The Corrosive Lie

There is a particular kind of lie that does real damage, and it is not the ordinary sort. It is not ignorance, confusion, or even spin shading into optimism. It is the lie told knowingly, by someone in power, wearing a role that demands trust, delivered in a setting where interruption is discouraged and consequences are absent.

That lie is not about belief. It is about domination.

The ordinary lie wants you to accept a falsehood. This one wants something colder. It wants you to experience the truth as useless. It says: I know this is false, you know it is false, and nothing you do with that knowledge will matter. The philosophical injury begins there. Truth is reduced from something that guides action to something inert. Reality still exists, but it no longer carries authority.

Donald Trump turned this into a governing style. Not the occasional false claim, but the constant, brazen, knowing lie. Plausibility was never the point. The point was to demonstrate that truth no longer had leverage. He did not expect to be believed in the normal sense. He expected to be obeyed, repeated, and defended. Reality became a loyalty test. The lie survived not because it convinced, but because consequences never arrived.

Kristi Noem represents a different, and arguably more dangerous, variant. Trump corrodes norms. Noem corrodes offices. When someone in high institutional office lies knowingly, the damage is structural. That office exists so citizens do not have to interrogate everything constantly. It is a cognitive and moral shortcut that makes collective life possible. When that shortcut is abused, trust itself becomes hazardous. Psychologically, people are forced into permanent vigilance. Philosophically, the connection between authority and truth is severed altogether.

This is where the injury turns inward. People do not stop caring. They stop seeing any point in caring. Being right leads nowhere. Speaking up changes nothing. Over time, this produces a rational withdrawal that looks like apathy but is actually learned powerlessness. Truth has not been disproved. It has been neutralised.

Television is where this becomes visceral.

TV pretends to be your proxy. The journalists are meant to be there on your behalf, interrupting where you would interrupt, saying what you would say. When they do not, the powerlessness becomes personal. You are watching a lie be spoken, knowing it is false, knowing the speaker knows it is false, knowing the people in the room know it is false, and watching the ritual continue anyway.

This is why the anger spills onto the journalists. You expect politicians to lie. What is destabilising is watching the lie pass through a performance of respectability. The nodding. The segue. The polite follow up. The refusal to say the one sentence that would puncture it. Civility is preserved, and reality is quietly abandoned.

Crucially, this moment does not end in the studio. An unchallenged lie on television is not neutral. It is authorisation. It signals to everyone watching that the claim is safe to repeat.

Nigel Farage has refined this technique for British television. He understands that TV is not a debate but a time limited performance governed by etiquette. He drops claims that are flatly untrue, often about things that are easily checkable, and relies on the reluctance to interrupt. He does not need the lie to withstand scrutiny. He only needs it to survive the moment. Once it does, correction becomes abstract and weak. The lie has already done its work.

Then comes the most corrosive group of all. The people who repeat the lie knowing perfectly well that it is a lie, out of tribal loyalty.

These are not the deceived. They are the mobilised. The lie is repeated not because it is believed, but because it signals belonging. To abandon it would be to fracture identity, admit error, or leave the tribe. Correction is treated as attack. Evidence as hostility. Truth as betrayal. At that point the lie no longer needs the original speaker. It becomes self sustaining, enforced socially, amplified freely, defended aggressively precisely because it cannot be defended honestly.

This is where the drift towards authoritarianism becomes visible.

Authoritarianism does not begin with tanks or cancelled elections. It begins when truth loses consequence and loyalty replaces reality. It begins when repeating a known falsehood brings social reward, while correcting it brings hassle, exclusion, or abuse. Enforcement no longer requires the state. The tribe does the work for free.

Psychologically, people are not convinced into this future. They are worn down into it. Some withdraw. Others flip and start enforcing the lie themselves, because enforcing it feels better than being ground down by it. Silence becomes survival. Repetition becomes identity.

By the time overt authoritarian measures arrive, if they arrive at all, the ground has already been prepared. Trust has been hollowed out. Journalism has been neutralised by etiquette. Tribal loyalty has replaced shared reality. Enough people are repeating the lie. Enough people are enforcing it. Enough people have decided that fighting it is not worth the effort.

And there you are at home, shouting at the television, not because you think it can hear you, but because you can see exactly what is happening.

Truth still exists. That is not the problem.

The problem is that it has been stripped of power, protected by civility, amplified by bad faith, and enforced by people who know better and do it anyway.

That is how an authoritarian future arrives. Quietly. Respectably. To applause from the mobilised troops.

The Village Pub

I was listening to a radio programme about the demise of the village pub, which is usually the cue for a familiar round of sighing, nostalgia and finger pointing. Big business. Supermarkets. Wetherspoons. Councils. The government. Anyone, really, except the people doing the sighing.

What we are repeatedly told is that this collapse is sudden. A shock. A crisis. As if the pub trade was healthy until very recently and then, without warning, fell off a cliff. That simply is not true. This has been happening at a steady, predictable pace for forty years. Not a collapse, a thinning. Decade by decade, habit by habit, the sums quietly stopped working.

The problem with most of the lamenting is that it treats the pub as something that was taken from us, rather than something we quietly stopped using. Ask the average mourner when they last went into their village pub and the answer is often two years ago, possibly more, usually followed by a justification involving work, health, driving, the weather, or “it just wasn’t what it used to be”. All fair enough. But a business cannot survive on fond memories and annual Christmas lunches.

Before Covid, we went out to a pub once a week for a meal. Nothing fancy, just a routine. Covid intervened, the habit was broken, and when restrictions disappeared we simply never resumed it. Not out of principle. It just did not restart. What we did notice, however, was that we were about £150 a week better off. That is more than my monthly diesel spend on the car. Once you see that written down, nostalgia has a harder job competing with arithmetic.

The same forces took out the village shop and the attached post office. They were never really commercial enterprises in the modern sense. They were social infrastructure disguised as retail. Once people drove to supermarkets, commuted out of the village, ordered online and did their banking on a phone, the logic collapsed. What was left was nostalgia with overheads.

Ironically, many pubs tried to absorb those losses as a survival mechanism. A corner becomes a shop. The snug becomes a post office counter. The pub quietly turns itself into a Swiss Army knife of rural services, not because it wants to, but because someone has to host what remains of communal life. At this rate, they may as well double up as churches too. Attendance there has been falling for decades, and at least the pub already has seating, heating, and a working collection plate.

This is the point where it is worth asking what does work, because some pubs are not just surviving, they are doing perfectly well. The pattern is fairly consistent. Successful pubs pick a lane and stay in it. They stop pretending they are essential infrastructure and accept that they are leisure businesses. If they do food, they do it properly, with short menus and competence rather than ambition. If they focus on drink, they do it deliberately and cheaply enough to matter. They understand that reviews now replace habit, and that one bad meal does more damage than ten good pints ever did.

They also accept that routine local trade has gone and replace it with destination custom. Walkers, cyclists, tourists, weekenders. Parking helps. So does being on a route, having rooms upstairs, serving coffee in the morning, or working the building harder in other ways. They control costs ruthlessly, limit opening hours when it makes sense, and design themselves around the demographics they actually have, not the village population of 1985.

Wetherspoons gets blamed a lot, and it deserves some of it. It is not really a pub, it is big business selling alcohol efficiently. It recalibrated what people think a pint should cost, and once that happens the local publican is finished. But even that misses the point. Wetherspoons did not kill the village pub. It merely accelerated and exposed a decline already well under way.

Demographics did the heavier lifting. Younger people drink far less and rarely see the pub as a default social space. Older people drink differently, less often, and prefer the comfort of home. Add in commuting, housing churn, second homes and the disappearance of people who live and work in the same place, and the steady midweek trade evaporates. The pub was built on routine. We now live on choice.

Covid relief muddied the waters further. A lot of pubs were not saved so much as frozen. Furlough, grants, VAT cuts and rate relief paused the decline but did not reverse it. When that support ended, exactly as scheduled, the reaction was framed as a sudden betrayal. It was nothing of the sort. The clock simply restarted. Emergency support quietly became an expectation, and the return of normal arithmetic felt like an ambush.

Cheap supermarket booze finished the job. Alcohol became a loss leader, sold at prices pubs cannot legally match. People quite rationally drank at home, or drank before going out, or stopped going out altogether. The pub was left trying to sell atmosphere at a price people no longer recognise as reasonable. By the time anyone noticed what was being lost, the behaviour had already shifted.

Food was supposed to be the salvation. Instead, many pubs started serving frankly shit food. Not cheap, not good, and not memorable in a good way. Microwaved mediocrity at restaurant prices. Once you have a couple of bad meals, you stop trying. Meanwhile, stand-alone restaurants quietly disappeared, squeezed by costs and the collapse of routine eating out. Pubs stole their lunch, but only because the restaurant had already left the table.

At this point, it is worth noticing who actually buys a lot of failing pubs. Developers. Especially the ones with decent car parks. A pub with land is not a community asset, it is a planning opportunity. The decline does not need to be dramatic. It just needs to be allowed to continue until redevelopment becomes “inevitable”.

I am part of this too. I now only go to pubs when I am away on a short break, and not for the drink. I go for the food and the atmosphere, after checking the menu and the reviews. That is not how village pubs were meant to work, but it is how they are now consumed.

So when the village pub finally closes, the grief feels real but oddly hollow. We did not lose it overnight. We opted out of it slowly, over several decades, politely and with good reasons. The padlock on the door just makes the long decision visible.

Farage’s Useful Idiots

I’ve written about this before on my blog, but Suella Braverman’s defection to Reform just reiterates the point, so I’m making it again here for clarity.

Farage is hoovering up defecting Conservative MPs like they are bargains in the middle aisle at Lidl. Every one of them comes with a little speech about “principle” and “accountability”, and every one of them has somehow discovered these virtues at the exact moment their career prospects in the Tory party have started flashing red.

And yes, defecting sitting MPs are useful to Farage. They swell his numbers, they swell his headlines, and they swell the impression that Reform is “a serious force now”. But it’s not strategy. It’s tactics. It’s influence, pressure, and optics. The defectors think they’re joining a project. In reality, they’re joining a press cycle.

Political theory has a very old distinction that helps here: politics as persuasion versus politics as mobilisation. Liberal democracy is meant to be persuasion. You assemble coalitions, you accept pluralism, you compromise, and you treat institutions as constraints that protect everyone from arbitrary power. Populism is mobilisation. You generate intensity, identify enemies, and keep supporters emotionally engaged. It is far easier to do that in opposition than in office, because mobilisation doesn’t require delivery. It only requires grievance, momentum, and a permanent sense of betrayal.

Most of the defectors are fuelled by naked ambition. They are not political geniuses executing a master plan. They are careerists trying to keep their seats and their status, and they are mistaking attention for achievement. In older conservative thought, politics was supposed to involve duty, prudence, restraint, and a loyalty to institutions. What we have now is politics as a marketplace, with MPs acting as rational agents inside a degraded system.

But it’s worse than mere careerism. It’s the absence of self-awareness. These people are being used, cynically, and they don’t even have the self-awareness to realise it because their judgement has been hijacked by instantaneous opportunism. They are not defecting into a coherent programme of government. They are defecting into a brand. They are being deployed tactically, not embraced strategically, and once they’ve served their purpose they’ll be discarded the moment they become inconvenient or start demanding a share of the spotlight.

Because I still don’t believe Farage actually wants to be Prime Minister. Not in the way normal politicians do. Governing is where slogans go to die. It is budgets, courts, trade-offs, civil servants, international obligations, and the small matter of reality. It forces what Max Weber called the ethic of responsibility: you own consequences, you compromise, you choose between bad options, and you accept constraints. Farage’s entire political brand is closer to an ethic of conviction: moral certainty, simple answers, and perpetual accusation. That is a brilliant way to run a movement. It is a terrible way to run a state.

And we have seen with Trump where accountability leads. The moment reality and scrutiny arrive, the instinct is not to adjust the policy, but to attack the referee. Courts, prosecutors, journalists, civil servants, even the electoral system itself. The accountability doesn’t produce learning. It produces rage, denial, and an escalating attempt to discredit the mechanisms that hold power to account in the first place.

And that’s the point. Farage doesn’t need Number 10 to win. His paymasters don’t need him to win either. He can win simply by shifting what counts as “common sense” and “realistic”. That’s textbook agenda-setting power. Drag the Overton window rightwards so everyone else has to chase him on tax, regulation, immigration, protest, “British values”, the BBC, the courts, you name it. The mainstream parties start triangulating and tightening and copying the framing, and Farage gets to claim victory even if he never runs a department in his life.

But there’s a problem for him, and it’s a delicious one. Accepting ex-Conservatives in bulk annoys a good chunk of his own base, and it certainly spooks the waverers. Reform’s brand is “we’re not the Tories”. If he keeps filling his benches with the people who broke the country, he starts looking like Conservative Party 2.0 with a new paint job. The waverers aren’t signing up for a Tory reunion tour in turquoise. They want a wrecking ball, not a committee of failed ministers.

So Farage has to perform this ridiculous balancing act. He needs the defectors for credibility, but he needs to pretend he doesn’t need them. That’s why he makes them grovel. That’s why they have to say the Conservatives “broke the country” out loud. It’s not contrition. It’s branding. It’s a ritual that signals to the base that these aren’t colleagues, they’re trophies.

This is also where anti-pluralism comes in. A defining feature of populism is the claim to exclusive moral authority: “we represent the real people”. Once you accept that, opponents aren’t just wrong, they are illegitimate. Courts become obstacles, the media becomes hostile, civil servants become saboteurs, and compromise becomes betrayal. Permanent outrage isn’t an accident. It’s the mechanism that keeps legitimacy alive without delivery.

Now here’s the irony. As the Boris-era Conservatives drift over to Reform, the Conservative Party might actually have a route back. A real one. Not by chasing Farage harder, but by finally letting that wing go and regrouping as something closer to One Nation Conservatism. A smaller party, perhaps, but one that is serious, competent, and capable of governing without setting fire to the furniture.

The Conservatives could stop trying to out-Farage Farage, and go back to being the boring, pragmatic centre-right party that at least believed in institutions, compromise, and the idea that you don’t run a country like a pub argument.

But if they want that, Badenoch would have to go.

You can’t rebuild as One Nation while led by someone still operating in the culture-war lane. Badenoch’s pitch is built for the membership, not the country. It’s all sharp lines, factional positioning, and grievance politics. It narrows the gap between the Conservatives and Reform instead of widening it. It keeps the party trapped in the same doom loop: chase Farage, lose to Farage, then blame the electorate for not appreciating your “common sense”.

Frankly, it would be better for everyone if Badenoch herself defected. She’d be with her natural political tribe, Reform would get another headline, and the Conservatives might finally be forced to decide whether they want to be a serious centre-right party again or just a smaller, sulkier version of Farage.

A One Nation recovery would mean accepting that the Johnson years were a disaster, that Brexit has left the country weaker, that public services need rebuilding, and that competence is not “woke”. It would mean choosing stability over slogans, and governing over performance. That requires a different temperament, a different tone, and frankly a different leader. Rory Stewart.

So yes, Reform is growing. But it’s growing in the way mould grows. Fast, loud, and in all the wrong places. The defectors are ambitious, Farage is tactical, and the people paying for it are the ones still waiting for a GP appointment while Westminster plays musical chairs with rosettes.

Regency Leisure on a Pension

Being retired is like living the life of a Regency gentleman who isn’t Jane Austen rich.

Not “Pemberley with a lake and a staff of twelve” rich. More “decent coat, warm house, no urgent letters from the bank” rich. Comfortable. Secure. But with the faint, nagging sensation that you’re basically just waiting for the next meal like an indoor cat with a pension.

Because that’s the thing they don’t tell you about retirement. Everyone bangs on about freedom, but freedom is only enjoyable if you’ve got somewhere to point it. Otherwise it just sloshes around inside you like unused energy in a battery you can’t quite be bothered to wire up.

Working life, for all its nonsense, gives you structure. It gives you deadlines, consequences, and that small, addictive hit of competence when you solve something and the world moves because you moved it. Then one day you stop. And suddenly nothing needs you by 4pm. Nobody is waiting for an answer. Nobody is ringing to say “we need this sorted now” in that tone that suggests the building will collapse if you don’t respond in the next six minutes.

So you potter. You dabble. You don’t “do projects” anymore. You “have a little go”. You wander into the garage, look at something with intent, pick up a tool, put it down again, and then spend forty five minutes researching the best version of the tool you already own. Alternatively, you buy yet another tool. Pottering is retirement’s default setting. It looks like leisure from the outside. From the inside it’s more like life on standby. You’re not unhappy. You’re just not fully deployed.

And dabbling is what happens when you still have the instincts of a capable man, but the world has stopped issuing you missions. So you invent tiny ones. Move that plant pot. Tighten that hinge. Sort out that drawer that has been “on the list” since 2017. Reorganise the shed, which is a noble fantasy that lasts precisely one afternoon before entropy reasserts itself and you retreat indoors for tea.

Tea becomes the new quarterly review. Did you achieve anything today? Well… I replaced a washer. I located the thing. I thought about the other thing. I moved three objects from one surface to another surface. Then I rewarded myself like I’d negotiated the Treaty of Versailles.

And this is why retirement car rebuilds take forever. When you’re working, you rebuild a car like a normal person. You need it done. You need it running. You need it back on the road before you forget what the steering wheel is for. So you make decisions, you compromise, you bodge the non critical bits, and you move forward.

In retirement, urgency dies. And without urgency, the project stops being a job and becomes a permanent seminar. You don’t “fit the part”. You research the part. Then you research the better part. Then you discover a third part that might be better still, but only if you redesign the bracket, relocate the thing it mounts to, and re route three pipes that were perfectly fine yesterday.

Then you stand there for half an hour, staring at it, not because you’re stuck, but because you’re thinking about the optimal attack strategy like you’re planning D Day, except the enemy is a Triumph and it’s already surrendered.

The actual work becomes a small percentage of the time. The rest is contemplation, refinement, and the slow realisation that you can spend an entire afternoon achieving nothing except certainty.

And once you’ve rebuilt a car slowly enough, you start applying the same mentality to everything else.

Take candles. I now make candles from old candles that are no longer viable. Not in a charming, Pinterest sort of way. More in a “clearly this man has too much free time and access to a saucepan” sort of way.

A candle has done its duty. The wick has gone feral. The wax is a cratered wasteland. It still smells vaguely of Christmas, but it’s never going to burn properly again. In working life, you’d bin it without a second thought and move on with your day. In retirement, nothing gets binned. Everything becomes “materials”.

So you melt the remnants down like an apothecary. You strain out the old wick debris. You pour it into a mould with the solemn care of a man casting a bronze cannon. You insert a fresh wick with the precision of a shipwright stepping a mast. Then you leave it to set, feeling quietly pleased with yourself, as if you’ve just secured the nation’s energy supply.

And to be fair, they are very nice. They burn well. They look decent. They smell reassuringly of civilisation. But they are also entirely pointless.

There is no actual need to do this. You can buy candles. You can buy them cheaply. You can buy them in bulk. You can buy them in scents so aggressive they could fumigate a Victorian workhouse. Candle making is not an economic strategy. It’s not even a hobby with a clear outcome.

It’s just something to do because the day is long and you’ve already tightened every hinge in the house twice.

This is retirement in a nutshell. You become a man who can’t just own things, you have to optimise them. You can’t simply accept that a candle has reached the end of its life. You have to recycle it, upgrade it, and bring it back into service like it’s a decommissioned naval vessel being refitted for one last glorious voyage.

It’s pottering, but with fire. And that’s the point. Not the candle. The ritual. The quiet sense of purpose. The fact that for an hour or two, you’re not just drifting through the day like a Regency gentleman of modest means. You’re engaged in industry. You’re applying skill. You’re transforming matter. You’re being useful. Even if the only person who benefits is you, sitting there later in the evening, looking at a perfectly good candle you didn’t need, thinking:

Well. That’s another crisis averted.

Another example is this:

I’ve had a Spitfire Rolls-Royce Griffon rocker cover hanging over a door for about six years, like it’s perfectly normal to walk under wartime aviation engineering on the way to the kitchen. It started as a brilliant bit of industrial decor and a conversation piece, but as with all things in retirement, it slowly stopped being “a thing on the wall” and became “a thing that needs doing properly”.

The original intention was to have it chrome plated. If you’re going to own a piece of Griffon hardware, you may as well make it gleam like a museum exhibit and blind visitors at ten paces. But the condition was too bad. Too pitted and too scarred, too far gone for polite society. Chrome plating would have been like putting lipstick on a brick, except more expensive.

So it ended up powder coated silver instead. And to be fair, it looked alright. It looked clean and “restored”. But it wasn’t original, and the lettering didn’t pop. The whole thing just sat there, quietly competent, like a man in a grey suit at a party.

Which is how I ended up repainting it satin black.

And because retirement gives you unlimited time to overthink small details, I didn’t just paint it and hope for the best. I inlaid clay into the lettering so that when the paint went on and the clay came out, the words would come up silver and crisp, like they were meant to. It’s the sort of thing you do when nobody is going to ring you at 4pm demanding a progress update, and when you’ve got the luxury of being able to redo it if it’s not quite right.

And the moment it was done, it was obvious. Satin black was always the answer. The lettering finally stood out. It looked less like “something I found on eBay” and more like “something that belongs to a Merlin’s angry older brother”.

That’s the other retirement trick. By 2pm you’re looking at the clock thinking, “Christ! Where’s the day gone?” Yet when you were stuck in the 9-to-5 grind you’d look at the same clock and think, “Christ. Will this day never end?” Time doesn’t change, obviously. It just stops being your enemy and starts being your raw material, which is both lovely and faintly unnerving.

But there’s a darker version of this, and it’s not a joke.

Retirement strips away structure, status, tribe, and purpose. You go from being needed to being optional. You go from being in the flow of things to being a spectator. And if you’re not careful, you go looking for a replacement.

Some people find it in grandkids, gardening, volunteering, fixing things, learning Italian, or finally rebuilding the car properly. They invent harmless little missions. They potter, they dabble, they make candles. They restore a Griffon rocker cover like it’s a sacred relic. It’s all slightly ridiculous, but it’s constructive, and it keeps the brain engaged.

Others find it in certainty.

Certainty is the most seductive retirement hobby of all. It’s easy. It’s instant. It comes with a tribe, a uniform, a few slogans, and a ready-made list of people to blame. It gives you purpose without the inconvenience of nuance, or evidence, or the tedious business of being wrong and having to change your mind.

And the really grim part is that it doesn’t feel like you’re becoming more gullible. It feels like you’re becoming more “awake”. More “informed”. More “common sense”. Which is exactly why it works.

Because the scepticism gland atrophies.

At work, you’re constantly being forced to test your assumptions. People challenge you. Numbers don’t add up. Plans fail. Someone wants something impossible by Friday. Reality keeps tapping you on the shoulder and saying, no mate, try again.

Then you retire and your world gets smaller and smoother. Fewer awkward conversations. Fewer people telling you you’re wrong. Less need to justify your opinions to anyone who matters. And if you’re not careful, you drift into a life where you only hear what you already believe.

That’s when certainty starts feeling like wisdom.

And once you’ve got certainty, you need enemies to keep it warm. You need someone to be the reason your life doesn’t feel as important as it should. Migrants. “Woke”. The BBC. The EU. The neighbour’s kid with blue hair. Anyone will do, as long as it gives you that little hit of moral purpose.

It’s purpose by substitution. And it’s dangerous because it feels like meaning.

The antidote is staying curious, staying technical, staying grounded in the real world where things either fit or they don’t. Where you can’t argue a bolt into place by shouting “common sense” at it. Where reality doesn’t care how patriotic you feel while you’re holding a spanner.

Which is why I’d rather spend my afternoons restoring a Griffon rocker cover than restoring my own certainty.

At least the rocker cover doesn’t lie to me.

Cat Admin

Kitty has a habit of going into cupboards. Any cupboard. If it has a door, it has potential. This is not curiosity so much as a belief system. Behind every closed door there might be meaning. Or at least a quiet place to sit and judge.

The other day she selected the printer cupboard. A bold choice. It contains paper, cables, a machine that screams occasionally, and nothing that could reasonably be mistaken for comfort. I assumed she had gone in there to sleep, or to glare at the Ethernet cable, which she regards as personally suspicious.

Some time later, however, I heard noises.

Not the usual cat noises. No rustling. No offended yowl. Mechanical noises. Whirring. A pause. Another whirr. The sort of sound that suggests a process is underway, whether anyone wants it or not.

This is how modern life works. You are not doing anything, then suddenly something is happening to you. There is no visible output, but the machine is clearly very busy.

I waited. Nothing emerged. No paper. No error message. Just more industrious, inexplicable activity.

At this point it became clear what was going on.

Kitty was not stuck. She was not panicking. She was not trying to escape. She was engaged in an entirely pointless administrative procedure, for reasons known only to herself, involving a large piece of office equipment and no tangible result.

I can only conclude she was photocopying her arse.

This, frankly, explains a great deal about how institutions function.

Power to the People

We are told, endlessly and reverently, that the legitimacy of a polity is derived from “the people”. It sounds democratic. It sounds final. It is neither.

“The people” are not a single will waiting to be expressed. They are a shifting mixture of interests, fears, habits, and contradictions. Elections do not reveal a popular will so much as compress it into a result that can be administered. Something is always lost in that compression. To then treat the outcome as a moral blank cheque is not democratic principle. It is political convenience.

The problem becomes obvious the moment an election ends. Between elections the electorate has almost no power at all. Voters cannot recall laws, reverse decisions, or restrain executive action in real time. Power is exercised continuously by a small group, while consent is frozen at a moment in the past. The idea that “the people are in charge” during this period is a comforting story we tell ourselves to avoid looking at how thin popular control actually is.

This is why institutions matter. Courts, legislatures, regulators, auditors, devolved bodies, and a free press are not irritants to democracy. They are the means by which democracy continues after polling day. Elections authorise power. Institutions supervise it. Remove that supervision and elections become ritualised abdication rather than ongoing consent.

But democracy cannot solve this by voting constantly. A system in permanent campaign mode cannot plan. Infrastructure, defence, education, climate policy, industrial strategy all require decisions whose benefits arrive long after the next headline or the next vote. Continuous plebiscite produces short-term bribery, not stewardship.

So democracy lives in tension. Too much electoral distance and power hardens into entitlement. Too little and governance collapses into populist panic. The solution is not to worship elections, but to embed them in a structure that restrains power while voters are absent.

This is where electoral systems stop being technical details and start being constitutional safeguards.

Winner-takes-all systems are uniquely dangerous because they convert narrow victories into total control. A party or individual can acquire sweeping authority on a minority of support, then claim exclusive ownership of “the people’s will”. Opposition is marginalised. Institutional resistance is reframed as anti-democratic obstruction. What follows is not a coup with tanks, but a coup by legality. Norms are bent, checks are weakened, watchdogs are attacked, and all of it is justified as democratic entitlement.

Just look at Trump.  

These systems also encourage binary politics. Winner versus loser. Mandate versus betrayal. Once that frame is embedded, anything that slows or limits the winner is cast as illegitimate. Volatility is mistaken for decisiveness. In reality, legitimacy erodes with every lurch.

Proportional systems behave differently. They fragment power deliberately. They make outright domination rare unless it is genuinely supported by a majority. Governments depend on negotiation and shared authority. Opposition is not an inconvenience to be crushed but a permanent feature of governance. Policy evolves as the balance of opinion in society evolves. That process can be slow and frustrating, but it is honest.

Crucially, proportional systems frustrate coups. Authoritarian takeovers rely on speed and consolidation. Proportional systems impose delay, bargaining, and visibility. Power cannot easily be seized all at once. When rapid change does occur, it is usually because public opinion has shifted decisively and persistently, not because a transient mood was magnified into absolute control.

Systems that concentrate executive power in a single individual are especially vulnerable. When authority is personal, indivisible, and time-locked, restraint is easily framed as sabotage. Elections become existential battles. Losing power feels like exclusion rather than opposition. Under those conditions, attempts to bypass constitutional limits become rational rather than exceptional. History shows that such systems are far more prone to coups, self-coups, and democratic hollowing-out than systems where power is shared and conditional.

The deeper point is this. Legitimacy does not flow from “the people” as a one-off event. It flows from a continuing relationship between consent, law, restraint, and outcomes. Elections provide authorisation. Institutions provide accountability. Stability makes long-term planning possible. Remove any part of that chain and democracy degrades, either into paralysis or into elective absolutism dressed up as popular will.

Those who shout loudest about “the people” are often those most eager to escape supervision. History suggests that when power starts using “the people” as a shield, the people are usually the first to be hit.

Burnham

I like Andy Burnham. I’ve got time for him. He sounds like a normal bloke, he’s got a record in Greater Manchester, and he doesn’t give off that faintly haunted Westminster vibe where everything you say has been focus-grouped to death.

But if you look at this properly, without the fan club goggles on, what he’s doing now doesn’t look like “best for the party”. It looks like “best for Andy Burnham”.

Because this isn’t his first go at the top job. He ran for the Labour leadership in 2010 and lost. He ran again in 2015 and lost. So when people pretend this is just a noble act of service, you have to laugh. He’s not being called back to Westminster because the nation is short of men in suits. He’s being pulled by the one thing Westminster is always about: another shot at the leadership.

And I get it. Politicians are ambitious. That’s not a sin. But timing matters, and this is not the right time.

If Burnham stands as an MP, he has to give up the mayoralty. That means a new Greater Manchester election. Labour might hold it, but it’s not guaranteed. Reform would love to turn it into a national protest vote, and the Conservatives would love to claim Labour can’t even keep hold of its own backyard. Even if Labour scrape through, you’ve still created a huge distraction, spent a load of money, and handed the opposition weeks of attack lines.

Then there’s the by-election itself. Yes, Labour should win. But by-elections are weird. Turnout collapses, the angry show up, and the media turn it into a verdict on the government. If Burnham lost, he’d be out of the mayoralty and out of Parliament. That’s not bold. That’s reckless.

And the big giveaway is this: there are two years to go until a general election.

Two years. That’s ages. That’s enough time for Labour to recover in the polls, enough time for Reform to overreach and wobble, enough time for the government to actually deliver something people can feel. It’s also enough time for one ugly internal story to fester and become the permanent headline: “Labour divided”.

Because the right-wing press are already writing the script. “Plot”. “Coup”. “Civil war”. “Starmer under siege”. They don’t need Labour to be collapsing. They just need Labour to look like it might be. Burnham standing would hand them that story on a plate, with garnish.

And after what we’ve just lived through with the Conservatives, Labour should know better. We had revolving Prime Ministers, endless factional nonsense, and a party that looked like it was governing as a side hustle while it obsessed over its own internal psychodrama. It didn’t look strong. It looked unstable. Voters hated it.

Labour’s whole pitch is supposed to be the opposite. Calm. Competent. Boring in a reassuring way. Get on with the job. Don’t turn politics into a knife fight every six months.

Burnham might well be a better politician than Starmer. Starmer might well be a better Prime Minister than Burnham. Both can be true. But neither of them escapes the constraints. The NHS is still battered. The public finances are still tight. Debt interest still bites. Growth is still weak. Brexit is still dragging the economy like an anchor.

Changing the leader doesn’t change any of that.

So yes, Burnham senses another chance. He’s been here before, he’s lost before, and now he thinks the moment might be coming round again.

But the party doesn’t need another leadership soap opera. Not now. Not with two years to go. Not when the public have only just stopped flinching every time a Prime Minister walks up to a lectern.

If Burnham wants to be a serious asset to Labour, he stays where he is, keeps delivering, and waits for a moment when the party actually needs a change, not just when he fancies another run at the crown.

Because right now, this doesn’t look like leadership. It looks like ambition getting ahead of judgement.

Heart says yes, head says no.

Games Without Frontiers

Right. New idea. Since international law is apparently just a sort of optional etiquette for grown-ups with missiles, we settle global disputes the only way modern civilisation still understands.

At the World Cup.

No summits. No UN resolutions. No solemn men in grey suits saying “this is a pivotal moment” while doing absolutely nothing pivotal. Just 90 minutes of football, a dodgy referee, and the faint smell of lager and panic.

If two nations are at war, they don’t get to flatten cities and call it “security”. They get a fixture. Tuesday night. Under the lights. Winner gets the disputed territory. Loser goes home and has to write an apology on a bit of paper like a naughty child.

Imagine it. Russia v Ukraine. Not in a trench, but in a stadium. Putin in the VIP box, trying to look statesmanlike while secretly hoping VAR gets bombed. Zelensky looking like a man who has slept three hours in four years and still has more moral authority than the entire Kremlin.

The match starts. There’s the national anthems, the handshakes, the awkward moment where the Russian captain pretends he’s never heard of Crimea. Then it’s on. Sliding tackles instead of artillery. Corners instead of cruise missiles. A tactical foul instead of an assassination.

And if it’s a draw? Penalties. None of this “we’ll keep talking” nonsense. Straight to the spot. The fate of nations decided by a 19-year-old winger with a haircut like a Lego man and the emotional stability of a squirrel.

Of course, the real genius is that this system scales. Why stop at bilateral disputes? Let’s sort the whole mess out in one tournament.

Israel v Palestine? Group stage. India v Pakistan? Quarter-final. China v Taiwan? Semi. North Korea can come too, but only if they promise not to eat the linesman.

And then, the final. The big one. The World Cup winner takes the lot.

Not the trophy. Not the bragging rights. The entire world.

They don’t just get to lift a golden cup. They get to run the planet. Borders, budgets, the lot. Every passport gets rebranded. Every embassy becomes a fan zone. The UN is replaced by a bloke with a whistle and a can of shaving foam.

France wins? Fine. Everyone has to strike more, eat better bread, and argue about philosophy while smoking moodily outside cafes. Germany wins? The trains run on time and you get fined for smiling incorrectly. England wins? God help us. We’d spend the first six months arguing about who “really” won, then appoint a Prime Minister based on a penalty shootout, then outsource the NHS to a hedge fund because someone on TalkTV said it was “common sense”.

Brazil wins and it’s samba, sunshine, and the economy being held together by vibes and football. Argentina wins and everyone is legally required to be dramatic about everything. Even the weather forecast.

The USA wins, obviously, because the tournament is held there and they’d rename it the “World Freedom Cup presented by Lockheed Martin”. The referee would be sponsored. The goalposts would have adverts. The national anthem would last 11 minutes. And the post-match interview would include the phrase “we’re bringing jobs back”.

But the best bit is the deterrent effect.

Want to invade a neighbour? Fine. But first, can you actually defend a corner?

Thinking of annexing someone? Better practise your first touch. Planning a “special military operation”? Hope your centre-backs can cope with a high press.

It’s a perfect system because it humiliates the warmongers. Dictators hate being laughed at. They love tanks, parades, and grim men in uniforms. They do not love losing 3-0 because their right-back got nutmegged by a lad from a country they claimed didn’t exist.

And it’s cheaper. Instead of spending hundreds of billions on weapons, we spend it on grass, floodlights, and therapy for goalkeepers. We get fewer refugees, fewer mass graves, and more disappointing group-stage exits. That’s a trade I’ll take.

Yes, there are flaws. Obviously.

England could accidentally win on penalties and end up in charge of the planet, which would be like handing the nuclear codes to a man who thinks a “strategy” is shouting at a linesman. And there’s always the risk that some despot refuses to accept the result, claims the match was rigged, and storms the pitch with his personal militia.

Still. That’s basically what happens now, just with more rubble.

So yes, let’s do it. Settle disputes at the World Cup. Put war on the pitch, not in the streets. Let the politicians sit in the stands, powerless, watching the one thing they can’t spin: the scoreline.

I fancy Denmark against the USA, any day.

And when the final whistle blows, the winner takes the world.

Which, come to think of it, is exactly the problem with letting certain people host the tournament in the first place.

Suicide Squad

There’s a moment in far too many dramas where the tension is building nicely. The police have the place surrounded, the villain is cornered, everyone’s shouting, and you think, right, this could be good.

Then the baddie does the thing. Out he runs into the open, standing bolt upright like he’s about to take a penalty at Wembley, and starts firing wildly at armed police. Not from cover, not from a doorway, not even from behind a wheelie bin. Just out there in the middle of nowhere, waving a gun around like it’s a wand and he’s trying to summon plot armour. And obviously he gets shredded, because he’s basically volunteered for the firing squad.

It’s stupid, and it ruins a perfectly good scene because it turns the whole thing into a cartoon. It’s always framed as some brave last stand, but it isn’t bravery. It’s a character suddenly becoming too thick to breathe because the writer wants the scene over in 20 seconds and can’t be bothered with the hard work of a proper standoff.

A realistic villain doesn’t sprint into open ground to have a gunfight with a dozen trained officers. They hide, they bargain, they run, they wait, they do anything except step into the kill zone like they’ve forgotten how bullets work. If the script allowed them to behave like an actual human being with survival instincts, the ending would have to be earned with patience, fear, tactics and negotiation, and the police would have to look methodical rather than heroic.

And when it’s a gang it’s even more ridiculous, because you’re not just watching one idiot do it, you’re watching a whole group of idiots take turns. A gang is supposed to have two advantages: numbers and intimidation. In real life that usually translates into caution, control of territory, and a strong preference for not getting perforated. They melt away, scatter, use cover, and live to fight another day because that’s the whole point of being organised. But TV gangs behave like a queue at the Post Office. One runs out firing wildly, gets dropped. Then another. Then another. It’s basically whack-a-mole, except the moles have guns and no interest in self-preservation. You stop thinking “these people are dangerous” and start thinking “these people couldn’t organise a crisp packet in a gale”.

The maddening part is it’s not even necessary. A tense, believable standoff is gripping. Two sides behind cover, time stretching, one wrong move changing everything. That’s drama. But instead we get the magic idiot run because the plot needs a tidy full stop, and the moment you notice it you can’t unsee it. A lot of dramas don’t have gangs or villains at that point, they’ve got a firing-range with dialogue.

My Word Is My Bond - Until It Isn’t

A long post, but bear with me:

Technocratic centrism isn’t dead. It’s just been pushed off the stage by something louder, nastier, and far more dangerous. And because it comes wrapped in slogans, flags and performative rage, half the audience still thinks it’s entertainment.

For a few decades after the war, a lot of the West ran on a bargain that was never properly written down, but everyone understood it. You paid your taxes, the state did the basics, and life slowly got better. Governments didn’t have to be brilliant, they just had to be competent and broadly honest. Politics was a bit like running a well managed shipping line. Not glamorous, but predictable. You didn’t need fireworks, you needed the timetable.

That was the Post War Settlement in spirit if not always in detail. It was built on trust. Trust that the numbers weren’t invented. Trust that civil servants weren’t party operatives. Trust that if you lost an election you accepted it and went home. Trust that most politicians weren’t saints, but they weren’t openly looting the place either.

Then came the stress test. Not one crisis, but a series of them. The financial crash. A decade of austerity. Brexit. Covid. The cost of living spike driven by global energy prices after Russia invaded Ukraine. Add in housing shortages, creaking infrastructure, and public services stretched past the point of decency. Each crisis took a bite out of competence and a bite out of trust.

And here’s the awkward part. Crises have a price. Somebody has to pay it. In a serious country, the bill is shared and it’s explained honestly. In a tired country, voters start wanting the benefits without the cost. They want the state to fix everything, instantly, without taxes rising, without bills rising, without sacrifice, and without admitting that some of the pain is the price of earlier mistakes.

That’s when “handshake government” starts to fail. The old model relies on trade-offs and patience. It assumes voters will accept that complex problems take time and money to solve. But after enough shocks, patience runs out. People stop wanting management and start wanting magic.

They want instant solutions.

They want an NHS that works tomorrow, without paying for it. They want cheaper energy, without building anything. They want lower taxes, better services, and no difficult decisions. They want immigration controlled, but they don’t want the administrative grind of enforcement, courts, returns agreements, staffing, and processing. They want the results, not the work. They want a country that feels like 1997, but with today’s living standards and none of the global pressures.

That is the moment the populist walks in.

And this is where the Baltic Exchange comes in, because it’s the best analogy I know for what’s happening to trust.

The Baltic Exchange was the London marketplace for shipping, where shipbrokers and charterers fixed cargoes and agreed deals. For much of its history it ran on reputation and convention. The old motto was “My word is my bond”. It wasn’t a legal contract in the modern sense. It was a way of saying: if I give you my word in this room, the deal stands, because if it doesn’t, I’m finished. In a close market, trust is currency. Once you lose it, you’re out.

That sort of system works brilliantly, right up until the day someone walks in who doesn’t care about the convention.

Putin is the textbook example. He’s both the warm-up and the final result. He took a weak democracy, kept the outward forms, and turned it into a managed system where power sticks, money flows upwards, and opponents are treated as enemies of the state. He didn’t abolish elections. He made them pointless.

Trump is simply copying the same playbook, adapted for a country with stronger institutions and a louder media. The same MO, just with different props. The goal isn’t policy. The goal is dominance. You don’t persuade the electorate, you divide it. You don’t accept scrutiny, you discredit it. You don’t treat the state as a public trust, you treat it as something to be owned.

The key thing people miss is what elections are actually for.

Elections exist so you can boot them out before they start thinking the country belongs to them.

That ability is the safety catch. If leaders know they can be fired, they behave differently. If they know they can’t, they behave exactly as you’d expect human beings to behave when they’re untouchable.

So the real trick isn’t cancelling elections. That would be crude. You keep the rituals, the ballot boxes, the speeches, the solemn talk about “the will of the people”. You just quietly make sure the result can’t threaten you.

You do it by picking a fight with anyone who might stop you. Judges, journalists, regulators, election officials - they all get shoved into the same bucket: “enemies of the people”. Reality becomes just another hostile actor. It’s the political equivalent of smashing the speedometer because you don’t like what it says.

Thomas More had it nailed, centuries before social media and culture wars. If you cut down the laws to get at the devil, you’ll have no shelter left when the devil turns on you. That is exactly what happens when people decide courts, watchdogs, rules and due process are just “red tape” that can be swept aside to deliver instant results. You don’t end up with freedom, you end up with a leader who can do whatever they like, and a public that has removed its own protection in the name of common sense.

Then you tilt the playing field quietly. Nothing dramatic, nothing that looks like a coup. Just a steady drift of small changes that all point the same way. Voting gets a little harder in the wrong places, the rules get bent, the money flows to the right people, and the state starts behaving like it has favourites. The opposition can still exist, but it’s forced to fight with one hand tied behind its back.

And all the while, you run the country as a performance.

It’s all done as performance. A crackdown on camera, a new enemy every week, and a constant sense of emergency. The targets change depending on what’s useful. The point is the same: keep the electorate angry and distracted. When people are knackered and raging, they don’t organise properly. They don’t demand receipts. They just react.

Now here’s the part that centrists are too polite to say out loud, because it sounds rude, and rudeness is apparently worse than corruption.

The real thing after Trump won’t be about governing. It will be about extraction.

Once the leadership no longer fears being removed, it stops serving the public and starts serving itself. That isn’t ideology. It’s basic human behaviour. If you can’t be fired, you stop caring what the customer thinks.

The state becomes a funnel. Taxes still come in, but they don’t come back as functioning services. They come back as mates’ rates contracts and cosy appointments, and the rest is quietly funnelled upwards. You’ll see it in everyday life: the bills creep up, the services get worse, and the same firms keep winning the work. Your money is still taken, but the basics quietly rot - hospitals, courts, schools, water systems, roads. You pay more and get less, because the difference is being siphoned off.

And you’ll be told this is freedom.

They’ll call it sovereignty. Patriotism. Common sense. Taking back control. But what it really means is your citizenship has been reduced to applause while the people at the top help themselves. You stop being treated like a citizen. You’re treated like an audience.

That’s what “hollowing out democracy” actually means in real life.

You still get to vote, but it stops being a way to change the leadership. It becomes a ritual. A bit like shouting at the telly during Match of the Day. It feels satisfying in the moment, but it doesn’t change anything important. The candidates are pre-filtered by money, media ecosystems, and party machines that have been bent into shape. The opposition exists, but it’s starved of oxygen, smeared as “unpatriotic”, and treated as a security risk rather than a political alternative.

Then your vote gets replaced by your identity. Politics becomes less about what the state does and more about which tribe you’re in. The point is to keep you loyal, angry, and distracted. If your living standards fall, it’s not because the system is failing you, it’s because “they” are doing it to you. Migrants, judges, Brussels, woke teenagers, whoever’s handy this week.

And when you finally notice you’re poorer, the services are worse, and nothing works, you’ll be told it’s your fault for not believing hard enough.

Does this mean you instantly become Putin’s Russia? Not overnight. Western democracies have stronger institutions and deeper habits of legality. But Russia shows you the endpoint: elections that exist but don’t change power, courts that serve the regime, media as state theatre, and corruption as the operating system. A country where leaders aren’t accountable to voters because they’ve made themselves immune to voters.

That’s the warning. Not that democracy ends with a bang. That it ends with a shrug.

Democracy doesn’t die when people stop voting. It dies when voting stops being a threat to the people in charge.

And if you think this is all too dramatic, ask yourself a simple question. If “my word is my bond” stops meaning anything, what exactly is left holding the whole thing together?