Three Big Ideas #32
The £10 billion question, de minimis debacles, and the scroll as the message
Welcome to our weekly Three Big Ideas roundup, in which we serve up a curated selection of ideas (and our takes on them) in entrepreneurship, innovation, science and technology, handpicked by the team.
🧑🎓 Philip Salter, Founder
Rumours abound that the Government is considering restricting international students by curtailing the Graduate visa route. This pathway allows international students to stay in the UK for two years after graduation, or three years for those with a PhD. It makes studying in the UK more attractive and serves as a draw for universities looking to attract the very best and brightest. Even the Home Office’s own data makes it clear that being able to work in the UK after studying is a pull.
Those young people then feed talent-hungry firms, which is why business leaders across the country are urging the government to consider the critical role that international students play in the growth and success of UK businesses.
We’ve been here before. Back in 2015, we teamed up with the NUS to produce Made in the UK, which made the case for the reintroduction of a post-study work visa that Theresa May had taken away. Economic sense prevailed. When it comes down to it, the British public wants local economic growth, universities offer by the bucket-load.
Over on his essential Substack, Tim Leunig unpacks the damage that could be caused to a place like Huddersfield. The university has a £180 million turnover – outpacing the £130m turnover of the area’s top private firm, UK Greetings, much of which comes from reselling imports. In contrast, the university imports virtually nothing and is a major exporter: every international student represents money flowing into the UK.
This story repeats across the country. Research by Public First shows that in over 100 constituencies, the local university is one of the top three exporters – more than any other sector. Of those, 85 are Labour seats. As Jonathan Simons puts it: “In a lot of towns your university is your car plant, it is your steel mill.”
Let’s not make ourselves at least £10 billion poorer each year. Not again.
📦 Eamonn Ives, Research Director
Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last few months, you’ll know that tariffs are firmly back on the agenda. Thanks to US President Donald Trump’s zeal for taxing imports and subsequent retaliation by leaders of other countries and trading blocs, we’ve all had to become trade experts at breakneck speed. And though soaring headline tariff rates have captured most of the attention, other anti-trade related measures have also arisen.
One such example is the scrapping of ‘de minimis’ exemptions for tariffs that would otherwise apply to the import of low-value goods. Last Friday, Trump ended this ‘loophole’, as the White House calls it, which enabled parcels valued at less than $800 to enter the country duty-free. Closer to home, the Chancellor Rachel Reeves announced last month – while in Washington, perhaps not coincidentally – that she would review the tax treatment of low-value imports into Britain (currently our de minimis threshold is set at the much lower rate of £135).
While opinions differ on de minimis, the common justification in favour of it as a rule is that calculating and processing the tax that low-value imports would otherwise attract would simply not be financially worthwhile. Moreover, common sense dictates – and real-world evidence proves – that it would clog up already strained ports as lots of small shipments take extra time to be checked.
Some, including a lot of retail groups who stand to benefit from its abolition, argue against de minimis exemptions because it effectively creates a two-tier tax system. A more economically rational system would be neutral towards both low-value and high-value imports. Here at The Entrepreneurs Network, we’re guilty as anyone of professing our support for neutrality.
In this instance, however, I think it’s fair to say that tax idealism trades off against tax practicalities. While anyone can envision a more perfect tax system in the abstract, ensuring it works well in reality is another matter. (And, it goes without saying that reducing the scope of tariffs – as far from a feature of a perfect tax system as any – is generally going to be a good thing.)
A paper published last year estimated that ending de minimis in the US would not only reduce consumer welfare by between $10.9-13 billion, but also that these losses would be concentrated among lower-income and minority consumers. De minimismight translate to ‘of little importance’, but scrapping it would have profound consequences for living standards.
🧶 Anastasia Bektimirova, Head of Science and Technology
How much thought do we usually give to how a presentation format, such as text layout, colour palette, and visual pacing, shapes how compelling we find what we read? For example, how does the effect of the Situational Awareness microsite’s scrolling experience differ from going through a static PDF think tank policy report? A recent essay Scroll the Future: How AI microsites reshape persuasion, urgency, and memory by Ben Johnson, Professor of Practice in Research and Innovation Policy at the University of Strathclyde and Head of Science at the Centre for British Progress, makes one pause and think.
Ben writes about how these microsites – which have an influence on public discourse and policy thinking about AI – not only contain arguments about AI futures, but also constitute arguments through their very design:
“The microsite aesthetic is a velvet hammer. It hits softly but leaves a deep impression. Readers must be careful: just because a site looks serious does not mean every claim within it is equally serious. Minimalism is not a substitute for epistemic caution. [...] This carefully calibrated aesthetic performs substantial rhetorical work. It frames even highly speculative claims with an aura of plausibility and projects objectivity without having to explicitly argue for it.”
The scroll becomes our sensor, allowing these microsites to tap into our sensory apparatus: the rhythmic scrolling motion, the visual pacing of ideas, the progression through carefully designed screens. Their very form – the slow, deliberate scroll through carefully sequenced arguments – shapes how we perceive the content before we’ve even processed a single claim. Marshall McLuhan would have instantly recognised his “the medium is the message” working directly on our nervous systems in ways that can bypass some immediate rational filters.
While the strategic use of design for persuasion has a long history – from Victorian science papers whose austere typography signalled rigorous scholarship to Cold War white space giving ideologically charged arguments a veneer of neutrality – what’s noteworthy is how today’s digital environment is expanding the palette of persuasive techniques available to communicators. The microsite is an evolution of familiar rhetorical instruments which, as Ben writes, requires “new literacies not just of reading, but of pacing, aesthetic resistance, and epistemic humility.” As we scroll through these carefully designed narratives about future technological trajectories, the question becomes not just what we believe, but how the medium itself has already shaped what feels believable.
Yet we should maintain a healthy realism about the actual influence. While microsites may present certain technological futures with inevitability, the messy reality of institutional policy development and implementation tends to resist tidy narratives and the policy pathways that follow from them. They may shape the initial framing, but the real world inevitably introduces complexity that no scroll can fully contain.