Take Back Control

Sovereignty is often presented as an absolute principle. It sounds clean, moral, and reassuring. Nations have borders, those borders are inviolable, and international law exists to protect them. But the moment you examine how sovereignty actually operates in the real world, the simplicity evaporates.

The principle itself is clear enough. Sovereignty means that a nation’s territorial integrity and political independence cannot be altered by external force. It is the legal bedrock of the modern international system. Without it, there is no stability, only coercion. Every country, large or small, possesses sovereignty equally under the law. Ukraine’s sovereignty is not more valid than Mauritius’s. Britain’s sovereignty is not more valid than Estonia’s. The principle does not distinguish between them.

What does distinguish between them is the response when sovereignty is violated.

If sovereignty alone dictated action, every breach would trigger the same level of outrage and the same level of enforcement. Every unlawful occupation would be reversed with equal urgency. Every violation would provoke equal sanctions, equal diplomatic pressure, and equal willingness to bear economic or military cost. That plainly does not happen, because sovereignty is a legal principle, not a self-enforcing mechanism. Action is determined not only by legality, but by consequence.

Ukraine demonstrates this distinction with brutal clarity. Russia invaded a sovereign state and attempted to annex its territory. The violation was unmistakable, and the Western response was severe. Sanctions were imposed, assets frozen, weapons supplied, and Russia was economically and diplomatically isolated. This was not because Ukraine’s sovereignty is inherently more sacred than anyone else’s, but because the consequences of allowing its destruction would reach far beyond Ukraine itself. It would destabilise the entire European security framework, weaken deterrence, and invite further aggression.

The principle explains why Russia is wrong. Strategy explains why the response is so extensive.

Now consider the Chagos Islands, where the same principle produces a very different outcome. The International Court of Justice ruled that Britain’s continued control of the islands is unlawful. The United Nations General Assembly voted overwhelmingly that sovereignty belongs to Mauritius. Britain, meanwhile, continues to rely on the same international legal order to defend Ukraine’s sovereignty that it ignores in the case of Chagos. The legal framework is treated as binding when Britain invokes it, and advisory when it constrains Britain itself.

The usual justification is strategic necessity. Diego Garcia hosts a critical US military base. Relinquishing sovereignty, we are told, would endanger Western security. But this argument quietly confuses sovereignty with basing rights. Britain could comply with international law, transfer sovereignty to Mauritius, and then support or facilitate the continuation of the US base through a lease agreement with the lawful sovereign. The United States already operates bases in dozens of sovereign countries under precisely such arrangements. Sovereignty and military access are not mutually exclusive. The real issue is not capability. It is control.

Nothing about the principle has changed. Only the strategic calculation has changed.

This is the uncomfortable truth that political rhetoric often conceals. Sovereignty is universal in law, but selective in enforcement. It establishes what is right, but it does not, by itself, determine what states are willing to do. Power, geography, alliances, and consequence determine that.

The inconsistency becomes more obvious when sovereignty is elevated into political doctrine. Nigel Farage built his entire Brexit campaign around the claim that sovereignty was absolute and non-negotiable. Britain, he argued, must leave the European Union entirely, not merely its trade arrangements but its legal and political authority. He spoke explicitly about leaving the EU’s "polity", meaning its sovereign governing structure. Sovereignty was presented not as one factor among many, but as the overriding principle that justified everything else.

Yet when sovereignty belongs to Mauritius, his position shifts. He opposes returning the Chagos Islands, despite the legal rulings. Sovereignty remains sacred when Britain demands it, but becomes negotiable when Britain possesses territory whose loss would diminish its strategic position. The principle itself is unchanged. The willingness to apply it is not.

Donald Trump illustrates the same dynamic from the opposite direction. He does not pretend sovereignty is an absolute rule. He treats it openly as transactional, something to be respected, ignored, or overridden depending on advantage. His proposals to acquire foreign territory and his willingness to threaten allies expose the underlying reality more honestly than those who wrap selective enforcement in the language of universal principle. He does not contradict the doctrine of sovereignty. He reveals its conditional enforcement.

None of this means sovereignty is meaningless. On the contrary, it remains the essential legal framework that allows international order to exist at all. Without it, Ukraine would have no legal claim to its own territory. Without it, small states would have no protection from large ones. The principle is real, and its legal validity does not depend on whether it is enforced.

What it does reveal is that sovereignty alone does not compel action. States respond based on the consequences of violation, not solely on the existence of violation itself. Ukraine’s sovereignty is defended vigorously because its loss would destabilise Europe. Mauritius’s sovereignty over Chagos is acknowledged in law but resisted in practice because of strategic interests. The principle is constant. The response is conditional.

Sovereignty is not a switch that automatically triggers action. It is a rule that nations enforce when they choose to. The law is constant. The choice is political.

The Universal Gun Symbol

When I was a boy, the world was divided into cowboys and Indians. The lines were clear. One side had hats and honour. The other had feathers and an alarming tendency to die theatrically behind the swings.

What nobody had, however, was a double-barrelled Colt .45.

I was slightly worried I’d end up being chased out of the saloon for firearms pedantry, but it needs saying. The archetypal revolver of the Wild West, the Colt Single Action Army, had one barrel. Singular. Unambiguously so. No over-under arrangement. No side-by-side innovation from a bored gunsmith in Dodge City.

Yet give any human being the task of miming a handgun and what happens? Out come two fingers. A sort of pocket-sized over-under that never existed outside the human imagination.

At no point did Wyatt Earp lean across a card table and extend his index and middle finger in rigid formation. No outlaw ever snarled, “Draw,” while brandishing what looked suspiciously like a poorly co-ordinated V-sign. The Old West was violent, but it was not anatomically imaginative.

And yet we all do it.

Children do it. Adults do it. News presenters do it when explaining “armed suspects”. Two fingers together, thumb cocked, slight squint. Bang. The gesture is universal. It has outlived the revolver.

I suspect the reason is structural rather than historical. One finger wobbles. Two fingers together form a convincing flat plane. The human hand, like most British infrastructure, requires reinforcement before it can perform theatrically.

It also reveals something mildly profound. We do not recreate machinery accurately. We reduce it to symbol. The revolver becomes a cartoon. The bang becomes “pew”. Accuracy quietly leaves the saloon through the side door while recognisability takes centre stage.

You could replace cowboys with GIs, Viet Cong, gangsters, spies, or whatever conflict the decade prefers. The gesture survives. Different wars, same two fingers. The hand remains stubbornly double-barrelled.

So next time someone levels a two-fingered pistol in jest, resist the urge to offer a lecture on nineteenth-century firearms design. Accept that civilisation runs not on mechanical precision but on shared shorthand.

Though I still maintain that if anyone had actually invented an over-under Colt, the O.K. Corral would have been considerably shorter.

The Patriotic Curriculum

It began, as these things often do, with a flag.

Not an actual flag, mind you. A metaphorical one. Waved vigorously from a television studio by someone in a well cut suit explaining that British children must be taught to love their country again. This, apparently, requires a "patriotic curriculum", which sounds marvellous until you realise it has very little to do with teaching children how the country actually works.

Because if you were serious about patriotism, you would start with tax. Not waving flags. Paying for them. You would explain that the NHS is not powered by bunting, it is powered by PAYE, and that aircraft carriers are not floated by national pride but by Treasury gilts and a lot of invoices. The rule of law is not maintained by stern looks and talk of sovereignty either, it is maintained by salaried judges, heated courtrooms, and someone remembering to keep the roof watertight.

Instead, the proposed curriculum seems to focus heavily on how Britain stopped the slave trade, while jogging briskly past the awkward detail that Britain spent a long time enthusiastically running it first. It then abolished slavery and compensated the slave owners, not the enslaved, and sent the bill to the taxpayers, who only finished paying it off in 2015. It is a curious form of patriotism that celebrates writing the apology letter but omits the burglary, then asks you to chip in for the postage.

There is also the promise to remove "woke ideology", which is a wonderfully elastic term. It can mean anything from teaching that slavery happened, to teaching that it was not just a bit of regrettable admin, to teaching that people can be treated decently even if you do not like the label they use for themselves. The beauty of the word is that it has no fixed definition, which makes it ideal for being against. It is the political equivalent of saying you oppose "bad things" and expect a round of applause.

All this is from Suella Braverman, the 'Shadow Education Secretary'. Last time I looked, the Shadow Education Secretary was the education spokesperson from the largest opposition party, not a minority party. Maths, obviously, isn't their strong point.

Meanwhile, the same lot want to withdraw from the ECHR so they can deport more people, as if the only thing standing between Britain and tidy borders is an international treaty and not the small practical matter of other countries agreeing to take people back. They also oppose closer cooperation with the EU to reduce Brexit friction, because nothing says "taking back control" quite like choosing paperwork over prosperity. It is sovereignty as a hobby, pursued at everyone elses expense, like a man insisting on walking to Cornwall to prove he does not need trains.

Then we get to energy, where they want to stop net zero and lean back into oil and gas, locking the UK into expensive fuel priced on global markets. Renewables are treated like a suspicious foreign influence, despite having the awkward habit of being cheap once built, with no fuel cost and far less price volatility. If you are trying to improve competitiveness, cheap and stable electricity is not a culture war issue, it is an industrial strategy issue. But industrial strategy is dull, and you cannot wave it at football matches.

And then comes the tax bit, which is always marketed as help for ordinary people, right up until you read the small print and notice it mainly helps people with large incomes and large assets. Abolishing inheritance tax is a lovely gesture if you have an estate large enough to pay it, and a touching tribute if you do not. Raising higher rate thresholds is splendid for those already above them, and entirely irrelevant if you are not. The average taxpayer is invited to enjoy the warm glow of someone elses tax cut, like being told you should feel personally richer because a hedge fund manager has bought a second kitchen.

The arithmetic, inevitably, does not cooperate. The state cannot collect less money, sell off assets, isolate the economy, keep services running, and lower everyones bills simultaneously. That is not a political opinion, it is a mathematical constraint, and mathematics is famously unimpressed by slogans. But perhaps this is where the patriotic curriculum really comes into its own, because if you teach enough children that wishing makes it true, you can eventually replace the Treasury with positive thinking.

So yes, you can call it patriotism if you like. But it looks less like love of country and more like branding, where pride is the product and reality is the inconvenient small print. And if it all goes wrong, do not worry, they will still have the flag. For now.

Plant-Based Marketing

Once upon a time it was margarine. It came in a tub, it spread without complaint, and nobody felt the need to apologise for it. You bought it because it was cheaper than butter and that was that.

Now it is “plant-based spread”. Plant-based, as opposed to what exactly? Livestock-derived smear? Petrochemical toast compound? Industrial dairy-adjacent emulsion? Margarine was always plant-based. That was its founding mission statement, long before anyone started photographing breakfast next to a houseplant.

But the word “margarine” picked up a reputation. It started to sound faintly refinery-adjacent, like something kept in a drum behind a factory. So rather than defend the word, the advertising industry quietly put it to sleep and invented a new personality with better lighting and nicer typography.

Inside the tub, nothing has undergone an epiphany. Oil is still persuaded to behave in ways nature did not strictly intend. Water is still folded in, with an emulsifier acting as the bored referee. The ingredients list remains stubbornly practical - rapeseed oil, palm oil, water, salt, and a couple of vitamins drafted in to make it look respectable.

What has changed is the mood music. The packaging now implies you are entering into a compact with the planet. Soft greens, sunlit fields, a font that looks like it owns a keep cup. “Plant-based” is less a description of the chemistry than a gentle pat on the head for doing the right thing at breakfast.

It is clever, really. The industry has not altered the physics of oil and water. It has altered the story you tell yourself while you butter a crumpet. Same contents, new halo, and the cow remains entirely unconsulted while I look for the jam.

When Illness Meets Labour Supply

We keep talking about growth as though it lives entirely in tax policy, trade deals and planning reform. Meanwhile, around 2.7 million working-age adults are economically inactive because of long-term sickness. That number rose sharply after 2020. Mental health accounts for a large share. Musculoskeletal conditions remain significant. Post-viral illness is part of the picture, though its precise contribution remains debated.

This is not a single-cause story. It is a systems story.

At various points, ONS surveys have estimated around 2 million people reporting ongoing symptoms after Covid infection, with several hundred thousand describing their daily activities as limited “a lot”. Many remain in work. Some reduce hours. Others move in and out of employment. What matters here is not mechanism, but function. Labour supply is not binary.

Even small shifts in functional capacity are economically material. The UK workforce numbers over 33 million. A reduction of just 1 percent in effective working hours across that base equates to the output of more than 300,000 full-time workers. At median earnings levels, that translates into several billions of pounds annually in lost output before tax effects are counted.

That is macroeconomic, not anecdotal.

Now compare political framing.

Dementia research attracts tens of millions annually from NIHR alone. That is not a criticism. Dementia imposes substantial health and social care costs. But it primarily affects older people, many of whom are already outside the labour market. Its economic impact is indirect, through care systems and family labour displacement.

Yet dementia is framed as a strategic priority.

That reflects something straightforward. Pensioners are numerous, politically engaged and economically influential as a voting cohort. A condition that affects them carries electoral weight.

By contrast, health-related inactivity among working-age adults is diffuse. It cuts across diagnoses. It lacks a single organised constituency. Its costs show up gradually in productivity statistics rather than dramatically in headlines.

The point is not to challenge the legitimacy of dementia funding. It is to observe how urgency is generated in practice.

At the same time, fiscal constraint is real. The NHS is under pressure. Waiting lists remain long. Staff shortages are persistent. No government has unlimited capacity to add new programmes without trade-offs.

So the issue is not expansion. It is alignment.

Health policy focuses on clinical outcomes. Labour policy focuses on participation rates. Treasury oversight focuses on expenditure control. What is less visible is whether restoration of working capacity is treated as a shared objective across those systems.

Current welfare structures remain largely binary. You are fit for work, or you are not. That works tolerably well for permanent incapacity. It works less well for conditions where functional capacity fluctuates over time.

Where someone can manage limited hours for a period and then relapse, the interaction between NHS care, DWP assessments and employer expectations can create friction. Attempted partial recovery can trigger reassessment, uncertainty or financial instability. That is not a moral failure. It is a design feature.

Addressing that does not require a vast new funding stream. It requires coordination. Align rehabilitation plans with benefit case management. Allow graded, flexible returns to work without repeated entitlement resets. Treat partial capacity as something to preserve rather than something to test suspiciously.

This is not about biological certainty. The underlying science is heterogeneous and still evolving. Institutions, however, cannot wait for complete mechanistic clarity before adapting to observable functional realities. In a constrained fiscal environment, avoidable labour market loss is expensive. Growth rhetoric and labour supply design should not operate in separate compartments.

Dementia demonstrates that when political urgency is strong, uncertainty does not prevent strategic framing. The question is whether erosion of working-age capacity attracts similar attention when its constituency is dispersed. That is not a partisan argument. It is an observation about incentives, and incentives, sooner or later, shape outcomes.

Sheep in the Sunshine, Tax in the Shade

I’ve revisited the farm Inheritance Tax debate, wondering how solar farms affect the argument, so I did some digging (I’m starting to hate the word research as it has become debased by Reform supporters’ shouts of “Do your research,” when what they mean is to visit a Facebook echo chamber).

What I wanted to know was simple. If a farmer leases a chunk of land to a solar operator for 30 or 40 years, what happens to all the high-minded talk about Agricultural Property Relief and protecting the sacred continuity of the family farm?

The answer is not ideological. It is technical.

If the land stops being used for agriculture, Agricultural Property Relief may fall away on that portion. Solar generation is not farming. It is an energy business. If sheep genuinely graze beneath the panels, you may preserve relief on the agricultural value. If it is fenced off and humming away like a polite industrial estate, relief becomes harder to defend.

On the other hand, Business Property Relief might step in if the wider enterprise remains mainly trading rather than mainly investment. That “mainly” test is where advisers begin earning their sheep.

And here is the delicious irony.

The same voices arguing that unlimited inheritance tax relief is essential to prevent the breakup of fragile, cash poor farming businesses are often the same voices signing index linked 40 year leases at £900 an acre with minimal operational risk. Quite rational. I would do the same. But it slightly undermines the image of the perpetually imperilled ploughman.

Let us be clear. Diversification into renewables is good business. It provides stable income. It improves liquidity. It strengthens balance sheets. It makes servicing a deferred tax bill far less apocalyptic than the tractor convoy suggests.

What it also does is blur the line between working agricultural enterprise and structured land investment. Once land becomes a long term infrastructure asset with sheep as a decorative accessory, the moral case for unlimited, unconditional inheritance tax exemption becomes less self evident.

This is not an attack on farmers. It is an observation about coherence. You cannot simultaneously argue that land is uniquely deserving of tax immunity because farming is uniquely precarious while also turning parts of that land into highly predictable energy income streams and expect no one to notice the tension.

The debate should be honest. If relief exists to protect active trading businesses from forced break up, then structure it accordingly and apply it consistently across sectors. If relief exists to preserve land wealth across generations regardless of use, then say so openly and defend that principle.

But spare us the pastoral theatre. The sheep are grazing beneath solar panels, the rent arrives on time, and somewhere a tax adviser is quietly updating a spreadsheet.

The Trump Tariff Racket

Trump’s outrage at the Supreme Court has all the hallmarks of performance. You would think he had been blindsided by an unforeseeable betrayal, rather than watching the final act of a legal drama that had been playing out in plain sight for months. Courts had already ruled that he lacked the authority to impose those tariffs under the emergency powers he claimed. His administration appealed, delayed, and carried on collecting the money anyway. The legal vulnerability was not hidden. It was the defining feature of the policy.

What turned this from a constitutional misstep into something far more revealing was what happened while those legally fragile tariffs were still in force. Companies paid billions. And Cantor Fitzgerald, the investment bank run by the sons of Trump’s Commerce Secretary, Howard Lutnick, who himself championed the tariffs, began offering those companies cash upfront in exchange for the rights to any eventual refund. This was not charity. It was a calculated investment. Cantor paid a discounted amount today and secured the legal right to collect the full refund later, as the courts eventually ordered. The difference would be their profit.

That calculation only made sense if they believed the tariffs were likely to collapse in court. No bank advances serious money unless its analysis tells it the odds are favourable. They were not betting on Trump winning. They were betting on him losing. The more likely the tariffs were to be struck down, the more valuable those refund rights became.

This transformed the illegality of the tariffs into a financial asset. The pool of money created by Trump’s legally questionable policy became something that could be bought and owned in advance. And here is where the structure becomes impossible to ignore. Trump imposed the tariffs. His Commerce Secretary defended them. His Commerce Secretary’s sons ran the bank buying the rights to profit when those tariffs were declared unlawful. The profit did not come from successful policy. It came from failed policy.

And the public ultimately pays for that failure. When the courts ruled the tariffs unlawful, the government became liable to refund the money. That refund comes from the US Treasury. And the Treasury is funded by taxpayers. The public pays first through higher prices while the illegal tariffs are in force, and then pays again when the government refunds the money. The intermediary keeps the margin.

This is where the incentive structure becomes deeply troubling. Trump did not divest from his financial interests. His political operation depends heavily on private funding, donations, and financial support from wealthy individuals and institutions. When policies create large pools of financial gain for those close to power, some of that financial gain can naturally flow back into the political ecosystem that created it. Not necessarily as a crude cash transfer, but through campaign donations, political funding, legal defence funds, and financial support structures that sustain political influence.

What makes Trump’s latest move even more revealing is that he has now imposed a new round of tariffs under Section 122 of the Trade Act, a provision that is explicitly temporary and lasts only a few months unless Congress approves it. This means that from the moment they are imposed, their permanence is uncertain. The money collected immediately becomes legally contingent, just as before. The same refund mechanism can arise. The same financial opportunities can be created. This is no longer a constitutional misstep. It is the recreation of a structure that converts legal uncertainty into financial profit.

In other words, policy creates profit. Profit sustains political power. Political power creates more policy.

Trump’s anger at the Supreme Court makes sense as theatre. But structurally, the tariffs had already served their financial purpose. They extracted billions. They created a pool of legally contingent money. They created an opportunity for those positioned correctly to profit from the legal correction. The judicial defeat did not erase that structure. It completed it.

This is why tariff authority belongs to Congress. Tariffs move enormous sums of money. When imposed without lawful authority, they do more than distort trade. They create financial opportunities tied directly to the restoration of legality itself. By the time the Supreme Court restored the constitutional boundary, the financial consequences had already been allocated.

Trump wants the public to see a president thwarted by judges.

What actually happened is simpler. His unlawful tariffs created a financial asset. Those closest to power bought the rights to profit from their collapse. And the public paid the bill.

To understand any of Trump's policies, they have to be framed through one simple lens - how does someone else's misery make profit for Trump, his family or his close associates? It's nothing to do with Make America Great Again, it's Make Trump Fabulously Wealthy.

Spooky Action at a Distance

I have recently been attempting to understand “spooky action at a distance.” This was Einstein’s irritated phrase for quantum entanglement, in which two particles appear to remain mysteriously correlated no matter how far apart they are. It sounds dramatic. It is dramatic. It is also, apparently, experimentally verified and mathematically unavoidable.

I have read about Bell’s theorem. I have read about measurement axes. I have read about probability amplitudes that must be squared before they become probabilities, which feels faintly indecent. I have read about hidden variables that cannot be local and local variables that cannot be hidden. At some point, I found myself muttering “statistics, shmatistics” at the laptop.

Logic suggests the whole thing is not as problematic as advertised. If two particles are created together and must conserve spin, why not assume that from the start one is simply the opposite of the other? Symmetry maintained, books balanced, distance irrelevant. The particles separate, each carrying its assigned role. No drama. No metaphysics. Just tidy accounting.

The physicists, however, insist that this perfectly sensible picture will not survive contact with rotated measurement axes and large data sets. There is, apparently, no pre-written answer sheet listing what each particle would do if measured in every possible direction. Classical intuition would very much like there to be. Quantum mechanics politely declines.

Apparently the failure is not of statistics, but of classical statistics. Which is the sort of sentence that makes you put the kettle on.

And then it happened.

While I was deep in Hilbert space, wondering whether locality or realism was the sacrificial lamb, I noticed movement in the herb bed.

Spooky.

Spooky is one of the neighbourhood cats.

He was not in the garden. Then he was. I did not observe his arrival. No trajectory. No intermediate states. One moment absence, the next moment presence. A full collapse of the feline probability waveform.

I stepped outside. He vanished. I returned indoors. The rosemary was disturbed again. Non-local. Quite clearly non-local.

This is what the physicists are up against. They worry about entangled electrons separated by kilometres. I worry about a cat entangled with three gardens, two compost bins and a suspiciously shredded cushion on our patio furniture.

Unlike electrons, Spooky definitely carries hidden variables. If measured along the axis of food, he is always spin up. If measured along the axis of obedience, he is catastrophically spin down. No statistics required.

The physicists can keep their Bell inequalities. I will settle for a functioning fence.

You Can Declare an Emergency. You Can’t Invent the Powers

The United States Supreme Court has just performed an act so shocking, so constitutionally outrageous, that it may cause permanent injury to the modern political psyche. It has read the law.

Not skimmed it. Not waved it around at a rally. Not squinted at it through a haze of grievance and capital letters. Actually read it.

And in doing so, it committed the gravest sin imaginable in contemporary politics. It noticed that the word "tariffs" does not appear in a law being used to impose tariffs.

This has caused understandable distress. After all, the International Emergency Economic Powers Act sounds exactly like the sort of thing you would use if you wanted to do absolutely anything at all, simply by declaring an emergency. The clue is in the title. It contains the words "emergency" and "powers," which in modern political dialect translates roughly as "do what you like."

Unfortunately, the Court has now pointed out a tedious technicality. Tariffs are taxes. And under the US Constitution, taxes are the responsibility of Congress. This is not an obscure footnote or an interpretive flourish. It is the entire point of having a legislature.

The dissenting judges, to their credit, took a more modern and imaginative view of language. They essentially argued that when Congress authorised the president to "regulate" imports, it might well have meant "tax them arbitrarily, in unlimited amounts, for as long as he feels cross." This is a refreshingly creative approach to statutory interpretation, and one that could be usefully applied elsewhere. One imagines bank customers would be fascinated to learn that "account management" now includes confiscation.

But the majority remained stubbornly anchored in the dull world of words meaning what they say. Their ruling has now crystallised the law, which is deeply inconvenient. It means that presidents cannot simply rummage around in the constitutional toolbox, pick up the largest wrench labelled "emergency," and start swinging it at global trade.

Naturally, this has prompted howls of outrage from those who had grown accustomed to government by proclamation. They had assumed the presidency had evolved into something between a medieval monarch and a disappointed hotel manager, empowered to impose penalties on foreigners for failing to admire the curtains.

What makes this episode particularly instructive is that the Court’s conservative majority largely agreed with the liberal minority. This is deeply unsettling, because it suggests the decision was based not on tribal loyalty, but on law. And law, as we are increasingly discovering, is a profoundly unreliable instrument when your strategy depends on ignoring it.

The ruling does not mean tariffs are impossible. It merely means Congress must authorise them, which is where tariffs have always lived. This is rather like discovering that only the owner of a house can sell it, rather than a man who has loudly declared himself in charge of the neighbourhood.

In the end, nothing has changed, except one crucial thing. The emergency powers toolbox has been closed, labelled properly, and returned to its shelf. And somewhere, deep in the machinery of American government, a dusty and neglected concept has stirred briefly back to life.

Just After Opening Time

You know how, when there’s a bombing in parts of the Muslim world, reports often say it happened just after Friday prayers? The phrase does a lot of work. It tells you the place was full. It tells you it was timed. It tells you the weekly rhythm had peaked.

It got me thinking what the British equivalent would be.

We don’t really have a single weekly religious congregation any more. If something happened “just after evensong”, most of the country would assume it was a Radio 4 scheduling mishap. Our predictable mass gatherings are secular.

So the British bulletin would read: “The bombing occurred just after Wetherspoons opened on Saturday morning.”

You can picture it. Nine o’clock. The doors swing open. The early congregation files in with quiet resolve. The laminated breakfast menu is studied with monk-like dedication. Coffee for some. A pint for others. The carpet pattern defies science. It is ritual without theology, but it happens every week.

And if you wanted the full, grim symmetry - the so called double tap - you would wait.

“Another device detonated just after the 3pm kick off.”

Now you have the second congregation. Scarves raised like hymn sheets. Chants replacing psalms. Entire towns gathered because the fixture list demands it. Hope, despair, indignation at the referee - all delivered on schedule.

The joke, dark though it is, rests on structure not belief. Friday prayers marks the weekly moment when large numbers gather. In Britain, our weekly congregation points are the opening of Spoons and the 3pm whistle.

We have not stopped assembling. We have simply changed the altar.

And if a newsreader ever did say, in solemn tones, that something happened just after Spoons opened and again just after the 3pm kick off, the entire country would understand immediately. Not because of doctrine. Because we know exactly where we would have been.