomes, Tugendhat explains Labour’s 2024 landslide — a 179-seat majority on roughly 34 percent of the vote — as a function of narrow, efficiently distributed wins rather than broad popular support: switching roughly 175,000 votes nationally would have reduced it to a minority. He reads the thinness of that mandate as grounds for optimism about his own party’s prospects of a fast turnaround.

Devolution, the House of Lords, and the monarchy

On devolution for Scotland and Northern Ireland, Tugendhat argues the problem is not that it has gone too far but that it is imbalanced: devolved representatives can promise spending without holding the tax-raising responsibility to pay for it, then blame Westminster when funding doesn’t follow — a breach of what he calls the old principle of aligning accountability, responsibility, and authority. He traces part of the imbalance to the 1947–48 Town and Country Planning Act, which centralised local business-rate revenue that English local authorities had previously kept, removing the fiscal stake that once came with local decision-making. On the House of Lords, he opposes abolition: the hereditary chamber’s freedom from electoral pressure lets it think generationally — 50 to 100 years — in a way democratic incumbency structurally cannot, and while he acknowledges its unrepresentative, largely male composition as ‘clearly an issue’, he would convert the hereditary lottery into a jury-style temporary one rather than remove the mechanism. Asked why the British monarchy retains a global fascination that peer monarchies (the Netherlands, Norway) do not, Tugendhat credits Britain’s run of female monarchs — Victoria and the two Elizabeths — with a ‘guiding presence’ that never became politically ‘strident or separatist’, alongside a deliberate cultural separation of monarchic splendour from day-to-day prime-ministerial government.

The Middle East: Iran, the Houthis, and rational actors

On Afghanistan, Tugendhat sees little basis for medium-term optimism: the country functions less as a genuine internal civil-war combatant than as a ‘playground’ fought over by proxy interests from its neighbours, and durable change depends on regional change first. Asked what the Houthis are seeking to maximise, he reads them as fully rational within their own frame: their Red Sea shipping attacks are aimed less at damaging Israel than at winning tribal legitimacy in Yemen’s internal civil war and securing continued Iranian arms supply — attacking Israel serves both goals at once, even though it periodically invites Israeli retaliation that does not obviously help their war effort. On Iran, he separates the people (‘an incredible country of an unbelievably rich civilisation’) from the regime, which he calls ‘a cancerous growth’ pursuing an explicitly messianic agenda — preparing, in its own stated terms, for the coming of the Mahdi by destroying Israel and conquering Jerusalem. Hamas and Lebanese Hezbollah, alongside the Houthis, are in his account largely proxies through which Iran projects violence without direct exposure.

Russia and China: why autocracies fail differently

Asked why Russia has so rarely been close to a free country, Tugendhat admits he cannot fully explain it, weighing the country’s scale, weak urban–rural connection, and a persistent ‘fear of chaos’ rooted in repeated historical near-collapse — illustrated by an Estonian friend’s account of hosting the country’s entire public data record abroad against a feared future Russian invasion. Cowen offers his own synthesis (scale, an expansionist frontier that bred brutality rather than freedom, urban–rural imbalance, a more authoritarian strand of Eastern Christianity, chronic insecurity from invasion, and an unstable mix of European, Asian, and Muslim influences), which Tugendhat does not dispute. On why Taiwan and South Korea diverged from China despite comparable starting points, he attributes the difference to secure property rights and a predictable, non-arbitrary court system — which China denies its own citizens through a dual legal track, one for Communist Party members and another for everyone else, illustrated by Jack Ma’s 2020 disappearance from public view after challenging the Party. Asked how years of access to classified intelligence as Security Minister changed his worldview, Tugendhat offers a single, deliberately limited disclosure: conspiracies are ‘unbelievably difficult’, and state behaviour is far more often explained by accumulated error and misjudgement than by coordinated design.

The production function, and why he entered politics

In a closing personal segment, Tugendhat names Joseph Roth’s The Radetzky March as his favourite novel — a book about loss at the end of one world and the disorienting arrival of another (the telegram, the train) that is simultaneously about innovation. He traces his own path from studying Arabic out of intellectual interest in Islamics, to unexpected mobilisation to fight in Iraq after 9/11, to the Foreign Office, continued military service, and eventually politics — a decision he calls one of the most consequential of his life, taken lightly at the time. On civil-service pay, he argues salaries should rise but that money is not the primary competitive constraint against the private sector: government retains the best people in fields such as intelligence and defence, where only the state can deploy the relevant powers and resources. Asked what led him into politics, he points to the leadership and courage he saw demonstrated at every rank during ten to fifteen years in the armed forces, and his conviction that the mistaken belief — that military service is the only route out of disadvantage — needed a democratic answer instead.

See also

• Tom Tugendhat — speaker
• Tyler Cowen — host
• State Capacity — the concept this episode extends with a UK over-centralisation and devolution case
• Jennifer Pahlka on Reforming Government — the American counterpart account of state-capacity failure