VoN #3: Should Britain buy Greenland?
What attracts smart people to crypto? How much havoc can one NIMBY cause? How did someone magic a £58bn company out of thin air? And why should Britain buy Greenland?
Welcome to this week’s links & notes round-up.
Donald Trump and the Utmost North (Lucy Inglis)
Greenland lies closer to mainland Britain than Naples or Gibraltar1 yet it feels incredibly remote: the end of the world, or as Lucy Inglis recounts in her beautiful essay on the island, ‘Utmost North’. Sadly, distance has offered little protection, and the history of Greenland is marked by relentless waves of occupation and exploitation, with the most active and recent players being Denmark and the U.S.
The United States has been loitering near Greenland, credit card in hand, since the purchase of Alaska in 1867. Indeed, Trump’s plans seem rather weak compared to William H. Seward’s expansionist efforts to negotiate the purchase of both Greenland and Iceland, and therefore sort of ‘engulf’ Canada into the U.S. by default.
Why would you buy Greenland? The economic case is… unconvincing. Yes, in theory there are abundant deposits of minerals and metals, but they’re buried in a frozen wilderness with basically no infrastructure or people to draw on. Talk of a ‘race’ for Greenland’s mineral wealth seems overblown when there are only two functioning mines on the entire island amid a litany of failed enterprises. With enough long-term investment there’s wealth to be found, but a) that’s a very long, expensive play and b) nothing is stopping Americans from investing now.
What about defence? Greenland lies at one end of the awkwardly-named GIUK gap, a strategic line that stretches from Greenland through Iceland to the UK. Control of this maritime boundary is vital for NATO to prevent enemy ships and submarines from entering the North Atlantic and disrupting trans-Atlantic communications, trade or logistics. In World War II, with mainland Denmark having fallen to the Nazis, Britain and the US moved swiftly to seize Iceland and Greenland respectively2. Today, Iceland is a full NATO member while the U.S. retains its bases on Greenland and Denmark is expanding its air force presence there - defence is not really a problem.
A more likely reason to buy Greenland is the looming prospect of Greenlandic independence, and what comes after. As a former colony, the island nation has the right to declare independence at any time, and polls have shown strong support for this in recent years3. Why would the U.S. care about this? A glance at the nation’s main export partners gives a clue: Denmark (49% of exports) unsurprisingly comes first, but popping up in second place is China (24%). The UK (6%) comes a distant third with the U.S. nowhere to be seen.
China has declared itself a ‘near-Arctic state’, on the basis that it occupies the same planet as the Arctic and is therefore closer to it than, say, Mars. It sees the rapidly-defrosting region as a key strategic zone for trade, resources, and therefore military power projection. An Arctic shipping lane would massively cut cargo transit times from China to Europe, with nations like Iceland4 and Greenland suddenly finding themselves in key strategic positions along the route.
The fear is presumably that an independent Greenland could fall into the sphere of influence of a hostile power like China, who would then have a massive base of operations parked on Washington’s doorstep, poking a hole through NATO’s northern defence perimeter - a major headache in the event of a global war (assuming that war is conventional and we haven’t all nuked each other by that point).
Whether you agree with this logic or not, it’s striking that Trump had little interest in the topic during his first term, but seems much more exercised now that Greenland is possibly on the verge of an independence referendum.
Denmark doesn’t want to sell, but if it did the British would apparently have first dibs. So - massive legal and ethical issues aside - should we offer to buy it? Greenland’s GDP is about $3.5bn. A generous valuation for a company with that revenue might be around the $10bn mark, or roughly £8bn. That’s… not a lot of money! In fact it’s roughly what we’re paying to offload the Chagos islands, a mere 24 Kilobats5. But of course I’m pulling numbers out of my Utmost South here.
The thing is, why would you give billions of dollars to Denmark when you could just… invest it in Greenland? Developing the island’s economy, reducing its dependence on subsidies from Denmark, and building stronger diplomatic ties while supporting self-determination seems like a better, more ethical use of the cash than brute-forcing the local population into joining another country. If the U.S. is really so concerned about the islanders falling into the welcoming arms of China, perhaps they could try the radical approach of being nice to them.
Did DeepSeek just Deepsix Big Tech? (Ben Ansell)
Ben Ansell has a good piece up looking at the possible fallout from the emergence of DeepSeek, a cheaper Chinese rival to OpenAI. I’m withholding judgement until I see more, but the prospect of cheaper AI models would only be a good thing, not least for the public sector as Ben writes:
Here’s a happier thought. If AI models become much cheaper because of DeepSeek and similar models, that’s good news for anyone who wants to use them but is cash-strapped. And you know who is cash-strapped? The British government. As part of their new strategy to have a growth strategy, the Labour Government has doubled down on AI as both a private sector industry that can succeed in the UK (I’ll come back to this) and as a tool to reduce costs and increase efficiencies in the public sector.
The worst thing that could happen to this plan is for Labour to get continually snookered by high-paid IT consultants recommending extremely expensive proprietary AI systems, run by Big Tech, that are priced at a level that might be able eventually to pay back all those incredibly expensive Nvidia GPUs that got bought over the last few years. Nobody should want to the British government - or indeed other governments - to be caught in the position of signing long-term contracts that shuffle monies back to the giant Big Tech Nvidia bill.
If the government can instead use a basically as good set of AI models for, let’s say, three percent of the cost, well why wouldn’t they? What’s more, small and medium-sized app developers will also find it much more cost effective to work with cheaper and open AI models, which they can easily customise to their client’s - in this case the government’s - needs.
Aside from the public sector, stiffer competition would bring obvious benefits for the 99% of the tech industry that isn’t Nvidia, Google, Meta or Microsoft - the thousands of smaller, innovative companies looking to build cheaper, better products and services around generative AI.
$BUCKLEUP (Helen Lewis)
Friend-of-the-’stack Helen Lewis6 nails the ‘no I’m conning you’ nihilism that underpins much of the crypto movement in 2025.
One of the reasons I find the MAGA-crypto mashup depressing is because of a phrase that’s been whirling round my head for the last few weeks—it’s easier to con someone than convince them they’ve been conned. All the apex crypto bros have a vested interest in shit-talking the “MSM,” because it says things like “this is clearly a pyramid scheme” and “this ‘investment scheme’ has no value, you’d be better off just tracking the stock market”.
Unfortunately, lots of amateur crypto guys think they’re smart—they know it’s all a con, they just think they are the conmen. Discovering they are the marks instead will be a brutal, but educational, process.
People tend to assume that marks are stupid or ignorant, but being smart is often what gets you in trouble. We saw this dynamic play out over the MMR vaccine in the 1990s and early 2000s, where the decline in uptake was more pronounced among more-educated parents with greater access to information.
Intelligence isn’t immunity. The cleverer you are, the more powerful your motivated reasoning can be, and the more exhausting it becomes for people to argue with you. You can be the smartest, most-informed person in the world, and still do incredibly dumb things7.
How much harm can one NIMBY do? (Michael Dnes)
This thread from Michael Dnes is well worth your time, explaining how one man managed to snarl-up billions of pounds worth of infrastructure projects and add hundreds of millions to their costs through nuisance legal actions.
This raised an interesting question - is NIMBYism like crime or antisocial behaviour8, where a tiny number of people are responsible for the overwhelming majority of harm? Sam Freedman reminded me of a case from Australia, in which a single person made over 20,000 noise complaints against the local airport in one year (a process which surely must have been automated). Heathrow was subjected to something similar - 60,000 complaints from just ten people.
I don’t know if anyone has compiled this already, but it would be fascinating to see a list of legal cases brought against UK infrastructure projects, and a summary of the organisations who brought them. If anyone knows of such a thing, please stick it in the comments…
The £58bn company that doesn’t exist (Dan Neidle)
Dan Neidle’s thread is an astonishing read, and raises the question of how someone was able to fabricate a £58bn business and file identical fake accounts every year without Companies House noticing.
It’s the sort of thing you would imagine could be solved in an afternoon with a Python script, but as someone pointed out to me, there’s no standard structure for accounts, and many are filed as photocopies or scans in PDF formats that can’t easily be read by machine. Which seems nuts to me - asking for at least the basic information in a standardised format doesn’t feel like a huge imposition (and would open up all kinds of downstream analysis potential).
That’s all for this week! As I write this, Sam Freedman has just published a new column about the ‘feral’ press lobby, which I mention because I’ll be exploring a closely related topic in next week’s essay, including a forensic analysis of the value of one political editor’s tweeting... do please hit the subscribe button if you’d like to read it.
Oh, and don’t forget to follow me at BlueSky.
It also extends both east and south of the easternmost and southernmost points on Iceland, which is a slightly mind-bending fact. The capital, Nuuk, is about as close to us as Cyprus.
The situation with Greenland was more complex and is explained better than I can in Lucy’s blog.
I say ‘strong’ support here, but the picture is slightly more complicated. Polls consistently show strong support for independence in theory, but only if Greenlanders can maintain their standard of living, which is obviously difficult given the island is still dependent on subsidies from Denmark.
China’s embassy in Iceland is able to hold around 500 staff but as of 2020 housed… 5 diplomats, so either major growth is expected or they really don’t get on.
Yes I’m still trying to make ‘the Bat’ a unit of public spending (equivalent to a third of a million pounds) a thing. It’s all a bit cringe.
Helen used to be my editor at New Statesman some years ago and has been incredibly generous with her support but is also a great writer so rest assured her inclusion here isn’t some kind of inverse nepotism.
I’m not saying his name and you can’t make me.
I almost wrote: “Is NIMBYism like other forms of antisocial behaviour?” but managed to stop myself in a moment of profound personal growth.
Companies are already required to submit their accounts with XBRL tagging which is a standardised format which captures key data. VAT returns are also now submitted through Making Tax Digital (MTD) which requires a standard format and digital links which gives them more standardised data.
I suspect the issue is money to review the data and ownership (HMRC vs Companies House vs someone else) more than data quality.
Poland has had MTD in place for Sales tax (VAT) returns for much longer than us and has had some excellent success stories in routing out issues through data analysis demonstrating it's value, but as is increasingly frequent the UK lags behind.