A Manifesto for the Wrong Parliament

I had a look at Reform’s manifesto for the Welsh elections - so you do not have to. 

It is an interesting document, though not always in the way intended. Quite a lot of it reads as if it has been written for a parliament that does not actually exist.

The first thing that strikes you is how many of the big themes sit firmly outside the powers of the Senedd. Immigration is a good example. Asylum policy is not devolved. Border control is not devolved. Visa policy is not devolved. These are matters decided in Westminster. The Welsh Parliament can debate them, complain about them, pass motions about them, but it cannot actually change them.

Unless, of course, the plan is to put a booth on the Severn Bridge and start checking English passports before they are allowed in to buy holiday homes. That would at least solve two Reform complaints at once.

Yet immigration sits right in the middle of the manifesto. One rather gets the impression that the document is aimed less at governing Wales and more at provoking nods of agreement in the pub. Which is perfectly fine as campaigning goes, but it does raise the small question of what exactly you would do with the levers of power if voters handed them to you.

There is a second difficulty, and this one is structural. Welsh politics is not organised in quite the same way as English politics. A large slice of the electorate places real weight on language and cultural identity. Support for the Welsh language, in one form or another, runs through Labour, Plaid and even parts of the Conservative vote. It is one of the few things that crosses party lines.

So proposing to dismantle large parts of the language policy framework is not quite the clever insurgent move it might appear from the outside. In significant parts of north and west Wales it simply puts a hard ceiling on how far you can go. Plaid’s vote in those areas is not just political. It is cultural. Outsiders tend to underestimate how sticky that kind of loyalty can be.

Which is slightly ironic for a party that spends much of its time talking about culture and identity. Welsh language policy is exactly that. It just happens to be Welsh culture rather than English culture, which appears to cause a certain conceptual difficulty.

Then there is geography. Reform’s support, where it exists, is likely to be spread thinly across the country. The new Senedd electoral system is proportional, which helps smaller parties, but it still rewards parties whose votes are concentrated in particular regions. Plaid benefits from that. Reform probably does not.

And finally there is the rather awkward matter of credibility. It is one thing to run as a protest movement. It is another to look like a party that has seriously thought about how devolved government actually works. When large chunks of your programme involve policies the Senedd cannot deliver, opponents do not have to deploy devastating rhetoric. They merely have to hand you a copy of the devolution settlement and a highlighter pen.

None of this means Reform will fail. They may well pick up a share of the protest vote, particularly at the expense of the Conservatives, who are having a fairly miserable time in Wales. Under the new voting system that could translate into a respectable number of seats.

But there is a difference between being a disruptive presence and being a party capable of governing. At the moment the manifesto feels much more like the former. It reads as though someone has mistaken the Senedd for Westminster and written a campaign accordingly.

Which is an unusual approach to running Wales, though it may save time when it comes to writing the next manifesto.

The Red Line You Forgot to Draw

There is something faintly irritating about watching governments discover their strategy halfway through a crisis. It gives the impression of a driver who insists he knows exactly where he is going while repeatedly stopping to ask for directions.

With the benefit of hindsight, and I freely admit that, the problem with the government’s messaging over the use of British bases was not the underlying policy. The problem was that the conditions were never stated clearly at the start. On day one the message seemed fairly clear: Britain was not allowing its bases to be used for the operation. Then British assets were attacked and the position shifted rather quickly.

At that point the government found itself explaining that supporting defensive action was entirely different from participating in offensive operations. Which is technically true in legal terms, but rather less convincing in practical terms. Missiles launched from a base do not pause at the runway to check whether their paperwork describes them as offensive or defensive.

What should have been said from the outset was something far more straightforward. Britain will not permit its bases to be used for offensive action in this conflict. However, if British forces, territory or assets are attacked, that changes the situation and we will support defensive operations. That is not escalation. That is deterrence.

The clever part of that wording is that it quietly builds in the legal justification from day one. Under international law, the right of self defence only arises once an attack has occurred. So if the condition is clearly stated in advance, any later response sits neatly within that framework. The legal argument, the deterrent signal and the political narrative are all aligned before events begin to move.

States do this all the time. Alliances are built on exactly this sort of conditional commitment. An attack on one member triggers a response from others. The purpose of stating the condition in advance is not merely to justify retaliation afterwards. It is to make the red line visible so that everyone understands the consequences before they stumble over it.

By not spelling out the condition early, the government ended up looking as if it was making things up as it went along. First a refusal. Then an attack. Then a revised position. Even if the underlying policy never actually changed, the public narrative quickly settled on hesitation followed by a reluctant reversal.

This is really the difference between strategic communication and tactical messaging. Tactical messaging reacts to events as they happen. Strategic communication sets out the logic of the response before events force your hand, so that when something does happen everyone already knows what follows. One looks deliberate. The other looks weak, and almost invites criticism because it appears that the government is being pushed into its own decisions.

None of this is especially mysterious. If someone attacks your forces, you respond. That is the oldest rule in statecraft. The clever part is making sure everyone understands that rule in advance so that the attack never happens in the first place.

Instead we were treated to the diplomatic equivalent of announcing the rules of the game after the first foul has already been committed. It works, eventually. But it rarely looks particularly convincing.

Starmer was right, but at the wrong time.

Nuclear Bombs Don’t Stop Revolutions

People talk about Iran getting nuclear weapons as if the ayatollahs would immediately start flinging them about like fireworks on Bonfire Night. The picture tends to involve apocalyptic theology, a red button and Tel Aviv glowing in the dark before breakfast. It makes for good television, but it is not actually how nuclear weapons behave in the real world.

The awkward truth is that nuclear weapons are mostly political insurance policies. Their purpose is not to be used but to make sure nobody tries to overthrow you from the outside. Once a regime has them, any invasion carries the small but rather terminal risk that the defender might decide to take the attacker with them. That tends to concentrate minds wonderfully.

You can see the logic by looking at the countries that do have nuclear weapons. The United States has them. Russia has them. China has them. India, Pakistan and North Korea have them. None of those governments are in serious danger of being invaded and removed by foreign armies. Meanwhile Iraq and Libya, which abandoned or never finished nuclear programmes, were both dismantled by external intervention. One does not need to be a conspiracy theorist to notice the lesson other governments might draw.

But nuclear weapons only solve one problem. They protect regimes from external destruction. They do nothing to protect them from their own people.

The Soviet Union collapsed while sitting on the largest nuclear arsenal on Earth. Thousands of warheads, fleets of missile submarines, entire cities dedicated to building the things. None of it stopped the state dissolving in 1991 because nuclear weapons are rather poor at managing economic stagnation, corruption or political legitimacy. Even the Kremlin could hardly threaten to vaporise Moscow in order to win a domestic argument.

The same logic applies to Iran. If Tehran acquired a small nuclear arsenal it would not suddenly become suicidal. It would become harder to invade. Israel and the United States would have to think much more carefully about military action, which is rather the point of the weapons. But they would not prevent regime change from inside. A government cannot nuke its own territory to deal with protests, factional struggles or a collapsing economy. Those things are settled the old fashioned way, with politics, power and occasionally a great deal of shouting in the streets.

Which leaves the uncomfortable conclusion. Nuclear weapons can make a regime safer from foreigners, but they do very little to save it from itself. History suggests that when governments finally fall, they usually manage it perfectly well without the help of an invading army.

3.000-, 4.000-, 5.000-Kilogramm-Bomben!

I watched Pete Hegseth’s speech about the Iranian ship yesterday and found myself becoming distracted by something rather odd. Not the submarine bit. Submarines sinking ships is, after all, what submarines are designed to do. Sailors have known this for about a century and the whole thing tends to be handled with a certain professional understatement. What caught my attention instead was the way he began talking about bomb weights.

Quite a lot of bomb weights, in fact. Two thousand pounds of this. Several thousand pounds of that. Delivered with a sort of energetic enthusiasm that reminded me faintly of a man explaining the horsepower of his new ride on mower. And as this catalogue of explosive poundage went on, a small historical memory started stirring somewhere in the back of my head.

Because there is a rather well known precedent for this rhetorical device. Adolf Hitler had a habit during the early war years of doing exactly the same thing. He would stand at a podium and start listing the weights of German bombs destined for British cities. One thousand kilos. Two thousand kilos. Delivered with the same dramatic cadence of someone unveiling an impressive new industrial appliance. The point was not military explanation. It was theatre. The audience was meant to feel the scale of destructive power through the numbers.

Now before anyone gets too excited, I am not suggesting Pete Hegseth is Adolf Hitler. That would be absurd. For one thing, Hitler usually built up to his bomb statistics rather than launching into them halfway through a press briefing. The resemblance is purely rhetorical. When politicians start reciting the specifications of explosives with visible relish, it produces a tone that sits oddly with the subject matter.

The slightly funny thing is that the genuinely interesting part of the episode is the submarine. Submarines are frightening not because of the size of the bang but because they are quiet and patient. They do not make speeches about bomb weights. They sit somewhere cold and grey under the ocean, do their calculations, fire a torpedo, and then disappear again while everyone else tries to work out what just happened.

Which is why naval announcements normally sound calm to the point of boredom. Professionals talk about objectives, threats, and outcomes. They rarely sound like someone reading the specification sheet of a particularly exciting firework. Somewhere out there there will be a submarine captain who carried out the operation with total composure and then went back to the routine of the control room, someone probably putting the kettle on while another officer checks the charts.

Meanwhile in Washington the speech had drifted into something that sounded suspiciously like a monster truck rally for explosives. Bomb weights, enthusiastic cadence, the faint sense that the speaker was enjoying the description a little too much.

Naval warfare, historically speaking, has generally benefited from the opposite tone. If your briefing about a torpedo attack begins to sound like a wartime propaganda speech about the size of the bombs, it may be a sign that the presentation needs a small adjustment.

The submarine, after all, already did the impressive part. The rest of us could probably manage with a slightly quieter explanation. In fact I suspect the submarine crew themselves would have preferred it that way. They probably heard the speech afterwards while making tea and quietly wondered why anyone felt the need to start announcing the poundage of the explosives.

Inventing Self Defence

Every time something blows up in the Middle East someone appears online to explain that this somehow proves Putin was right about Ukraine all along. The argument usually runs that if the US or Israel can strike Iran in the name of preventing a future threat, then Russia invading Ukraine must have been defensive too. It has the faintly chaotic logic of saying that because someone somewhere committed a burglary, the bank robbery down the road was really just prudent household security.

Putin has been claiming the Ukraine war was defensive since the start. The Kremlin line is that Russia recognised the breakaway regions of Donetsk and Luhansk, those regions asked for help, and Russia therefore acted in collective self defence. It sounds tidy until you remember that Ukraine had not attacked Russia and that almost nobody recognises those regions as independent states in the first place. International law tends to frown on inventing the country you are supposedly defending.

That legal point has not stopped the argument, of course. The real purpose was never to persuade international lawyers. It was to create enough ambiguity that people outside the Western alliance might shrug and conclude that everyone bends the rules when it suits them.

Which is where the Iran strikes come in handy for Moscow. Russia can point to them and say, look, the West also uses force without waiting for the United Nations to approve it. From the Kremlin’s perspective that is useful material. Not because it suddenly validates the invasion of Ukraine, which it does not, but because it helps muddy the narrative. In geopolitical terms that is often good enough.

Then there is Iran’s rather elaborate network of regional proxies. Hezbollah in Lebanon, various militias in Iraq, the Houthis in Yemen. For years Tehran has funded and armed them through the Revolutionary Guard. If the Iranian state weakened badly or collapsed, that entire funding pipeline would suddenly become rather unreliable.

At which point some people imagine Russia stepping neatly into Iran’s shoes and financing the whole enterprise. On paper it sounds plausible. Moscow dislikes Western influence in the region, the militias cause trouble for Western allies, and chaos in the Middle East has a habit of distracting attention from Ukraine.

In practice it is a stretch. Hezbollah is tied into Iranian religious and political networks in a way that Russia simply is not. Moscow is also busy spending vast sums on its war in Ukraine while under sanctions. Taking over as the principal banker of half a dozen militant movements would be an expensive hobby.

Russia might still try to keep links alive. Weapons shipments, intelligence sharing, the occasional quiet transfer of funds through murky channels. Moscow has always been comfortable operating in that sort of grey zone.

But replacing Iran as the central sponsor of the entire network is another matter. If Iran weakened dramatically, the more likely outcome is that these groups become poorer, more fragmented and rather less coordinated.

Which would leave the online strategists still insisting that somewhere in all of this lies the proof that Russia invading its neighbour was an act of self defence. It is an argument that tends to make perfect sense if you start with the conclusion and work backwards.

Farage - Wary Then, Eager Now

There was a time when Nigel Farage warned us not to take foreign policy advice from the American President.

In 2015, with Barack Obama in the White House, he tweeted: “We don’t need to take foreign policy advice from the American President. The last time we did that it was called the Iraq War. We should be wary.” He has long described Iraq as a disaster, not in Britain’s national interest, a conflict that destabilised a region and left us paying for decisions made elsewhere.

And Iraq did not unravel because the invasion was tactically difficult. It unravelled afterwards. The regime fell quickly. Then came the vacuum, the looting, the insurgency, the slow realisation that no one had properly worked through what the day after was meant to look like. Remove Saddam, fine. Then what? That part was never convincingly answered.

That was the lesson. Or so we were told.

Now we are asked to “back the Americans in this vital fight against Iran”. That is Farage’s current line, along with support for regime change and the use of British bases. The caution of 2015 has become something closer to enthusiasm.

And what exactly are we backing?

Donald Trump talks about missiles, naval power, nuclear capability, proxies, timelines that may be short or may stretch on. The scope shifts depending on the speech. Trump’s background is in business and television. He is a political operator, not someone who has spent decades managing post-conflict states.

Marco Rubio explains that the United States moved because Israel was about to move and Washington expected retaliation. So America acted first. That means the timing was not driven solely by a neat US strategy document or by the collapse of negotiations. It was shaped by an ally’s imminent decision. Britain, in turn, is being asked to align with Washington’s response to that.

Pete Hegseth says this will not become another endless war, though he does not entirely close the door on escalation. J.D. Vance says the aim is simple, that the United States is at war with Iran’s nuclear programme rather than Iran itself, and that diplomacy is preferred.

Except diplomacy was actually happening.

There were indirect talks mediated by Oman. Meetings in Geneva described as serious. Technical sessions planned. No formal declaration that negotiations had collapsed beyond repair. Strikes took place while that process was still live.

And who was conducting those talks for the Americans? Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner. Both experienced negotiators in property, finance and political deal-making. Kushner had a hand in the Abraham Accords. But neither is a career arms-control specialist steeped in enrichment limits, inspection regimes and compliance mechanisms. They are trusted envoys and dealmakers, not architects of nuclear non-proliferation frameworks.

Yet Farage’s instinct in all this is alignment, not hesitation.

Pause for a moment and look at the range of explanations on offer. Is this a tightly defined operation against specific nuclear facilities? Or is it a broader attempt to weaken Iran’s military capacity more generally? Is it pre-emption triggered by Israel’s timetable? Is it regime change in all but name, with the small matter of what follows left conveniently vague? And if diplomacy was still in motion, what exactly marked the point at which it was judged irretrievably futile?

These are not minor distinctions. They point to different risks and different outcomes. Regime change in particular drags us back to Iraq’s awkward question: once you topple the regime, who governs, who keeps order, who stops the vacuum from being filled by something worse?

If Iraq was wrong because there was no serious plan for what followed, then Iran has an uncomfortably familiar feel. The stated aims move around. The diplomatic track was interrupted rather than exhausted. No one has set out, in plain language, what success looks like beyond stopping a bomb and weakening a regime.

Farage once told us to be wary of following the American President into war. That was not an unreasonable position. If prudence was the principle then, it should be the principle now.

Net Zero, Oil Spikes and the Curious Case of Energy Amnesia

It is curious how quickly geopolitics can make yesterday’s certainty look a bit flimsy.

Oil jumps 30 per cent in a matter of weeks because two men decide to rearrange the Middle East with explosives, and suddenly the idea of importing vast quantities of fuel from volatile regions looks less like robust economic planning and more like wishful thinking with a spreadsheet attached.

For years we have been told that Net Zero is an expensive affectation, a hobby for metropolitan liberals who enjoy windmills and lentils. The argument runs that we are crippling ourselves while the rest of the world burns whatever it fancies. Better, apparently, to double down on fossil fuels and abandon the green fantasy.

Yet here we are, watching Brent surge because the Strait of Hormuz might become a shooting gallery. Every spike is effectively a tax on the British economy. It feeds straight into petrol prices, inflation, household budgets and industrial costs. We do not get a discount for scepticism. We pay the world price like everyone else.

The awkward truth is that renewables are not primarily a moral crusade. They are an insurance policy. Once you have built a wind farm, nobody in Tehran can make it more expensive out of spite. Once you have electrified transport, at least in part, you are not checking the oil futures market before filling the car.

Of course, it is not simple. Wind needs storage, grids need upgrading, EVs need infrastructure. None of this is cheap, and none of it happens by chanting slogans. But compare that complexity with the alternative, which is continued exposure to global commodity markets that can lurch on a Sunday evening because someone pressed a red button.

One wonders whether those still promising to “ditch Net Zero” have factored this in. If your central claim is that fossil fuels equal security and prosperity, a 30 per cent oil spike caused by geopolitical tension is not terribly helpful. It rather suggests that dependence on traded hydrocarbons equals volatility and vulnerability.

Perhaps the new line will be that we should drill more at home. Fine, where commercially viable. But North Sea oil is sold at global prices too. It does not come with a patriotic discount at the pump in Yate or Newton Abbot. The market does not care about flags.

As for me, I shall continue quietly generating my own electricity with solar PV, warming water with solar thermal, and letting the ASHP hum away in the background. It does not make me virtuous and it certainly did not come free, but it does mean that when oil spikes because somebody somewhere fancies a bit of brinkmanship, my exposure is at least slightly less than it might have been.

GP Appointments - By Combat

I have invented a new game show. It is called “Appointment or Annihilation”.

The premise is simple. Instead of sitting in a phone queue at 8.00 am listening to Greensleeves and questioning your life choices, patients gather in a municipal sports hall and fight for the right to see a GP. Nothing lethal, obviously. We are not barbarians. Just a brisk, morally improving gladiatorial contest with foam javelins and those oversized cotton bud things from It’s a Knockout.

The receptionist, elevated on a small dais, surveys the melee with a clipboard. “Two appointments left. One face to face, one telephone. Commence.”

There would be heats. Asthmatics in one corner, bad knees in another. The truly committed would have to prove the urgency of their condition. If you can sprint the length of the hall to tackle a retired scaffolder from Yate, perhaps your chest infection can wait until Thursday.

Points awarded for visible inflammation. Bonus round for anyone who can produce a rash without Googling it first.

I appreciate some will say this is dystopian. But is it really so different from what we have now? The current system already requires speed, agility, and a working knowledge of redial. I once rang 47 times in three minutes. That is not primary care. That is competitive sport.

At least my format has transparency. No more mysterious “all appointments gone” at 8.03 am. You would know precisely why you lost. It was the woman with the tennis elbow who took you out at the ankles while quoting NICE guidelines.

There could be sponsorship. Local physios on standby. A discreet booth where you can upgrade to private mid-bout, rather like fast track at an airport. “For just £85, sir, you may bypass the semi final and proceed directly to a mildly interested locum.”

The beauty of the concept is that it restores honesty to the system. Demand exceeds supply. We all know it. Politicians say access is improving, which usually means a spreadsheet somewhere looks tidier. Meanwhile, actual humans are Googling their symptoms at midnight and convincing themselves they have a rare Peruvian fungus.

My show merely accepts reality and adds a referee.

Of course, there are drawbacks. The over 80s might struggle in the grappling stages, though I would not entirely bet against some of them. And it may be awkward explaining to Ofcom why a man with suspected gout is wielding a foam trident.

Still, it would be quicker than pressing option 3 for prescriptions and being cut off.

In truth, what irritates me is not the lack of appointments so much as the theatre around it. We pretend that if only we all refreshed the NHS app with sufficient civic virtue, the system would miraculously expand. It will not. Resources are finite. GPs are finite. Illness, regrettably, is not.

So perhaps a little absurdity would at least match the mood.

Anyway, I have not fully thought it through. I suspect the indemnity insurance would be prohibitive, and the sports hall is already booked on Tuesdays for Speed Dating.

You're a Porkie

For most of my life, I have operated under a comforting and largely unexamined assumption that humans, as a species, occupied an entirely separate culinary category from the rest of the animal kingdom. Not morally, you understand. Morally we are clearly worse than most animals. But biologically, I assumed we would at least taste distinctive. Something refined. Possibly faintly of Earl Grey and quiet disappointment.

It turns out this is not the case.

Biochemically speaking, human meat is, rather inconveniently, very similar to pork. So similar, in fact, that various Pacific cultures settled on the term “long pig” as a practical descriptor. Not an insult. Not satire. Just straightforward taxonomy. Short pig had four legs and rooted about in mud. Long pig had two legs and invented tax returns. From a culinary standpoint, the distinction was apparently one of posture rather than composition.

There is something deeply unsettling about the calm practicality of the phrase. No moral panic. No existential angst. Just a quiet nod to biochemical reality. Long pig. It has the tone of something you might find on a butcher’s chalkboard between “lamb shoulder” and “sausages.”

Modern science, with its usual flair for removing the last remaining layers of human dignity, has confirmed the comparison. The muscle fibres are similar. The fat composition is similar. The chemistry is similar. Strip away the layers of identity - the job titles, the car keys, the vague belief that one is more important than one actually is - and what remains is structurally very close to something that lives in a farmyard and has never once worried about mortgage rates.

It does rather puncture the grand narrative of human exceptionalism.

We like to think of ourselves as elevated. Civilised. Separate. We build institutions. We debate philosophy. We invent cryptocurrency. And beneath it all sits the quiet biochemical truth that, at a molecular level, we are simply long pig with access to broadband.

It also casts everyday life in a slightly different light. The gym, for example, ceases to be a temple of self improvement and becomes more of an optimisation facility. We are refining the long pig. Improving the tone. Reducing excess fat. Preparing the long pig for professional presentation.

Likewise, the entire edifice of modern society begins to look faintly absurd. Boardrooms full of long pig discussing quarterly performance. Long pig standing in supermarkets comparing olive oils. Long pig arguing on the internet with absolute certainty about things they understood perfectly five minutes ago and will forget entirely by Tuesday.

The phrase “long pig” endures precisely because of its uncomfortable accuracy. It reminds us that beneath the elaborate theatre of civilisation, beneath the suits and ceremonies and carefully curated identities, we remain biological organisms built from the same basic materials as everything else that walks, crawls, or roots around in a field.

We are not separate. We are not exempt. We are simply long pig who, through an improbable sequence of evolutionary accidents, acquired the ability to name ourselves - and, in doing so, accidentally revealed more than we intended.

The Minimum Wage

There is something quietly absurd about profitable businesses relying on the state to finish paying their staff. We have constructed an economic system in which a company can announce healthy margins, pay dividends, and congratulate itself on commercial success, while the taxpayer quietly subsidises its payroll through Universal Credit and housing benefit.

Strip away the jargon and that is what is happening. The public is helping to pay the wages of private employees so their employer can remain profitable.

If that sounds backwards, it is because it is.

In a functioning market economy, a business covers its own costs. Labour is a cost. Electricity is a cost. Rent is a cost. No serious person would argue that taxpayers should subsidise a company’s electricity bill so it can remain profitable. Yet when it comes to wages, this distortion has become normalised. Low pay is quietly topped up by the state, and the business model survives not because it is efficient, but because it is subsidised.

This creates a perverse inversion of capitalism. Risk and cost are socialised, while profit remains private.

Supporters of this arrangement retreat to a familiar warning whenever minimum wage rises are proposed. Businesses will collapse. Jobs will vanish. Prices will spiral. We have heard this before.

When the UK introduced the National Minimum Wage in 1999, business groups warned that up to two million jobs could be lost. It was presented as an existential threat to the economy. And yet employment rose by millions in the years that followed. Businesses adapted. The economy continued. The catastrophe never arrived.

What did happen was exactly what basic economics predicts. Prices adjusted modestly, and they adjusted together. One café did not suddenly become unviable while its competitors thrived. They all faced the same wage floor. Competition remained fair because the adjustment was universal.

At the same time, the very people receiving higher wages became better customers. They spent more. That money did not disappear. It flowed back into the economy, strengthening demand across the system. The economy did not shrink. It rebalanced.

Meanwhile, the same state that quietly subsidises low wages ensures unemployment support remains far below minimum wage income. This is not accidental. It is deliberate policy. Universal Credit provides subsistence, not replacement income. The purpose is clear: work must always be financially preferable to unemployment.

But consider the consequence. Workers are not negotiating from a position of strength. They are negotiating from a position where the alternative is hardship. This stabilises the supply of labour at the bottom of the market, even when wages are low. It ensures the system continues to function, but at the cost of embedding structural dependence on low pay.

At the same time, the same voices who insist the market must determine wages without interference are remarkably relaxed when the state intervenes to protect corporate profitability. When a major employer sustains an entire town, governments routinely step in with grants, tax breaks, infrastructure, or outright financial support. The justification is always the same: jobs must be protected.

Jim Ratcliffe provides a particularly vivid example. His company, INEOS, has benefitted from substantial public support over the years, including government backing for major industrial sites such as Grangemouth, infrastructure investment, and energy policy support designed to preserve British manufacturing jobs. Yet Ratcliffe himself chose to relocate to Monaco, placing his personal wealth beyond the reach of the UK tax system that helped sustain the industrial base underpinning his fortune.

This is entirely legal. But it reveals the asymmetry. Public money helps sustain the enterprise. Private wealth is free to detach itself from the public obligation that made it possible.

And often, governments justify such support on pragmatic grounds. The collapse of a major employer can devastate a community. But let us be honest about what this means. It is a political decision to preserve employment by transferring part of the cost onto the taxpayer. The public absorbs the risk so the company can continue operating. In both cases, the market outcome is being shaped by political choice. The only question is whether that choice protects corporate margins, or ensures workers are paid enough to live without public subsidy.

Critics sometimes retreat to one final technical objection. What about export industries, competing internationally? But export sectors rarely employ minimum wage workers in their core operations. Engineering firms, pharmaceutical companies, and advanced manufacturers depend on skilled labour paid well above the legal minimum. Where minimum wage roles exist, they are usually peripheral - cleaners, facilities staff, catering, or contracted services. The core export economy does not depend on poverty wages. The subsidy problem lies overwhelmingly in domestic sectors serving the local economy.

If a business cannot survive without the taxpayer quietly funding its wage bill, then its profitability is an illusion. It is not a triumph of enterprise. It is a triumph of accounting.

Minimum wage laws do not distort the market. They define its boundaries. They draw a simple line and say that if you employ someone full time, you must pay enough to sustain that employment. Not the taxpayer. You.

What follows is not economic collapse, but economic sorting. Businesses that create genuine value adapt and survive. Businesses that exist only because labour is artificially cheap, or quietly subsidised, must either improve or exit. That is not failure. That is the market functioning properly.

We know this because we have already seen it. The minimum wage was introduced. The warnings were dire. And yet employment rose, businesses survived, and the economy continued.

The uncomfortable truth is that some profits in Britain have been built not on innovation or productivity, but on costs quietly transferred to everyone else. Minimum wage laws do not break the system. They simply stop the public from quietly carrying part of it.

And that, perhaps, explains the noise.