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.

A Logic Chain

I have developed a logic chain that anyone can follow.

A billionaire living in Thailand does not pour millions into British politics because he is worried about waiting times at Scunthorpe Jobcentre or the condition of a road in Grimsby.

Extremely wealthy people generally fund political movements aligned with their economic interests.

Of course, some billionaires are genuine philanthropists. So the obvious question is:

- what is Christopher Harborne’s public track record?

The visible pattern is overwhelmingly:

- Reform and Brexit funding
- Conservative donations
- support for deregulation
- crypto and investment interests

What is far less visible publicly is:

- major anti-poverty philanthropy
- large charitable foundations
- public health campaigns
- educational philanthropy
- major community investment projects

That does not prove private philanthropy does not exist. But the public evidence points far more strongly toward political and economic influence than social philanthropy.

That usually means support for:

- lower taxes on wealth and capital
- weaker regulation
- smaller government
- reduced welfare spending
- privatisation
- weaker labour protections

Opposition to Green policies fits naturally into this because serious decarbonisation usually requires:

- state intervention
- public investment
- infrastructure change
- constraints on some industries

So anti-Green politics becomes politically useful:

- frame net zero as elite interference
- turn climate policy into a culture war
- weaken trust in institutions and expertise
- protect existing economic interests

So if such a movement gains power, the logical direction is:

- public services cut in the name of efficiency
- welfare reduced in the name of incentives
- deregulation in the name of growth
- more economic risk pushed onto ordinary individuals

The consequence is predictable:

- economic gains flow disproportionately upward
- inequality widens
- public services deteriorate
- pressure increases on local economies and infrastructure

And when economic frustration grows, attention must be diverted elsewhere:

- migrants
- small boats
- “wokeism”
- Europe
- net zero
- culture wars

Because if voters examine the actual mechanics for too long, they may notice something awkward:

- they are being persuaded to dismantle their own protections by people wealthy enough never to need them.

The fortunes made during the Brexit chaos should have been the warning sign. Reform increasingly looks like the continuation of the same project.

Press Button To Continue Being Ignored

I have developed a theory that many pedestrian crossing buttons are not actually connected to anything meaningful at all, beyond perhaps a small yellow light and the fading optimism of the British public.

Take the temporary roadworks crossings. You march up to them with purpose, jab the button and are rewarded instantly by a glowing WAIT sign, which I increasingly suspect is the electrical equivalent of a nurse saying, “The doctor will be with you shortly,” before disappearing for three hours.

The lights then continue exactly as they were going to anyway.

You stand there watching completely empty roads while nothing whatsoever happens. Then somebody else arrives and presses the button too, as though your earlier attempt perhaps lacked authority. Soon there are four of you taking turns to prod the thing like Victorian villagers attempting to contact the dead through a table in a village hall.

I joined in myself yesterday, despite already suspecting the whole apparatus was a fraud. That is how powerful the conditioning is. The button lights up, so you feel you have achieved something. British people are especially susceptible to this sort of thing because we were raised on queues, forms and implied authority. If a metal box on a pole tells us to WAIT, we obey automatically. Half the population would stand politely beside a sign saying “Press button to continue being ignored”.

What convinces me the whole thing is psychological is that nobody merely presses the button once. They hammer at it repeatedly with growing indignation, as though the crossing is a recalcitrant photocopier from 1987. You even see people arriving after the button has clearly already been pressed and immediately pressing it again, just to make certain the request has really gone through to Central Crossing Command.

In fairness, some crossings genuinely are demand-responsive, particularly late at night when pressing the button can produce an almost magical instant green man. Which only deepens the confusion because it keeps alive the national belief that all the others are also listening.

I suspect many temporary systems are simply running fixed timing sequences designed to optimise traffic flow while giving pedestrians the comforting illusion of participation. It is a bit like democracy, really. You are invited to press the button, your request is acknowledged with reassuring lights and noises, and then the system carries on doing exactly what it intended to do from the outset.

It is rather like those “close door” buttons in lifts which, according to persistent rumours, are often disconnected entirely. Millions of people solemnly pressing a button whose real function may simply be to occupy the human urge to interfere.

You see the same philosophy elsewhere. Self-service checkouts requiring staff authorisation to buy a cucumber. QR code menus in pubs that managed perfectly well with laminated paper for half a century. “Smart” motorways apparently making decisions by consulting damp tea leaves.

The pedestrian crossing button has clearly joined this great British tradition. A ceremonial interface. Something to keep the public occupied while the machinery gets on with its own priorities.

Still, we all keep pressing them.

Partly out of hope, partly superstition, and partly because if you do not press it, someone arriving thirty seconds later will immediately march up, stab the button theatrically with one finger, and look at you as though you are the sort of idiot who had been standing there all day without thinking of it.

Reality Waits Patiently With a Clipboard

The votes are in, the tally has been made and the media frenzy has started.

Radio schedules abandoned. Giant touchscreen graphics wheeled into studios like NATO command systems. Earnest correspondents standing outside leisure centres in Doncaster at 2am speaking in hushed tones because a district council in Lincolnshire has changed political control by four seats.

Britain increasingly covers local elections as though civilisation itself is hanging by a thread attached to a returning officer’s clipboard. And yet, when the excitement subsides and the caffeine wears off, what these elections actually reveal is something both simpler and more complicated than the headlines suggest.

Brexit never really ended. It merely changed clothes.

You can see it immediately when you place the map of Reform gains beside the old Brexit map. The overlap is almost comically obvious. It is practically tracing paper.

The strongest Reform areas are, broadly speaking, the old Leave strongholds. Lincolnshire. Essex. Hartlepool. The old industrial north-east. Bits of the Midlands. Coastal towns where the high street consists mainly of vape shops, empty banks and a charity shop specialising in mobility aids. The same places that were told Brexit would bring renewal, investment and sovereignty now appear to have concluded that, since none of that happened, the answer must be an even more concentrated form of Brexit.

It is a bit like somebody whose home-made wine exploded in the airing cupboard deciding the solution is to buy a larger demijohn.

And the strange thing is that everybody involved seems desperate not to mention this obvious continuity. Reform presents itself as something thrillingly insurgent and fresh. Labour talks as though this is all merely about immigration messaging. The Conservatives pretend voters have simply misunderstood how brilliantly Brexit went. The BBC solemnly analyses every council by-election as though decoding Bronze Age pottery fragments.

But the political geography has barely changed. The Brexit coalition was always unstable. Some wanted lower immigration, some deregulation, some simply wanted to kick Westminster in the shins after decades of feeling ignored and economically stranded. Europe became the bucket into which every national frustration was emptied.

That is why Brexit survived its own disappointments. It was never just about Europe in the first place. Europe was simply the visible target onto which wider frustrations were attached. Now much of that emotional infrastructure has transferred directly to Reform.

The irony is that many of these areas are still suffering from precisely the structural problems Brexit was supposed to solve. Weak local economies. Poor transport. Hollowed-out town centres. Lack of skilled employment. None of which were caused by Brussels bureaucrats hiding in Belgian basements regulating bananas.

And yet the emotional logic remains intact because Brexit was psychologically satisfying even where it was economically damaging. It offered clarity, villains and rebellion after decades of managerial politics in which every answer involved a consultation document and a PDF nobody read.

What makes local elections particularly volatile is that, deep down, most people suspect the actual practical differences between councils are fairly marginal anyway. Labour councils, Conservative councils, Liberal Democrat councils - they are all trapped inside much the same financial straitjacket.

So turnout collapses because people conclude, often reasonably, that changing the colour of the rosette does not magically refill the potholes or reduce the council tax. Local government increasingly resembles the management of decline with different logos.

That is why protest parties thrive there. A local election is one of the few opportunities voters have to kick the political system in the shins without accidentally ending up with Liz Truss moving into Number 10 again.

A general election feels different because it carries consequences. People may happily vote Reform for district council dog-waste policy, then become rather more cautious when choosing who controls interest rates, defence policy and whether the bond markets start sweating visibly.

And this is where the media frenzy becomes actively distorting.

Only parts of England even voted, and disproportionately the sort of places where Reform was always likely to do well anyway. Yet within minutes of the results arriving, parts of the media began speaking as though Britain had collectively packed a suitcase for Clacton and was preparing Nigel Farage for coronation.

Modern political journalism increasingly survives on emotional escalation. A nuanced explanation of fragmented local voting patterns under low-turnout conditions does not produce excitement. “Political earthquake” does. Politics is now covered less like governance and more like a mixture of sport, weather forecasting and psychological crisis.

The irony is that this style of coverage may itself help fuel protest politics. If voters are constantly told the system is collapsing, corrupt, broken and illegitimate, eventually some of them will decide they may as well vote for whoever promises to kick the furniture over.

Meanwhile, actual local government remains stubbornly mundane underneath all the hysteria. Somewhere in a village hall, a newly elected Reform councillor whose previous political experience consists mainly of shouting at a parking meter is about to discover that local government chiefly involves sewage contracts, social care budgets and deciding whether the Christmas lights can be repaired for under eighty quid.

And perhaps that is no bad thing. Britain may be about to receive a second practical demonstration that slogans are considerably easier than governing. Brexit already collided with reality once the campaign buses had gone home and the customs paperwork arrived. If Reform councils now spend four years discovering that potholes do not fear patriotism and social care cannot be repaired with Facebook comments, the country might finally absorb a useful lesson before the next general election.

Reality, as ever, waits patiently in the background with a clipboard.