Douglas Carswell, the former Tory and, after his defection, UKIP MP for Harwich has popped up again writing various articles about Mississippi, where he now lives. You might assume as a man of consistent principle, he’s over there campaigning to get the state to secede from the Union, out of the sclerotic grip of Washington, and once again fully sovereign to pass its own laws and negotiate trade deals tailored to its own needs. If you did, you would be wrong. He's doing no such thing.
He was ‘appointed’ to head up a free-market, conservative think tank, The Mississippi Center for Public Policy (MCPP) in Jackson, Mississippi. Its stated mission is "To advance the constitutional ideals of liberty and justice for all Mississippians by employing an evidenced-based approach to public policy whereby we advocate for and advance real conservative ideas with policy makers, members of the media, business leaders, the academic community, and private citizens." MCPP's governing principles are HERE if you're interested.
It’s not completely obvious to me why he would choose to campaign for Brexit (he was co-founder of Vote Leave), achieve his goal and then emigrate to the USA. I assume money came into it somewhere.
Anyway, in May he popped up in The Telegraph: Why I fled socialist Britain for the great state of Mississippi.
In his article he explains one of the reasons he went was because the US is "not a unitary state" and is "far more decentralised, and a single solution that those in charge might like to impose on the country cannot as often be imposed everywhere."
At the end of July in The Times: I quit Britain for America’s poorest state — here’s why its economy is beating ours, and a few days ago, again in The Telegraph: As a Brit who has lived in the USA for years, here are seven things they do better. Quite a bit of coverage, eh?
This isn't new by the way since he penned a similar piece in The Telegraph last November: While the Tories slowly destroy Britain, US conservatives are transforming America
His tale of Mississippi's prosperity compared to ours was taken up by Daniel Hannan and by Andrew Neil, who used it to question in the pages of The Daily Mail why Britain would ever want to rejoin the EU: Why would we want to rejoin the EU when citizens of America's poorest states earn more than the French... and the Italians can't even afford pasta?
However, the figures he used to prove his point was picked up by Jonathan Portes, a professor of Economics at King's College London, and The Times was forced into a retraction:
One week later... https://t.co/Ty9zkWWgwj pic.twitter.com/tZ7iP3DjIi
— Jonathan Portes (@jdportes) August 7, 2023
They had to admit Carswell had used unadjusted figures and hence were misleading.
Neither Neil nor Hannan has apologised as far as I know.
However, I also note that Carswell gave as one of the reasons Mississippi was doing so well was down to a reform of its employment laws. He says that dentists, accountants, beauticians, (and other professionals I assume) who are qualified in one US state no longer need to “undergo a new professional examination process in order to provide their services in a different state” and can get “fast-track approval.”
This is Mississippi's approach I assume to a shortage of dentists, accountants, and beauticians, but he doesn't claim their rules are reciprocated by other states. And in any case, it is just a pale shadow of the EU single market's freedom of movement of labour where the right to work in another member state is automatic. US states also have their own gun laws, election rules, building codes, and everything else so the US isn't even a single market in goods, think how much more productive it would be if it was.
It's not surprising to me that Mississippi is prospering. It's the 32nd US state by size at roughly 48,000 square miles with a population just shy of three million. To put this into perspective, Great Britain is 93,000 square miles, with 65 million people. In short, Mississippi is half the size of GB with a twentieth of the population. The better comparison would be with a developing country, not a crowded, mature post-industrial country like Britain where growth is always going to be slower.
When Mississippi's population reaches 30,000,000 or so, let's see how they cope with planning, infrastructure, social housing, and all the rest of it.
