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Last week, House Speaker Jason White unveiled HB2, the Mississippi Education Freedom Act - the most exciting and ambitious advancement for school choice in our state in years, perhaps ever!
 
This comprehensive bill delivers everything supporters of parental power have long hoped for, and it aligns perfectly with President Trump’s strong commitment to education freedom.
 
This isn’t some minor adjustment or performative law – it’s the real thing for anyone who believes in putting parents in charge of their children’s education.

Here’s what the bill does and why we at MCPP are so enthusiastic:
 


In the initial phase, up to 12,500 accounts will be available, with priority for low- and middle-income families, and a balanced split between current public school students and others. The program will expand each year until every family that wants one can have access. Homeschool families participating can also receive $1,000 annually to help cover costs.
 

 
HB2 is Speaker Jason White’s flagship reform for the 2026 session, fulfilling his promise that “all Mississippi families, regardless of income or zip code, have real choices and the freedom to pursue what works best for their children.”  He deserves strong support for the most significant conservative education reform our state has seen in a generation. 
 
Dozens of Mississippi business leaders, along with former Governors Haley Barbour and Phil Bryant, have already voiced strong support. Team Trump is behind it too.
 
In short: If you oppose this bill, it’s hard to credibly claim to be a conservative.  That’s exactly why the progressive left is already fighting it tooth and nail – they fear real parent power and will twist the facts to stop these reforms.
 
HB2 is now moving through the legislature, with real momentum in the House.  Having had a massive conservative majority in Mississippi for years, here at last is the opportunity to implement a conservative reform in our state that will change our state for the better.
 
Real change is happening – and Mississippi is leading the way!

As we kick off 2026, the Mississippi Center for Public Policy is more energized than ever.  We are excited about the successes our state has seen – and we have a plan to build on that momentum with further free market reform!
 
For decades, our state lagged behind.  Growth was slow and too many young people left our state to seek opportunities elsewhere.  That is starting to change.
 
Over the past five years, Mississippi has seen more economic growth than in the previous 15 combined. 
 
Mississippi’s progress is real, but it did not happen by chance.  It is happening thanks to free market reform - including major tax cuts, flexible labor laws, affordable energy, and fiscal discipline.
 
MCPP aims to help build on this in the 2026 legislative session.  We have a clear, targeted plan for further free market reforms. Here is our focus for the 2026 legislative session which starts this coming week:
 

  1. School Choice
     

Mississippi has already taken a strong step by assigning every public-school student a personalized education budget. Now is the time to let families truly control it. We are working to see a universal Education Savings Account (ESA) program, modeled on successful reforms like Arkansas’s LEARNS Act.  
 
Other education reforms, such as making it easier for families to move from one public school to another are important, but the key goal must be an ESA system, just like they now have in Arkansas, Tennessee and Alabama. 
 

  1. Repeal of Certificate-of-Need (CON) Laws

 
Mississippi’s outdated health regulation regime stifles competition, blocks investment in healthcare and drives up costs - especially in rural areas. We are pushing for a partial repeal of these restrictions across regulated services.
 
It is also essential that we grant Advanced Practice Registered Nurses full practice authority. These changes could lower healthcare costs significantly, expand rural access, and save millions annually - freeing the market to deliver better, more affordable care.
 

  1. Conservative Spending 

 
To enable future tax cuts, and to prevent the public sector crowding out local businesses, we need to see fiscal discipline in this state. The fiscal climate is changing, and the days of large federal subsidies is coming to an end.  It is essential that our lawmakers live within our means.  That means keeping spending under control and not squandering any surpluses.
 
These are MCPP’s big three priorities for the coming session – and we will be working closely with key lawmakers and our coalition allies to advance them.  
 
MCPP is also supportive of a number of other reforms up for discussion.  For example, we would love to see a restoration of the ballot initiative.  With labor-force participation in Mississippi still too low, we would love to see reform in welfare administration to ensure more stringent requirements on able-bodied welfare recipients, and more meaningful sanctions for non-compliance.  We would support such changes, but they are not our primary focus for this session.  
 
We are super excited at the start of the 2026 legislative session. Our team will be working hard to ensure real reform – and I will be sure to keep you personally updated on the progress we make as the session advances!

Imagine facing arrest simply for posting sharp or critical comments online. Picture police at your door for expressing opposition to mass immigration. Envision a country where you could be imprisoned for years without a jury ever deciding your guilt.

This isn't dystopian fiction - it's the reality unfolding in Britain today, my former home and once part of the free world.

Earlier this year, parents Maxie Allen and Rosalind Levine from Hertfordshire were arrested in front of their children over disparaging remarks made in a private parents' messaging group.  They were among the estimated 10,000 people arrested in Britain this year for online posts - more than in communist China.

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.

Clause 39 of Magna Carta declares that no free person shall be punished “except by the lawful judgment of his peers or by the law of the land” - enshrining the right to trial by jury.  Yet recently, Britain’s Justice Secretary David Lammy has proposed reforms that would severely limit jury trials, restricting them largely to the most serious offenses (such as murder, manslaughter, and rape) while moving many others to judge-only hearings.

If these changes proceed, someone in Britain could be arrested, prosecuted, and imprisoned for years for something they said online - all without ever facing a jury of fellow citizens.

Is Britain still a free country?  A generation ago, the question would have seemed absurd.  Today, it hangs in the balance.  Truly free societies do not treat their citizens this way.

England, birthplace of common law, no longer applies the law equally.  In some cases, individuals have received longer sentences for online speech than others convicted in serious child grooming gang scandals.

Just last week, Luke Yarwood was sentenced to 18 months in prison for anti-immigration posts viewed only 33 times.  That same period saw Demiesh Williams, who beat a man to death in a supermarket queue dispute, receive five years and three months.

Why should Americans care?  Because Britain serves as a stark warning of how quickly a once-free society can slide into anarcho-tyranny: lax enforcement against repeat offenders, yet draconian crackdowns on law-abiding citizens who speak out.

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 Australian authorities announce any review of how such extremists entered the country—or how radical views took hold among those raised here? No word of it.

Instead, Prime Minister Albanese quickly reaffirmed that “diversity is Australia’s strength,” while pushing for tighter gun laws and stronger hate-speech restrictions.

Rather than scrutinize immigration or integration failures, the focus shifted to limiting firearms access and curbing free expression.

Officially, these speech curbs aim to stop antisemitic mob chants - like those heard outside the Sydney Opera House after Hamas’ October 7, 2023, atrocities.

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 real-world consequences of mass third-world immigration - roughly 4 million arrivals in the five years since I left - and they don’t like what they see.

Before Elon Musk’s acquisition of X, the state could suppress dissent through algorithmic censorship.  Now, with that avenue limited, targeted prosecutions and heavy sentences have become the tool of choice.  The situation is that dire.

Jury trials are being curtailed - not merely to clear backlogs (the official reason), but because juries often acquit those with dissident views, frustrating state efforts to silence opposition.

So how should America respond as Britain and other Western nations drift toward autocracy?

  1. Cherish and defend the First Amendment. Despite criticisms, the U.S. remains far stronger on free speech than most of the world, thanks to the Founders. Protect the Constitution fiercely, ensuring that even offensive or foolish speech remains free. 
  2. 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?
  3. Secure your borders. Control immigration, or governments will control their citizens to suppress complaints about the fallout from uncontrolled borders.
  4. Stand with dissidents. During the Cold War, Ronald Reagan supported Soviet dissidents like Natan Sharansky, whose moral backing proved vital.
  5. 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 ago, I half-jokingly suggested that if Britain deteriorated further, Donald Trump could offer every Brit under 30 the right to work in America, triggering a collapse-inducing exodus. That notion no longer feels entirely far-fetched.

For decades, Mississippi has been the punchline in national discussions about economic performance - often ranked at the bottom in income, education, and opportunity.

But something remarkable has happened in recent years: the Magnolia State is undergoing a genuine resurgence, driven not by federal handouts or gimmicks, but by principled free-market reforms.

A major national publication, the Washington Examiner, recently spotlighted this transformation in a feature titled "Mississippi Turning." The article notes that Mississippi has achieved more economic growth in the past five years than in the previous 15 combined.

This isn't hyperbole; recent data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis shows Mississippi posting some of the nation's strongest GDP growth rates, including a 4.2% real GDP increase in 2024 that ranked second nationally.

What’s fueling this engine? Bold structural changes that prioritize freedom, competition, and low barriers to opportunity.

First, labor-market reforms have opened doors for workers and entrepreneurs. In 2021, Mississippi enacted universal recognition of out-of-state occupational licenses, allowing skilled professionals to bring their talents here without jumping through needless bureaucratic hoops. The state has also slashed red tape on in-state licensing requirements, eliminating hundreds of hours of mandatory training for many everyday jobs. These changes have attracted talent, put downward pressure on remaining barriers, and made it easier for Mississippians to earn a living.

Second, historic tax reform is putting money back in people's pockets. Starting with the largest tax cut in state history in 2022, Mississippi phased in a flat 4% income tax. In 2025, lawmakers went further, enacting legislation to reduce the rate to 3% by 2030 and trigger annual cuts thereafter until the state income tax is fully eliminated—the first such move by a state in decades. This pro-growth policy rewards work and ambition while making Mississippi more competitive for businesses and families.

Third, a commitment to reliable, low-cost energy has made the state a magnet for investment. By resisting costly subsidized green mandates, Mississippi has kept electricity prices among the nation's lowest, powering energy-intensive industries like data centers and advanced manufacturing. Major announcements, including billions from companies like Amazon Web Services, underscore how affordable energy translates into jobs and capital inflows. Since 2020, the state has attracted tens of billions in private investment, fueling record-breaking economic development.The results speak for themselves: explosive GDP growth, surging personal incomes, rising university enrollments, and—for the first time in generations—net in-migration as people choose to move to Mississippi rather than away. Recent years have seen positive net migration, reversing long-standing outflows and signaling a brighter future.

This turnaround didn't happen by accident. It's the direct consequence of free-market ideas championed by policymakers and advocates who refused to accept the status quo. Mississippi is no longer just catching up; it's becoming a national model that other states are watching closely.

As we close out another productive year, moments like the Washington Examiner's recognition remind us that principled, steady work pays off. Mississippi is proving that freedom works—creating a freer, more prosperous place for all its citizens. Other states should take note: lower taxes, fewer regulations, and reliable energy are the path to revival.

Click here to read the Washington Examiner article.

Having just celebrated Thanksgiving across the United States, I’ve been reminded of what makes this holiday truly special.  If you’re an American who’s grown up with the holiday your whole life, it’s easy to take it for granted. Speaking as an immigrant, let me tell you: there’s something genuinely magical about a country setting aside a national day simply to give thanks.

Most nations have a national day, and like America’s July 4th, 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.

As we look ahead to a new year, thank you—from a grateful immigrant in a grateful state, in the greatest republic on earth.

I only recently learned what a “groyper” is - you may or may not be familiar with the term?
 
From what I can tell, a groyper is a hardline white nationalist.  Often anti-Semitic, groypers are hostile to mainstream conservatives.  To the extent they have a coherent agenda, groypers seem more national socialism than free-market capitalism.
 
Having been involved in the conservative movement for three decades, I’d hesitate to call anyone with such views conservative.  Indeed, I’d argue people that think like that are essentially hardline leftists. 
 
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.

Big news on School Choice this week!  A fresh poll shows massive support in Mississippi to have families, not government, control their child’s education.  Mississippi voters say they’ll reward lawmakers who make it happen.

The brand-new statewide survey (October 27-30, 2025) conducted by The Tarrance Group shows rock-solid support for expanding education freedom.  There is massive bipartisan support across every region, race, and political affiliation. 

Any little cliques that try to derail school choice need to know what they are going to be up against.  Either they can support School Choice and President Trump, or they can side with leftwing teacher unions - and lose, as some anti School Choice lawmakers in Texas found out. 

Here’s what Mississippi voters are saying - loud and clear:

Mississippians see progress and according to the poll, 58% say K-12 education is heading in the right direction - and 65% of parents agree.

Wanting School Choice is not fringe – it’s the mainstream position in Mississippi.
 
With your help, we’ll hold lawmakers accountable and deliver the education freedom Mississippi families deserve.

The future for our state looks bright.  In just the past five years, Mississippi has seen more economic growth than in the entire fifteen years before that combined.
 
We’re on track to phase out the state income tax entirely, allowing 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:
 

 
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.

Remember the tariff debates that dominated Washington just a few months ago?  For a while it was the only thing anyone seemed to talk about.
 
First tariffs were raised by eyewatering amounts.  Then they weren’t.  Eventually, after all sorts of back and forth, we saw tariffs imposed at the highest rates in decades. Free trade advocates warned of economic catastrophe, while protectionists claimed tariff revenue would fix the deficit. When immediate disaster didn’t strike, the issue seemed to fade – until now.
 
Two local stories that caught my eye this week suggest that we are going to hear a lot more about tariffs.
 
Agriculture is Mississippi’s largest industry, and soybeans the largest crop.  Only a few days ago, U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced $10-15 billion in federal support for soybean farmers, including those in the Mississippi Delta.  Why is the federal government having to support soybean farmers in one of the most fertile places in America? Exports have collapsed. China, which once bought over half our soybean crop, now purchases from Brazil due to steep retaliatory tariffs on U.S. soybeans, triggered by U.S. tariffs on Chinese goods.
 
In other words, federal funds are now bailing out farmers hurt by federal tariffs.
 
A second story that got my attention this week was about grocery prices.  53% of Americans say grocery costs are a major concern, with prices spiking last month at the fastest rate in three years.  I couldn’t help also notice another news item about how coffee prices have jumped 20% in the past year, partly because of a 50% U.S. tariff on Brazilian coffee imports.
 
It is said that we often tend to overestimate the impact of new technology in the short term and underestimate the impact in the long term.  I wonder if the same might be said of tariffs. The sky did not fall in when tariffs went up, but the lag effects of the historic hike are only just beginning to be felt by ordinary Americans. 
 
There may yet be something in what the free traders keep trying to tell us.  Defenders of free trade have been reluctant to speak up.  I suspect that may be about to change. By the time of the midterm elections, I suspect millions of Americans will be feeling the effects of tariffs.  Tariffs?  We are going to hear a lot more about them than some people expect.

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