Blair, Starmer, and the Missing Steering Wheel

The media have managed to turn Tony Blair’s essay into a leadership story, because of course they have. Westminster sees a former prime minister criticise a current one and immediately reaches for the ceremonial dagger. It is much easier than reading the argument.

But Blair did not really say “Starmer must go”. He said something more awkward, and rather more important. He said Labour has no coherent plan.

That is not the same thing.

In fact, he specifically warned against removing Starmer before deciding the policy direction. Which, inconveniently, is the bit much of the coverage has treated as small print. The headline version is assassination. The actual argument is strategy.

And this is the point I keep coming back to. People talk as if Starmer can simply wake up one morning, stride into No 10, slap the desk, and announce a new direction for the country. As if the prime minister is the managing director of Britain plc, and the rest of the state is just waiting for a briskly worded memo.

It does not work like that.

He can change the slogan by lunchtime. He can have a new lectern by teatime. He can probably find a backdrop with the word “renewal” on it before anyone has finished microwaving soup in the Cabinet Office. But changing the actual strategic direction of a government is rather different.

That needs policy. It needs money. It needs the Treasury. It needs the Cabinet. It needs parliamentary discipline. It needs the party not to start chewing its own ankle in public. It needs a plausible electoral coalition, which is slightly harder now that Brexit has taken the old map, folded it into a hat, and thrown it into a canal.

And here is the bit people keep missing. Many of the levers Starmer would need have already been removed, weakened, rusted solid, or buried under events no British prime minister could simply wish away. Some of that was political choice. Some of it was public choice. Some of it was the brute arrival of crisis.

The Tories inherited a country still carrying the damage from the financial crash, then chose austerity as a governing doctrine. The electorate then endorsed Brexit, sold as control but delivered as friction across trade, labour supply, investment and the public mood. Covid was not chosen. Ukraine was not chosen. Global energy shocks were not chosen. But the condition of the country when those shocks arrived was not an act of God. It was the product of years of underinvestment, short-term politics and pretending that resilience was an optional extra.

So when people say “Starmer should just change direction”, one has to ask: with what?

The public wants better public services, lower taxes, controlled immigration, higher wages, cheaper housing, secure borders, faster growth, lower bills, less debt, and no visible disruption to anything they personally enjoy. Fair enough. I would also like a Triumph GT6 that does 60 mpg, never rusts, and comes with an E-Type parked inside it.

But politics is not a menu where you tick all the pleasant boxes and send the bill to someone unpopular. If you vote for fourteen years of managed decline, austerity, Brexit friction and performative sovereignty, then watch the world add Covid, war, energy shocks and inflation on top, you cannot be astonished that the next prime minister finds half the controls missing from the dashboard.

This is where Blair is both useful and limited. He is right that Labour lacks a coherent governing story. He is right that changing leader without deciding what Labour is actually for would be court politics dressed up as renewal. But he is also a man who won elections before Brexit smashed the landscape. His map is not useless, but it is not current either.

The centre he dominated no longer exists in quite the same form. Scotland changed. The Midlands and North changed. The graduate vote changed. The Brexit divide cut through old party loyalties like a badly supervised angle grinder. You cannot simply reboot New Labour in a country that has spent the last decade being reformatted by austerity, Brexit, Covid, Ukraine, energy shocks and the faint whiff of Boris Johnson’s decorating arrangements.

So yes, Blair has added something useful. He has pointed at the hole in the middle of Starmerism. But he has not filled it. He has mostly reminded us that there is a hole, that it is quite large, and that in his day holes were managed with more confidence and better tailoring.

The real question is not whether Starmer stays or goes. The real question is what Labour becomes next.

If it moves right, it risks losing its base and younger voters. If it moves left, it risks frightening business, the Treasury and half the press into clutching the furniture. If it moves closer to Europe, the Brexit wound reopens. If it avoids Europe, the economic drag remains. If it promises public service repair without serious tax reform, it is pretending. If it promises growth without explaining where it comes from, it is doing motivational speaking in a slightly better suit.

That is why the leadership story is so shallow. It treats politics as casting. New face, new energy, new beginning. Wonderful. But if the script is still unfinished and the plot makes no sense, changing the lead actor only gets you a different person looking worried in front of the same collapsing scenery.

Blair has not called for Starmer to go. He has done something more irritating. He has said that Labour cannot solve its problem by changing the wrapping paper.

What a Turn-up!

As I was getting dressed this morning, Hayley pointed out that one leg of my shorts had somehow acquired an accidental turn-up.

One side neat and cuffed like a 1950s Italian film star strolling around Portofino with a cigarette and inherited confidence. The other hanging normally like a man about to go to B&Q for weedkiller and wood screws.

That made me think.

What exactly is the point of turn-ups?

The official explanation is always practicality. Mud. Rain. Protecting the trouser hem. That's how they supposedly started. Men in the nineteenth century folding their trousers up to avoid puddles and horse filth. Entirely sensible. Britain used to excel at sensible things. Drainage. Steam engines. Naval logistics. Then, as always happens, society got hold of the idea and converted it into fashion.

A practical emergency fold became a permanent sewn-in feature. A temporary adjustment transformed into a signal of refinement. The same species that invented the adjustable spanner somehow ended up paying extra for trousers deliberately designed to look as though they are perpetually avoiding a puddle outside Swindon station.

And the odd thing is that nobody ever questions it.

You can walk into a tailor and ask for turn-ups with complete seriousness. Measurements are taken. Cloth discussed. Solemn nodding occurs. Somewhere deep in Savile Row there are men speaking quietly about "a one-and-three-quarter-inch cuff" as though discussing naval gunnery tables.

Yet fashion has spent the last century behaving as though the existence of turn-ups is a matter of civilisation itself.

They drifted in and out of favour decade by decade. Wide turn-ups in the 1930s. Wartime austerity in the 1940s, when Britain suddenly decided extra cloth at the bottom of trousers was practically aiding Hitler. Narrower, sharper styles later on. Then flared trousers without turn-ups. Then power suits. Then designer minimalism. Then suddenly fashion rediscovered cuffs again because somebody in Milan spotted an old photograph of Cary Grant looking pleased with himself.

During rationing the government even frowned upon turn-ups because they wasted cloth. Which is marvellous when you think about it. Somewhere in Whitehall, civil servants were effectively conducting strategic calculations about trouser hems while German bombers crossed the Channel. The nation that built the Empire ended up auditing cuffs in the national interest.

And, absurdly enough, it probably mattered. Wartime Britain counted everything. Steel. Coal. Rubber. Fabric. Housewives saved bacon fat for the war effort while men were quietly expected not to swan about using unnecessary wool around their ankles. One imagines a Ministry leaflet urging citizens to defeat fascism by surrendering two inches of unnecessary trouser.

But the logic completely collapses the moment you notice turn-ups on shorts.

Shorts.

There is no puddle-protection issue with shorts. If floodwater has reached the hem of your shorts, your concerns have moved beyond tailoring and into survival strategy. At that point you need a lifeboat, not elegant drape.

Which means turn-ups long ago ceased to be practical and became entirely psychological. They exist because clothing designers fear a plain edge. Left unattended, a simple hem apparently causes existential panic within the fashion industry. Somebody somewhere sees an ordinary trouser leg and thinks, "No. It needs... extra trouser."

The fashion world does this constantly. Buttons that do nothing. Zips leading nowhere. Fake pockets stitched shut. Shoes designed for walking which visibly prevent walking. Men's fashion has its own outbreaks of madness too. Tiny suit jackets that only fit if the wearer survives entirely on almonds and despair. Trousers cropped halfway up the shin so grown men resemble Edwardian newspaper boys waiting outside a pie shop.

And now, apparently, my shorts had joined the movement.

The disturbing thing is that the accidental turn-up genuinely did make them look slightly smarter. One tiny fold of cloth and suddenly the shorts looked less "retired man trying to remember where he left the hose connector" and more "casual Mediterranean leisurewear". This is worrying. It means I may be only one laundry accident away from style.

I briefly considered deliberately turning the other leg up to match. Then I caught sight of myself in the mirror and realised I was only about three styling decisions away from owning a linen fedora and discussing olives.

So I flattened it back down again and went downstairs for tea. Britain was spared.

Categories

Human beings are obsessed with boxes.

We like things labelled, sorted and filed away neatly because ambiguity is exhausting and most of us have enough trouble remembering where we left the car keys.

Reality, unfortunately, keeps producing continuums.

Light was one of the great scientific irritations. Physicists spent centuries demanding to know whether it was a wave or a particle, as though the universe had a legal obligation to tick one box on the form. Waves were waves. Particles were particles. Nice solid Victorian categories. Then quantum mechanics arrived and light effectively replied, "Depends what you're doing with it."

That was not the answer anyone wanted.

Sometimes light behaves like a wave. It interferes with itself and produces rainbows. Then it abruptly starts behaving like a stream of particles smashing electrons out of metal like microscopic shotgun pellets. The categories themselves turned out to be incomplete. Reality had quietly wandered off while the scientists were still labelling the drawers.

Even the rainbow is cheating. We talk about colours as though they are distinct things. Red. Orange. Yellow. Green. But there is no actual line where red stops and orange begins. Nature does not install borders. Humans do. We stare at an uninterrupted spectrum and start naming regions because otherwise we'd spend all afternoon in B&Q debating whether the bathroom should be painted "Sunset Coral" or "Tuscan Apricot".

And once you notice this tendency, you start seeing it everywhere.

Politics now functions almost entirely through categorical collapse. Are you left or right? Patriot or traitor? Woke or fascist? Modern political tribes cannot tolerate spectral positions because nuance performs horribly online. Somebody saying, "Well, this issue contains competing pressures and trade-offs" will be flattened instantly by a man with a Union Jack avatar screaming, "ANSWER THE QUESTION."

Take the endless debate about whether Trump is fascist. The internet demands a box. Yes or no. But reality is more awkward than that. Trump does not fit neatly into classical fascism as a coherent ideology, yet he clearly rummages through parts of the authoritarian toolbox whenever useful. Both sides are convinced their box is the correct one. Reality, meanwhile, sits somewhere awkwardly between the shelves.

And then there is my GT6.

I have umpteen boxes of parts for it. Electrical. Interior. Engine. Suspension. Trim. That at least is the theory. In practice, opening any given box resembles an archaeological dig conducted by somebody with attention deficit disorder.

The electrical box contains relays, certainly, but also two bonnet catches, what may be part of a door mechanism, three unidentified brackets, and a bolt that looks as though it came off agricultural machinery during the Attlee government.

Now, according to me, these things do not belong in the electrical box. They are categorically not electrical. But clearly the person who originally filled the boxes operated under a different philosophical framework. Perhaps the criterion was merely, "small metal things I found near the wiring loom."

And it never ends. Every few months I rearrange the shelves in the garage in pursuit of some glorious final system of categorisation that will supposedly bring order to the universe. Sanders here. Drills there. Paint equipment on that shelf. Electrical testing kit over there.

This lasts about three weeks.

Then some object appears that is not quite a drill, not quite a sander, and not entirely clear in purpose. It may polish. It may grind. It may remove rust. It may, for all I know, prepare cappuccino. Suddenly the entire classification system starts wobbling because reality has once again produced a thing that sits awkwardly between the boxes.

And that is the point. Categories are not laws of nature. They are human convenience systems. Another person creates different boxes entirely. One man's "electrical components" is another man's "bits that were on the same shelf at the time."

The internet has made all this dramatically worse because algorithms reward certainty. Nuance spreads across social media with all the speed and grace of a wardrobe falling downstairs. Certainty, meanwhile, races around the world in under a minute carrying a flamethrower.

So we keep trying to compress continuums into categories because categories are easier to weaponise, easier to administrate and easier to store mentally.

Reality, meanwhile, continues behaving suspiciously like my GT6 garage shelves. Full of awkward objects that refuse to stay obediently in the box somebody assigned them to years ago and which, if thrown away in frustration, will almost certainly turn out to be absolutely essential six months later when fitting the driver's door seal.

Deaths Per Terawatt Hour

I started looking at the fossil fuel versus renewables debate slightly differently recently. Not cost. Not aesthetics. Not whether a wind turbine spoils somebody's view from a converted barn in the Cotswolds.

Deaths per unit of power generated.

And once you look at it that way, the whole cultural argument around energy starts to look faintly absurd.

People have a very strange way of assessing danger. If a wind turbine catches fire somewhere in Denmark, there will be videos all over Facebook within the hour accompanied by comments about "green madness" and civilisation collapsing under the tyranny of woke electricity.

Meanwhile, millions of people quietly inhaling combustion by-products from coal, oil and gas barely registers because it happens slowly, indoors and without visible flames shooting into the sky.

The numbers are not even remotely close. Coal causes roughly 25 deaths per terawatt-hour of electricity generated. Oil about 18. Gas around 3. Wind and solar sit down near 0.04 and 0.02 respectively. Not slightly safer. Vastly safer. Orders of magnitude safer.

And those fossil fuel deaths are not mainly dramatic mining disasters or exploding rigs any more. Most come from the dull, grinding business of air pollution. Tiny particulates. Nitrogen oxides. Sulphur compounds. The invisible stuff that quietly shortens lives while everyone carries on making tea and watching Escape to the Country.

In fact, almost on cue, a gas explosion at a coal mine in China has just killed around 90 miners in the deadliest mining disaster there for more than 16 years.

Which is revealing in itself. Because when people think about fossil fuel deaths, they often imagine something confined to history books. Victorian pits. Soot-covered children. Brass lamps and exhausted men emerging from shafts in black-and-white photographs.

But this is not ancient history. It is now. And even disasters like this are still only the visible tip of the fossil fuel death toll. The overwhelming majority of deaths linked to coal are not dramatic explosions that make Reuters headlines. They are the slow-motion deaths from air pollution that never become headlines at all.

Nobody films a man slowly developing cardiovascular disease from years of combustion pollution and uploads it with dramatic music and a caption saying: "Net Zero fanatics won't tell you THIS."

Which is perhaps why that old line attributed to Stalin keeps resurfacing in human affairs: "A single death is a tragedy. A million deaths are a statistic." A turbine fire is dramatic. A mining collapse is dramatic. An oil rig explosion is dramatic. Millions of people quietly shaving years off their lives through combustion pollution is just background atmosphere. Literally.

People fear spectacular danger far more than statistical danger. A battery fire becomes proof that electric vehicles are rolling bombs. An offshore wind farm is treated as an environmental outrage. Yet entire cities breathing fossil fuel exhaust every day has become so normal that people mentally edit it out altogether.

There is also still a strange romance attached to fossil fuels for some people. Hard hats, sparks, pipelines, oil rigs in storms, blokes welding things at dawn while somebody waves a union flag in the background.

Renewables, by comparison, look faintly middle class. Silent panels. White turbines. People explaining tariffs over coffee at the Hay Festival. But lungs do not care whether their particulates arrived patriotically. A boiler does not become healthier because somebody describes gas as "common sense energy". The cardiovascular system remains tediously unmoved by Facebook memes featuring Winston Churchill.

Which is why the whole debate has started to resemble people defending smoking by pointing at the rare occasions somebody chokes on a nicotine patch.

At some point, familiarity stopped being mistaken for safety in most areas of life. We no longer assume asbestos is harmless because grandfather lagged pipes with it in 1958 while cheerfully eating a cheese sandwich.

Yet with fossil fuels, millions still instinctively treat the old dangerous system as the reassuringly normal one, while viewing the newer, vastly safer technologies with suspicion simply because they look culturally unfamiliar.

It is not really an engineering argument any more.

It is aesthetics wearing a hard hat.

Substack

I’ve recently started putting some of my more political writing on Substack, partly as an experiment and partly because prolonged exposure to Facebook increasingly feels like living beside a leaking chemical plant.

Most people will probably have heard of Substack without having the faintest clue what it actually is, beyond “that place Dominic Cummings writes long angry essays on”. Which, to be fair, is not entirely inaccurate, but still doesn’t really capture it.

My actual blog readership was never really the problem. Most people who voluntarily end up reading a long Blogger post about energy policy, Brexit, fiscal strategy or constitutional drift have already passed a basic literacy and attention-span threshold. You might get a thoughtful comment, perhaps a disagreement, perhaps silence, but at least there is usually some evidence the person reached the end without suffering neurological collapse.

The real experience was always Facebook beyond your own posts.

The algorithm, having detected both my usual political position and my fatal tendency to engage with nonsense, now steadily drives the feed towards the more surreal end of the anti-woke spectrum. Every time I respond to something especially idiotic, Facebook concludes:

“Excellent. He wants more of this.”

So the feed increasingly fills with posts insisting Britain is collapsing because of migrants, electric cars, low traffic neighbourhoods, oat milk, cyclists or somebody saying “Happy Holidays” in Minneapolis three years ago.

Most of it appears under accounts decorated with Union flags, bulldogs, Spitfires or Churchill quotations. Then you click on the profile and discover the account itself is based in Sri Lanka, was created six weeks ago, and posts twenty hours a day about preserving traditional British culture.

At that point the whole thing starts feeling less like political debate and more like a low-budget psychological operation accidentally outsourced to a call centre in Colombo.

Substack, though, is different.

The certainty is still there, naturally. The internet never lacks certainty. But on Substack the certainty usually arrives attached to footnotes, historical references and somebody politely dismantling your argument using statistics from West German industrial output in 1974.

People actually read things there. Entire things. Sometimes they quote your own paragraphs back at you before disagreeing with them. It is deeply unsettling after Facebook, where many users appear to process written language the way cattle react to sudden movement.

The genuinely fascinating thing is that even the cranks on Substack are generally higher calibre cranks. Instead of “YOU’RE WOKE” followed by fourteen Union flags, you get a 3,000-word essay arguing that fractional reserve banking caused modern architecture.

Oddly, I quite like it.

It feels less like being barked at by a man standing beside a mobility scooter draped in St George’s flags outside Wetherspoons, and more like wandering into a slightly overwrought university seminar where everyone has had too much coffee and very strong opinions about monetary policy.

Which, all things considered, is probably healthier for everyone.

Here's my Substack link.

The Motorhome Fraternity

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

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

The first sign is the wave.

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

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

“We understand each other.”

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

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

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

There are tribes within the movement, naturally.

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

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

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

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

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

You can almost hear the thought process.

“Oh dear. Manual step. How brave.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And yet everybody still respects him.

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

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

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

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

Entire temporary communities appear overnight.

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

Then, by morning, it vanishes again.

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

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

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

Mind you, there are limits.

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

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

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

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

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

Socialism Never Works - Apparently

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

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

School meals? Socialism.

Universal healthcare? Socialism.

Public transport? Apparently one step from the gulag.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You can practically set your watch by it.

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

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

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

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

Again.

And suddenly all the anti-socialist rhetoric evaporates overnight.

Banking collapse?
Nationalise risk immediately.

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

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

Energy crisis?
Price caps, subsidies and intervention.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Tax-Free Overtime Trap

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

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

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

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

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

Which roughly translates as:

“You finish when the chaos subsides.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Work longer.”

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

Just stay another couple of hours.

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

England, Layered

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

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

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

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

That was when I noticed the building.

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

And yet it was still alive.

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

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

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

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

But this one somehow held together.

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

That is probably why England remains interesting despite itself.

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

And oddly enough, it works.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Leave No Trace

You can almost pinpoint the exact moment the mood changed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So we wisely retreated.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then the scramblers arrived.

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

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

But it can still be a nuisance.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But it did complete the atmosphere rather neatly.

Then came the final straw.

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

Which rather summed the whole thing up in the end.

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

And then there was the rubbish.

Three bags of it.

That was the point the whole thing crystallised.

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

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

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

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