Legislating aesthetic standards with real enforcement
Beauty as a legitimate, enforceable concern of public policy.
Policy Paper No. 01Britain’s capacity for serious ambition hasn’t gone anywhere. The habit of acting on it has.
Anglo · Futura · Audax
The Anglofuturism Initiative is an independent research organisation. We exist to make the intellectual case for recovering that habit, and to produce work rigorous enough that it can be used.
No party. A position.
We don’t have a party affiliation. The condition we’re describing predates the current political settlement by several governments, and the solution will outlast whatever comes next.
What we have is a position: that Britain is capable of more than it has been attempting, that the evidence for this is historical rather than speculative, and that the organised argument for it has been missing.
What we do
AFI produces policy research, long-form analysis, and strategic proposals. These aren’t separate briefs maintained by separate teams. They connect, because the problems connect.
- Infrastructure and planning
- Energy
- Technology and innovation
- The built environment
- Britain’s geopolitical orientation
A planning system that can’t approve a reservoir and an energy policy that exports its emissions to foreign supply chains and a built environment that stopped enforcing its own standards are symptoms of the same underlying failure of institutional confidence. We write about all of it, and we write about how it fits together.
How we work
AFI occupies a position that doesn’t map neatly onto the existing landscape of British policy debate.
Evidenced
We’re not academic, though the research is evidenced.
Readable
We’re not journalistic, though the writing is meant to be read.
Direct
We’re not a pressure group, though we have views and state them directly.
The closest description is this: we make arguments. Long ones, specific ones, ones that name the problem and propose the solution and don’t retreat into managed ambiguity when the conclusion is unfashionable.
What we’re building toward
The projects Anglofuturism advocates for won’t be delivered quickly or without resistance. AFI’s role isn’t to deliver them. It’s to make the case clearly enough, and early enough, that the political will to attempt them becomes imaginable.
Institutional architecture for serious Anglosphere cooperation
Giving weight to a relationship that already exists.
The CANZUK caseA domestic nuclear programme that matches the scale of Britain’s energy needs
Advanced nuclear and selective renewables, not managed scarcity.
Our positionA country that stops producing serious long arguments about its own future doesn’t lose them in a single moment. It loses them gradually, institution by institution, generation by generation. We think that process is reversible. This is the attempt.
A note from the founder
“I started AFI because the ideas that eventually became Anglofuturism had nowhere obvious to go. The organisations that existed were either too partisan to make the argument credibly, too narrow to make it completely, or too invested in the conventions of British policy debate to say plainly what those conventions had cost.
The ideas here are not new. They are, in many ways, very old. But they have been absent from serious public discourse for long enough that their return feels radical. However, the arguments that were unfashionable five years ago are becoming unavoidable. The planning system, energy security, the question of what Britain does with its post-Brexit position in the world: these are no longer fringe concerns. The window for serious proposals is open in a way it wasn’t recently, and that window won’t stay open indefinitely.
AFI is the attempt to be ready for it. Whether the work is good enough to earn the attention it needs is the only question that matters, and we don’t intend to be complacent about it.”
The Anglofuturist, Founder
Get involved
The window for serious proposals is open. Join the people arguing for what Britain builds next.