Labour and the Fear of Stability

There is something magnificently Labour about finally crawling back into government after fourteen years in the wilderness, inheriting an economy held together with expired cable ties and optimistic Treasury spreadsheets, beginning - just beginning - to show signs of stabilisation, and then immediately deciding the real priority is to start plotting against your own Prime Minister because the vibes are off.

One can almost hear the ghost of the SDP gently clearing its throat in the distance.

GDP ticks upward for the first quarter. Inflation starts easing. The adult supervision, while hardly thrilling television, appears to be functioning. Britain has not exactly become Singapore-on-Thames overnight, but the ship has at least stopped making the alarming noises associated with bulkheads separating. And Labour MPs, rather than quietly allowing the machinery time to work, have collectively decided this is the ideal moment to start crawling over one another like rats in a sack looking for a leadership election.

The challengers are not even united. That is the funniest part.

Streeting increasingly gives the impression of a man who has rehearsed his first conference speech as Prime Minister several hundred times in the shower. Rayner appears to be maintaining the traditional deputy leader role of hovering just behind the mutiny with the careful expression of somebody wanting the benefits of regime change without technically being seen climbing through the palace window. Andy Burnham is being discussed as a sort of northern saviour figure despite already losing to Starmer once and currently occupying one of the safest and most influential jobs outside Westminster.

And Burnham’s route back appears to involve a by-election in terrain where Reform UK has just been stomping around in steel-capped boots kicking chunks out of the old Labour vote.

Excellent plan.

Because voters famously adore carpet-bagging politicians suddenly developing a spiritual attachment to a constituency the precise moment there is a leadership opportunity available. Nothing says "man of the people" quite like a carefully choreographed Westminster insertion operation involving an MP nobly sacrificing themselves in the hope of perhaps receiving a consolation seat in the House of Lords later. Assuming, of course, the whole thing does not detonate in their faces first.

And that is before one gets to the central absurdity of the entire exercise.

What exactly changes?

This is the bit nobody seems terribly keen to explain. The Treasury arithmetic does not magically disappear because the person at the dispatch box has different hair. Britain still has weak productivity, ageing demographics, strained public services, high taxation, welfare pressures and markets which remain deeply allergic to politicians pretending money is a fictional concept.

So whichever poor soul takes over still arrives at precisely the same conclusion: if you want visible improvement quickly without detonating borrowing costs, you end up squeezing welfare, restraining spending or finding taxes somewhere.

At which point the very same Labour backbenchers currently hyperventilating about Starmer will rediscover their moral objections to arithmetic.

One suspects some MPs imagine there exists, hidden somewhere in Whitehall, a secret room labelled "Good Policies We Chose Not To Use". A replacement leader merely has to find the correct key and Britain immediately transforms into a Scandinavian social democracy with Italian weather and German productivity.

Sadly the real state of the nation is less Nordic utopia and more "provincial leisure centre changing room after a flood".

Meanwhile Reform watches all this with growing delight. Because Reform does not need detailed governing plans. It merely needs the governing party to resemble participants in a committee room coup at a failing golf club while ordinary voters worry about mortgages, rent, energy bills and whether the GP surgery will answer the telephone before retirement age.

Labour’s genius has always been its ability to confuse emotional discomfort with imminent collapse.

The economy is weak? Replace the leader.

The polls wobble? Replace the leader.

Voters are impatient eighteen months into repairing fourteen years of drift? Replace the leader.

Never mind whether the replacement has a coherent alternative. Never mind whether the public even wants another Westminster psychodrama. Never mind whether changing captain during the first signs of calmer water might be politically idiotic.

No. The important thing is that MPs feel restless.

It is all very British. Not in the Churchillian sense. More in the sense of a parish council launching a bitter procedural dispute over the village fete while the church roof quietly catches fire in the background.

And Keir Starmer, for all his faults, should probably do the one thing Labour MPs historically struggle to do themselves.

Hold the line.

Because if the economy continues to improve, even modestly, this entire episode may end up looking less like democratic renewal and more like a group of MPs trying to change drivers while the car had finally, after fourteen years, started moving again.

Nature Found Outdoors in Major Camping Scandal

I was researching the campsite we’re at in the New Forest and stumbled across a couple of reviews which initially made me think, “Good grief, what sort of place have we booked?” 

Then I kept reading and gradually realised the reviewers were essentially furious about having encountered countryside.

One reviewer wrote: 

“The biggest drawback, however, is the animal excrement. The site allows farm animals to roam freely - which means the ground is littered with droppings everywhere you walk.”

Another added:

“Bizarrely the entire camping area is freely accessed by New Forest ponies/horses.”

Bizarrely.

Like arriving in Venice and lodging a complaint about all the canals.

About halfway through reading these reviews I suddenly realised the core issue here was not poor campsite management. It was shock that horses, when left outdoors in fields for extended periods, behave in a recognisably horse-like manner.

There is something wonderfully modern about visiting one of the oldest surviving common grazing landscapes in Europe and reacting as though the presence of animals is some sort of catastrophic management failure.

“Is this even legal?” asks the reviewer.

Yes. Fairly certain the ponies have more historical rights there than most of the visitors.

I also began forming a mental picture of the reviewers. The sort of people who probably live in a city suburb with a motorhome or caravan squeezed onto a tiny resin driveway between the recycling bins and the neighbour’s fence, then venture into the “real countryside” twice a year only to discover, with mounting horror, that the countryside contains actual countryside.

The New Forest is not Centre Parcs. It is not one of those immaculate continental campsites where every hedge is clipped to within a millimetre of its life and the shower block resembles a private hospital. It is an ancient landscape full of semi-wild ponies, cattle, donkeys and pigs wandering about with the quiet confidence of creatures that know they were there first.

And, inevitably, they leave evidence.

You cannot really demand authenticity and then become upset that authenticity smells faintly of horse.

I particularly enjoyed the complaint that the area was “scrubby and overgrazed”.

Again, yes.

That is why it looks like that. If you remove the grazing animals, the landscape changes completely. The reviewer seems to have expected some sort of lush cinematic wilderness and instead discovered an actual bit of southern England with livestock in it.

The complaint about “a definite whiff of horse urine in the air” after rain was also rather splendid. Well yes. Wet horses and damp earth do tend to smell somewhat... horse-adjacent once the rain starts. That is not really a campsite defect so much as biology carrying on in the usual way.

Then there was the criticism of the shower block being “shipping container variety”.

Oddly, that made me feel slightly patriotic because British campsites often do have that faintly improvised atmosphere. The showers usually look as though they were originally intended for either roadworks or military exercises, yet somehow function perfectly adequately while a retired bloke in sandals nearby explains to somebody the exact noseweight limit of his Bailey caravan and whether diesel heaters flatten leisure batteries overnight.

What really struck me, though, was the underlying contradiction. People increasingly say they want nature, authenticity and rustic experiences, but only if nature has first been carefully pressure washed and deodorised.

They want wild ponies, but apparently operating under strict waste-management protocols.

Personally, I now rather like the sound of the place. If a pony wanders past the motorhome looking faintly judgemental while I’m drinking tea outside, I shall consider the holiday a success.

Though admittedly I reserve the right to revisit that position after stepping barefoot into something warm on the way to the showers.

Doctoring the Titles

There is something quietly odd about the way we hand out titles in this country. A chap can spend years learning how to rebuild an engine by ear, coax life out of something most of us would have written off, and keep half the nation moving with a box of spanners and a cup of tea, and what do we call him? Dave.

Meanwhile, someone else disappears into a lab for years, emerges with a thesis on the finer points of biochemistry that only a small circle can fully follow, and from that day forward it’s Doctor. Not Dave. Not even Dave-with-a-PhD. Just Doctor, as if he might prescribe antibiotics at any moment. It is not that the title is undeserved, it is the inconsistency that gives it a slightly comic edge.

We have, over time, elevated certain professions into a sort of social nobility, while leaving others, arguably more immediately useful, firmly on first-name terms. Take Doctor. If someone is about to cut you open or decide whether you live to see Tuesday, a bit of deference seems reasonable and you rather want the room to go slightly quiet when they speak.

And then, just to keep things interesting, the moment a doctor becomes a surgeon, we quietly revert to calling them “Mr”, in a nod to a time when they were essentially barbers with ambition. The training has improved somewhat since then, but the title has remained.

Dentists sit awkwardly somewhere in the middle. Some are “Dr”, some are not, and most people would struggle to tell you which is which without looking at the brass plate. Which again suggests that whatever this is, it is not a system so much as a collection of habits that nobody has quite got round to sorting out.

But then along comes Professor. A title so carefully guarded in Britain that you can spend decades teaching at a university and still not be allowed to use it, and once you have it, it follows you everywhere. Dinner parties, bank forms, probably the odd parking ticket appeal. One imagines it helps.

Then we wander into the clergy, where titles multiply like rabbits and you can address the same man in half a dozen ways depending on his denomination and how much incense is involved. It all feels faintly medieval, which is probably the point. The legal system, never knowingly under-formal, insists on Judge or Justice, and you do not pop into court and say, “Morning, Steve,” even if his name is Steve, because the whole system would likely collapse on the spot.

And then there is the military and maritime world, where Captain, Major, and Sergeant do at least serve a practical purpose because it is genuinely useful to know who is in charge without a committee meeting. Calling someone “Captain” is not a courtesy, it is a survival mechanism, and everyone understands that without needing it explained.

Step outside these little islands of tradition, though, and the whole thing falls apart rather quickly. We do not say “Accountant Brown,” even though he may be the only thing standing between you and a tax investigation, and we do not say “Engineer Smith,” despite the fact he probably understands more about how the modern world actually functions than most of the titled classes put together.

Which is slightly ironic, because on the Continent and in a fair few other places, Engineer is exactly the sort of title you would use. In Germany you will happily address someone as “Ingenieur”, and in various other places “Engineer” is used with a straight face. The person who can actually make things work is given the title.

Here, by contrast, the person who fixes your heating is still just Kevin. And then there is the plumber, who can arrive at your house at two in the morning, stop your ceilings collapsing, restore hot water, and quite possibly save your marriage in the process, yet remains stubbornly just Kevin. Try greeting him with, “Ah, Plumber, thank goodness you’re here,” and you will either get a look or a revised invoice, neither of which improves the situation.

Then you get Hayley, which is where the whole system starts to creak a bit.

Hayley is a Doctor, with a doctorate in biochemistry earned through years in a lab rather than a clinic. She is not a medical doctor and she is not a nurse, but she is, in the precise and correct sense of the word, Doctor. She has, in the most literal sense, added to the sum of human knowledge, which is supposed to be the entire point of the exercise.

Put her in a health practice, though, in scrubs, and something quietly revealing happens. The title evaporates and then reappears in the wrong form, because scrubs plus female still nudges people towards “Nurse” without much conscious thought. No one checks, no one asks, and the brain fills in the blank and carries on.

Even when corrected, it does not quite stick, because “Doctor” in that setting has been quietly annexed by medicine. Medical doctors use it as a working title, which is fair enough, but it does mean that anyone else using it looks faintly out of place, like they have wandered into the wrong club wearing the right badge.

That leaves Hayley in a neat little trap. Outside, she is Doctor without question. Inside a health practice, calling her Doctor risks confusion. Not calling her Doctor is simply wrong, and the fallback, rather lazily, is to call her Nurse.

She is not unqualified, quite the opposite, and has spent years acquiring expertise that most people would struggle to follow even if they tried.

There is also the usual nudge of assumption ticking away in the background, where men in scrubs drift towards “Doctor” and women towards “Nurse” often enough to be noticeable. No conspiracy is required for that, just habit doing what habit does.

All of which rather undermines the idea that these titles are precise markers of anything. In practice they are handed out based on clothing, setting, and who looks like they fit the part. Which is how you end up with a biochemist with a doctorate being called Nurse, a medical doctor being called Doctor as a matter of routine, a surgeon being called “Mr” out of tradition, and Kevin still being Kevin.

Kevin, who can actually fix the boiler, remains Kevin, with no title, no deference, and no small hush when he walks in. If we were designing this from scratch, you might give him something grand or at least say “Engineer” with a bit of intent, but instead we have inherited a system where prestige and practicality parted company somewhere in the 18th century and never quite reconciled.

Still, it ticks along well enough, and most of the time nobody notices. Until the heating fails, the titles get muddled, and Kevin disappears for a part just when you thought he was about to fix it.

The Electorate Wants Honesty. Just Not That Much

Britain increasingly feels like a country demanding adult outcomes while behaving like a child who wants pudding before finishing the vegetables.

We need houses, apparently. Young people cannot afford homes. Rent is absurd. Adult children are living with parents into their thirties.

Then somebody proposes building twelve houses near a market town and the church hall fills with retired couples explaining why it would destroy “the character of the village”, despite the village now largely consisting of Range Rovers, hanging baskets and “Save Our Community” signs attached to hedges outside houses worth £850,000 because Britain stopped building enough homes sometime around the peak years of Dire Straits.

The contradictions appear everywhere.

“We need cheaper electricity.”
Not if there are pylons.

“We need energy security.”
Not if there are wind farms.

“We need growth.”
Not if there is construction.

“We need stronger defence.”
Not if taxes rise.

The country increasingly behaves as though all the benefits of modern civilisation should somehow be provided invisibly by magic.

Part of the problem is generational memory. A great many boomers grew up during an unusually favourable economic period and gradually came to see it as normal rather than historically exceptional. Cheap housing, expanding industries, strong growth, reliable pensions, abundant energy and steadily rising prosperity became the assumed background condition of life.

But those conditions were not normal. They were the product of a very particular historical moment. Britain was still living partly off the accumulated advantages of empire, post-war industrial strength, North Sea oil, expanding global trade and a younger population supporting a smaller retired population.

Over time, however, Britain gradually shifted away from building and making things towards an economy increasingly dependent upon finance, property inflation and consumer spending. Rising house prices quietly became a substitute for long-term economic strategy.

Council houses were sold off without equivalent replacement. Infrastructure investment was repeatedly delayed. Productivity stalled. Cheap credit and rising asset values papered over deeper weaknesses for years.

Britain is now drifting quietly from a society where prosperity mainly came from earnings towards one where inheritance increasingly determines who gets ahead. Some people will eventually inherit a house in Surrey and think they are Warren Buffett. Others will inherit a sofa, a box of tangled cables and possibly a commemorative mug from the Isle of Wight.

And much of this supposed wealth transfer will arrive when recipients are already middle-aged, long after the years they actually needed help buying a home or raising children.

Yet politically, much of the country still behaves as though the boom years should somehow continue through sheer inertia, provided nobody builds too much, changes too much, taxes too much or puts a pylon anywhere near the Cotswold stone.

The same newspapers demanding Britain “rearm urgently” are usually also demanding tax cuts, lower borrowing, protected pensions and more spending on everything else. The arithmetic evaporates in a cloud of patriotic headlines and archive footage of Spitfires.

Whenever a politician points out that maintaining a serious military might involve paying for it, people react as though he has proposed selling Stonehenge on eBay.

Which brings us neatly to politics itself.

People constantly say they want honesty from politicians. But what many actually mean is that they want comforting lies delivered more convincingly.

Because genuinely honest politics sounds awful.

A truly honest politician would stand up and say:
“No, you cannot have permanently rising house prices and affordable homes simultaneously.”
“No, you cannot have Scandinavian public services with American tax levels.”
“No, Britain cannot dramatically rearm while cutting taxes and increasing spending elsewhere.”
“No, major infrastructure cannot appear magically without upsetting somebody’s view or increasing somebody’s bill.”

Voters would punish that honesty almost immediately.

That is why simplistic populism works so well. It removes arithmetic from politics.

You can have lower taxes and higher spending.
Affordable homes and permanently rising house prices.
Cheap energy and no infrastructure.
Economic growth without development.
Military strength without paying for it.

Brexit itself was perhaps the purest example. Britain was told it could reduce immigration, cut bureaucracy, increase spending, maintain frictionless trade and negotiate from overwhelming strength simultaneously. Much of the rhetoric was emotionally satisfying but economically divorced nonsense, because it deliberately removed trade-offs from the discussion.

Had Nigel Farage actually been Prime Minister immediately afterwards, his rhetoric would very quickly have collided with the same stubborn realities that later consumed successive Conservative governments. Populism is often most politically effective just before implementation.

The bill simply gets shoved forward until it lands on younger people, future taxpayers or the next government.

This is where many of Keir Starmer’s problems come from. Britain’s problems are structural and decades in the making, but modern politics expects instant visible transformation. Governments are treated like takeaway deliveries. If the country does not feel palpably better within six months, people start demanding refunds.

Labour backbenchers are often just as guilty of this childishness as the electorate itself. Some already behave as though if housebuilding, NHS reform and economic growth have not visibly transformed Britain within a year then the answer must be panic and replacing the leader.

Which rather misses the point that Britain’s addiction to short-termism is part of what created the mess in the first place.

In many ways this may simply be democracy’s Achilles heel. Even Athenian democracy struggled with it. Athens wanted prosperity, military strength and imperial influence while rewarding persuasive rhetoric and emotionally satisfying promises. Cautious voices warning about limits and consequences were often ignored in favour of optimism and flattery, right up until catastrophes like the Sicilian Expedition.

Even Themistocles, the architect of Athenian naval power and victory at Salamis, eventually ended up ostracised and exiled by the democracy he helped save. Electorates have never been especially reliable at rewarding long-term strategic thinking.

The technology has changed slightly since then, admittedly. Athens did not have GB News, Facebook groups or furious parish council WhatsApp chats about bypasses.

But the underlying problem looks remarkably familiar.

Democracy functions best when electorates are willing to hear things they do not like. The trouble is that electorates often demand honesty in theory while voting against it in practice.

Britain increasingly resembles a country demanding hard truths while repeatedly voting for whoever promises there are not any.

In Defence of Cyclists - a Bit

There is a particular irony in finding yourself defending cyclists when, for years, you have regarded many of them as a sort of mobile religious movement. Usually dressed head to toe in black lycra like bargain-bin ninja commandos, travelling in tightly packed pelotons, speaking in hushed reverential tones about cadence and carbon fibre while simultaneously ignoring every red light between Cheltenham and Cirencester.

I have often thought that if a normal motorist behaved with the same tribal certainty as a Sunday cycling posse, there would be national outrage. Imagine eight men in matching Audi jackets driving side-by-side at 14 mph while discussing electrolytes and artisanal flapjacks. The police helicopter would be deployed by lunchtime.

And yet, the other day, there I was on a bicycle myself, crossing a large roundabout properly, legally and cautiously, only to be greeted by the automotive equivalent of an air horn blast from somebody who had entered the roundabout at approximately the same speed used by Royal Navy destroyers intercepting narcotics traffickers in the Gulf.

The truth is that large roundabouts reveal something deeply odd about British driving culture.

People approach them not as junctions requiring caution, but as performance challenges. There is a quiet national belief that if one can maintain speed throughout the manoeuvre without touching the brake pedal, one has somehow achieved engineering greatness. Clarksonism distilled into infrastructure.

This particular chap came from the opposite side of the roundabout. Because of the size and curvature, he could not see me until he had already committed himself. Which, in a sane world, would suggest he ought perhaps to have entered a little more cautiously. Instead, the logic appears to have been:

“I did not anticipate another road user existing there, therefore the other road user is clearly at fault.”

This is becoming increasingly common. The modern British motorist often treats unexpected events not as information requiring adaptation, but as personal insults. If something appears ahead requiring braking, the horn must immediately be sounded so that nearby villagers understand a grave injustice has occurred.

And I do understand some of the irritation drivers feel toward cyclists. I really do. There are cyclists who seem to dress specifically to resemble unlit bin bags drifting through the dusk. There are others who travel in intimidating swarms with the collective road awareness of migrating wildebeest. Some behave as though the Highway Code was written purely as a series of optional suggestions for lesser beings.

As an aside, cyclists also seem oddly resistant to the idea that visibility matters. Many will spend four thousand pounds on a bicycle made from aerospace-grade carbon fibre, shave ten grams off a saddle clamp, and then ride through dappled woodland sunlight dressed entirely in matte black on a black bicycle wearing a black helmet. In their minds they are visible because they themselves can see perfectly well. Unfortunately, that is not how human vision works. A tired van driver glancing through a fly-splattered windscreen does not perceive “enthusiastic cyclist”. He perceives a fleeting disturbance in the shadows shortly before his insurance premium rises.

But the uncomfortable reality is that on a large roundabout, a cyclist is terrifyingly vulnerable even when doing everything correctly.

The driver who beeped me probably went home convinced he had narrowly avoided catastrophe thanks to his own lightning reactions. In reality, the catastrophe was avoided because I had already spent the entire manoeuvre assuming somebody would eventually appear at speed having mistaken the roundabout for the opening stage of the British Touring Car Championship.

That, in the end, is the real problem. Roads now operate increasingly on assumption rather than observation. Everybody expects everybody else to vanish conveniently from their path. Drivers assume cyclists will hug the kerb. Cyclists assume drivers have seen them. SUV owners assume the laws of physics are now merely advisory because they are sitting three feet higher than everybody else.

And hovering over all of it is the horn. That magnificent British instrument of moral self-certification.

Not:

“Sorry mate, didn’t see you.”

Never that.

Always:

“How dare you exist where I intended to continue travelling quickly.”

The High Street We Remember Never Really Existed

There’s a particular sort of meeting where someone leans forward, taps the table, and says, “We need to get the shops back into town,” as if they’ve just rediscovered fire. Everyone nods, because it sounds sensible. It always has. It just hasn’t been true for about fifteen years.

The odd thing is that if you walk through most town centres now, they already look identical. Same chains, same layouts, same slightly weary signage. It’s like they were all ordered from the same catalogue. Perfectly serviceable, faintly forgettable, and interchangeable once you’ve left.

That sameness isn’t an accident. It’s the final stage of a very specific version of the high street, one that only really took hold in the 20th century. Rows of shops, mostly selling things made somewhere else, often by the same national chains. It felt permanent at the time. It wasn’t.

Before that, the high street meant something quite different. It wasn’t even about shopping, not really. “High” just meant the main street, the principal route through a town. Go back far enough and you find something much messier and, oddly enough, much more alive. Workshops, homes, traders, inns, all mixed together. Things were made and sold in the same place. Markets came and went. People were there because they lived there, worked there, or had something to do there. The buying and selling was just part of it.

We’ve forgotten that. Or rather, we’ve edited it out and kept the bit from about 1985 to 2005 and decided that was the natural order of things.

Then, in the 1960s and 70s, we did something else. We knocked a good deal of that older fabric down and rebuilt it around a single idea: retail. Clean precincts, tidy walkways, ring roads to keep things moving. Efficient, on paper. And for a while it worked.

But it came with a catch. We stripped out the mixed use. Fewer people living there. Fewer reasons to be there beyond shopping. Everything arranged around the assumption that shops would always be the main draw.

Then along came the rather inconvenient detail that if you’re selling something standardised, you don’t actually need a physical shop at all.

So the demand moved. Quietly at first, then all at once. And the chains followed it, retreating into the biggest centres where the numbers still stack up. Which leaves places like Preston trying to persuade a model that no longer works to come back and have another go.

You can hear the different political instincts circling around this without quite landing on it. Tories and Reform focus on safety isn’t wrong, but it’s treating a condition, not the cause. A place can feel perfectly safe and still be empty if there’s nothing to draw people in. Meanwhile Labour reaches for public investment and compulsory purchase, which can help unblock derelict sites but also risks councils trying to revive a retail model the market has already left behind. LibDems come closest when they talk about culture and the Guild Hall, even if it sounds a bit like a committee finding its way to a conclusion. And The Greens, perhaps unintentionally, brush up against the real constraint when they point out that people simply do not have the spare money to keep a town centre alive through spending alone.

What none of them quite say out loud is that the high street was never the destination. It was a by-product. People went into town because that’s where everything else was - work, services, markets, social life - and the shops fed off that. We’ve inverted it. We’re trying to rebuild the shops and hoping the life will follow.

It doesn’t work like that.

The places that still feel alive have stopped pretending. They’ve accepted that retail is now a supporting act. They’ve put people back into the centre, given them somewhere decent to live, and then built reasons for others to visit that don’t involve buying anything in particular. Food, culture, events, things you can’t click and have delivered tomorrow.

And this is where that older model quietly reappears, not as nostalgia, but as something practical. You start to see things being made and sold in the same place again. Bakeries, breweries, workshops, repairs. You get markets that create a bit of urgency, because if you miss it on Saturday, you miss it. You get squares and streets where people linger because they live there, not just because they might spend something.

That last bit matters more than we admit. The old market squares still work not because they’re pretty, although they are, but because they were built for living as well as trading. People above the shops, windows looking out onto the square, life going on whether anything is being sold or not. You can’t build that overnight, and when you try, it tends to feel a bit stage-managed. But you can recreate the conditions if you’re prepared to let places evolve rather than designing them to within an inch of their life.

Even then, it’s not a magic answer. You don’t fill an entire city centre with artisanal candle makers and hope for the best. You build a mix, you accept it will be uneven, and you quietly let go of the idea that every unit must be occupied by a recognisable brand.

The awkward truth is that towns are now competing in a very different way. If you offer the same shops as everywhere else, people will either go to the biggest version of that or stay at home. The only way to compete is to stop being the same.

Which is why “get the shops back” isn’t just unrealistic, it’s the wrong question. The real question is why anyone would go there in the first place.

If the honest answer is “to visit a row of shops they can find anywhere”, then you’re not reviving a town centre. You’re just walking past another empty unit, with the lights off at half five, wondering when that became normal.

Ad Hoc Security - Reassuringly Improvised

There are few things in life more reassuring than a large sign announcing that a vulnerable, empty property is protected. It speaks of order. Systems. Men in high-vis who know which end of the radio to shout into.

So imagine the effect of discovering that your building is under the vigilant protection of something called “Ad Hoc”.

Ad hoc. Two small Latin words that translate, roughly, as “we’ll make it up as we go along”.

You half expect the next line on the sign to read: “Security provided as and when Dave is available, assuming he’s found his keys.” It has the air of a committee decision taken at 4.55pm on a Friday. Not so much a security solution as a shrug in corporate form.

Branding, in this context, is not a decorative extra. It is the first line of defence. A decent security sign is meant to project dull, grinding inevitability. Cameras that always work. Patrols that always happen. A system so tediously reliable that even the most enterprising copper thief decides to try his luck elsewhere.

“Ad Hoc” does rather the opposite. It hints at improvisation. A man with a torch and a sense of optimism. Possibly a clipboard. You can almost hear the conversation: “Is this place covered?” “Well… provisionally.”

To be fair, the company may be perfectly competent. There may be layers of process, response protocols, insurance cover, all the usual machinery ticking away behind the scenes. But none of that is what the casual observer sees. What they see is a sign that sounds like it was named by someone with a fondness for Latin and a tin ear for English.

And tone matters. Opportunists are not, on the whole, great students of corporate structure, but they are very good at sniffing out weakness. A vague promise is not a deterrent. It is an invitation to experiment.

There is a wider point here about the modern tendency to dress things up in cleverness when plain language would do. Security is not a field that benefits from wit. You do not want nuance. You want blunt force certainty, preferably in block capitals.

Instead, we have arrived at a place where a vacant building can be guarded, at least nominally, by something that sounds like a last-minute agenda item.

If nothing else, it is a small masterclass in how not to name a company. When your core offering is reliability, do not lead with improvisation. It is not a difficult rule. Yet here we are, reassured that everything is under control, in a manner to be determined.

Just Grow Up - FFS

People keep asking why they are not yet “feeling the benefits” of voting Labour.

Well, Labour have been in office about five minutes. The electorate seems to think governments are like those novelty cash-grab machines where you step inside a booth and banknotes swirl around your head while you snatch at them. Press a button, pull a lever, instant prosperity.

But that only works if the machine was full of money to begin with.

The uncomfortable reality is that Britain’s problems are structural, long-term and, in large part, self-inflicted. We are not dealing with a temporarily blocked sink. We are dealing with decades of underinvestment, stagnant productivity, weak infrastructure, a chronic housing shortage, regional inequality, an ageing population, soaring health and social care costs, and an economy that became far too dependent on cheap money, cheap imports and financial services.

And then, in a moment of collective national genius, we voted to make trade with our largest nearby market more difficult.

That was not done to us by aliens. We voted for it. Not me personally though.

People now behave as if the country simply woke up one morning and found itself mysteriously poorer, more indebted and less economically flexible. No. We made choices. Democratic choices. Some of those choices were driven by anger, nostalgia, or the comforting fantasy that complicated problems always have simple solutions.

For years, large sections of the electorate wanted Scandinavian public services, American tax levels, Brexit sovereignty, low immigration, rising pensions, cheap energy, no borrowing and strong growth all at the same time. Preferably by Thursday afternoon.

Politics adapted to that fantasy market.

Nigel Farage understood this perfectly. Sheila Fogarty yesterday made a point on LBC that Farage tells stories while Starmer presents spreadsheets. And she is correct, up to a point. Human beings respond emotionally before they respond rationally. Farage knows how to walk into a room and make people feel that all complex problems have obvious villains and easy answers.

The problem is that many of those answers are nonsense.

Brexit itself was sold as a magic lever. Pull this one lever and Britain becomes richer, freer, stronger and sovereign all at once. No trade-offs. No costs. Just a sort of patriotic Narnia accessed through Dover.

Instead, we rediscovered that modern economies are complicated systems involving supply chains, labour shortages, investment flows, borrowing costs and regulatory interdependence. Extremely inconsiderate of reality, frankly.

And now, astonishingly, parts of the country appear ready to double down by drifting toward Reform, whose answer to the damage caused by simplistic populism appears to be even more simplistic populism. It is rather like responding to an engine fire by pouring in extra petrol because flames indicate enthusiasm.

The strange thing is that many of the same people demanding instant improvement are still attracted to precisely the politics that helped create the instability in the first place. They want somebody to tell them it is all somebody else’s fault. Brussels. Migrants. Net zero. Judges. Cyclists. The BBC. Take your pick.

Anything except the possibility that difficult national choices sometimes produce difficult national consequences.

People look at Starmer as though he is sitting in the cockpit of a giant Boeing 747 with hundreds of glowing switches labelled LOWER BILLS, HIGHER WAGES, CHEAPER HOUSING and NHS FIXED. They imagine he is simply refusing to press them because he lacks charisma.

But modern governments often have only a few small wheels left to turn, and some are barely connected anymore.

The old post-war economic model operated in a world of lower debt, younger populations, cheaper energy, stronger industrial capacity and fewer geopolitical shocks. Governments had more room to borrow, spend and stimulate without markets immediately punishing them.

Now look around.

Borrowing costs are far higher than they were during the cheap-money era. Interest payments swallow huge chunks of public spending. The Ukraine war destabilised European energy markets. Tensions involving Iran threaten shipping routes and oil prices. Productivity growth across much of the West has slowed for years. Britain also carries the additional self-imposed friction of Brexit on top of all that.

So when people ask, “Why can’t the government just invest massively?”, the answer is simple: because borrowing is no longer cheap, and markets eventually notice if you start behaving like Liz Truss with access to a Red Bull multipack.

Of course investment is still necessary. Britain desperately needs investment in infrastructure, housing, energy generation, transport, training and technology. Productivity does not rise because somebody gives an inspiring speech in Doncaster. It rises because people and businesses become more efficient over many years through investment, education and stability.

Which brings us to the current hysteria over Starmer.

A section of the Labour movement seems convinced that replacing him with Andy Burnham or some other more emotionally performative figure would suddenly transform the situation. But unless Burnham has secretly discovered North Sea-sized reserves of cheap money hidden beneath Rochdale, he inherits exactly the same structural constraints.

You can change the salesman without changing the balance sheet.

People also confuse communication with capability. In politics, as in life, charisma is often mistaken for competence. But if I am on an aircraft flying through a violent storm, I do not particularly care whether the captain is emotionally engaging. I care whether he understands the instruments.

I do not need him bursting into the cabin shouting, “Come on everyone, let’s believe in Britain!” while accidentally stalling the engines over the Bay of Biscay.

I need somebody calm enough to understand what is actually happening.

And yes, that person also has to communicate. They have to explain the route, the weather, the risks and the likely duration of the turbulence. But communication is not a substitute for competence. It is an addition to it.

The electorate, however, often behaves like toddlers demanding to know why the seeds they planted yesterday have not yet become a fully grown oak tree with a patio and integrated barbecue area.

“We voted Labour months ago. Why is everything not fixed?”

Because economies are not apps. You cannot reboot them.

Starmer is probably banking on exactly what rational governments usually bank on: that if stability returns, inflation falls, investment improves, energy prices settle and infrastructure projects begin moving, voters may eventually notice tangible improvements before the next election.

That is not glamorous politics. It is slow politics. Administrative politics. Competence politics.

Which is precisely why so many people find it boring.

But boring is underrated. Boring is what you want in air traffic control. Boring is what you want in nuclear engineering. Boring is what you want when your economy resembles a 20-year-old motorhome held together by cable ties, expanding foam and receipts from Screwfix.

Britain does not need another performer standing on a barrel telling us foreigners, judges, Brussels or net zero are the source of all suffering.

It needs patience, investment, realism and an electorate mature enough to admit that some of the current mess was voted for willingly, repeatedly and sometimes enthusiastically.

Because until voters themselves grow up and accept responsibility for the choices that helped put Britain here, they will remain vulnerable to the next grinning salesman offering another magic lever that turns out to be attached to absolutely bloody nothing.

It took the Tories 14 years to fuck up the country - pardon my French. It's unrealistic to think it can be fixed in 2 years.

The Forgotten Casualties of the Iran War

There was a wonderfully grave segment on Radio 4 yesterday morning about the economic fallout from the Iran war. Oil prices. Gas supplies. Fertiliser. Haulage. Manufacturing. Entire sectors apparently wobbling as energy prices spread through the economy like a leak nobody can quite find.

And fair enough. Those things matter.

But once again, the BBC managed to overlook one of the great endangered pillars of the modern British economy. The influencer sector.

Nobody ever talks about the human cost to influencers during geopolitical crises.

Nobody asks how Chantelle from Basingstoke is supposed to continue producing "Sunday Reset" content if sanctions disrupt the supply of imported Scandinavian oat milk and electrically heated eyelash curlers. Nobody considers the effect on a 24 year old lifestyle creator when global instability interferes with the availability of motivational water bottles, collagen sachets and those little iced coffees that appear to contain more branding than actual coffee.

There was much discussion about logistics and fuel dependency. Yet not a single mention of the terrible vulnerability of the Dubai brunch ecosystem.

You can picture the scene already. Flights delayed. Beach clubs under strain. Influencers forced to photograph themselves beside merely adequate infinity pools while wearing oversized sunglasses and staring thoughtfully into the middle distance as though contemplating the collapse of civilisation rather than whether to order truffle fries.

Some may even have to return briefly to Britain and produce content from their parents' conservatory in Swindon.

The programme spoke solemnly about job losses in steel, chemicals and transport. Important, obviously. But what about the thousands employed in secondary influencer support services? Teeth whiteners. Eyebrow laminators. Young men wandering around Shoreditch pretending not to notice the camera while carrying tiny cups of expensive coffee.

Entire supply chains.

And what of LinkedIn influencers? The forgotten casualties of modern conflict. Middle managers standing in front of office windows explaining that "uncertainty creates opportunity" while somehow relating the Strait of Hormuz to leadership culture and personal growth.

One can only imagine the suffering.

"Yesterday, amid escalating regional tensions, I learned a powerful lesson about resilience."

No you didn't, Darren. Your connecting flight in Doha was delayed and Pret had run out of the vegan wrap.

It is easy to mock, of course, but economies evolve. Britain once made ships, locomotives and precision machinery. We now increasingly produce podcasts hosted by people discussing "their journey".

And perhaps that is why the Today programme omitted them. The numbers may simply be too frightening to contemplate. Once you start calculating the economic contribution of people filming themselves unpacking skincare products, the whole economy starts looking faintly suspicious.

Somewhere tonight, while tankers edge nervously through the Strait of Hormuz and traders watch oil futures flicker across their screens, somebody will still be trying to photograph a flat white beside a scented candle in weak natural lighting while saying, "A lot of you have been asking about my morning routine."

The Melting Pot Lectures the Continent

There is a certain comic bravado in watching Donald Trump take lumps out of Europe as though it were a failed experiment in over-integration, rather than a continent that has, quite deliberately, stopped short of becoming what his own country already is.

Because the awkward truth is this. The United States is not just influenced by Europe. It is what happens when Europeans stop being European in any meaningful sense and become something else entirely.

Germans arrived, Irish arrived, Italians arrived, along with half the map in due course. They did not remain Germans, Irish and Italians for long. They married each other, moved states, lost the languages, kept the surnames for decorative purposes, and produced a population that is now thoroughly blended. The old national distinctions survive, but mostly as faint labels rather than anything that structures daily life.

Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, the much-maligned European Union is attempting something far more modest and, in its own way, more difficult. It is trying to get French, Poles, Italians and the rest to cooperate while remaining recognisably French, Polish and Italian. Integration without assimilation. Coordination without merger.

If Brussels announced tomorrow that its objective was to turn the French into a regional variant of Germans with a shared language and interchangeable identities, there would be riots before lunch. Quite sensibly so. That is not the project.

And yet, when Trump rails against Europe, the complaint often sounds like this. Too integrated, too entangled, insufficiently sovereign. One is left wondering what he thinks the United States is. It is not a loose club of English, Germans and Irish politely minding their own business. It is the end result of those groups largely dissolving into a single, mixed population over time.

In other words, America resembles what a far more deeply integrated Europe might look like after a long period of blending, rather than anything the EU is currently trying to build. It has a single political system, a dominant language, and a population so intermixed that the original national labels carry limited weight.

There is also the small matter of timing. The United States did its blending in the 19th and early 20th centuries, under conditions that no longer exist in modern Europe. Large-scale migration into a relatively open society, a common language, and the absence of entrenched nation-states made that process possible in a way that cannot simply be replicated today.

The irony is not subtle. The same political instinct that frets about blurred identities and over-integration abroad presides quite happily over a society built on precisely that process. The average American of European descent is a small coalition government in their own right, assembled from bits of the continent and held together by habit rather than principle.

None of this makes the United States uniquely enlightened. It has its own divisions, some of them stubborn. But on this narrow question, the contrast is hard to ignore. Europe is trying to make cooperation work without dissolving its nations. America dealt with the problem by largely dissolving those distinctions within its own borders, and calling the result normal.

So when Trump takes aim at Europe, he is not just criticising a foreign arrangement. He is, in a roundabout way, objecting to a diluted version of the very process that produced the country he leads.