The Motorhome Fraternity

Yesterday's post about our recent trip in the motorhome stimulated some thoughts.

There is a curious thing that happens when you buy a motorhome. Nobody warns you about it beforehand. Dealers will happily explain payload limits, solar controllers, habitation checks and the precise Scandinavian engineering advantages of German cupboard hinges, but nobody mentions the moment you accidentally join a travelling fraternity.

The first sign is the wave.

You are driving down some winding road in Wales or the Lake District and another motorhome appears coming the other way. Quite without conscious thought, two fingers rise gently from the steering wheel. The other driver responds. A tiny acknowledgement. Barely perceptible to outsiders. And suddenly you realise you are part of the club.

Bikers do the same thing, of course, except theirs is a helmet nod because removing a hand on a damp bend while perched on 150 horsepower of poor impulse control can end badly. The psychology, though, is identical.

“We understand each other.”

It is essentially a mobile Masonic handshake. A coded sign between members of the same mildly irrational brotherhood. You know that person has also spent twenty minutes trying to level a vehicle on plastic ramps while their spouse stands outside saying, “It looks fine to me.”

You know they too have experienced the uniquely British humiliation of emptying a cassette toilet in sideways rain while pretending this is all part of the grand spirit of freedom. You know they have reversed slowly into a pub car park while an audience forms for reasons nobody fully understands.

And, above all, you know they have reached the same strange conclusion about modern life: that perhaps sitting in a traffic jam to commute towards a semi-detached house full of unused possessions is not the only way to exist.

There are tribes within the movement, naturally.

The Campervan Collective tends towards enamel mugs, fold-out fairy lights, artisan coffee grinders and phrases like “off-grid lifestyle” uttered while running a lithium battery system capable of keeping a medium-sized village alive during a power cut.

The larger motorhome owners are more like retired infrastructure managers on tour. They discuss tyre pressures, axle weights and German heating systems with the seriousness of men organising flood defences.

There is also a faint class structure to the whole thing.

We, with our slightly weathered 2002 Fiat Ducato-based Swift, occupy the lower middle ranks of the order. Perfectly respectable. Functional. Paid for. Does the job.

But occasionally one senses a certain restrained pity emanating from the owners of vast gleaming gin-palace motorhomes with hydraulic levelling systems, heated double floors and enough electronic control panels to launch a weather satellite.

You can almost hear the thought process.

“Oh dear. Manual step. How brave.”

The thing is, I struggle with spending the price of a decent extension on something mainly used for making tea beside estuaries. Besides, a twenty-two-year-old motorhome still performs the core functions perfectly adequately. It moves. It sleeps people. It contains tea.

Beyond that, much of the industry appears devoted to convincing retired couples they urgently require ambient lighting and televisions that emerge silently from cupboards like something in Thunderbirds in order to spend a weekend in Carmarthenshire.

There is also something faintly time-warpish about the whole thing. Couples who normally share everything with perfect modern equality can mysteriously revert to 1974 the moment the motorhome starts moving.

The man drives while discussing fuel economy and whether the alternator is charging properly. The woman navigates, manages snacks, supervises parking manoeuvres and quietly prevents the entire expedition descending into chaos.

Outside every motorhome toilet block stands a man with his hands behind his back solemnly inspecting somebody else’s solar panel arrangement like a retired RAF ground crew engineer.

Or at least that is the traditional arrangement. In our case Hayley often drives while I sit in the passenger seat muttering about politics and correcting strangers on Facebook about heat pumps, which perhaps reflects the modern age more accurately.

Then, of course, there is always the bloke with the Swabian knot.

Every travelling tribe has its mystics, and in the motorhome world he usually appears in a faded 1960s VW camper travelling at 43 mph with immense spiritual determination.

You spot him long before you pass him. The vehicle itself resembles an escaped museum exhibit held together by optimism, marine plywood and herbal tea residue. The curtains are patterned. There is almost certainly a string of Tibetan prayer flags somewhere near the windscreen.

And there he sits, hair tied in a neat little Swabian knot perched slightly to one side like a travelling artisan sourdough consultant, peering serenely over a steering wheel apparently connected to the front wheels largely through faith.

He does not wave in the ordinary sense. He gives more of a knowing benediction. A gentle raising of two fingers conveying:
“Yes, brother. We have rejected mainstream campsite consumerism.”

Meanwhile the rest of us thunder past in diesel-powered rolling bungalows carrying enough lithium battery capacity to alarm the National Grid.

The wonderful irony is that the old VW owner is often the most ideologically committed member of the entire movement while simultaneously possessing by far the worst fuel economy, least effective heating and highest probability of catastrophic breakdown somewhere near Stroud.

And yet everybody still respects him.

Partly because keeping a sixty-year-old camper alive on British roads requires the sort of mechanical optimism normally associated with restoring castles. Partly because he represents the romantic origin myth of the whole thing.

Before satellite dishes, hydraulic levelling systems and motorhomes with underfloor heating and wine coolers, there was simply the little VW van, trundling slowly towards Cornwall with a camping stove and vague notions of freedom.

And this is the odd thing. Modern Britain increasingly feels fragmented. People barely speak to neighbours. Headphones, screens and algorithmic tribalism have turned public life into a sort of low-level social avoidance exercise.

Yet put somebody in a motorhome and suddenly they become part of a wandering republic of complete strangers cheerfully discussing waste tanks and hook-up amperage in supermarket car parks.

Entire temporary communities appear overnight.

By dusk, a random field in Pembrokeshire has become a functioning settlement complete with shared tools, unsolicited parking advice, someone cooking bacon outdoors despite gale-force winds, and a retired man called Keith explaining what is wrong with Britain beside a collapsible table.

Then, by morning, it vanishes again.

The biker world is similar. Another parallel tribe bound together not by class, politics or profession, but by shared inconvenience and mild exposure to the elements.

Perhaps that is the secret. Modern life has become so frictionless and isolated that people instinctively gravitate towards activities involving minor hardship. Cold mornings. Mechanical faults. Rain. Levelling ramps. Condensation. The occasional electrical mystery.

Shared inconvenience creates community far faster than social media ever could.

Mind you, there are limits.

Fail to wave back at another motorhome and the sense of personal betrayal is wildly disproportionate.

“Oh. Right. Clearly Captain A-Class in the £140,000 Hymer no longer acknowledges the lower orders.”

Which proves that even among free-spirited wanderers, human beings remain gloriously petty.

Still, somewhere tonight, two complete strangers parked beside a windswept estuary are probably already discussing battery chemistry and whether external thermal screens are worth the faff.

And tomorrow morning they will wave warmly to one another before driving off in opposite directions, only for one of them to discover twenty miles later that the leisure battery has somehow gone flat again despite “nothing being left on”.

Socialism Never Works - Apparently

I could feel my irritation rising when I saw somebody on Substack confidently declaring that “socialism has never worked”.

The commenter was probably American, which immediately narrowed things down a bit because this is a surprisingly common theme in American political discourse. In the US, “socialism” has gradually become shorthand for almost anything involving collective provision, public spending or the government doing more than waving politely from the sidelines.

School meals? Socialism.

Universal healthcare? Socialism.

Public transport? Apparently one step from the gulag.

At this point, half the American right would probably describe public libraries as creeping Bolshevism.

And it struck me, yet again, that people saying this almost always confuse socialism with Soviet communism, as though the NHS, Swedish childcare and Stalin’s Soviet Union are all basically the same thing with different logos.

Mind you, Stalin’s USSR was hardly the stateless workers’ paradise Marx had in mind. It was essentially an authoritarian command empire wearing socialist branding. Workers did not control production. A paranoid state bureaucracy did. But nuance tends to die quickly once political tribalism gets involved.

What really annoys me about the argument, though, is that the answer to virtually every major crisis in modern history has involved collective action, state intervention and enormous public spending.

In other words, when things become genuinely serious, even committed capitalists suddenly become temporary socialists.

Because the awkward reality is that capitalism does not merely suffer crises occasionally. It repeatedly creates them.

That is not some accidental software bug in an otherwise perfect system. It is baked into the machinery itself.

Markets reward risk because risk sometimes produces innovation, growth and wealth. Fair enough. The problem is they also reward speculation, bubbles and increasingly detached optimism during boom periods. Every cycle eventually reaches the stage where people convince themselves this time the old rules no longer apply.

You can practically set your watch by it.

Tulips in Holland. Railway bubbles. Dotcom shares. Subprime mortgages. Crypto firms valued largely on confidence, hoodies and podcasts.

Human beings do not become rational merely because somebody put a Bloomberg terminal in front of them.

The pattern barely changes. Credit expands, asset prices soar, everybody becomes an investment genius for six years, journalists start writing pieces about “a new economic paradigm”, and eventually somebody discovers the entire thing has been balanced on debt, fantasy and PowerPoint presentations.

At which point governments arrive like exhausted parents cleaning up after teenagers who borrowed the car and wrapped it round a lamp post while insisting they were “disrupting transport”.

Again.

And suddenly all the anti-socialist rhetoric evaporates overnight.

Banking collapse?
Nationalise risk immediately.

Pandemic?
Government furloughs, emergency healthcare coordination and massive public borrowing.

War?
State planning, rationing, industrial coordination and central control of production.

Energy crisis?
Price caps, subsidies and intervention.

Take the current Iran war energy panic. The same political voices who normally treat state intervention as one step away from Lenin are suddenly furious that Labour is trying to persuade supermarkets to keep staple prices down and trying to stop fuel costs exploding.

Kemi Badenoch has spent days attacking Starmer over Russian-linked fuel imports and North Sea policy, presenting herself as defending ordinary consumers. But her actual solution is essentially “drill more in the North Sea”, which may or may not help in ten years’ time but does absolutely nothing to reduce next month’s petrol prices in Chipping Sodbury.

And yet the moment prices spike, even governments instinctively hostile to intervention start reaching for intervention anyway.

Because deep down, even the loudest free market evangelists know perfectly well that civilisation itself depends on collective systems once reality turns up dripping wet and demanding something actually be done.

And the irony is that many of the same people denouncing socialism spend almost their entire lives surrounded by systems built collectively over generations.

They drive on public roads to publicly regulated workplaces, protected by publicly funded police and military, using infrastructure heavily shaped by planning, regulation and state investment.

Then they go online using technology originating partly from publicly funded research and announce:
“Socialism never works.”

None of this means pure state control works brilliantly either. Soviet supermarkets were hardly the pinnacle of customer experience. Human beings are perfectly capable of creating chaos with clipboards as well as hedge funds. A badly run bureaucracy can become every bit as absurd as a speculative financial bubble.

The actual lesson of history is not that capitalism or socialism “wins”.

It is that civilisation itself depends on a delicate balance between markets, regulation and collective response.

Markets generate enormous wealth and innovation. Regulation stops that process drifting into monopoly, exploitation and the whole thing periodically disappearing up its own backside. Collective systems provide the stability and resilience that stop ordinary people experiencing the full force of market failure every time the economy hits a wall.

Modern capitalism survives precisely because welfare states and public institutions soften the impact when markets periodically lose their minds.

Markets are useful tools. Extremely useful tools. But left entirely to themselves they tend to concentrate wealth, underinvest in resilience, ignore long-term costs and periodically disappear into speculative madness.

So societies spend decades enjoying the wealth markets generate, then repeatedly have to install regulations, welfare systems and emergency interventions afterwards to stop the whole thing unravelling socially and politically.

Modern social democracy is basically capitalism fitted with airbags after repeated high-speed collisions with reality.

And yet after every crash there is still somebody climbing out of the wreckage insisting the real problem was too many seatbelts.

Usually while relying on the NHS, their state pension and somebody from the council remembering to empty the bins.

The Tax-Free Overtime Trap

Nigel Farage’s proposal to scrap income tax on overtime sounds wonderfully simple. Work harder, keep more of your money.

And politically it is very clever because it is aimed squarely at the sort of workers Reform is chasing. Warehouse staff, drivers, shift workers, tradesmen and factory workers. People doing clearly measurable extra hours who feel they are working harder and harder while somehow getting nowhere. For those workers, overtime is relatively straightforward. You finish your normal shift, then you work additional paid hours. Simple enough.

The problem is that the moment you move beyond those hourly-paid sectors, the entire definition starts wobbling. Large parts of Britain no longer run on punch clocks and neatly logged extra hours. They run on vague salaried contracts, unpaid additional work and the unspoken understanding that everybody quietly does extra hours because otherwise the place falls apart.

Teachers marking papers at night. Managers answering emails on Sundays. IT staff fixing systems after dinner. NHS administrators staying late because otherwise the whole machine jams solid. Most salaried contracts are deliberately woolly:

“Such hours as necessary for the proper performance of duties.”

Which roughly translates as:

“You finish when the chaos subsides.”

So the moment government says overtime becomes tax-advantaged, employers and accountants immediately start redesigning contracts around the definition. Someone on a standard salaried contract who routinely works unpaid extra hours suddenly has part of those hours redesignated as “overtime”. The same work is simply relabelled differently on paper.

That is the nub of the problem. The policy only works if government can clearly distinguish between genuinely additional labour and work that was already being done quietly reclassified as overtime. In a modern service economy, that rapidly becomes difficult.

Then comes the self-employed, where the entire idea really starts wobbling. A self-employed electrician, plumber or consultant does not really have “overtime”. They simply work until the work is finished. Often evenings. Often weekends. Often while doing invoices at midnight.

So do they get excluded entirely, or does anything above forty hours suddenly become overtime? Because if the second option exists, the Treasury’s costing starts dissolving remarkably quickly. Which is why Reform’s £5 billion estimate feels highly speculative. It only works if people behave exactly as the policy designers hope they will.

History suggests that once tax advantages appear, people rearrange contracts with extraordinary enthusiasm. And economically that is where the proposal becomes genuinely dangerous, because if behaviour changes at scale, tax revenues start falling rapidly without any corresponding increase in productivity. Britain does not suddenly become richer. It simply starts classifying more existing work as tax-efficient income.

Governments can survive tax cuts that stimulate growth and productivity. They struggle with tax cuts that mainly encourage income relabelling while the underlying economy remains just as sluggish as before. At that point you are not creating new wealth. You are simply shrinking the tax base while public spending pressures remain exactly where they were.

Which reveals something deeper about Britain’s economic malaise. Britain is now discussing tax breaks for extra hours because ordinary hours no longer provide sufficient living standards for many people.

Farage helped sell Brexit as the route to a richer, lower-tax, more dynamic economy. Instead Britain ended up with weaker growth, labour shortages, trade friction and the highest sustained tax burden in decades. So now the proposed solution is effectively:

“Work longer.”

Not make the economy more productive. Not improve investment. Not raise wages through growth.

Just stay another couple of hours.

And that is why the policy feels less like serious economic reform and more like a politically intelligent retail offer wrapped around a tax loophole that payroll departments will start quietly redesigning contracts around before the minister has finished the press conference.

England, Layered

I came across a building in Gloucester the other day that rather restored my faith in Britain. Which is no small achievement at present, given that most modern British architecture resembles either a distribution warehouse for frozen peas or a dentist's waiting room designed by an accountant.

I had been wandering along Dean's Walk near St Oswald's Priory, mainly because I had parked nearby and started drifting about aimlessly in the way retired people do once there is no meeting waiting to ruin the afternoon. Gloucester Cathedral loomed over everything in that wonderfully Norman way that says, "We conquered you, and just in case anyone forgets, here is an enormous stone reminder visible from three counties."

The priory ruins themselves date back to the time of Aethelflaed, daughter of Alfred the Great, which means parts of that area were already old when William the Conqueror was still somewhere in Normandy wondering how boats worked.

And threaded through all this history runs an ordinary modern road with lamp posts, traffic markings, parked vans and somebody in a lime-green hatchback probably trying to remember whether they paid for parking on an app designed by a sadist.

That was when I noticed the building.

Proper old timber framing. Great black oak beams twisted and weathered by centuries of rain, frost and probably the occasional drunken Civil War supporter relieving himself against it on the way home from the tavern. The upper floor jutted out over the pavement in that delightfully impractical medieval fashion where people appeared to believe gravity was merely a suggestion.

And yet it was still alive.

That was the thing that struck me. Not turned into one of those ghastly sanitised heritage attractions where volunteers in linen tunics explain bread ovens to children while a gift shop sells artisan chutney at nine pounds a jar. This building was still functioning. Still adapted. Still earning its keep.

The windows had been replaced sympathetically. The brick infill repaired carefully. Modern rooflights inserted without making the whole thing look like a Scandinavian kitchen showroom. Even the dreadful modern necessities of life had been handled with restraint.

I only later noticed the air-conditioning units tucked away at the side behind the fence. That, in itself, felt almost miraculous. Usually these things are attached to historic buildings with all the sensitivity of somebody fitting a spoiler to a horse-drawn carriage.

Likewise the CCTV cameras, conduits, alarms and security grilles. Ordinarily, every generation leaves behind another layer of visual clutter. Victorian pipework. 1950s wiring. 1980s plastic signs. Satellite dishes. Mysterious junction boxes no one can identify. Buildings often end up looking as though they have survived several minor wars and an especially vindictive British Telecom engineer.

But this one somehow held together.

And I realised that was because the whole area around Dean's Walk is like that. Within a few hundred yards you can see Saxon England, Norman England, Tudor England, Victorian England and modern Britain all sitting untidily on top of one another without anyone having had the courtesy to separate them properly.

That is probably why England remains interesting despite itself.

We never really erase anything. We just keep adding to it. Somewhere beneath the tarmac are Roman roads. Beneath the priory are Saxon remains. Nearby there will be Victorian drains, fibre-optic cables and at least one abandoned shopping trolley. You can stand beside stones laid down a thousand years ago while hearing somebody nearby complain that their phone signal has dropped to only two bars.

And oddly enough, it works.

The older I get, the more suspicious I become of places that are too perfectly restored. Historic city centres cleaned into immaculate heritage zones where every pub sign looks committee-approved and every paving slab appears to have been pressure-washed hourly since 1998. They often feel oddly dead despite all the money spent on making them picturesque.

This, by contrast, felt inhabited. Useful. Slightly worn in the reassuring way genuinely old things usually are.

Modern buildings rarely improve with age. They start off looking sleek and futuristic, then reality arrives. Somebody needs broadband. Somebody installs security lighting after the third burglary. Another manager wants larger signage. A ventilation duct appears. Ten years later the place resembles a regional insurance office beside the A417.

Old buildings seem far more tolerant of human beings. They expect compromise. A Tudor timber frame can absorb CCTV cameras and wiring because it has already absorbed four hundred years of repairs, arguments, leaks, fashions and bodges.

Which, come to think of it, also explains the British constitution, the plumbing in my motorhome, and most marriages over twenty years old.

Meanwhile that timber-framed building near St Oswald's has survived plague, civil war, industrialisation, Luftwaffe bombing, town planners, cable television and probably at least one catastrophic attempt at pebble-dashing during the 1970s.

The remarkable thing is not that it looks slightly imperfect after several centuries. The remarkable thing is that it still stands there at all, calmly getting on with life while half the office blocks built in 1987 already look ready for demolition.

Leave No Trace

You can almost pinpoint the exact moment the mood changed.

It had actually been a rather lovely little trip up to that point.

We had spent the previous night at a BritStop at Hazel Beach in Pembrokeshire. One of those quiet waterside spots where the evening consists mainly of looking at boats and remembering that I actually spent three years living on one on the Thames, which sounds wonderfully romantic until you recall winter condensation and carrying things awkward distances in the rain.

The plan had then been to spend a night in the public car park at Hay on Wye. We had not realised we had accidentally timed our arrival with the Hay Festival. I had vaguely assumed it was usually later in June somewhere, rather than already in full migration mode.

It probably did not help that it was a Bank Holiday rolling straight into half term either. The entire western side of Britain appeared to be on manoeuvres.

In the end we never even got into Hay itself. The coaches gathering on the outskirts were warning enough. What started decades ago as a slightly eccentric literary gathering now appears to have evolved into a temporary city state run by Radio 4.

Every road seemed to contain people wearing festival lanyards and discussing geopolitics over compostable coffee cups while carrying canvas bags full of books they will never quite finish. Somewhere nearby, no doubt, Rory Stewart and Alastair Campbell were probably inside a heated marquee discussing the decline of Western democracy to an audience of retired headteachers nodding gravely into flat whites.

Hay has essentially become Glastonbury for people whose idea of rebellion is owning a particularly opinionated tote bag.

So we wisely retreated.

One of the pleasant surprises about Wales, incidentally, is how accommodating many councils still are towards motorhomes. England increasingly treats overnight parking as though you are attempting to establish an illegal micronation. Wales often just seems faintly pleased somebody has turned up.

So we headed instead towards Crickhowell for the night. While there, a local butcher told us about a back road beauty spot nearby that made a perfect overnight stop. And he was absolutely right.

Big skies, distant hills, sheep doing whatever it is sheep do all day that requires such concentration. The sort of place people drive hundreds of miles to experience because modern Britain increasingly sounds like somebody reversing a Transit van into a skip.

We had parked up with our motorhome, which carries a large "Leave No Trace" sticker across the bonnet. That has always rather been our philosophy. Arrive quietly. Enjoy the place. Leave it looking as though you had never been there at all.

We are not exactly anti-farming zealots either. We do, after all, live in the Cotswolds. We listen to Farming Today and The Archers practically every day, which in Britain effectively makes you honorary DEFRA consultants after a while. I now possess unexpectedly strong opinions on slurry management, upland stewardship and whether Eddie Grundy should ever be trusted near financial paperwork.

So this is not townie outrage about the existence of quads in the countryside.

And to begin with, the atmosphere was actually rather pleasant. It was clearly a stopping point for bikers as well. I took some lovely photographs, including a beautifully kept 1948 Triumph that looked entirely at home against the backdrop of the hills. There was also a magnificent Cobra replica and a gleaming Harley parked up overlooking the valley. The attraction was obvious enough. Long, winding roads through open countryside. If you like driving or riding, it is hard not to understand the appeal.

That is partly why the whole thing felt so contradictory. The bikes and cars somehow seemed to belong there. They moved through the landscape. Appreciated it. Paused to look at it.

And perhaps that is really the distinction underneath all this. The difference between participation and domination.

Then the scramblers arrived.

Three young lads roaring off from the beauty spot car park and into the hills like an agricultural version of Mad Max. Shortly afterwards came the quads. No licence plates. Obviously farm vehicles. Almost certainly local farmer's lads out enjoying themselves on a summer evening.

And this is where it becomes awkward, because they were not outsiders invading the countryside. In a sense, they are the countryside. Their families probably know every inch of those hills. Their grandfathers were likely crossing the same land long before the National Park designation existed.

But it can still be a nuisance.

That is the bit modern debates struggle with. We like our moral categories tidy. Noble rural custodians versus antisocial yobs from the city. Reality is messier than that.

Because if I turned up in the Brecons on an unregistered quad and disappeared into a National Park for recreational off-roading, there is a fair chance somebody would eventually introduce me to the legal system. Quite briskly too.

But if everybody knows whose boys they are, things become a little more flexible.

And to be fair, rural life has always operated partly on informal understandings. Farmers crossing roads between fields. Machinery being used pragmatically. Villages quietly sorting things out without needing three enforcement officers and a consultation document.

The problem is when the public experience becomes one of visible double standards.

National Parks are not private playgrounds. They belong to all of us. People go there for quiet. For space and wind and the strange luxury of hearing almost nothing mechanical at all for a while.

What they do not necessarily expect is the distant sound of internal combustion engines bouncing around entire valleys for half the evening.

And speaking of modern intrusions, there was also a pizza van parked at the beauty spot. Which, to be fair, is not remotely the pizza chap's fault. A man selling wood-fired pepperoni to tourists is not personally responsible for Britain's inability to carry empty packaging back to a bin.

But it did complete the atmosphere rather neatly.

Then came the final straw.

Somebody had left a car alarm armed while disappearing off into the Brecons for the day. Every few minutes the thing would erupt again across the valley like an electronically distressed goose. Eventually we gave up and moved further down the road.

Which rather summed the whole thing up in the end.

The National Park slowly starts feeling less like protected countryside and more like an outdoor event with sheep. Vans parked up everywhere. Disposable packaging blowing about. Engines coming and going. Somewhere nearby, inevitably, somebody playing music through a bluetooth speaker that sounds like a crisp packet full of wasps.

And then there was the rubbish.

Three bags of it.

That was the point the whole thing crystallised.

Because after the engines had faded away into the hills and everyone else had gone home, there we were filling bin liners beside a motorhome literally carrying the words "Leave No Trace" across its bonnet.

Which increasingly felt less like a philosophy and more like a plea.

And the awkward thing is that most people actually want to support farming communities. They like the idea that somebody is looking after these landscapes properly. But goodwill has a habit of evaporating once people start feeling there is one set of rules for locals and another for everyone else.

And eventually you find yourself standing in one of the most beautiful landscapes in Britain at sunset, stuffing pizza boxes and energy drink cans into a bin liner while the sound of quads fades off somewhere over the next ridge.

Deficits Good, Surpluses Bad? Not Quite

I’ve seen a lot of posts lately waving around January’s £30bn surplus as proof that the government is “draining money from the economy”, based on the familiar trope that deficits inject money into the private sector while surpluses remove it.

There is some truth in that. Governments are not households, and deficits can absolutely support demand during weak periods.

But I thought I’d actually investigate the claim rather than simply applaud the infographic because it had arrows and the phrase “fiat currency” on it.

Turns out the £30bn was not even a quarterly figure. It was a single January monthly figure, which matters because January is always unusual in Britain due to self-assessment deadlines, CGT payments, VAT receipts and the usual January tax bunching.

In fact, the UK was still running a very large annual deficit overall. The January surplus sat inside a wider yearly borrowing figure well above £100bn.

In other words, a lot of the “surplus” may simply reflect more economic activity, timing effects and seasonal receipts, not the state sucking life out of the economy like a Treasury vampire.

And here’s another awkward point. Because this was a single January monthly spike, not a permanent state of affairs, presenting it as proof the government has somehow permanently “removed £30bn from the economy” is economically simplistic at best. The next months could easily swing back into deficit again, which is exactly what usually happens.

Equally, the other side should be careful too. You cannot hail one strong January surplus as proof the economy has suddenly been transformed either. One unusual tax-heavy month does not mean Britain has escaped its deeper problems of weak productivity, low investment and anaemic growth.

There’s also a reason governments often tighten finances during stronger periods of growth. If an economy is already running hot, continually flooding it with borrowed money can simply fuel inflation instead. Borrowing is not automatically wise any more than fiscal tightening is automatically reckless. Timing matters.

All of which rather suggests a lot of the Facebook outrage is less economic analysis and more partisan point-scoring. People are starting with “Reeves bad” and then working backwards from there using whatever infographic floated past that morning.

That doesn’t mean Reeves is automatically right. Britain still has weak productivity and anaemic growth, and excessive caution can become self-defeating. Rebuilding public services also requires real resources and credible funding, not just slogans about deficits being good.

Governments also need enough fiscal room to respond when the next crisis arrives, rather than already sitting permanently at the limit of what markets will tolerate. Lower borrowing and lower debt interest costs do matter eventually, even if Facebook economics prefers to skip straight from “fiat currency” to “infinite free money”.

But economics is not as simple as “deficits good, surpluses bad”. If it were that simple, Chancellors would just sit in the Treasury pressing the “prosperity” button all day.

Footballgate

There is something deeply funny about modern football’s “spying” scandals.

Southampton have effectively been treated as though they were caught attempting to steal nuclear launch codes rather than peering at Middlesbrough training sessions from behind a hedge in the rain.

Expelled from the playoff final. Points deductions. Television pundits discussing “integrity” with the expression of men announcing the outbreak of war in Europe.

And yet every football match is already filmed from so many angles that by half time some bloke on YouTube has reconstructed the entire tactical setup using arrows, circles and the pause button.

Football analysis has become completely unhinged.

There are now heat maps, sprint maps, passing maps, pressing maps and things called “transitional phase metrics”, which sounds less like football and more like somebody trying to restart a damaged reactor at Sellafield.

You cannot simply watch a match anymore. Some retired midfielder immediately appears beside an enormous touchscreen saying: “What you’ll notice here is the inverted overload between the half spaces.” No Gary, what most people noticed was the left back falling over and hoofing the ball into the crowd while somebody behind them disappeared for tea.

And this is the odd thing about the outrage.

Most clubs already know more or less how their opponents play. There are analysts whose entire existence revolves around watching endless footage looking for patterns in throw-ins and corner routines. Fans themselves now function as volunteer reconnaissance units.

A player limps slightly while getting off the coach and within minutes somebody online has declared: “Hamstring issue confirmed.”

A reserve goalkeeper buys a Lucozade at Warwick Services and suddenly half the fanbase is convinced the starting keeper is injured.

Honestly, half the Championship could probably be reconstructed from motorway service station sightings and blurry photos taken through bushes.

Which admittedly is where the problem begins.

There is obviously a difference between watching publicly available footage and sending some nervous graduate analyst called Connor into shrubbery carrying a long-lens camera and dressed like he is preparing for reconnaissance behind enemy lines.

That does slightly change the atmosphere. But once you start thinking about it logically, the whole thing becomes wonderfully muddled.

Football clubs now treat training-ground footage as though it were top-secret state intelligence while simultaneously uploading cinematic drone footage of training sessions onto social media every afternoon complete with dramatic music, slow-motion closeups and players staring moodily into the middle distance.

Meanwhile paparazzi have spent decades hiding in bushes photographing footballers leaving nightclubs, climbing into hotel rooms or kissing people who are plainly not their wives, and nobody describes that as a threat to sporting integrity.

Apparently if a photographer hides behind a hedge to photograph a Premier League winger leaving a hotel at midnight, that is celebrity journalism.

But swivel the camera six feet left onto a defensive set-piece drill and suddenly the security services are practically on standby.

You can imagine the briefing.

“Sir, we’ve caught a man with a telephoto lens outside the training ground.”

“My God.”

“We believe he may have captured footage of near-post corner routines.”

“Who is he?”

“Daily Mail.”

The line between spying, journalism, analysis and bored blokes with smartphones has become increasingly difficult to define anyway.

By Sunday evening supporters online have usually worked out who limped in training, who looked annoyed during the warm-up, which formation was being rehearsed and which player appeared to be buying Calpol in Tesco Express at half nine the previous evening.

Still, football now takes itself so seriously that all this probably feels perfectly rational inside the game.

Clubs talk endlessly about “marginal gains”, “elite environments” and “high-performance culture” until eventually somebody concludes that hiding near a training ground with binoculars is simply part of modern professional football.

You can see where this ends.

Within ten years managers will refuse to train outdoors.

Pep Guardiola will conduct sessions inside underground bunkers.

Mikel Arteta will accuse Bournemouth of satellite surveillance.

And somewhere outside Burnley, security staff will discover a damp twenty-four-year-old analyst lying face down in a ditch whispering:

“They’ve moved the wall six inches forward for free kicks...”

The Empire Was Based on Farthings

People often ask how Britain, a damp little island full of drizzle, suet puddings and men called Keith repairing carburettors in sheds, managed to acquire an Empire covering a quarter of the globe.

The answer, I have concluded, is not naval power, industrialisation or trade. It was old British weights, measures and coinage. Specifically, the fact they forced the population into advanced mental arithmetic from the age of six.

A Victorian child could emerge from a sweet shop having calculated the cost of three ounces of pear drops at tuppence ha'penny per quarter pound, paid with a florin, received change involving a shilling, a thruppenny bit and two farthings, then gone home and helped his father calculate how many hundredweight of coal remained in the bunker. All without a calculator, spreadsheet or visible emotional distress.

Modern children can operate a smartphone containing more computing power than NASA had for Apollo, yet would regard "half a crown and tuppence farthing" as evidence of a mental health episode.

People forget what pre-decimal Britain actually required of ordinary citizens. Twelve pence to the shilling. Twenty shillings to the pound. Four farthings to the penny. Sixteen ounces to the pound. Fourteen pounds to the stone. Eight pints to the gallon. Then, just to ensure nobody became complacent, there were rods, chains, furlongs, bushels and hundredweights roaming around like escaped medieval livestock.

Buying bacon in 1954 involved mathematics now reserved for ballistic missile trajectories. Naturally, this produced a population with brains permanently wired for fractions, approximation and rapid conversion. Which, entirely coincidentally, also happens to describe artillery calculation, naval navigation and bombardment ranging.

You can immediately see the advantage. A French gunner, raised sensibly on decimal logic, receives the order:

"Adjust elevation by 0.7 degrees."

Meanwhile the British gunner hears:

"Right lads, target bearing two points off starboard, account for tide drift, compensate for windage, reduce by three-eighths and move the bloody thing half a gnat's whisker to port."

And he does it while eating a sandwich.

Nelson did not win at Trafalgar because British sailors were inherently braver. He won because every man aboard HMS Victory had spent his childhood calculating whether his mother had been cheated over a quarter pound of liver and two ounces of dripping.

The Industrial Revolution itself begins to make more sense under this theory. British engineers were effectively raised inside an administrative puzzle designed by a drunken monastery accountant. By adulthood, calculating steam tolerances in sixteenths of an inch probably felt like a pleasant break.

You still occasionally encounter survivors of this system. Elderly market traders who can mentally total seventeen purchases faster than a supermarket scanner while discussing the weather, criticising Brussels sprouts and checking whether you've slipped an Australian five-dollar note into the twenties.

Then came decimalisation, metrication and calculators. Since then Britain has struggled to build a reservoir without a public inquiry, a railway without geological despair, or an aircraft carrier without discovering halfway through that nobody ordered enough aircraft.

Coincidence? I think not.

We replaced generations trained in applied arithmetic with people who need a phone to calculate 15% off in Marks & Spencer and then hold it out to their spouse for confirmation.

Frankly, if Britain ever wants global influence again, the answer is obvious. Bring back farthings. Abolish metres. Force Year 5 pupils to buy cheese by the quarter pound while working out the change from ten bob in their heads. Within thirty years we'd probably accidentally administer half the Indian Ocean again simply because nobody else could understand our paperwork.

Persistence

Our visit to Beaulieu last weekend got me thinking - most people vanish astonishingly quickly.

Not physically at first. The body hangs about for a bit while relatives discuss catering, flowers and whether the deceased “looked peaceful”, despite now resembling a startled shop mannequin in a suit last fashionable during the Heath government. But the actual person, the pattern that was them, begins dissolving almost immediately.

Within three generations, most of us are little more than a surname on a bit of paper nobody can quite decipher because Great Grandad apparently signed everything during an earthquake. Most people cannot name all eight of their great-grandparents. Quite a few struggle with four. The eddies fade.

And that, oddly enough, may explain aristocracy better than politics ever has.

The aristocracy are not immortal. They have merely found ways to keep disturbing the same bit of water for centuries. A normal person dies and leaves behind a few photographs, a watch nobody wants, perhaps an argument over a sideboard, and a recipe for pickled onions that nobody can recreate properly because “a teacup” was apparently considered a legitimate unit of measurement in 1932. The water settles quickly.

But aristocratic families built machinery specifically designed to stop the settling. Stately homes. Portraits. Family archives. Land. Titles. Churches with entire walls covered in one surname. Villages arranged around a single family line. Stories repeated at dinner tables for two hundred years.

The local duke is not important because of who he is personally. He is important because he sits inside a centuries-old feedback loop continuously reinforcing the pattern. Every generation inherits not merely money, but identity scaffolding. You are one of us. This is your house. These are your people. Your ancestor entertained Nelson. Don’t touch that vase.

Humans are also very susceptible to confusing persistence with importance. If something survives long enough, occupies enough buildings, and appears in enough oil paintings, we instinctively assume it must matter profoundly. In reality, continuity itself creates much of the illusion. If your ancestors had owned twelve thousand acres, a castle and several portrait painters, you too would appear mysteriously significant to later generations.

Meanwhile, the rest of humanity disappears into historical compost almost instantly. And before anyone gets too romantic about all this, much of what we call “tradition” is simply institutionalised memory preservation funded by inherited wealth.

There is also something faintly tragic about it. The aristocracy often behave as though they are preserving themselves against oblivion, when in reality they are merely slowing the smoothing of the water.

The portrait in the hall eventually becomes:

“Not sure who that is. One of the Gloucestershire branches, I think.”

The Interlude Is Ending

People do not drift towards authoritarianism because they suddenly wake up one morning craving jackboots. Most are reacting to systems that increasingly feel exhausting, indifferent and faintly ridiculous.

Try rearranging a delivery and you disappear into automated menus and hold music for half an hour. Try contacting a GP surgery and you're asked to describe your symptoms in under 200 characters like a village fete slogan competition. Young couples with decent jobs can't buy homes anywhere near where they grew up unless somebody dies conveniently.

Public services still exist, technically, but increasingly feel like ageing machinery nobody's properly serviced in years. Things still sort of function, in the same way an elderly washing machine still works if you kick the side occasionally and don't ask too much of it.

Meanwhile politicians speak in managerial jargon and social media has turned public discourse into a giant pub row where everybody's got a megaphone and nobody can remember what started it. So when somebody arrives promising order, strength, certainty and national renewal, it's not exactly shocking that people listen.

The trap is what comes next.

Authoritarianism always presents itself as the cure for chaos. It never advertises the invoice afterwards. Nobody stands on a stage saying: “Vote for me and eventually independent institutions will weaken, criticism will become dangerous, loyalists will replace experts, and corruption will quietly seep into the machinery of the state.” Instead they talk about pride. Betrayal. Control. Enemies. Restoration.

Simple answers to complicated problems, which human beings have always found deeply attractive. Democracy is messy and cognitively demanding. It asks populations to tolerate compromise, ambiguity, delay and people they dislike. Authoritarianism offers something emotionally much easier: certainty, clarity and somebody to blame. Right up until the complicated problems reappear wearing a crash helmet and carrying petrol.

That drift has happened repeatedly. Weimar Germany didn't collapse because Germans suddenly became cartoon villains. It collapsed after economic crisis, political paralysis, humiliation and institutional decay destroyed faith in the existing order. Mussolini rose in a country exhausted by instability and fear of social collapse. Even the Roman Republic drifted gradually towards strongman rule as citizens lost faith in old institutions and started looking for figures who promised order instead of process.

The post-war settlement interrupted that pattern for a while. After two world wars and the Great Depression, Western societies built systems that gave ordinary people enough security, housing, rising living standards and functioning public services to make democracy feel worth defending. It was never perfect, obviously. Britain in the 1950s wasn't exactly a Scandinavian advert full of smiling cyclists and attractive furniture. But millions felt they had a stake in society and that their children would probably do better than they had.

But that settlement was an interlude, not the natural end point of history. It depended on unusual conditions: rapid growth, cheap energy, expanding industry, younger populations and American dominance, alongside a lingering fear among elites that if capitalism didn't moderate itself a bit, communism might eventually turn up and redecorate the place entirely.

The uncomfortable truth is that periods of major renewal often arrive only after societies have frightened themselves badly enough to abandon old assumptions. The post-war settlement emerged from the ruins of depression, fascism and total war. Political systems that had previously seemed incapable of serious reform suddenly became remarkably flexible once elites and populations alike had watched civilisation drive itself into a ditch twice within thirty years.

That doesn't mean war itself creates prosperity. Europe in 1945 was shattered, not wealthy. But crises often act as brutal reset mechanisms. They sweep away dead political assumptions, weaken entrenched interests and make previously impossible reforms suddenly achievable. The worrying question is whether modern democracies can still reform themselves peacefully before some new shock forces the issue for them.

Over time, politicians began treating that stability as automatic, as though prosperity and social trust were simply part of the plumbing and would continue working without maintenance.

Well, now the plumbing's rattling.

And there's another problem. One of the principal architects and guarantors of that post-war order increasingly appears to be losing faith in it itself. The United States spent decades underwriting the Western alliance system, liberal democracy and the rules-based order. As Vlad Vexler recently observed, the burglar outside your locked gates is worrying enough. The burglar already wandering around your living room is rather more alarming.

And then there are the oligarchs and billionaire patrons who increasingly treat politics as a personal hobby. Men with enough wealth to influence public discourse globally, yet insulated from many of the consequences, amplifying polarisation and institutional distrust because they benefit from it, enjoy the chaos, or simply like feeling important.

That's hardly new either. Authoritarian movements have often been aided by wealthy figures who assumed they could ride the tiger without eventually being eaten by it. History's full of moments where frightened populations and overconfident elites accidentally built something monstrous together, then looked surprised when it started smashing the furniture.

And democracies often do look ridiculous. Endless committees. Judicial reviews. Coalition squabbles. Ministers contradicting themselves before breakfast. Watching Parliament can sometimes resemble a school debate where nobody's read the brief properly but everybody still wants to make a speech.

But democracies possess one enormous advantage over authoritarian systems. Their arguments happen in public. They can correct themselves without requiring the whole structure to collapse first. Authoritarian systems often look stronger partly because disagreement and failure are hidden until the cracks become impossible to ignore.

Authoritarian systems look efficient because disagreement is suppressed. The trouble is that disagreement is also how societies detect errors. Remove criticism and leaders begin governing inside an echo chamber built from fear and flattery. Reality doesn't disappear. It merely waits outside with a cricket bat.

History is littered with strongmen who promised renewal and delivered stagnation wrapped in flags. The Soviet Union came after decades of economic senility hidden beneath displays of strength. Fascist regimes often lurched from theatrical confidence into catastrophe with astonishing speed. Even modern authoritarian states suppress information their own leaders actually need in order to govern properly, which isn't ideal if you're attempting to run a country rather than a fan club.

That's the irony. People turn to authoritarianism because they want competence and control. They often end up with systems that are more brittle, more corrupt and less capable of correcting mistakes.

The deeper problem is that the post-war bargain has steadily frayed without anything durable replacing it. People were promised that endless efficiency drives, outsourcing, deregulation and globalisation would quietly deliver permanent prosperity in the background. Instead many got stagnant wages, unaffordable housing, insecure work and the growing suspicion that institutions no longer function properly unless you're affluent, connected, or useful to somebody important.

Well, into that gap step the strongmen, the grifters and the men with flags, all promising simple answers and national renewal.

That's why merely shouting “fascist” at voters achieves very little. People don't abandon democratic norms because they secretly long for dictatorship. They do it because they conclude the existing system no longer functions properly.

If democratic societies want defending, they first have to become defendable. That means housing people can afford. Infrastructure that works. Borders that are controlled rather than theatrical. Public services that function without requiring documentary evidence from 1997 and a blood sample. Energy systems based on abundance rather than permanent scarcity. Politicians capable of speaking like actual human beings instead of malfunctioning LinkedIn posts. Otherwise the man promising simple answers starts sounding increasingly persuasive.

And history suggests that once populations begin confusing certainty with wisdom, matters tend to deteriorate rather quickly. Usually beneath enormous flags while somebody insists all the problems are caused by traitors, foreigners, intellectuals, or whichever convenient group's been selected for the week.