Hearing Aid Update

Right. There is an audiology development.

It turns out I am no longer merely amplified. I am now tethered.

Because these NHS marvels are Bluetooth enabled, they do not simply pipe the world into my head. They maintain a relationship with my phone. A watchful, slightly clingy relationship.

If I wander too far from it, say by stepping out of the house having left it on the kitchen table like a reckless Victorian, my ears inform me. A discreet alert arrives directly in my skull. Not a ring. Not a buzz. A quiet, internal notification that I have strayed beyond acceptable range.

It is less “man with hearing aids” and more “officer leaving perimeter”.

The first time it happened I stopped in the driveway and looked around, mildly alarmed. I half expected a small drone to rise from behind the hedge and request my intentions. Instead it was simply my ears reminding me that my phone and I had become a bonded pair.

On the other hand, if I lose the phone somewhere in the house, which is not infrequent, the system reverses the process. As I wander from room to room, the connection re-establishes itself and I am subtly alerted. Warm. You’re close. Colder. No signal. Hot. There it is, under a newspaper I can now hear rustling.

I have effectively become a human tracking device for my own possessions.

There is something faintly dystopian about receiving proximity alerts inside one’s own head. I can hear birdsong, the heating pump, the cat’s disapproval, and now the digital reassurance that my communications hub is within range. If I’d been told in 1974 that I would one day be wirelessly linked to a small glass rectangle and warned if I strayed too far from it, I would have assumed either espionage or lunacy.

Instead, it is Tuesday.

The great irony is that these are NHS hearing aids. Free. Issued without ceremony. Yet they quietly outperform the thousand pound retail alternatives that were presented to me with the solemnity of a luxury upgrade. Mine not only restore my treble, they supervise my wandering.

I now receive alerts about distance from my own telephone directly inside my head.

This feels like a small but definite step towards being monitored by my ears.

On the bright side, I am far less likely to leave the house without my phone. On the less bright side, if the phone battery dies, I imagine I shall feel briefly abandoned.

I used to worry about losing my hearing.

Now my hearing worries about losing my phone.

Career Politicians & Direct Participation

I heard a debate on R4 about career politicians and direct participation, and I'm currently undecided. Which is annoying, because I prefer my opinions to arrive fully formed, like a well made cabinet door, rather than wobbling around in public like a newborn foal.

The anti-career-politician side made a decent point. Politics can become a sealed ecosystem where people spend so long climbing the internal ladder they forget the rest of us don’t live inside Westminster. They start talking in acronyms, moving from think tank to SPAD to ministerial office, and before you know it they’re announcing “bold reforms” that look suspiciously like a PowerPoint slide with a human haircut.

But the pro-career-politician side also has a point, and it’s the bit everyone skips because it’s less satisfying than a rant. Parliament is a trade. Most MPs arrive knowing how to campaign, how to do media, and how to survive the constant noise. They do not arrive knowing how the state actually functions. They don’t understand the rhythms of legislation, the dead weight of procedure, the silent power of the Treasury, the legal limits, the international constraints, or the fact that every “simple solution” has three unintended consequences and a bill attached.

That knowledge doesn’t drop into your lap on day one. It comes from the grind.

And the grind is not glamorous. It’s endless reading, briefings, Select Committees, constituency casework, and learning the hard way that government is mostly about saying “no” to things you’d love to say “yes” to. It’s dealing with civil servants who know more than you do, stakeholders who want something for nothing, and a media environment that treats complexity as a personal failing. It’s learning to spot the difference between a policy that sounds good and a policy that survives contact with law, budgets, and physics.

This is also where the PPE thing matters. A few MPs have done PPE, which at least suggests they’ve had formal exposure to politics, economics, and the basic idea of trade-offs. Plenty of new entrants haven’t even got that. They’re not stupid, but they’re arriving with enthusiasm and opinions, then being handed a department, a red box, and a problem that hasn’t been solved since 1978.

Which brings me to the comparison nobody likes because it’s too obvious. You wouldn’t trust a brain surgeon who didn’t have experience. And you’d trust him even less if he didn’t have a medical degree. Yet in politics we do this odd thing where we sneer at experience, sneer at training, and then act amazed when the results look like an amateur dramatics society trying to run an airport.

And if you want a case study in why the grind matters, look at Boris Johnson.

Johnson didn’t just have a talent for chaos. He had a talent for promoting people too early, for the wrong reasons. Loyalty and message discipline were treated as qualifications. Competence and experience were optional extras, like heated seats. People were moved up the ladder fast because they were useful to him, not because they were ready to run anything.

That has consequences. Departments aren’t debating societies. If you put someone in charge who doesn’t understand the brief, doesn’t know how to interrogate advice, and is terrified of contradicting the leader, you don’t get “fresh thinking”. You get paralysis, blunders, and policy made by headline.

It also poisons the culture. If everyone can see that the route to promotion is flattery rather than ability, you select for the wrong personality types. You get courtiers, not administrators. You get people who never say “this won’t work” because they’re trying to stay in favour. And you lose the one thing government needs most: internal honesty before the public humiliation arrives.

Somebody on the direct participation side said the answer is “expertise on tap, ordinary citizens on top”. It sounds marvellous. Like ordering a new kitchen. You pick the colour, and a team of professionals quietly makes it all happen behind the scenes.

The problem is that “expertise on tap” only works if the person doing the tapping knows what questions to ask, can judge competing advice, and can accept trade-offs. Otherwise expertise becomes a buffet. You pick the expert who tells you what you wanted to hear, and you call the others “the establishment”.

And there’s another awkward truth: ordinary citizens on top doesn’t get rid of elites. It just changes which elites win. You end up with organised activists, lobbyists, donors, and media operators doing the steering, while the citizens provide the decorative seal of approval. It’s democracy as a showroom model.

On the other hand, I do get the anger. It’s hard to watch people regulate an industry one minute and then pop up the next in a well-paid “strategic advisory” role in the same sector. Even if nothing illegal happened, it looks like the job was an extended audition. And if you were on a fairly normal salary before politics, the temptation is obvious. Parliament pays decently, but it doesn’t pay “private sector redemption arc” money. After years of being shouted at in the street and having your life turned into a headline, a cushy job offer starts to look like compensation.

So yes, I’m undecided. Not because I can’t see the flaws in career politicians, but because I’m not convinced direct participation fixes them. It might just swap one set of problems for another, with fewer safeguards and more shouting.

At the moment I’m leaning towards a dull conclusion, which is usually a sign it’s true: we need representative democracy, but with tighter rules on lobbying, longer cooling-off periods, proper enforcement, and a bit more direct citizen involvement where it actually works, like citizens’ assemblies and local decisions with real information and time.

In other words, keep the engine, improve the brakes, and stop pretending the steering wheel can be handed to the loudest bloke in the comments.

Amplified and Slightly Outraged

Right. I have done it. I am now officially amplified.

For years I maintained that everyone else was mumbling. It wasn’t my hearing. It was standards. The nation had simply given up on consonants. Newsreaders whispered. My wife, apparently, had been issuing domestic instructions at a frequency only detectable by bats.

Then the audiologist produced a graph that looked like the north face of the Eiger and gently explained that I was missing rather more than I’d imagined. High frequencies, mostly. The crisp bits. The bits that make speech intelligible rather than atmospheric. Also, as it turns out, the Mem-Sahib bits of instruction. Those quiet, apparently casual remarks from the kitchen which are in fact operational directives.

A few beeps later and the world snapped back into focus.

The first shock was paper. Paper is ferocious. An envelope adjusted by half an inch now sounds like I am lighting a small fire in the study. Receipts crackle. Everything has edges.

And yes, I can hear a pin drop. Not poetically. Properly. Pins are being dropped all over Britain and I am now party to it. If MI6 are short of equipment, I am available to eavesdrop on Moscow from the Cotswolds. Provided the Russians keep the crockery down.

The aids themselves are NHS issue. Completely free. Not the softly lit, thousand pound numbers that Specsavers were tactfully recommending with the air of someone offering walnut trim and a service package. No. These are state supplied and rather clever.

They connect to my phone. Calls arrive directly in my head without troubling the surrounding air. There is an App. I can stand in a queue and adjust the volume of existence. Tone down background noise. Favour the person in front of me over the enthusiastic cutlery behind. I had expected beige compliance. Instead I have wireless firmware behind my ears.

They also come with what can only be described as a gentleman’s travelling kit. A neat little Danalogic pouch. Inside it, a tiny brush, spare batteries, and several long, slender plastic filaments for clearing wax from the tubes. These filaments are impressively engineered. Elegant. Slightly intimidating. They are, however, supplied in a zip bag that is approximately one third too short.

Which means that once you have extracted one of these delicate rods, using it with the air of a man performing microsurgery on his own ear canal, you are then required to return it to a bag that patently does not wish to accommodate it. The bag fits the outer case perfectly, you see. The outer case fits neatly in a pocket. The filaments, meanwhile, are obliged to arc like a longbow while you attempt to coax the zip closed with what would ideally be a third hand.

Why not provide a bag that actually fits the contents? Or, more radically, a slightly larger case? We can stream audio directly into my auditory cortex, but we cannot design a zip bag of sufficient length to accept its own cleaning implements. It is the sort of minor British engineering compromise that built an empire and then slightly annoyed it.

I'm not the only user who has noticed this frustration with the zip bag - by sister-in-law has the same issue.

There is also the small matter of first light. Inserting them in the morning is not the serene, dignified ritual I had imagined. It is a negotiation. Overnight ear wax, industrious and unashamed, has usually staged a minor coup. The aids must be persuaded, cleaned, adjusted, inserted, removed, wiped again, and reinserted. This can take up to fifteen minutes. I have brewed tea in less time.

Once seated properly, however, they behave impeccably for the rest of the day. Crisp, obedient, technologically impressive. Until, of course, I remove them for some reason. A shower. A quick adjustment. A moment of optimism. Replacing them can trigger another fifteen minute faff while wax and mechanics renegotiate terms. It is less plug and play, more dockyard refit.

Stepping outside was instructive. Leaves rustle with intent. Gravel announces itself. My car indicators have been ticking patiently for years and I had been ignoring them with serene confidence.

Indoors, the house has developed opinions. The fridge hums. The boiler clears its throat. The cat, previously a silent assassin, now approaches with a faint padding that feels mildly judgemental. I can hear the heating pump thinking.

Conversation has changed too. I no longer possess the useful shield of selective deafness. If someone mutters something in the next room, I am suddenly fully briefed. There are fewer tactical “sorry, what was that?” moments. I had not realised how strategically valuable those were.

Restaurants are carnage. Crockery collides. Someone laughs like a reversing lorry. The aids do their best, but I am now aware of the entire acoustic ecosystem.

Checking my pockets for keys has become hazardous. A gentle pat produces something close to a detonation. Coins clash. Receipts flare up. I still don’t know whether the keys are there.

And yet, there is something quietly marvellous about it. Birdsong is no longer a vague countryside suggestion. It is specific. Insistent.

I still maintain that some people mumble.

Unfortunately, I can now hear them doing it.

Votes at 16? Fix the Foundations First

I was originally in favour of lowering the voting age to 16. On principle, it made sense. If you can work, pay tax and are subject to the law, then representation should follow. No taxation without representation is not decorative rhetoric. It sits at the core of parliamentary democracy.

I have changed my mind, not because I doubt the capacity of 16 year olds, and not because I want to narrow the franchise, but because I think we are expanding rights in a system already showing strain without strengthening the preparation that should underpin those rights.

We have drifted into the habit of treating arithmetic as optional. We want generous public services, low taxes and fiscal credibility, and we vote as if those aims can coexist without tension. Then the bond markets clear their throat, mortgage rates rise and we call it an unforeseen shock.

The trade-off is straightforward. Tax cuts today mean spending cuts or borrowing. Borrowing means interest. Interest means future tax or future restraint. There is no fourth door marked miracle, however attractively it is painted at election time.

The NHS makes the point concrete. Even those who use private healthcare ultimately rely on the NHS backbone. Private consultants are trained in it. Emergency cover is run by it. Complex intensive care capacity is built and maintained by it. You can pay for comfort and speed, but when something serious happens the system underneath is public. If that backbone weakens too far, everyone feels it.

Yes, democratic systems contain corrective mechanisms. Markets react. Courts intervene. Elections punish excess. But those corrections still allow for damage before the lesson lands. Mortgage shocks are a brutal tutor. Pension instability is not a classroom exercise. Relying on crisis as the primary teacher is an expensive way to run a country.

Foreknowledge is cheaper.

Education will not eliminate conviction or ideological preference. Some voters will understand the trade-offs perfectly well and still prefer lower taxes and a smaller state. That is legitimate. But understanding provides a counterbalance. It shortens the gap between promise and consequence. It makes it easier to spot a design flaw in a policy before the engine seizes.

At present we send young people into adulthood able to analyse poetry and solve equations, yet many cannot explain how a Budget works, what the Office for Budget Responsibility does, how borrowing compounds or why gilt yields matter. Constitutional and fiscal mechanics are treated as peripheral knowledge, and public debate drifts accordingly.

Teaching political and fiscal literacy in the final two years of secondary school would not settle political arguments. It would not produce uniform outcomes. It would simply raise the floor. After two cohorts had passed through, a generation would enter the electorate with a working understanding of trade-offs and institutional limits. Even if that improvement is modest, modest improvements in resilience matter.

A serious civic curriculum would have to be tightly defined and politically neutral, focused on process and arithmetic rather than ideology. It would test spending fantasies as hard as tax fantasies. It would expose the mechanics behind expansive promises as well as revenue cuts. That is not indoctrination. It is maintenance of the operating system.

For that reason, if we are going to lower the voting age to 16, we should strengthen that operating system first. Not because catastrophe will follow otherwise, and not because 16 year olds are uniquely reckless, but because prudence suggests upgrading the foundations before widening the structure. Two years of reform before expansion is not obstruction. It is sequencing.

Democracy is a system of trade-offs, not wishes. We can choose lower taxes and leaner services. We can choose higher taxes and thicker institutional protection. What we cannot choose is to deny the connection between the two and hope that constraint will be gentle when it arrives.

It never is.

Lex Shrapnel: The Law, the Blast Radius, and the Opening Credits

We were sitting there watching the 2nd series of Red Eye, minding our own business, following the plot, when the credits roll up a name that detonates whatever narrative tension the writers have so carefully assembled.

Lex Shrapnel.

At that point the drama is over. Not because it is bad, but because my brain has left the aircraft and is circling the concept of nominative determinism at 35,000 feet. You cannot casually introduce a man called Lex Shrapnel and expect the audience to focus on anything else. It is not a name, it is a plot device.

“Lex” implies law, authority, Rome, tablets of stone, the cool weight of precedent. “Shrapnel” implies sudden noise, chaos, fragments embedded in places they should never have reached. Together they suggest a legal system administered by high explosive. Habeas corpus, but with a blast radius.

You half expect his characters not to enter scenes but breach them. Doors fly open. Policies collapse. Minor characters dive for cover. Even if he is playing someone entirely benign, say an earnest civil servant or a quietly competent officer, the name alone suggests that something nearby is about to go catastrophically wrong. But he was only a bit player.

What makes it even better is that it is entirely real. Not a stage name cooked up by an agent with a sense of irony. Not a post-drama-school rebrand. Just a straight-faced inheritance, handed down without mercy. Some people are born sounding like accountants. Others like dentists. Lex Shrapnel sounds like a clause in the Geneva Conventions.

And then there is the historical twist. The surname Shrapnel did not begin life as an explosive. It already existed. The family was established in Wiltshire centuries before anyone thought to pack iron balls into artillery shells. When Henry Shrapnel lent his name to a new and particularly efficient way of turning cannon fire into airborne chaos, the language simply seized the opportunity.

That is why it works so disturbingly well. The surname effectively split in two. One branch remained a perfectly respectable family name. The other escaped into the language as flying metal. Most surnames do not get that privilege.

So Lex Shrapnel is not named after an explosive device. He is named after a family whose name was later turned into one. Which is arguably worse. It means the menace was there all along, patiently waiting for the Industrial Revolution to catch up.

And yet he wears it with admirable restraint. No wink. No nudge. No attempt to defuse it. Just calm professionalism, as if everyone else is peculiar for noticing. Which, frankly, is the most British response possible.

So yes, Red Eye is very watchable. Taut, well paced, solid television. But for me it will always be remembered as the moment when the credits reminded us that sometimes the most explosive thing in a drama is not the plot, but the name quietly sitting underneath it.

Trumper, ICE and the Business of Rounding Up

I was watching Shaun the Sheep the other evening. Harmless comfort viewing. Sheep wandering about, the farmer blissfully incompetent, nothing heavier than a misplaced sandwich.

Then Trumper the dog catcher arrives. That is his actual name. Trumper. You could not make it up if you tried.

He pulls up in his van and gets on with the business of collecting anything that does not belong where he thinks it should. No grand speech, no moral struggle, just steady confidence and a system that runs without hesitation. The sheep are in the wrong place according to the rulebook. That is sufficient.

And yes, the name does rather sit there on its own.

What struck me was not villainy but conviction. Trumper believes in the net. He believes in the cage. He believes in process. Once the sheep are categorised as strays, the rest follows automatically. Their individual woolly lives are irrelevant. They become units to be gathered.

It is difficult not to see shades of ICE in that mindset. Not because claymation equals federal policy, but because of the same mechanical certainty. Label someone illegal and the conversation contracts. Context fades. Family, work, contribution, history. The apparatus does what it was designed to do and measures success by visible activity.

Recent events in Minneapolis have amplified that impression. A heavy federal presence, conspicuous enforcement, statements delivered with unwavering assurance. The display of control becomes the message. Whether the display reassures anyone seems secondary.

No serious person disputes that immigration law exists or that it has to be enforced. The issue is temperament. There is a difference between restraint and zeal. When enforcement begins to look proud of its own visibility, something shifts. Jackets emblazoned with large letters. Convoys that feel as though they are part of a production. Language that leaves little room for doubt or reflection.

In the film, Trumper is faintly absurd because he never pauses to consider whether his solution fits the situation. He has cages, so he uses cages. Children laugh because the overreach is obvious. The sheep are not masterminds. They are simply in the way.

With ICE, the laughter drains away. When the system is built around removal, removal becomes the measure of competence. The bigger the operation, the firmer it appears. Meanwhile, communities are left tense and divided, wondering whether this display of authority has solved anything at all.

Sitting in Old Sodbury with a cup of tea, it was hard to ignore the irony. A children’s character named Trumper, dedicated to rounding up anything out of place, feels less like innocent satire and more like uncomfortable commentary. When the van and the cage become symbols of virtue in themselves, judgement has quietly stepped aside.

And that, unlike plasticine sheep, does not spring harmlessly back into shape when the credits roll.

Principle or Partisanship?

It is curious how quickly the principle of responsibility becomes selective.

When Jacob Rees-Mogg advised the late Queen to prorogue Parliament, and the Supreme Court later ruled it unlawful, nobody serious suggested Her late Majesty should have abdicated. The monarch acts on ministerial advice. Responsibility lay with those who gave it. The liar, if liar there was, owned the lie.

Fast forward. Mandelson gives assurances. Vetting is sought. On current public information there were no ignored warnings, no suppressed intelligence, no red flags knowingly overridden. Later, those assurances unravel. Suddenly we are told the Prime Minister must fall because he trusted them.

So which principle are we applying?

Either we accept that responsibility for deception lies with the person who deceives, or we invent a doctrine in which anyone who relies in good faith on formal vetting must resign the moment that trust proves misplaced.

Political accountability still sits at the top. Of course it does. But accountability is not the same as culpability. The liar owns the lie. The appointer owns the decision made on the basis of it.

If further evidence were to show that Starmer ignored clear warnings or knowingly brushed aside serious concerns, then yes, he should go. That would cross the line from misjudgement into negligence.

But deciding that he must resign now, absent such evidence, is not constitutional principle. It is tribal politics dressed up as moral outrage.

Standards either apply consistently, or they are just tribal weapons swung at whoever happens to be in office.

Winter Olympics

Every four years the Winter Olympics arrives like an unexpected house guest from Scandinavia.

It stands politely at the door, wrapped in Lycra and frost, while Britain peers out from behind the curtain and says, "Do we know you?"

The Summer Games make sense. We understand running. We occasionally do it ourselves, usually for a bus, an overdue train, or an appointment we swore was at half past. We grasp swimming. Some of us even throw things, albeit normally at the recycling bin. There is a comforting familiarity about it all.

But the Winter Olympics? That is a fortnight devoted to sliding about in specialist pyjamas on terrain we normally avoid in a Range Rover. And I must confess, I do not watch it. Not a minute. Not even accidentally while searching for the news.

I can just about process skiing in theory. Man on plank goes downhill quickly. Fine. Gravity is relatable. But luge? Skeleton? Two grown adults voluntarily launching themselves head first down an ice chute at motorway speeds on what appears to be a reinforced baking tray? I struggle to see this as sport rather than an elaborate Scandinavian insurance claim.

And then there is curling. Ah yes, competitive housework. One individual gently nudges a granite kettle across the ice while two colleagues sweep furiously in front of it as if trying to erase the evidence. I am assured this is a contest of subtle angles and tactical genius. To me it looks like a domestic mishap unfolding in slow motion.

Entire nations take this very seriously. In Norway, cross country skiing commands audiences that would make a Premier League club weep. Small children there can ski before they can spell. In Britain we close the schools at the sight of a single flake and issue stern warnings about grit supplies. Our natural winter sport is peering suspiciously at the boiler.

Interest here, when it flickers, depends on whether we have a medal hope. When Lizzy Yarnold wins gold, we are briefly a nation of aerodynamicists. When Eddie the Eagle hurled himself nobly off a ramp, we adopted him as a patron saint of pluck. But once the novelty fades, so do we.

The truth is that the Winter Olympics feels like a magnificent spectacle conducted in a climate entirely alien to the damp pragmatism of the British Isles. It is impressive, certainly. Brave, undoubtedly. But compelling to those of us whose winter athleticism extends to walking briskly to the car? Not especially.

So when the snowbound fortnight rolls around, I nod respectfully at the highlights on the news, make a cup of tea, and return to pursuits that do not involve intentional contact with ice. I leave the hurtling, sweeping and airborne theatrics to the Norwegians. They seem very keen.

It's a national disgrace that there's no 'Wrong Snow on the Railway Lines' competition.

Speed vs Accuracy

I’ve developed a small domestic ritual when it comes to UK news. If something is breaking, I go to Sky News. If I want to know whether it’s actually true, I wait for BBC.

That is not a moral judgement. It is a workflow.

Sky is like the bloke who shouts “Fire!” the moment he smells smoke. The BBC is the chap who checks whether it’s the toaster before ringing the brigade. One is fast, the other cautious. Both have a role. The mistake is thinking speed and accuracy are the same thing.

We live in an age where “breaking” has become theatre. Red banners. Urgent tones. Instant outrage. Within minutes, half the country has decided who is villain and who is victim. The difficulty is that in the first hour of any big story, facts are fluid. Context is missing. Motives are guessed at.

Even something like the current lawsuit from Donald Trump against the BBC over a Panorama edit is a neat illustration. It arrives with a ten billion dollar headline and predictable outrage. The slower reality is procedural: jurisdictional arguments, motions to dismiss, and the possibility that it may be thrown out for a number of reasons. Not least because claiming reputational and commercial harm opens the door to financial disclosure, something Mr Trump has historically treated as a guarded state secret. The bang is immediate. The substance is incremental.

Sky will tell you what is being reported. The BBC will tell you what it is prepared to stand behind.

And here is the uncomfortable truth. Caution now looks like bias to people who have already chosen their conclusion. If the BBC does not instantly frame a story in the way someone prefers, it must, in their eyes, be suppressing something. If it waits for confirmation, it must be dragging its feet.

Oh, and What Do You Do?

There is one question that arrives early in almost every conversation, usually just after names and before anyone risks saying something genuine.

“Oh, and what do you do?”

It sounds friendly. It’s anything but. It’s not curiosity, it’s calibration. A quick scan to work out where you sit, how carefully to listen, and whether this conversation is worth investing in beyond polite nodding.

We pretend it’s small talk. It’s actually shorthand. A way of skipping the messy business of finding out who someone is by jumping straight to what they’re for.

If you answer with a job title, the exchange resolves instantly. The mental filing cabinet slides open. Consultant. Engineer. Director of something with a budget. You are indexed, weighed, and assigned a default level of seriousness. You could say something quite stupid after that and still be indulged, because the label is doing the heavy lifting.

If you say “I’m retired”, the system hesitates.

Not in a dramatic way. Worse than that. In a quiet, barely perceptible way. Like a screen freezing for half a second before carrying on as if nothing happened.

Retired isn’t an identity. It’s a blank space. It tells people only that you no longer do something that can be printed on a lanyard. It collapses a lifetime of judgement, experience, mistakes, competence and scar tissue into a single administrative outcome. Formerly something. Now… nothing in particular.

You can feel yourself fade slightly at the edges.

Not shunned. Not dismissed. Just… de prioritised. The conversational equivalent of being gently dimmed. You’re still there, still pleasant, still welcome. But no longer central to the exchange. You haven’t said anything wrong. You’ve just removed the hook they were planning to hang you on.

This is where the follow up questions arrive, almost on autopilot. “Ah. Keeping busy?” “Doing a bit of travelling?” “Got any hobbies?” They are not really interested. They are fishing for something that looks like activity, something that can be weighed, ranked, or at least politely admired without effort.

Because we don’t really know how to talk to people without first establishing their status.

This is why many retired people develop a sudden and quite pronounced distaste for small talk. Not because they’ve become antisocial, but because small talk is almost entirely about hierarchy. Who does what. Who’s important. Who’s busy. Who’s still in the game. Once you’re out of it, the whole ritual starts to look faintly absurd, like watching people compare rank insignia from a war you’ve already left.

There are moments when you’re tempted to answer more honestly. “I’m on permanent standby.” Or “I’ve gone freelance on time.” Or “I no longer do anything that appears on a spreadsheet.” All accurate. All guaranteed to kill the conversation stone dead and possibly have you gently edged away from the canapés.

So you stick with “retired”. The socially approved shrug. And you watch yourself become slightly less visible in real time, like someone slowly backing out of a photograph without anyone quite noticing.

The darker joke is that nothing about you has actually changed. You haven’t lost your ability to think, judge, observe, or contribute. You just no longer come with a status badge attached, and without one, many people don’t quite know what to do with you.

This isn’t about ego. It’s about how thin our categories are. We have no decent language for people who are not currently exchanging time for money that doesn’t sound either congratulatory or faintly apologetic. Lucky you. Must be nice. As if the only meaningful thing a person can do is be busy on someone else’s behalf.

Once you notice this, you can’t unhear it. How often “what do you do?” is really “why should I care?” in a nicer jacket. How rarely anyone asks what you’re interested in, what you’ve learned, or what you’ve changed your mind about. None of that fits neatly into the social machinery of polite conversation.

So retirement doesn’t make you invisible. It just removes the costume that made you legible. And without it, you start to see how much of everyday conversation is less about connection and more about sorting, ranking, and quietly deciding who matters.

Which is why a lot of retired people stop bothering with small talk altogether. Not out of bitterness. Out of clarity. Once you’ve stepped outside the status game, watching others play it can feel less like socialising and more like loitering near a scoreboard you no longer recognise or are interested in.

“Oh, and what do you do?”

It turns out it was never a very good question. It was just a convenient one.

Clearance Is Not Judgement

Let’s keep this anchored in how the British state actually works, rather than how it is caricatured online.

Security vetting in the UK does not change with the colour of the government. UKSV, MI5 and Cabinet Office procedures are institutional. An ambassador under Labour goes through the same clearance framework as one under the Conservatives. The machinery is designed to be politically neutral.

But clearance is not endorsement. It answers a narrow question: is this person suitable to hold access to classified material at a given level? It does not answer whether appointing them is politically wise, reputationally resilient, or strategically elegant.

That distinction is where this argument lives.

Starmer has apologised for appointing Mandelson to Washington. He says he relied on Mandelson’s account of his relationship with Epstein and now regrets the decision in light of what has emerged. That does not automatically prove anyone ignored security advice. It does, however, raise a serious procedural question. Was full disclosure made? Did the vetting process have everything it needed? Were potential vulnerabilities properly interrogated before the appointment was confirmed?

Those are institutional questions, not partisan ones.

Contrast that with Johnson’s decision to grant a peerage to Evgeny Lebedev, despite reports at the time of security concerns because of his father’s KGB background. That was not a criminal case. It was a judgement call in the face of alleged caution. If concerns were raised and proceeded past, that is a conscious executive choice about risk tolerance.

Then there is Nathan Gill, convicted of taking money to promote Russian interests. That was criminal corruption, and it rightly attracted prosecution. But it did not involve control of British state machinery or access to classified diplomatic channels. Influence is not the same as executive authority.

Mandelson sits much closer to the nerve centre. An ambassador to Washington is not ceremonial. It is one of the most sensitive diplomatic posts in the system, operating at the junction of trade, defence and intelligence cooperation.

There was, to be fair, a strategic logic to the appointment. When dealing with Donald Trump, a transactional operator who respects leverage and deal-making instinct, there is an argument for sending someone equally seasoned. Set a thief to catch a thief, as the old phrase has it. Send a political bruiser who understands power games and will not be overawed.

But that logic only holds if the bruiser has no unresolved vulnerabilities. In a world of transactional politics, undisclosed baggage is not a footnote. It is leverage. And leverage in the wrong hands becomes risk.

So the core question is not whether Mandelson was cunning enough to handle Trump. It is whether the system satisfied itself that nothing in his past could be used to handle him.

Security vetting is colour blind. Political judgement is not. Clearance assesses vulnerability. Leaders decide whether to accept or discount risk.

Starmer’s apology does not prove clairvoyance was lacking. It acknowledges that the decision did not withstand scrutiny once fuller information emerged. The issue now is whether the machinery designed to surface relevant risks was given the full picture and functioned as intended at the time.

This government was elected on a promise of seriousness and competence. That promise applies most when decisions are finely balanced and reputational risk is present. The test is not hindsight perfection. It is whether safeguards were robust, advice was properly sought, and risk was weighed with sufficient caution.

The real measure is simple: did the safeguards work as designed, or did political confidence outrun institutional caution?

Shouting Like Tribes, Governing Like Coalitions

Polarisation was supposed to simplify politics. Pick a side. Nail your colours to the mast. Stop pretending everyone can be satisfied.

Instead, in Britain, it has produced something far stranger. The louder politics becomes, the broader the winning parties have to be.

Under FPTP, you cannot govern with a faction. You need 35 to 45 percent of the country. That means stitching together voters who do not agree about very much beyond a few headline issues. The compromise happens inside the party before polling day.

That is why both the Conservative Party and the Labour Party feel permanently unstable. They are not ideological movements. They are pre - election coalitions pretending to be unified tribes.

The Conservatives after Brexit had free - market libertarians, Red Wall statists, cultural traditionalists and City pragmatists under one roof. That alliance was built around a single mission. Once that mission was complete, the internal contradictions were exposed. The leadership churn was not accidental. It was structural tension meeting poor judgement.

Labour now performs a similar balancing act from a different angle. Trade unionists, urban liberals, fiscal moderates, climate activists, socially cautious ex - Tories. The arithmetic of the electoral system forces coexistence. The culture of polarisation punishes compromise. Leaders must sound absolute and govern conditionally.

Compare that with proportional systems such as in Germany. Parties like the CDU or the SPD can be more distinct. They aim for their share. The bargaining happens after the votes are counted, in a formal coalition agreement.

The compromise is visible and contractual. In Britain it is internal and personal.

But here is the crucial point. Coalition systems do not remove compromise. They relocate it. Polarisation does not remove coalition - building. It makes it emotionally harder.

Institutional design decides where the argument takes place. Leadership decides whether it looks like governance or civil war.

We complain that modern leaders seem weak. Often they are simply operating in a system that demands breadth while rewarding ideological theatre. They must hold together uneasy alliances while activists demand purity.

Polarisation promised clarity. The voting system still demands coalition. The friction between the two is where authority now goes to die.

Screw Caps

Right. So I have finally discovered why silicone sealant always ends up costing about three times what it says on the tube. It is not because the stuff is expensive, or because I apply it like I am icing a cake, or because I do DIY in the normal British way: 20 minutes of optimism followed by two days of swearing and a trip to Screwfix. 

It is because the moment you open a tube of silicone, you are no longer the owner of that sealant. You are merely the caretaker of a slow chemical process that is absolutely determined to turn your money into rubber.

And yes, before anyone starts, I did not just leave it sitting there with the nozzle open like a yoghurt pot in the sun. I did what every vaguely competent person does when they want to keep a cartridge usable. I jammed a nail in it, wrapped it in clingfilm, taped it, and generally performed the traditional rites of silicone preservation. It still set, because silicone does not respect folk remedies, no matter how confidently you apply them.

The key thing people miss is that silicone is not “drying” like paint. It is curing, which means a chemical reaction is taking place. Most household silicone is moisture curing, so it reacts with water vapour in the air and cross links into a solid rubber. That is literally the job. That is why it exists. Once you have squeezed out a bead and the sealant at the tip has met air, the reaction has started, and you have effectively lit the fuse. Blocking the opening afterwards is not the same as stopping the chemistry, especially if you have trapped a little pocket of moisture around the end.

In fact, a nail can make things worse, which is the sort of news that makes you want to sit down. The sealant cures from the outside in, so you get a plug forming at the tip. But if the nail does not seal perfectly, or if it leaves a tiny path for humid air to creep in, you have created a slow leak of moisture into a confined space. That is basically ideal conditions for curing, like a tiny damp greenhouse for polymers. Over weeks, the curing front can move deeper into the nozzle, and sometimes into the cartridge itself, until the whole thing turns into a rubber baton. You do not just lose the nozzle, you lose the tube, and you are left holding a perfectly cured product that is now only useful as a doorstop or an insult.

Clingfilm is not much better. It feels clever, because it is what you use to keep food fresh, and silicone is basically just a condiment for bathrooms. But clingfilm does not make an airtight seal on a nozzle that is already sticky, and it can trap moisture as well. So you come back a month later and unwrap a damp little parcel of disappointment, only to find the nozzle has become a solid plasticised fossil. You poke it with a nail, drill it out, cut it back, cut it back again, and eventually the hole is so wide that any “neat bead” becomes a kind of architectural extrusion.

I have tried those little caps that go on the nozzle too, and they are a lovely idea if you have never actually met silicone sealant in real life. In practice, they do not stop the nozzle curing, they simply help it cure neatly and efficiently. The nozzle still sets solid, because it is still full of sealant and still exposed to whatever air and moisture you have failed to exclude. It is like putting a hat on a man who is drowning. He looks slightly more presentable, but the outcome is unchanged.

So I assumed this was simply the way of things. Like printer ink, or washing machines that sound like a helicopter, or the fact that every “ten minute job” becomes a three hour saga involving blood. I assumed we were all meant to accept that half a tube of silicone will inevitably be sacrificed to the gods, and the only question is how quickly it happens.

And then I discovered these screw caps. Not the nozzle caps, not the little hats for the end of the applicator, but proper caps that screw onto the thread of the tube itself. Which means you can remove the nozzle entirely and seal the cartridge like a normal, civilised container, rather than a one shot dispenser designed to self destruct the moment you stop looking at it. It is such an obvious idea that it immediately raises the question: why have I never seen them before?

Because I have been to tool shops. I have bought more sealant than any household should ever need. I have watched tradesmen do this stuff in ten seconds flat while holding a coffee and a cigarette and somehow still get a perfect finish. I have never once seen someone casually whip out one of these caps and reseal a tube properly. Which suggests either it is a new invention, or it has been deliberately kept from the public by Big Sealant, who make a tidy living off the fact that we all accept waste as normal.

The funniest part is how I found out. I did not learn this from a builder, or from a DIY forum where the usual advice is to store it upside down and sacrifice a goat. I learned it by asking ChatGPT, because apparently we have reached the stage of civilisation where you ask a robot how to stop a tube of goo turning into a brick. And the robot, to its credit, did not recommend another nail. It did not recommend more clingfilm. It did not recommend prayer. It simply pointed out that there is a cap, a simple screw cap, that seals the tube properly. It has taken me 70 years to learn this.

So yes, I am buying a bag of them. I am putting them in the drawer. I will never again lose half a tube of silicone to the slow, inevitable chemistry of moisture curing cross linking, quietly turning my money into rubber while I am off making a cup of tea. If anyone asks why I am so pleased with a tiny orange plastic cap, I will tell them the truth. It is because I have finally won a long war against a tube of sealant, and that is as close to victory as British DIY ever gets.

The Hedge Fund Wing of the Pub Car Park

A new poll has broken down voting intention by education level, and the numbers are… telling. It says 42% of people whose top qualification is GCSE or lower would vote Reform, while only 13% of people educated to degree level would back Reform.

That stat is already being waved around online like a trophy. Proof, apparently, that Reform are the party of the “ordinary working bloke”, while the educated lot are too busy sipping flat whites and reading The Guardian to notice Britain collapsing.

So I made a slightly snide comment about that 13% being millionaires and hedge fund managers. Which, in fairness, was more sarcasm than sociology. Still, it landed because it pokes at something real: Reform’s loudest cheerleaders tend to be the ones with the least to lose, while the people who actually benefit from the agenda are often the ones you never see in the comments.

Then someone popped up and said, “I’ve got a degree and I’m voting Reform, and I’m not a millionaire.”

Fair enough. Degrees are not magical talismans that repel nonsense. Plenty of clever people believe daft things, especially when the daft thing comes wrapped in identity, anger, and a promise to punish the right targets.

But here’s the bit that matters. I started questioning the 13% figure because it felt a bit high. Surely anyone educated to degree level can see Reform’s policies are mostly theatre: big promises, thin numbers, and the usual magical thinking about deportations, tax cuts and instant NHS miracles. Then I realised the more interesting question isn’t who votes Reform, it’s who Reform actually benefits if they ever got near power.

Because when you strip away the pub chat, the Union Flag waving, and the endless talk about boats, what sits underneath is not a working class rescue plan. It’s the same old right wing offer, just louder. Tax cuts dressed up as patriotism, deregulation sold as “freedom”, and the state shrunk until it can no longer do anything except police the poor and subsidise the rich.

And this is where the graduate vote starts to make grim sense. If you’re educated enough to read the policies properly, you can also work out who wins. Some of those 13% won’t be voting Reform despite the economics, but because of them. If you’re already wealthy, or you expect to become wealthy, you can look at the direction of travel and think: lower taxes, fewer rules, less redistribution, more room to keep what you’ve got. You don’t have to love Farage’s pantomime to see the personal upside.

That’s why you’ll always find a slice of graduates voting Reform. Not because they’re all millionaires, but because a portion of them are comfortable enough to treat politics like a culture war hobby, and secure enough to see the economic angle as a bonus. They like the idea of a smaller state, lower taxes, and fewer constraints, and they’re far enough from the sharp end to think it will only hurt “someone else”.

Meanwhile, the people most likely to get clobbered by that agenda are the very voters Reform courts hardest. The ones who rely on the NHS, on social care, on local services that have already been hollowed out. The ones who have seen wages stagnate, housing disappear, and public services buckle. The ones who are then told, relentlessly, that the real enemy is a bloke in a dinghy.

It’s a brilliant con, if you think about it. Convince people who need a functioning state to vote for a party that wants to dismantle it, and distract them with immigration while you do it. It’s political pickpocketing. Keep them looking at the noise at the top of the screen while you quietly lift the wallet.

Crisis by Habit: Why We Now Expect Prime Ministers to Fall

There is a peculiar modern ritual in British politics. A story breaks. The name "Epstein" appears. A backbencher says something dramatic. Within hours we are told a prime minister's "days are numbered".

It is almost mechanical now.

Peter Mandelson's association with Jeffrey Epstein was not unearthed yesterday. It had been in the public domain for years. When Mandelson was appointed ambassador to Washington, that relationship was known and vetted. The present row turns on how extensive that contact was after conviction and whether the full picture was disclosed during the appointment process. That is serious. It is also specific.

From that, we have leapt to leadership obituary mode.

On what structural basis?

There is no organised leadership bid. No coordinated faction gathering numbers. No cabinet exodus. No confidence motion. Labour retains its majority. The Intelligence and Security Committee is reviewing the relevant material. The police are investigating Mandelson. Institutions are functioning.

What we are seeing is narrative inflation.

And part of the reason it inflates so easily is that the country has been conditioned to expect collapse. Four Conservative prime ministers in fourteen years rewired expectations. Cameron, May, Johnson, Truss, Sunak. Leadership became disposable. A wobble meant a resignation letter. A bad week meant a removal van.

That was not normal British politics. It was a governing party fracturing under Brexit pressure and market reality. But the habit stuck. We now instinctively read every controversy as the prelude to execution.

So a Commons climbdown becomes "authority shot". A handful of irritated MPs becomes "days numbered". The word "Epstein" guarantees maximum emotional voltage, and the news cycle obliges by turning ambiguity into crisis.

None of this means Starmer is untouched. Political capital is cumulative. A public retreat dents it. He built his brand on probity and caution, so anything that jars with that narrative stings harder. But embarrassment is not structural failure.

British prime ministers fall when three conditions align: public polling collapse, internal coordination against them, and a credible successor waiting in the wings. Those mechanics matter more than headline temperature. None of them are currently in place.

If the Intelligence and Security Committee produces evidence that Starmer knowingly approved something materially worse than what was understood at the time, the calculus changes. Evidence changes things. That is how constitutional systems are supposed to work.

Until then, much of what we are witnessing is a press corps trained by fourteen years of Conservative self-immolation, projecting instability onto a situation that does not yet justify it.

Heat is not the same as structural failure. And in British politics, unlike the last few Tory years, prime ministers do not automatically fall just because the headlines shout that they should.

Socialism Is Not Stalin - Its Just the American Culture War Talking

I was watching a Vlad Vexler YouTube video the other day, and underneath it - like clockwork - a MAGA type had turned up to perform the usual ritual incantation.

“Socialism has never been for the working man, socialists despise and look down on the working man, its an academic ideology and academics think the working man shouldn't get a vote, the American Political Economy IS for the working man, its whole premise is based on Industry, it's the model that Stalin and now the Chinese look to, and also the basis of Putin's Russia.”

Before you even get to the content you can tell exactly where the comment is coming from. The instant jump from “socialism” to Stalin and communism is a dead giveaway. That’s a very American reflex. In the US, it’s almost a cultural tic to treat “socialism” and “communism” as interchangeable words, as if the NHS is just five minutes away from gulags and compulsory potato farming. Over here we tend to use words with a bit more care, partly because we’ve actually lived with social democratic institutions for decades and nobody had to start wearing a Mao suit.

Anyway, let’s unpack it, because it’s a perfect example of how political arguments are now assembled. Not from evidence, but from vibes, resentment, and a handful of scary foreign nouns thrown in for flavour.

First, “socialism has never been for the working man.”

This is one of those statements that only works if you delete the entire 20th century. But let’s go further back, because the whole myth depends on forgetting where we started.

We didn't begin with “the market” as some benign force lifting everyone up. We began ruled by an aristocracy, living off land, rents and inherited privilege, with working people treated as labour to be used up. If you were poor, that wasn’t a social problem to solve, it was your place in the natural order. You worked, you suffered, you died early, and the people at the top called it civilisation.

Yes, things improved a bit when the old aristocracy began to be displaced by merchants and industrialists. Some of them came from ordinary backgrounds and had real drive. But plenty of them just climbed out of poverty and bought their own seat at the top table. They didn't abolish exploitation, they just made it more efficient and gave it a glossy brochure. The new bosses didn't cure the worker’s plight. They just charged for it.

Real change came only when working people organised. Trade unions, labour movements, and socialist parties turned the working class into a political force that couldn't be ignored. Rights at work, safety rules, pensions, public health, free education, paid holidays, the NHS, unemployment support, council housing - none of that was gifted by benevolent capitalists. It was forced into existence by collective action and then defended politically.

So if you want to talk about whether socialism has been “for” the working man, look at what actually improved everyday life. Look at the curve of living standards rising sharply in the mid 20th century. That isn’t a coincidence. It was the result of politics that shifted power away from owners and toward citizens.

Then comes the grievance garnish:

“Socialists despise and look down on the working man… academics think the working man shouldn't get a vote.”

This is pure invention. The working class vote wasn't gifted by kind hearted capitalists. It was expanded through political struggle, labour movements, unions, and reform campaigns. If you want a group that historically tried to keep the vote restricted, it wasn't the people building trade unions. It was the people defending property as the only qualification that mattered.

And the idea that “academics” are uniquely anti-worker is just modern anti-intellectual cosplay. Some academics are insufferable, yes. So are some plumbers. That’s humanity, not ideology.

Now for the punchline:

“The American Political Economy IS for the working man.”

If that’s true, it’s doing an excellent job of not showing it.

America is the place where you can work full time and still be poor. Where healthcare is so expensive it needs its own insurance industry, billing industry, and bankruptcy industry. Where job security is weak, unions have been battered for decades, and “freedom” often means your employer is free to sack you because they woke up in a mood.

If that’s “for the working man”, it’s a strange kind of devotion. Like saying a casino is “for the gambler”.

And then, because every rant needs a foreign villain, we get:

“its the model that Stalin and now the Chinese look to, and also the basis of Putin's Russia.”

This is where the whole thing collapses under the weight of its own nonsense.

Putin’s Russia isn't socialism. It isn't social democracy. It isn't even a normal market economy. It’s an oligarchic kleptocracy: a state captured by a small circle of the wealthy, with elections as theatre and the rule of law as a punchline. Calling that “the American model” is either confusion or an accidental confession about what happens when money buys politics.

China isn't “looking to America” because it loves the working man either. It’s state directed capitalism with authoritarian control. It manufactures cheaply because labour is cheap and dissent is inconvenient. That’s not worker power. That’s a production strategy.

And Stalin? If you have to invoke Stalin to argue against universal healthcare and decent labour rights, you’re not making a point. You’re just shaking a rattle.

Here’s the reality, stripped of culture war perfume.

Social democracy isn’t about “despising the worker”. It’s about recognising that working people need power, security, and public services because the market doesn’t provide them out of kindness. It provides them only when forced - by law, by unions, by taxes, and by political pressure.

The post war decades weren’t perfect, but they were the closest Britain ever came to an economy that genuinely worked for the many. That’s why living standards rose so sharply. Not because we discovered greed, but because we restrained it.

So when someone turns up under a Vexler video claiming socialism hates workers and America is their salvation, what you’re really seeing is a man defending a system that treats the working class as an input cost - while insisting, loudly, that this is “freedom”.

It’s not freedom.

It’s just exploitation with better branding.

Emoji Minefield

Emojis are a minefield now, and not because I’m getting old. They’re a minefield because we’ve replaced tone, nuance, and actual sentences with tiny yellow hieroglyphs that can mean anything from “I agree” to “I hope your boiler explodes”.

Take the laughing emoji. In real life, laughter is usually obvious. You can tell if someone’s laughing with you or at you. You can hear it. You can see their face. You can see whether they’re enjoying the joke or enjoying your discomfort. Online, you get a single little grin and you’re left doing forensic analysis like a detective at the scene of a minor social crime.

Because “Haha” can mean: “That’s genuinely funny.” It can also mean: “I’m pretending this is funny so I don’t have to answer you.” Or: “I’m laughing at you, because I’m the sort of person who thinks mockery is a substitute for having a point.” Same icon. Three different intentions. No context. Lovely.

And of course the real fun starts when someone uses it as a weapon. You write a perfectly reasonable comment, you lay out an argument, you even manage not to call anyone a moron, and they hit you with the laughing face. Not a reply. Not a counterpoint. Just a little digital snigger, like a teenager behind the bike sheds.

It’s the modern version of sticking your fingers in your ears and going “la la la” except now it comes with a tiny cartoon face and the smug satisfaction of thinking you’ve “won” without doing any work. The emoji becomes a shield. You can’t argue with a shield. You can only watch someone hide behind it.

Then there’s the passive-aggressive smiley. The one that looks friendly but somehow feels like a threat. The one that says “I’m being polite” while the rest of the message says “I’m absolutely not being polite”. It’s the written equivalent of someone calling you “mate” while reversing a van towards your shins.

Even the thumbs up has been ruined. Thumbs up used to mean “yes” or “OK”. Now it means “fine”, as in “I’ve decided you’re not worth another word”. It’s basically a slammed door in emoji form.

And the problem is, once you notice this, you can’t unsee it. Every reaction becomes a guessing game. Are they agreeing? Are they mocking? Are they trying to defuse tension? Are they just socially clumsy and pressing buttons like a toddler with an iPad?

Half the time, it isn’t even malice. It’s laziness. People don’t want to type. They don’t want to think. They don’t want to engage. They want to express a vibe and move on. Which is fine, until the vibe is “I’m laughing at you” and they’ve just lobbed it into a serious conversation like a grenade with a smiley face on it.

At this point we probably need a Ministry of Emojis. I fully expect to see it in a Reform manifesto any day now. A new quango, obviously. Staffed entirely by people who think “common sense” is a policy platform and that diplomacy is just using the Union Flag as punctuation. Its job would be to regulate online reactions so that nobody is ever accidentally mocked without the correct paperwork being filed in triplicate.

There’d be an Emoji Border Force. Any 😂 entering the country would need to prove it was laughing with you, not at you. If it can’t demonstrate intent within 72 hours, it’s put on a barge and sent to Rwanda, along with the 😏 and the passive-aggressive 👍.

And the Minister would stand up in Parliament and announce, with a straight face, that they’ve “taken back control” of sarcasm. The nation can sleep soundly knowing that all future arguments will be conducted under strict emoji quotas, with mandatory labelling on every post: This reaction may contain traces of contempt.

Meanwhile the economy collapses quietly in the corner, but it’s fine because we’ve finally cracked down on the real enemy within: people reacting “Haha” instead of forming a coherent sentence.

The real punchline is this: emojis were supposed to make online communication clearer. They were meant to add tone where text falls short. Instead, they’ve become a whole new layer of misunderstanding, where we all stare at a yellow face and wonder whether we’ve just been insulted by a cartoon.

It’s like we’ve invented a language where every word can mean its opposite, then we act surprised when people end up annoyed. If you want to disagree, disagree. If you think something’s funny, say so. If you’re just trying to dodge the argument, at least have the decency to do it with words, like a grown-up.

Otherwise we’re all just stuck here, decoding tiny faces, trying to work out whether someone’s laughing with us, at us, or just quietly demonstrating they’ve got nothing to say.

Assisted Topping

There is a curious sleight of hand at work in the Assisted Dying debate, and once you notice it the whole thing starts to look less like ethical concern and more like procedural obstruction dressed up as virtue.

Start with the House of Lords. Discounting the Lords Spiritual, whose objections are explicitly theological and therefore beside the point in a secular legislature, what we are seeing is not calm revision but functional filibustering. Hundreds of amendments, many circling the same points, debated at length in a chamber with no guillotine and no electoral accountability. No one needs to shout for hours to kill a Bill. You just bury it under paper until the clock runs out.

And it matters who is doing this. It is not the Lords as a whole. It is a particular cohort. Older, unelected peers. A heavy concentration of hereditaries and Crossbenchers. Retired professional elites with strong personal objections and no democratic mandate to veto a Commons decision outright. Add a small but noisy group of absolutist disability campaigners for whom no safeguard would ever be sufficient, and you have the nucleus of a delaying strategy. The aim is not to improve the Bill. It is to ensure it never quite gets there.

Many defenders say the Lords are merely delaying. But in the context of a Private Member’s Bill, delay is the mechanism of defeat. There is no automatic rollover. Time is finite. Exhaust it and the Bill dies without anyone having to vote it down. So yes, they are delaying. But in this parliamentary context, that is not a lesser sin than blocking. It is simply the polite, British way of doing it while keeping one’s hands clean.

When you strip out the dogma, there is really only one objection that stands on solid ground. The psychiatrists. Their concern about mental capacity, depression at the end of life, and the difficulty of distinguishing a settled autonomous wish from treatable distress is real. It is technical, not moral. It is about judgement under uncertainty, not ideology. And it deserves to be taken seriously, resourced properly, and designed into the law rather than used as a reason to kill it.

But notice what follows logically from that concern. If psychiatrists believe depression may be driving a wish to die, the answer is not an automatic veto. It is treatment, time, and reassessment. That is how medicine already works. We do not assess consent in the middle of delirium, unmanaged pain, or acute distress and then freeze the outcome forever. We stabilise, we treat what can be treated, and then we ask again. If depression lifts and the wish disappears, that tells you something important. If it persists, consistently and coherently, that also tells you something important. What is not defensible is using the possibility of depression as a one way ratchet that blocks choice even after treatment. That is not caution. It is avoidance dressed up as care.

None of this is theoretical. Other countries have been here already, and they did not answer these concerns with sentiment. They answered them with bureaucracy.

Oregon requires two independent doctors to confirm capacity and voluntariness, with mandatory psychiatric referral if either has doubts. Australia, particularly Victoria, went further and built a deliberately cumbersome, multi stage process with mandatory reporting at every step and a statutory review board that audits every case after the fact. Canada recognised that not all cases carry the same risk profile and split its system into tracks, with stricter safeguards where death is not imminent and lighter ones where it clearly is. None of this relies on blind trust in individual clinicians. It relies on duplication, delay, documentation, and audit. Assisted dying regimes work precisely because they are dull.

The same applies to coercion. Other jurisdictions did not wave it away. They hard wired protections into the process. Only the patient can initiate the request. Requests must be repeated and documented. Clinicians must actively assess voluntariness. The process can be paused or stopped at any stage. Every case leaves a paper trail that can be scrutinised later. That is how you deal with subtle pressure. Not by pretending it does not exist, but by designing systems that are robust to it.

The palliative care argument also collapses once you look beyond our borders. No country has made perfect palliative provision a prerequisite, because that would mean doing nothing forever. Instead, they require that alternatives be discussed, documented, and genuinely considered. The evidence from Australia and Canada shows assisted dying operating alongside palliative care, not replacing it. People do not vanish from services the moment they ask a question. The idea that assisted dying becomes a substitute for care is asserted loudly here, but it is not borne out elsewhere.

Which brings us to the workforce and cost arguments, where the sleight of hand becomes most obvious.

We are told assisted dying will overwhelm doctors and nurses, as if end of life care is currently some light administrative afterthought. It is not. It is labour intensive, emotionally draining, and often crisis driven. If a small number of terminally ill people choose an assisted death, some of that work does not happen. Fewer emergency admissions. Fewer late stage interventions. Fewer prolonged deteriorations that everyone knows the outcome of anyway.

This is not crude or callous. It is simply reality. And yet the moment anyone points it out, the response is performative horror. "So you want to kill people to save money?" No. But pretending that costs only ever run one way is not ethics. It is intellectual dishonesty.

Other countries have been far more grown up about this. Canada has published serious modelling showing that the cost of providing assisted dying is lower than the cost of the end of life care that would otherwise have been provided, producing net savings even after implementation costs. The authors are explicit that this must never be a bedside motive. It is a system level observation, not an individual one. Earlier US work points in the same direction. End of life care is disproportionately expensive in the final weeks and months, and assisted dying, used by a very small proportion of patients, reduces some of that expenditure. Not all of it. Enough to make cost neutrality, or modest savings, entirely plausible.

What is notable is how cautious this literature is. No one promises windfalls. No one claims workforce miracles. The claim is simply that the dire warnings of spiralling costs are not borne out, and that once avoided care is counted, the numbers flatten out. No jurisdiction has reported assisted dying as a budgetary crisis. None has reported system overload. None has reported insurance instability or perverse incentives.

The insurance scare story, in particular, dissolves under light scrutiny. In every country where assisted dying is legal, it is treated for insurance purposes as death from the underlying illness, not suicide. Policies pay out. Families are not penalised. Insurers prefer clarity and legality, not moral theatre. This has been settled elsewhere for years, yet it is occasionally wheeled out here as if it were some terrifying unknown.

The workforce impact abroad is similarly unexciting. Australian experience shows assisted dying to be administratively heavy but numerically small. It behaves like a specialist service, not a tidal wave. The evidence points to manageable operational impact, not collapse.

This is exactly the same trick used against Net Zero. Itemise every upfront cost. Amplify every disruption. Treat savings as speculative, distant, or somehow improper to mention. Lower fuel imports, insulation dividends, avoided health costs from cleaner air, resilience against energy shocks, reduced climate damage all quietly disappear from the ledger.

What is also never mentioned is that cheap, abundant renewable energy is precisely what manufacturing has been crying out for. Energy intensive industries do not thrive on volatility and imported fossil fuels priced in dollars. They thrive on stable, low marginal cost electricity. That is how you raise productivity, attract investment, and make British manufacturing competitive again. But that upside is inconvenient, so it is ignored.

Attack the costs. Never mention the savings. Then declare the policy reckless.

As for the slippery slope, this too dissolves under inspection. Other countries have expanded eligibility because legislatures chose to do so. If Parliament is worried about drift, it can write limits, review clauses, and explicit requirements for future primary legislation. That is what lawmaking is for. Governance is not prophecy.

So what is left once the smoke clears? One serious technical concern about capacity assessment that needs addressing properly, and a long list of objections that other countries have already confronted, engineered around, and monitored in practice. Set against that is an unelected chamber using procedure to avoid owning a decision it does not like.

The uncomfortable truth is that the status quo is not neutral. It is a choice. It just happens to be one that keeps suffering off the statute book and on the ward, where it is easier to ignore.

The 32 Inch Lie

I have a public service announcement for every man who still thinks he’s the same size he was at 18. You’re not. And if you are, you’re either a freak of nature, a professional cyclist, or you’ve spent the last forty years living on boiled chicken and quiet despair.

The rest of us are clinging to one of the last great lies of modern life: trouser sizing. Because my trousers are a 32. Occasionally a 34, but only in the way you occasionally get a parking ticket. It happens, you sigh, you move on. In my head, I’m a 32. I have been a 32 for ages. It’s practically part of my identity.

Then I put a tape measure round my belt line and it calmly informs me I’m 38 inches. Thirty eight. That is not a rounding error or a bit of Christmas weight. That is a full blown betrayal, the sort of number you expect to see on a shipping container, not a waistband.

Before anyone starts with the helpful suggestions, yes, I measured properly. I didn’t do it over a winter coat and I didn’t include a hip flask and a packet of Hobnobs. It was a simple, honest measurement of the sort that should be taught in schools, right after “how to spot a scam” and “why your back hurts now”.

So how, in the name of all that is zippered, am I still wearing a 32? Because trouser sizes aren’t measurements any more. They’re compliments. They’re affirmations. They’re a warm little cuddle from the fashion industry, whispering “don’t worry mate, you’re still the same bloke you were in 1976, go on, have another pint.” It’s vanity sizing, but with the subtlety of a brass band.

And here’s the genuinely dangerous bit. It isn’t just annoying, it’s bad for you. The label gives you permission to stay in denial. If you’re still buying 32s, then you must still be fine. You’re not getting bigger, the world is just getting smaller. Your metabolism hasn’t slowed, it’s merely taking a thoughtful pause. You can still eat like you did at 18, drink like you did at 18, and recover like you did at 18.

Which is brilliant right up until you actually try to do any of those things and your body reacts like a Victorian widow receiving bad news. This is how middle aged men get into trouble. Not because they’ve “let themselves go”, but because the waistband has been lying to them for decades. A 32 becomes a comfort blanket. A 34 is a crisis. And the tape measure is basically an A and E consultant with no patience.

Then there’s the other problem, which is that even if you accept the lie, it’s not even a consistent lie. A 32 in one brand is a 34 in another. A 32 in “slim fit” is an act of violence. A 32 in “relaxed fit” is basically a small marquee with belt loops. You end up in a changing room doing that weird sideways shuffle while holding your breath, bargaining with a button like it’s a hostage negotiation.

So yes, I think we need a class action. Not for the money, although I’d accept damages in the form of elasticated waistbands and a written apology. I want the principle. If you put “32” on the label, it should measure thirty two inches. Not thirty six. Not thirty eight. Not “32 in a spiritual sense”.

At the very least, we need a petition. We’ll gather signatures, present it to Parliament, and they’ll nod solemnly, thank us for our valuable contribution to democracy, and then file it somewhere between “ban loud motorcycles” and “make it illegal for cats to be smug”. Meanwhile the fashion industry will carry on printing smaller numbers on larger trousers, keeping us all convinced we’re still 18, right up until the day the zip gives up and makes a bid for freedom.