A Moral Decision for You

There is a decision to be made here. Not by politicians, but by you.

£15 - 25 million of public money will now be spent electing councillors to authorities that are already scheduled to disappear, only for another election to be held a year later. The money will be spent. The only question is what it buys.

So ask yourself what you would rather have.

Would you prefer ballot papers, count halls, and councillors serving briefly in transitional bodies, or the funding to recruit and employ 100 - 200 qualified nurses on three-year contracts, many of whom would need to be recruited from abroad because Britain does not currently train enough of its own?

Would you prefer a duplicated election cycle, or the ability to recruit and retain 40 - 75 fully trained GPs on three-year contracts, again, many recruited internationally, delivering hundreds of thousands of appointments and reducing waiting times where it actually matters?

Would you prefer another set of polling stations, or sustained funding for 110 - 240 border officers and immigration caseworkers on three-year contracts, strengthening processing capacity and enforcement year after year?

These professionals do not appear by magic. They must be recruited, often from abroad, integrated into the system, and retained. That requires stable contracts and sustained funding. This money would have provided exactly that.

This is not theoretical. The money will be spent. It can only be spent once.

In Dorset. In Buckinghamshire. In North Yorkshire. Elections were postponed during council reorganisations because Parliament had completed the legal groundwork first. Councils were being replaced, and holding elections to bodies about to cease existing was recognised as administratively pointless. Nobody declared democracy dead. Nobody launched legal crusades. The system moved forward, and public money was not spent twice for the same outcome.

This time, a different decision was made. A legal challenge ensured elections must now happen twice instead of once.

Nigel Farage made his decision. He chose the performance. He chose the headlines. He chose the political spectacle of claiming victory. Those things generate attention. But they do not recruit nurses on three-year contracts. They do not bring in trained doctors from abroad. They do not employ border officers. They do not fix the very problems he says are broken.

You may believe that was the right course. You may believe strict adherence to electoral timing outweighs administrative efficiency. That is a legitimate view. But it has consequences. The money will now be spent on process, not personnel.

So the real question is not whether elections should happen. They will.

The question is simpler.

If you had £25 million in your hand today, would you spend it on a second set of elections, or on three-year contracts for the trained professionals, from Britain or abroad, so often said to be missing?

That is the decision.

Trump's Ideological and Geopolitical Enemies - a Paradox

We used to think the map was straightforward.

Friends were liberal democracies. Enemies were authoritarian rivals. Values and interests broadly aligned, even if trade rows flared from time to time.

Under Donald Trump, that alignment has shifted, because the friend–enemy divide is no longer driven only by geopolitics. It is also driven by ideology and by the sort of politics he rewards.

On raw power, some things remain constant. China is the principal strategic competitor because of its economic scale and military reach. Russia still collides with NATO’s security architecture. Iran opposes US influence in its region. Those realities do not depend on personality.

Yet the loudest quarrels often involve allies.

Trump’s governing instinct is executive heavy and impatient with institutional restraint. He pushes against courts, challenges media legitimacy and tests federal authority. Liberal democracies are built around those restraints. When you treat constraint as obstruction, you end up arguing with the countries that treat rules as non-negotiable rather than optional.

Consider Canada. It is not a threat to US power. It shares a border and defence commitments with the United States. But it also operates within binding trade agreements and domestic legal limits. When Washington demands rapid concessions, Ottawa cannot simply override its own system. What follows looks like defiance, but it is often just process doing its job.

Now add the part that is plainly ideological. Trump does not merely clash with liberal governments abroad. He amplifies movements that are trying to weaken liberal constraints at home. He gives oxygen to European populist insurgents who campaign against supranational governance, independent institutions, and the rules-based order itself. That is not neutral diplomacy. It is taking sides in other democracies’ internal arguments, and it inevitably poisons relations with the mainstream governments those movements are trying to displace.

In that light, friction with core European partners is not just about trade or burden sharing. It is about legitimacy. Liberal governments see a US president backing forces that treat courts, regulators and independent journalism as enemies. They hear the message: the alliance is conditional, the rules are optional, and the people shouting loudest get rewarded.

By contrast, more centralised systems can move quickly because internal veto points are weaker. Leader to leader negotiation becomes more direct. That does not turn adversaries into friends, but it changes the texture of engagement, which can create a dangerous illusion that the relationship is healthier than it is.

The consequences are practical.

American strength depends on predictable alliances. When partners begin to doubt predictability, they hedge. The language of strategic autonomy stops being theoretical. Procurement decisions start to shift, intelligence cooperation becomes more cautious. None of this requires a treaty to collapse. It requires uncertainty to become normal.

Uncertainty weakens deterrence. If allied trust declines, coordinated pressure on China becomes harder to sustain and NATO’s credibility looks less automatic. Rivals do not need to win a battle if they can encourage a slow, quiet unravelling of the coalition that would otherwise oppose them.

The difficulty is that America’s geopolitical advantage still rests on liberal democracies. They extend its reach and anchor its influence. Yet those same governments embody the institutional limits that executive-heavy populism resents, and Trump’s habit of boosting the European versions of that populism makes the strain worse, not better.

When ideological comfort diverges from strategic necessity, the friend and enemy map no longer aligns cleanly. The result is not immediate rupture. It is gradual loosening. And gradual loosening is how stability erodes.

In Search of the Lost Crisp

Plain, salted crisps. You simply can’t find them. Not in a proper large bag anyway. You can find them in those six-packs of mini packets, each one wrapped like it’s carrying state secrets, which is handy if you’re planning a crisp-themed expedition and need to leave trail markers, but less handy if you just want - you know - crisps.

Walk into any supermarket and it’s a riot of flavours. Prawn cocktail. Chilli something. “Sour cream and black peppercorn with a hint of smugness”. Cheese and onion still hanging on like an old pub regular. There’s probably one now that tastes of “Sunday roast” or “Thai street food” or “Grandma’s disappointment”. But plain salted? The crisp equivalent of a white shirt? Apparently too boring for modern life.

I don’t want whisky drizzle. I don’t want truffle essence, harvested from the tears of an Italian count. I don’t want a crisp that’s been “crafted” or “curated” or “inspired by”. I want potato, oil, salt, and a bag large enough to get you through a film without having to open six separate packets like you’re doing a shift at a crisp-distribution centre.

And the packaging waste is the best bit. One decent large bag would do the job. Instead, you get six small ones, each with its own glossy branding, its own seam, its own crinkle, its own contribution to the plastic apocalypse. Somewhere, a product manager is congratulating themselves for “portion control” while the bin fills up with enough empty wrappers to upholster a Fiesta.

Retail logic says “plain” doesn’t sell. It doesn’t signal personality. It doesn’t suggest you’re an adventurous eater. It just sits there being crisps. Which is precisely the point. Salted crisps are the control group of snacking. They’re the baseline. They’re the thing you eat when you want a crisp, not an edible press release.

Every so often you do spot a large bag of plain salted, tucked away on a bottom shelf behind “Flame Grilled Peri Peri Chicken” and “Mature Cheddar and Vintage Port Reduction”. It’s like finding a sensible person at a party. You grab it quickly, check nobody saw you, and head to the till before someone offers you “limited edition” something with lime.

This is not nostalgia. It’s not being difficult. It’s basic practicality. Less waste, less nonsense, more crisps. A big bag of plain salted crisps should not feel like a rare artefact from a better civilisation, like Roman concrete or a government that can run a railway.

Anyway, I’ll be in the corner with my six tiny packets, opening them one by one, making a small mountain of plastic, and wondering which part of this was meant to be an improvement.

From Bent Spoons to Bristol Referrals

There was a time when seeing a doctor on a ship required either a passenger liner or a convenient outbreak of appendicitis in mid-Atlantic.

On a cargo ship you were the medical plan. If something ailed you, you consulted the First Mate’s locker, a dog-eared manual, and whatever unguent looked vaguely medicinal. A wipe down with boiled linseed oil was considered bracing. A strategic dam of Swarfega dealt with anything dermatological, mechanical or moral. If you survived, you called it resilience. If you didn’t, well, burial at sea was straightforward paperwork.

To be fair, anyone who has done a Master Mariner’s Certificate of Competency has effectively spent a week in A&E. The medical training is brisk, practical and faintly alarming. You learn how to suture, how to splint, how to inject, and how not to faint. It is all very admirable in theory. In practice, the prospect of allowing the First Mate to operate on you on the chart table with a bent spoon, while the ship rolls in a moderate swell, is not to be relished. Self-reliance has its limits.

And then there was Dhobi Itch. The name itself is a relic of empire. A “dhobi” is a washerman in the Indian subcontinent, from the Hindi word for one who launders clothes. British sailors and soldiers, stationed in hot climates, noticed that communal washing and damp kit encouraged a persistent fungal rash of the groin. The condition acquired its nickname accordingly. Officially it was tinea cruris. Unofficially it was Dhobi Itch, spoken in lowered tones as if naming it might encourage it.

The tropics had their own ideas about personal dignity. Hot steel decks, salt sweat and kit that never quite dried. Sooner or later something itched with intent. It was endured with stoicism, a dusting of antifungal powder if the slop chest happened to carry it, and a great deal of pretending it was merely “a bit of heat.” No one volunteered for a bent-spoon intervention in that department.

That sort of upbringing leaves a mark. You learn that most things pass. Cuts knit. Coughs rattle on and then retreat. Ankles swell and then forgive you. The human body, like a decent marine diesel, will usually keep going provided you don’t poke it too much.

Then I entered commercial life and discovered the modern miracle of the GP appointment. Not for the medicine, you understand. For the half-day off. A faint twinge in the elbow became a strategic diary intervention. “Medical,” I would say gravely, as if I were about to undergo exploratory surgery rather than sit in a waiting room leafing through a 2017 copy of Country Life. The NHS became, in a modest way, a form of sanctioned absenteeism.

Retirement has altered the calculus. Time is now my own. Pottering is sacred. The moment you book a GP appointment, it colonises the week. You must remember the day. You must remember the time. You must remember where the surgery has moved to since last Tuesday. It will, without fail, be at 10.40 on the one morning you had mentally reserved for reorganising the garage, or contemplating the metaphysics of a Triumph wiring loom.

And that is before the referral.

At our age, a GP rarely says, “It’s nothing.” They say, “Let’s just get that checked.” Which is code for Bristol. A city whose charms are much celebrated by those who do not have to drive into it. Parking is theoretical. The Clean Air Zone looms like a municipal tollbooth. Twenty mile an hour limits appear in places where even a milk float would feel constrained. One emerges from the experience not cured, but fined.

So the old sea-going instinct reasserts itself. A cough? Salt air would have sorted it. A twinge? Walk it off. A rash? There’s probably something in the workshop that will sting convincingly and therefore must be working. I find myself eyeing the Swarfega with renewed medical respect.

Being married to a PhD biochemist does not help. In her world, a cough is not a cough. It is an early signal in a complex cascade of pathological doom. The female body, she reminds me, is magnificently complicated. Layers of regulation, feedback loops, hormonal choreography. Compared with that, the male version is apparently a stripped-down edition. It is said that the default setting for a foetus is female and that becoming male requires the activation of certain genes and hormones. My wife summarises this more economically. In her view, maleness is what happens when something fails to develop fully, usually the brain.

Her concern, therefore, is not hysteria but projection. If one has spent a career navigating the biochemical labyrinth of female physiology, one naturally assumes that any organism emitting an unexpected cough is on the brink of systemic collapse. I, meanwhile, operate on the maritime principle that if the engine is still turning, we are broadly seaworthy.

The truth, of course, lies somewhere between boiled linseed oil and tertiary referral in Bristol. The sea taught self-reliance, but it also quietly relied on luck. Modern medicine is miraculous, but it has a talent for turning minor inconvenience into a logistical campaign.

So I compromise. Anything that interferes with pottering for more than a fortnight is escalated. Anything that bleeds excessively, glows, or produces a new and interesting smell is negotiable. Everything else is monitored with the seasoned eye of a man who once treated minor ailments with industrial cleaning products and called it character building.

If I do eventually succumb, I hope it is not in a multi-storey car park in Bristol, searching for a payment machine that only accepts an app. That, frankly, would be a poor end to a life at sea.

Ownership

I have been thinking about ownership.

Not in the playground sense of “that’s mine”, but in the more awkward philosophical sense. What does it actually mean to own something? Do we own matter, ideas, patterns, or simply a legally enforceable right to exclude other people?

At school it sounded simple. You buy a thing. It becomes yours. End of story. But ownership turns out not to be a solid block. It is a bundle of rights, carefully sliced.

Most of what we own are copies. I own my copy of a novel, not the novel itself. I own my particular car, not the model in the abstract. I cannot decide to print more books or manufacture another dozen cars just because I paid for one. I own the token, not the type.

Even uniqueness does not solve this. If I buy an original painting, I own the canvas and paint. I do not automatically own the copyright. The artist may still reproduce it. Physical singularity does not eliminate intellectual ownership.

Which brings me to my house.

This is not a production-line semi replicated down a cul-de-sac. It is a one-off. Designed for this plot, for our habits, for our slightly particular tastes. The architect designed it to my specifications. My brief. My insistence on light, proportion and a few maritime flourishes that probably caused discreet eyebrow movement. I walked the land. I described what I wanted. The architect translated that into drawings.

The Land Registry confirms I own the land and the building. When the roof leaks, it consults me directly. In every practical sense, this house is mine.

And yet.

Although I own the only physical instance of it, I may not automatically own the design. The architect, as author of the drawings, typically retains copyright unless it is expressly assigned. Paying for the design gives you the right to build this house on this site. It does not necessarily give you the right to build another identical one elsewhere.

So if I were seized by an entrepreneurial twitch and decided to construct a second version in a neighbouring field, I might discover that I cannot legally replicate my own house without permission. I own the bricks, the glass, the hinges and the heating bills. I can repaint it, extend it, sell it. I control the physical reality. But the architectural pattern that produced it may sit, in law, elsewhere.

That is the quietly comic discovery.

Even when you stray from owning copies into owning something unique, ownership remains layered. You can possess the only example in existence and still not possess the right to reproduce it.

So I remain master of my castle, firmly in the singular.

The plural, it seems, requires paperwork.

The Revolution Was Never Entirely Sober – Or Entirely Successful

I was listening to The News Quiz on Radio 4 when they asked: what are older people doing more of now that teenagers used to do in the 60s and 70s but no longer seem to?

On their own. In groups. And, apparently, with people they have never met before.

I thought the answer was protesting.

It seemed obvious. The teenagers of the 60s and 70s are today’s pensioners. Our generation marched against nuclear weapons, apartheid, Vietnam, Thatcher, the poll tax. If there was a banner to hold, our generation was underneath it. If there was a chant to learn, our generation was slightly off key but entirely convinced.

We knew the words to Blowing in the Wind and The Times They Are A-Changin by Bob Dylan. We could bellow Give Peace a Chance by John Lennon with more enthusiasm than pitch control. Some preferred the righteous snarl of The Clash. Others waved lighters to Joan Baez. Either way, the soundtrack came ready made.

And our generation still is at it. Go to almost any demonstration now, whether about climate, sewage in rivers, or the latest arrests linked to Palestine Action, and you will see a respectable showing of grey hair and sensible coats.

The difference is structural. At twenty, a night in the clink can derail a career. At seventy, with the mortgage paid and the pension guaranteed, it becomes a mildly inconvenient anecdote. There is a certain liberation in knowing that an employer cannot sack you because there is no employer. The worst they can do is confiscate your thermos.

But that was not the answer.

The answer was drinking.

Which, on reflection, is entirely consistent.

Because our generation did that with equal enthusiasm. Alone with a record player and something alarming in a bottle, Dylan crackling in the background. In groups in parks and pubs. And with complete strangers at festivals or after marches, bonded instantly by shared indignation, a borrowed guitar and a loosely supervised crate.

Young people today drink less. They are more health conscious, less inclined to wake up on unfamiliar upholstery wondering why there is a traffic cone in the kitchen. Sensible creatures.

Our generation, meanwhile, has not so much abandoned the habit as carried it forward.

Which raises an awkward possibility. Perhaps our generation protested, and still protests, because it has always been slightly marinated. Not incapacitated. Not incoherent. Just gently fuelled by a lifetime of mild indignation and moderate alcohol content. It would explain the stamina. It would explain the willingness to argue with strangers. And it would explain why a few hours in a police cell is less a deterrent than an interruption.

In youth our generation marched and then drank. In retirement it drinks and then marches. The order has shifted. The instinct remains.

The revolution, it seems, was never entirely sober.

Jim Ratcliffe III - the Art of the Non-Apology

Sorry seems to be the hardest word. Or so Elton John would have it. In modern public life, however, it has acquired an even more elusive cousin. The apology that apologises for absolutely nothing.

You will recognise it immediately. It arrives dressed in solemn language, accompanied by a grave expression and the faint rustle of a communications team hovering just out of sight. "I apologise for any offence caused." There it is. Perfectly formed. Immaculate. And entirely hollow.

Because offence is not an independent weather system. It does not drift in from the Atlantic and settle unexpectedly over a remark. Offence is the entirely predictable consequence of saying something offensive. It has a cause. And that cause is the speaker.

Apologising for offence is therefore a subtle act of linguistic evasion. It shifts the burden from the act to the reaction. The offence becomes the regrettable event. Not the words themselves. The implication is clear enough once you notice it. The problem is not what was said. The problem is that people reacted to it.

It is the rhetorical equivalent of standing on someone's foot and saying, "I apologise for your pain," while continuing to lean on their toes.

A real apology does something very simple. It acknowledges agency. "I said this. It was wrong. I regret saying it." That is an apology. It identifies the act and accepts responsibility for it. There is no ambiguity. No smoke. No mirrors.

The modern non-apology, by contrast, is an exercise in reputational risk management. It exists to neutralise consequences without conceding error. It reassures sponsors, calms shareholders, and creates the impression of contrition while preserving the original intent intact beneath the surface.

It is not remorse. It is maintenance.

And everyone understands this. The speaker understands it. The audience understands it. The journalists understand it. Yet the ritual continues, as though we are all participants in an elaborate theatre production whose plot has long since ceased to convince anyone.

The result is that the apology itself has been quietly hollowed out. It no longer serves its original purpose of acknowledging wrongdoing. It has become instead a form of linguistic insurance. A tool for containing fallout rather than confronting truth.

Which leaves us in the curious position where the rarest thing in public life is no longer honesty. It is responsibility.

Not the offence. The cause.

The Tyranny of the Decimal Place

Politics now runs on decimal points.

A quarterly GDP figure lands at 0.1 per cent and the country reacts as if a referendum result has just been announced. Government ministers beam. Oppositions howl. Commentators lean forward with furrowed brows. All because of a number so small it is often within the range of later revision.

The Office for National Statistics publishes early estimates that are, by its own description, provisional. Data are incomplete. Surveys are still coming in. Seasonal adjustments are applied. Assumptions are made. Then, months later, revisions quietly follow. A heroic 0.1 becomes 0.0. A supposed contraction disappears. The drama evaporates.

Yet the performance repeats every quarter.

The problem is that we confuse weather with climate.

A quarterly figure is weather. A warm December boosts retail. A wet summer dents construction. A strike, a one off defence contract, a shift in car production timing - any of these can nudge output by a tenth of a per cent. That tells you something about the quarter. It tells you almost nothing about the direction of the economy.

Annual growth is closer to climate. It smooths out the storms and heatwaves. It captures whether output is persistently rising, stagnating or shrinking. It begins to reveal structural issues such as weak productivity, falling real incomes or chronic underinvestment. It is slower, less exciting, and far more meaningful.

That said, even climate data can lag. Quarterly numbers can be early warning signals. The mistake is treating them as verdicts, rather than indicators that need confirming over time.

But climate is dull. Weather is dramatic.

So we obsess over the gust rather than the prevailing wind. A single quarterly uptick is hailed as a recovery. A single downtick is framed as collapse. Both interpretations are usually nonsense. If the annual trend remains anaemic, a good quarter is not salvation. If the annual trend is solid, a soft quarter is not doom.

There is also the small matter of scale. A 0.1 per cent quarterly move, especially once rounded, is barely distinguishable from noise. It is often revised. It may reflect timing quirks rather than real underlying change.

This obsession is not accidental. It feeds narrative. “Growth up” or “growth flat” fits neatly into partisan scripts. “Annual productivity remains weak despite short term volatility” does not. The first wins clicks. The second requires patience.

The result is a public conversation about economics conducted at the level of a barometer reading taken in a gusty courtyard.

Quarterly data matter, but they are indicators, not verdicts. If we want to know whether the economy is genuinely improving, we should look to annual growth, real wages over time, business investment trends and productivity per head. That is climate. Everything else is just a passing shower dressed up as a hurricane.

Until we learn the difference, we will continue to panic at drizzle and celebrate brief sunshine, all while ignoring whether the seasons themselves are changing.

Growth, Illness and Political Arithmetic

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 figure rose sharply after 2020. Mental health accounts for a large share. Musculoskeletal illness remains significant. Post-viral conditions are now part of the increase.

This is not monocausal. But it is structural.

ONS estimates have at points suggested around 2 million people reporting Long Covid symptoms, with several hundred thousand describing daily activities as limited “a lot”. Many have not left work entirely. Some reduce hours. Others fluctuate. But labour supply is not binary. A sustained reduction in working capacity across hundreds of thousands of people accumulates economically.

Run the arithmetic conservatively and you are quickly into billions of pounds in foregone earnings and tax receipts each year.

Now compare political treatment.

Dementia research attracts tens of millions annually from NIHR alone. Alzheimer’s and related conditions are unquestionably serious. But they predominantly affect older people, many of whom have already left the labour market. Their economic impact is felt through care costs and family labour displacement rather than direct loss of taxable earnings.

Yet dementia commands sustained funding and strategic framing.

That is not an argument against dementia funding. It is an observation about political salience. Pensioners are numerous, politically engaged and economically powerful as a voting cohort. A condition that affects them carries immediate electoral weight across parties.

Post-infectious illness is different. It affects working-age adults more heavily. Its impact shows up directly in labour supply and productivity. But it lacks a cohesive constituency. Its sufferers are dispersed. The costs appear gradually in GDP figures rather than dramatically in hospital wards.

That contrast matters.

The deeper issue, however, is not simply research funding. It is institutional alignment. Health policy treats chronic illness clinically. Labour policy treats inactivity statistically. Welfare assessments remain largely binary. You are fit for work, or you are not. That structure works for permanent incapacity. It works less well for fluctuating conditions.

Post-infectious illness often behaves variably. Someone may manage limited hours for a period and then relapse. The current Universal Credit and work capability framework is not designed around that pattern. It can create friction between attempted partial recovery and benefit stability.

A system concerned with growth would treat variable capacity as a predictable feature rather than an anomaly. That means aligning NHS rehabilitation plans with DWP case management and allowing graded returns to work without resetting entitlement or triggering repeated reassessment cycles.

This is not a question of generosity. It is a question of design. If partial capacity is administratively discouraged, labour supply contracts unnecessarily.

Dementia shows that political urgency can override biological uncertainty when the constituency is powerful enough.

The question is whether labour supply erosion commands equivalent urgency when its constituency is diffuse.

That is not left or right. It is political arithmetic.

And arithmetic, eventually, intrudes.

Jim Ratcliffe - Continued

Jim Ratcliffe declared that Britain is being “colonised”, and Nigel Farage and others applauded. It is a heavy word, the sort that suggests foreign control and decisions taken elsewhere. It sounds as though sovereignty has slipped away. But when you examine what is actually meant, the claim becomes less geopolitical and far more visual.

Because how, exactly, is this alleged colonisation detected?

Not through ONS migration tables. Not through visa criteria. Not through fiscal data. It usually comes down to what people say they can see when they “look around”.

And that is where the logic begins to wobble.

If “colonisation” is left undefined and treated as visible demographic concentration, then it logically extends to long-established communities such as the Haredi in Stamford Hill, Irish enclaves in west London, Australians in Clapham, French clusters in Kensington, or even me quietly minding my business in Dutch West Old Sodbury.

The instinctive clarification, “Oh, I don’t mean that group,” reveals the instability of the term. It suggests that the trigger is not cultural distinctiveness, not religion, not communal clustering, and not even foreign birth.

Of course, some may insist they do mean every concentrated community, including Stamford Hill and the French in Kensington. But if that is the case, then Britain has been in a permanent state of colonisation for centuries. Huguenots in Spitalfields, Irish in Liverpool, Jews in the East End, Americans in Surrey. The word ceases to describe foreign control and becomes shorthand for visible pluralism.

I was born in the Netherlands. By definition, I am an immigrant. Yet nobody has ever looked at me in the Co-op and muttered about demographic takeover. Why not? Because I look and sound familiar. I blend in.

Now consider a second-generation British citizen of Pakistani heritage, born here, educated here, speaking with the same regional accent as his neighbours. Legally British. Culturally British. The only obvious difference is skin tone.

If the concern were purely about scale or integration, it would apply consistently regardless of colour. When it does not, the remaining variable becomes clear. The conclusion is difficult to avoid. At that point the metaphor stops being about sovereignty or demographic arithmetic and becomes about who looks different. Europe has travelled that road before, and it did not end well.

That is not an accusation. It is a logical fork.

Now add the arithmetic.

Britain is ageing. Pension liabilities rise year after year. Health demand rises with them. Since 2020, economic inactivity due to long-term sickness has increased materially, with hundreds of thousands of working-age people out of the labour market because of chronic illness, including Long Covid and related conditions. That shrinkage has nothing to do with borders and everything to do with health.

Working-age migrants tend to be younger and economically active. Remove large numbers of them and the fiscal pressure does not disappear. It shifts. Fewer workers paying tax means a smaller revenue base. If you still want to fund existing pensions and public services, either tax rates rise, spending falls, or borrowing increases. Those are not ideological choices. They are accounting outcomes.

And here lies the contradiction. The same voices warning of colonisation are often demanding lower taxes at the same time. Fewer workers, lower inflows, reduced tax rates, and unchanged pension promises do not add up. That is not a moral point. It is simple arithmetic.

Some reply that automation will replace labour. Perhaps. But automation replaces payrolls, not necessarily tax receipts. It shifts income from labour to capital. Unless you tax capital more heavily, you risk shrinking PAYE revenues while increasing welfare claims from displaced workers. Robots do not automatically pay National Insurance.

Then there is sovereignty. Colonisation historically meant foreign political control. Britain sets its own immigration rules. Legal migration flows are determined by criteria established by British governments, usually linked to labour demand. If numbers are high, it reflects domestic policy choices about workforce needs. That may be wise or foolish, but it is not foreign domination. It is self-government.

And the economy has adjusted around those choices. The NHS recruits overseas because vacancies exist. Care providers look abroad because the shifts still need covering. Universities depend heavily on international fees. Employers search wherever skills can be found when domestic supply falls short. You can argue that this reliance should be reduced, and that is a legitimate debate. But it is the result of policy interacting with labour demand, not external occupation.

So here is the honest fork in the road.

If the argument is for lower overall migration, say so plainly and accept the trade-offs: tighter labour markets, higher wages in some sectors, slower growth unless productivity improves, and potentially higher taxes if pension promises and service levels are to be honoured.

But if the objection rests primarily on visible demographic change while also insisting on lower taxes and unchanged services, then the numbers simply do not reconcile. You cannot shrink the workforce, shrink the tax take, expand pension obligations and keep everything else the same. Something will give.

If the test of colonisation is what the country looks like rather than who writes its laws or funds its pensions, then this is not about sovereignty.

It is about comfort. And comfort, however understandable, still has to be paid for.