By-Election Blues - Sorry, Greens

We are told, in suitably apocalyptic tones, that the sky has fallen in because of a by-election in Gorton and Denton. Labour down, Greens up, Reform up, Conservatives and Lib Dems barely visible. Cue the usual chorus about collapse, betrayal and historic turning points, as if a mid-term local contest were the constitutional equivalent of 1945.

Let us calm down. Governments two years in nearly always lose vote share in by-elections, particularly on middling turnout. Voters know the government is not going to fall, so they feel entirely free to register irritation without consequence. It is political horn-honking. It makes a noise, but it does not change the engine.

Starmer inherited high debt, high tax as a share of GDP, weak growth and bond markets that still have the September 2022 episode seared into memory. There is no secret vault of unused billions behind the Treasury sofa. The fiscal envelope is tight because the arithmetic is tight. Anyone who thinks a different Prime Minister can simply wish that away is indulging in magical thinking.

So what, precisely, do people expect a Reform or Green government to change that would materially improve things in short order? Reform can cut migration, but it cannot repeal demographics, labour shortages or debt interest payments. The Greens can borrow and invest more, but they cannot abolish market scrutiny or the need to service that borrowing. The constraints would remain, however loudly one denounced them on the campaign trail.

What we are seeing is not a sudden national conversion to alternative fiscal blueprints. It is impatience. Labour’s majority was built on a broad coalition united by a desire to eject the Conservatives. Broad churches win elections, but they are uncomfortable in office because delivery within constraints is necessarily incremental. When improvement is marginal rather than dramatic, voters conclude that not enough is changing.

The Greens’ surge in that seat reflects local credibility and tactical consolidation on the left. Reform’s rise reflects a similar consolidation of anti-system sentiment on the right once the Conservatives looked non-competitive. First past the post rewards that compression. Once voters think there is a viable challenger, they coalesce around it, not because they have studied every policy line, but because it feels like the sharpest instrument available.

Yes, the macro indicators may be edging in the right direction. Inflation down from its peak, real wages slowly improving, trade friction with the EU being eased at the margins. But voters do not live in aggregates; they live in monthly bills and service experiences. If life still feels tight, “moving in the right direction” sounds like an economist’s consolation prize rather than tangible relief.

From a spreadsheet perspective, swinging to Reform or the Greens does not loosen the fiscal constraints one inch. From a human perspective, it is a way of saying that the pace of change feels too slow and the benefits too abstract. That may be economically unsatisfying, but it is politically predictable.

The real risk for Labour is not that this by-election heralds immediate catastrophe. It is that statistical improvement fails to translate into lived improvement quickly enough. Until voters feel the difference rather than read about it, they will continue to tap the glass and demand something more dramatic, even if the laws of arithmetic remain stubbornly in place.

The Rogue Decimal Point

There is a particular sort of financial genius that involves making money from a credit card while never actually being in debt. It is not glamorous. It does not involve hedge funds. It involves paying for the weekly shop, collecting the points, and then moving the exact same money across from the current account roughly half a nanosecond later. The bank imagines it has lured you into its velvet-lined parlour. In reality you are there with a clipboard, timing them.

Over three or four years this has produced about a thousand pounds in rewards. Free money. Not life changing, but enough to irritate the institution providing it, which is satisfaction enough.

Unfortunately, the weak link in this otherwise elegant system is the human input device, namely me.

The problem is the decimal point. Or rather, the absence of it. A transfer of £65.50 becomes £6,550 with a single inattentive tap. £40.18 becomes £4,018. The app does not blink. It does not cough politely and ask whether I am quite certain I wish to move a month’s council tax in order to clear a sandwich. It simply obeys. Ruthlessly.

There is something uniquely deflating about realising you have just transferred several thousand pounds to your own credit card in a fit of typographical enthusiasm. The satisfaction of gaming the rewards system drains away rather quickly when your current account looks as though you have bought a modest hatchback by mistake.

Reversing the transaction via the app is, naturally, impossible. That would be convenient. Instead one must telephone the bank and explain, in a calm and measured voice, that no, one did not mean to move £4,018 to settle a £40.18 petrol purchase. Yes, it was a decimal issue. Again. No, I am not laundering money. Yes, I appreciate the call is being recorded for training purposes, which I assume means someone in a back office is enjoying this immensely.

The tone of the call handler is always professional, but one senses a flicker of suppressed curiosity. Who is this man who repeatedly overpays his credit card by the price of a Mediterranean cruise? Is he reckless. Is he confused. Or is he attempting some advanced financial manoeuvre that has gone badly wrong.

The truth is far less glamorous. I am trying to extract supermarket vouchers from a multinational bank without paying them a penny in interest, and occasionally I type like a distracted Labrador.

The real irritation is that the system is designed to tolerate incompetence in one direction only. If I had underpaid, interest would arrive with mechanical efficiency. Overpay by thousands and it requires a conversation, an explanation, and what feels suspiciously like gentle amusement on the other end of the line.

Still, I remain ahead on the scoreboard. The rewards continue. The bank continues to hope I will slip into revolving debt. And I continue to wage war with a decimal point that has cost me nothing except dignity and a few recorded phone calls that are probably still circulating in the staff break room.

The Last Stand of the Sock Garter

There is something deeply comforting about binge watching Howards' Way on the U channel.

For weeks we have been marinating in shoulder pads, marina politics and the sort of restrained yacht club adultery that now looks almost courteous. Half the cast, I discover, were married to each other in real life, which explains the chemistry and also the slightly awkward eye contact during some of the more charged scenes. Method acting, Solent edition.

Then last night I found myself distracted not by a plot twist, nor by a collapsing boatyard empire, but by hosiery.

There sat Sir John Stevens, banker, establishment pillar, professional old buffer, at a polo match. The camera lingered. Not on scandal. Not on intrigue. On socks. Perfect socks. Regimentally upright. No slouch. No sag. No creeping descent towards the ankle like a wounded flag at half mast.

Which can only mean one thing.

Gentlemen’s sock garters.

For those under sixty, these were elastic contraptions worn below the knee to prevent one’s hosiery sliding south during the day. They were part of the invisible architecture of male dignity. My father wore them. Quietly. Efficiently. No announcement. Just socks that stayed where they were told.

Today, of course, we live in an age of moral and textile collapse. Socks puddle around trainers. Trousers hover uncertainly. Elastic waistbands have declared independence. The nation cannot even keep its knitwear vertical.

And yet there, on screen, in that gently absurd 1980s yachting universe, a banker sits at polo with socks so taut you could set your watch by them. It was like spotting a semaphore signal from a lost civilisation.

You do not buy sock garters in Tesco. You find them in traditional gentlemen’s outfitters, the sort that smell faintly of mothballs and Empire, where a man called Clive measures your inside leg with an expression suggesting he once fitted breeches for a colonel.

What I love is that no one ever discussed them. There was no lifestyle segment. No influencer unboxing his elastic retainers. They simply did their job. Discreetly. Like the best civil servants. Or a well tuned carburettor.

Perhaps that is why they appeal now. In a world of constant performative outrage and collapsing standards, there is something rather reassuring about hosiery discipline. Socks that know their place. Elastic that respects hierarchy.

I did briefly consider sourcing a pair, purely for anthropological reasons. Then I remembered I now spend most of my time in what I generously describe as workshop attire, which would render sock garters an exercise in optimism.

Still, I salute you, Sir John Stevens. Banker. Buffer. Guardian of vertical knitwear. While empires fall and plotlines wobble, your socks remain steadfast.

And really, if that is not a metaphor for lost British resolve, I do not know what is.

The Fountain of Filth

We were watching Channel 4 last night, Hay and I, in that slightly dutiful way you watch programmes that you suspect will irritate you but feel you ought to absorb, like taking a bitter pill for civic hygiene. It was Dirty Business, which turned out to be less drama and more documentary wrapped in drama clothing, which is a modern genre in its own right. Everyone glowered meaningfully, water companies twirled invisible moustaches, and rivers were presented as victims of something between neglect and organised crime.

None of it was especially surprising. Anyone who has walked along a British river recently and noticed the slightly apologetic smell will have grasped that something is amiss. You do not need a BAFTA winning script to explain that infrastructure designed when Queen Victoria was still experimenting with widowhood might struggle to cope with modern Britain and its enthusiasm for flushing everything that will fit down a pipe.

This morning, over coffee, Hay said, quite casually, "You should Google the Fountain of Filth." This is the sort of sentence that lands without warning in retirement. Thirty years ago it would have involved a regulatory investigation. Now it involves Channel 4 and a sculpture of citizens vomiting symbolic sewage into a basin while a bronze capitalist showers himself in money. Progress, of a sort.

So I did Google it.

The installation itself is exactly what you would expect. Large. Earnest. Vomity. The artistic equivalent of holding someone’s head under the water and saying "look what you’ve done." Perfectly legitimate as political theatre. London is full of statues celebrating far worse things.

What was more interesting was what wasn’t there.

The Guardian had covered it. The Independent had covered it. Both entirely predictably, like Labrador retrievers reliably fetching whatever stick of environmental outrage is thrown into the pond.

But the BBC? Nothing obvious. No prominent reporting. No sober voice explaining that yes, there is a sculpture, yes, it is meant to make you uncomfortable, and yes, this relates to a long running structural problem with privatised monopolies and regulatory capture. The BBC these days behaves like a man who has accidentally walked into a domestic argument and is trying to leave without anyone noticing. It senses danger in acknowledging anything that might be interpreted as political, so it quietly backs out of the room and pretends it was never there. It is not impartiality so much as timidity dressed up as virtue.

And then there is the right wing press. The Telegraph. The Mail. The Express. The Sun. Not a peep. Not a splash. Not even a discreet dribble.

This, too, is entirely logical. Because the Fountain of Filth is not just a sculpture. It is a visual summary of a deeply inconvenient argument. It suggests that in this instance privatisation has prioritised getting money out over putting investment in. That regulated monopolies, protected from competition and gifted predictable returns, can settle into a cosy equilibrium where dividends flow more reliably than infrastructure upgrades.

That is awkward territory if your paper’s politics requires privatisation to be inherently virtuous and public ownership to be inherently slapstick. Much easier to say nothing. Silence, after all, cannot be fact checked.

None of this means the programme itself was neutral. It was plainly campaigning television. It simplified, dramatised, and moralised. But that is what art and television do. They provoke. They exaggerate. They force attention.

What matters is not whether you agree with the sculpture. It is whether you acknowledge its existence. Because when bronze statues start vomiting sewage on the South Bank and half the national press looks the other way, it tells you less about the sculpture and more about the plumbing of our national conversation.

Meanwhile, I finished my coffee, glanced out at the garden, and made a mental note to check the pond filter. At least there, when the water turns murky, you know exactly whose fault it is.

The Double Slit Theory of DIY

It turns out the double slit experiment is not confined to laboratories. It is conducted daily in garages and sheds across the country, powered by optimism and a yellow button marked Buy Now.

Each object awaiting repair behaves like a single electron approaching two narrow openings in reality. On one side of the barrier lies Success. On the other, Mild Humiliation. Until the parcel is opened, both paths remain available. The hinge is simultaneously fixed and faintly uncooperative. The carburettor is rebuilt in principle and still harbouring doubts in practice. Competence spreads generously through every possible future.

In the laboratory, if you do not measure which slit the electron passes through, the probability waveform spreads through both and produces an elegant interference pattern. In the garage, before the padded envelope is opened, confidence does exactly the same. The car purrs in anticipation. The tap seals itself in theory. The shelf aligns in spirit. All outcomes interfere constructively.

Then measurement occurs.

The envelope is opened. The bolt is offered up. At that instant the probability waveform, which moments earlier was smeared gloriously across the entire universe of possible competence, collapses into one uncompromising certainty. There is no longer a luminous pattern of possibility. There is one dot on the screen labelled Wrong Thread.

There is always, of course, a tiny but stubborn probability that the bolt will fit despite clear visual evidence to the contrary. This probability decreases in inverse proportion to the torque applied. It is the quantum tunnelling of optimism through a classically forbidden barrier. Many a fitting has been rounded off in pursuit of this vanishing amplitude.

Worse still, repairs do not occur in isolation. The hinge does not merely fail. It enters quantum entanglement with the gatepost, the alignment of the latch, and the spirit level abandoned on the bench. Adjusting one parameter mysteriously alters three others in distant corners of the garage. Fixing the shelf introduces a vibration in the cupboard. Tightening the tap reveals a philosophical issue with the washer. Domestic quantum entanglement is a powerful force.

The lawnmower, meanwhile, is Schrodinger’s Cat, but in a shed. It is both operational and irredeemably knackered. Until the ignition key is turned, its probability waveform remains delicately balanced between gaily cutting the lawn and emitting a noise suggestive of mechanical despair. The act of turning the key is the measurement. The waveform collapses. One either proceeds briskly across the grass in quiet triumph, or one returns indoors and presses Buy Now once more.

One is not immediately aware that this new component is coming from Shenzhen. That detail reveals itself later, discreetly, like a hidden parameter in the equations. It adds not days but weeks to the delivery time. Time itself stretches. The lawn grows. Entropy advances.

On rare and almost miraculous occasions, however, the Shenzhen term is spotted before pressing Buy Now. This is a pre-measurement glimpse of the hidden variable. For a brief moment the probability waveform branches. In one branch, a tenner secures the part and patience is exercised. In another, a brisk fifty quid is transferred to a UK supplier and delivery occurs within forty-eight hours. One studies the amplitudes, weighs the cost, deliberately collapses the waveform toward fiscal pragmatism, and bugger the Chinese Embassy spying on me. Ten pounds now plus weeks of grass growth, or fifty pounds now and immediate classical certainty. It is quantum economics played out on a phone screen.

Layered over this delicate quantum drama are two universal constants.

The first is RETURNS NOT ACCEPTED. It is never visible before pressing Buy Now. It does not glow. It does not warn. It exists quietly in the fine print, emerging only after collapse has already occurred. A hidden term in the domestic equations of motion. It does not prevent superposition. It prevents reversal.

The second is the Shenzhen address.

This is not caused by RETURNS NOT ACCEPTED. It is a separate force entirely. Even when returns are theoretically permitted, the return address introduces a gravitational field of its own. One calculates international postage. One evaluates customs forms. One considers whether a 4.12 washer merits a diplomatic exchange between continents. The probability amplitude for actually sending it back collapses rapidly toward zero.

Thus the garage becomes a modest particle accelerator of suspended intentions. Projects enter superposition daily. The gate is both aligned and interpretive. The tap exists in a cloud of plausible futures. In some distant branch of the multiverse, the correct part was ordered first time. In this branch, a small drawer now contains four nearly identical but useless variations.

Like the electron, no one truly knows which path they have taken until the screwdriver meets resistance.

Until then, they are a broad and forgiving probability waveform of competence, smeared magnificently across every conceivable outcome.

Afterwards, they are a single dot on the screen.

Usually labelled “that will do”.

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.