Flags Don’t Power Heat Pumps

Mark Carney stood up at Davos and did something you don’t often hear from politicians: he described the world as it is, not as we wish it still was. The old “rules based order” is fraying, great powers are weaponising trade and supply chains, and sovereignty now means something brutally practical. Can you keep your economy running when someone decides to squeeze you?

His answer was “strategic autonomy”, which sounds grand until you translate it into plain English. It means resilience. It means options. It means not being one shock away from panic buying gas at any price.

And once you’ve said that out loud, you’ve basically written a love letter to the EU without meaning to. Because the EU is what “middle powers banding together” looks like when it actually exists. Not a summit photo, not a press release, but a permanent bloc with scale, rules, money, and the ability to negotiate like an adult.

That’s the part we gave up. Brexit wasn’t just leaving an institution, it was leaving leverage. We traded the power of a continental market for the thrill of “sovereignty”, then acted surprised when we had less influence over the rules we still have to live with.

Energy is where this becomes painfully obvious. If your electricity and heating depend on imported gas priced on global markets, you are not sovereign. You’re renting stability from the world, and the rent spikes whenever there’s a war, a cartel squeeze, or a trader panic. Flags don’t keep the lights on.

Which is why Net Zero matters, and why the anti-Net Zero brigade annoy me so much. Net Zero isn’t a lefty hobby or a moral crusade. It’s energy security with a climate benefit. It’s the long way of saying: stop being held hostage by fossil fuels.

Yes, it costs money. So does doing nothing. So does every gas price shock. So does every flooded road, wrecked harvest, and insurance bill creeping up because the climate is going off-script.

The UK should be brilliant at this. We’ve got wind, decent solar, engineering talent, and every reason to electrify fast. But we’ve somehow turned it into a culture war, as if physics cares what Nigel Farage thinks.

Carney’s point was simple: the world is hardening. Power is back. Energy is leverage. The winners will be the countries that build resilience quietly and at scale.

Which is why the EU will muddle through, and why Britain will keep paying extra for the privilege of pretending “going it alone” is the same thing as being in control.

Cows With Tools, Scientists In Shock

So a cow has been “observed” using a tool for the first time ever, and scientists are stunned. Stunned. As if the cow has just wandered into Halfords and asked for a torque wrench.

I’m sorry, but I’ve watched Shaun the Sheep - it was a documentary. If you think farm animals aren’t running a parallel civilisation the moment we turn our backs, you’ve not been paying attention.

The cow scratches herself with a broom and everyone acts like it’s the moon landing. Meanwhile the sheep are already in the shed converting cars to run on cow methane. Little overalls, tiny clipboard, whole thing. It’ll be a proper operation too, none of your amateur nonsense. Neat wiring, labelled switches, and a “Do Not Touch” sign that’s clearly aimed at humans.

And here’s the real point: we’ve spent millennia depriving farm animals of tools, then acted surprised they don’t use tools. It’s not as if we leave CNC milling machines or sets of screwdrivers lying around in fields, is it. We give them grass, fences, and a short life, then declare them thick because they haven’t invented plumbing.

Anyway, give it a fortnight and you’ll be watching the Cow Engineering YouTube channel. “Alright lads, welcome back. Today we’re doing a full methane conversion on a Defender, fitting a new gate latch, and I’ll show you why your feed trough setup is absolute rubbish. Like, subscribe, and mind your fingers around the chop saw.”

And it’s not just cows, is it. Take penguins. We pen them up in a little enclosure, chuck them a fish, and then laugh because they’re not producing beautiful pottery or running a small ceramics studio on the side. What did we expect? You don’t get a Feathers McGraw mastermind when you’ve stuck him behind a pane of glass with a rock and a puddle.

Give a penguin a kiln, a wheel, and a bit of peace and quiet and you’d have tasteful stoneware mugs by Tuesday. Proper glaze work. Little minimalist handles. “Hand-thrown in Antarctica” stamped on the bottom. But no, we keep them penned up, bored stiff, and then act amazed when the only creative outlet they have is standing there looking mildly murderous.

Honestly, the miracle isn’t that one cow used a broom.

The miracle is that more of them haven’t already organised a breakout.

Industrial Advantage - Addendum

I realised after posting a piece on industrial advantage that I’d left out one crucial element. Not because it weakens the argument, but because it completes it.

China did not become the world’s manufacturing hub by accident. It did so because, for a long time, labour really was cheap, plentiful, and decisive. That part of the story is true. Pretending otherwise only invites easy rebuttal from people who stopped thinking about manufacturing sometime in the Nokia era.

What matters is what happened next.

Automation eats cheap labour for breakfast. Once factories fill up with robots rather than people, wages stop being the advantage they once were. When labour falls from half the cost base to a tenth, the old logic collapses. The very thing that once made China attractive starts to fade as a competitive lever.

China saw this coming. That is the bit most Western commentary misses.

Rising wages did not threaten China’s industrial model. They triggered the next phase of it. Higher wages push automation harder. Automation drives energy demand through the roof. And once energy becomes the dominant input, the country that controls cheap, reliable, long term power wins.

That is where renewables come in. Not as environmental signalling, not as virtue, but as infrastructure. Renewables turn energy into a capital asset rather than a geopolitical gamble. No fuel imports. No price shocks. No dependency on shipping lanes or regimes with leverage. Just machines running flat out on predictable power for decades.

Seen this way, China’s dash into renewables is not a pivot. It is consolidation. Automation erodes the cheap labour advantage, so China replaces it with something far harder to undercut: electricity that is abundant, stable, and increasingly domestic.

This also explains why the renewables build accelerates as wages rise. It is not contradictory. It is sequential. The strategy evolving exactly as intended.

The West is still arguing about whether labour costs matter. China has moved on to securing the input that automation cannot function without. Factories do not care why the power is cheap. They only care that it is.

Yesterday’s post argued that energy policy is industrial policy. The missing sentence is this: automation dissolves yesterday’s advantage, so China is locking in tomorrow’s one.

The arithmetic has not changed. It has simply moved on while we were still talking.

From Punk to Populism: All Noise, No Plan

A couple of days ago I had Radio 4 on in the background, as you do, and there was a piece about the punk movement. One of the Sex Pistols was reminiscing about the sheer force of it all and came out with the line that they could have powered the UK with the energy they produced.

It is a cracking line. Half boast, half joke, half myth. It has that proper punk rhythm to it, and you can almost hear the grin behind it.

And to be fair, punk did have energy. Cultural energy. The kind that turns up, sneers at the furniture, kicks the door off its hinges and makes the rest of the room feel embarrassed for still wearing a tie. It was brilliant at exposing how stale everything had become. It made it acceptable to be angry, skint, and unimpressed, which is basically a British birthright.

But punk also made a virtue of not having answers. That was the aesthetic. “No future” is not a plan, it is a howl. Punk was protest as performance, disruption as identity. If you turned up with a sensible spreadsheet you’d have been ejected for witchcraft, possibly with a bootprint on your arse.

The thing is, punk didn’t just vanish. It mutated. Out of that chaos you got bands like The Smiths, who took the same anti-establishment instinct and made it sharper and more articulate. Less gobbing at the system, more describing what it feels like to be quietly crushed by it on a wet Tuesday, and somehow making it funny without pretending it was fine.

And once you start thinking about that, you realise plenty of musical movements offered more than just noise. Not “solutions” like a government programme, obviously. More like a way through. A bit of moral direction, a bit of community, a bit of relief. Something other than smashing the window and then acting surprised when it gets cold.

Take the old folk and protest tradition. Dylan didn’t just complain. He basically told people to stop being cowards. He wrote songs that made it harder to pretend you hadn’t noticed what was happening, and harder to hide behind “oh it’s all very complicated”. He didn’t offer comfort. He offered a shove.

Or look at soul and Motown. That wasn’t “burn it down”. It was dignity, excellence, aspiration. It was saying: we’re not here to beg, we’re here to win. The whole thing is built on discipline and pride, and the quiet confidence that you can’t keep ignoring people who are this good.

Reggae and roots did something else again. It didn’t just rage at oppression, it explained it. It offered solidarity and identity and a sense that the powerful aren’t automatically right just because they’ve got the uniforms and the microphones. It’s not a tantrum. It’s endurance. It’s the long game.

Even rave, for all its daftness and its occasional grim edges, did something useful. It built temporary little communities where people dropped the usual tribal nonsense for a few hours. Less judgement, less hierarchy, more togetherness. Not a manifesto, but a glimpse of what it feels like when everyone stops performing for a bit.

Britpop wasn’t trying to fix anything, and that was half the charm. It was cultural reassurance. It was saying: we’re alright, actually. We can have a laugh, we can make something out of the ordinary, we don’t have to live permanently in a state of national self-loathing. Not revolutionary. Just human.

Pink Floyd is another kind again. Not protest, not celebration, but diagnosis. The machine is grinding you down. School is turning you into a unit. Work is eating your life. War is industrial. Consumerism is anaesthetic. Their gift wasn’t a plan, it was the moment you realise the cage is real, and you’ve been helping to paint it.

And then there’s Led Zeppelin, who sit outside all of this in a useful way. They weren’t fixing the system. They were escaping it. Big riffs, big myth, big swagger, and the feeling that you are larger than whatever dreary little life you’ve been handed Monday to Friday. Not politics. Just release.

Heavy metal does that too, in its own way. It takes rage and alienation and turns them into something shared and survivable. It’s catharsis. It’s a tribe. Sometimes you don’t need a solution, you just need your feelings turned up to eleven so they stop rattling around your skull.

So yes, music can be pure protest. It can also be decency, pride, solidarity, escape, therapy, celebration, awareness. It can give you a route through, even if it’s only for three minutes at a time. It can do more than just scream at the furniture.

Which brings us back to that Radio 4 line about “powering the UK”. Because the real divide isn’t between loud music and quiet music. It’s between movements that offer something beyond disruption, and movements that treat disruption as the whole point.

And now we’ve somehow turned that into politics. We’ve taken the punk instinct, stripped out the humour and the art, and kept only the smash. No community, just enemies. No dignity, just blame. No solidarity, just scapegoats. No awareness, just slogans.

And the only thing he’s ever reliably powered is himself.

Nigel Farage.

Hard Choices, Hard Tariffs, and Harder Truths for Farage

There is a basic difference between Europe and America right now, and it is not GDP, or defence spending, or who can shout “freedom” loudest while quietly checking their share portfolio.

It is legitimacy. Public consent. The boring stuff political philosophers bang on about, because it turns out to matter.

If Trump slaps tariffs on Europe because Denmark refuses to hand over Greenland like its a spare set of keys, plenty of Europeans will not see that as “tough negotiating”. They will see it as bullying. And when people feel bullied, they are far more likely to back retaliation even if it costs them. Not because anyone enjoys paying more for imports, but because the principle is obvious. If you let a big power push you around once, it becomes a habit.

This is where Locke and Rousseau still matter. Governments can impose costs on the public only when the public believes the policy is legitimate and justified. Weber makes the same point in a more modern form: authority holds when coercion is accepted as legitimate. Tariffs are coercion. They are politically sustainable when voters accept the reason for them.

So European retaliation is easier to hold together politically because it can be framed as self defence. Not chest beating, not grandstanding, just refusing to be pressured. That sort of thing tends to travel well with the public, especially when the alternative is looking weak. That's not to say EU counter tariffs are a good thing - they're not. 

In America, it lands differently. Tariffs on Europe will be sold as “winning” and “putting America first”, but for most people it will show up as higher prices and more hassle in the things they actually buy and build with. Car parts, machinery, building materials, components, anything with a European supply chain behind it. Tariffs are not paid by foreigners in some magical way. They are paid by American importers, and then the cost spreads through the economy like a tax that nobody voted for.

And here’s the part that turns it into an own goal. If you make European goods more expensive, American buyers do not automatically “buy American”. Importers do not buy flags. They buy price and reliability. In some categories, that means switching to non-European suppliers, and that can include China, even with existing tariffs. China has stayed quiet on Greenland and will happily take whatever business falls off the back of a Western argument. It does not need to threaten anyone. It just needs to be available.

So Trump’s Greenland tariffs could easily become a policy that punishes Europe, irritates American consumers, and hands China extra market share. That is not “standing up to China”. That is helping China by accident.

Now bring it back home, because this is where it gets awkward for the UK.

Starmer has been trying to rebuild Britain’s credibility by doing something unfashionable: treating allies like allies. If Trump starts swinging tariffs at Europe over Greenland, Starmer looks more right than dull. He looks like the one who understands that sometimes “hard choices” are real, not a slogan. Standing by allies when it is inconvenient is one of them, because the alternative is being picked off one by one.

Farage, meanwhile, is treading a very narrow path. His entire brand is “sovereignty” and “Britain first”, but he has also tied himself to Trump, who treats other countries’ sovereignty as negotiable and allies as customers. Those two positions only coexist if you never ask awkward questions.

And when the Greenland tariffs story broke, Farage’s response was telling. He distanced himself and said the tariffs would hurt the UK. Fair enough. But he still avoided the bigger point, which is that this is not normal trade policy. It is pressure being applied to Europe for refusing to hand over territory. If your politics is built on sovereignty, that should be the easiest issue in the world.

Because if Trump keeps punishing Europe for backing Denmark, Farage has three options and none of them are pretty. He can back Trump and look like a lapdog cheering on economic damage to Britain and its neighbours. He can criticise Trump properly and annoy the base he’s spent years cultivating by borrowing Trump’s politics. Or he can keep half-disagreeing while sidestepping the principle, which makes him look slippery because the issue is not abstract. It is jobs, prices, and allies being threatened.

Oddly, this is also Kemi Badenoch’s chance to stop the drain to Reform. She has criticised Trump’s Greenland tariff threats, and she has also argued against retaliatory tariffs on the grounds that they make everyone poorer. That is a coherent position, and it is one she can use to look tougher than Farage without copying his Trump obsession. She can say: we will defend our allies, we will defend British interests, and we will not pretend trade wars are good for living standards. If she cannot make that case, then the Tory collapse really is terminal.

And it is worth saying out loud: this is exactly what Brexit bought us. Less influence, less shelter, and front-row seats to other people’s trade wars. We cannot shape Europe’s response from the inside any more, but we can still be hit by the fallout, because geography does not care about slogans.

So yes, this sort of Trump-led tariff bullying would probably strengthen Starmer and undermine Farage. It makes competence and alliances look like common sense again. And it leaves Farage where he always ends up when reality turns up: trying to keep the applause while the rest of us pay the bill.

The Quantum Trump

Trump is the first President to behave like a quantum particle.

Not in the “mysterious workings of the universe” way, more in the “you cannot possibly know where he is or what he believes until you look directly at him” way. Even then, you are not guaranteed to get the same answer twice.

In normal politics, leaders have policies. They may be dreadful policies, but at least you can write them down and argue about them like grown ups. With Trump, policy exists in a kind of superposition. He is simultaneously pro - NATO and anti - NATO, anti - China and weirdly impressed by China, pro - peace and pro - whatever looks like peace as long as it involves him getting credit for it. It's all floating around in a probability cloud of ego.

Then you get the collapse of the probability wave event. This is not triggered by facts, briefings, or anything as old fashioned as a spreadsheet. It is triggered by attention. A camera lens, a microphone, a rally crowd, a late night TV clip, a compliment from someone he thinks is important. The waveform collapses into a sentence. Sometimes it is even a policy - more often it is just a noise.

And the thing is, you cannot observe him without changing him. Every question is a quantum measurement. Every interview is an experiment. The very act of asking “What do you plan to do?” forces him to choose between several incompatible realities. If you ask him on Monday, he will sanction someone. If you ask him on Tuesday, he will praise them. If you ask him on Wednesday, he will insist he never said either and you are fake news for remembering.

His advisers must live like lab technicians. They spend their days trying to stop him being measured at all. Keep him away from microphones. Keep him away from Twitter. Keep him away from anyone who might say “Sir, you are a genius,” because that is basically a particle accelerator for his worst impulses. If he gets enough praise, he starts emitting executive orders at random angles through double slits.

People keep saying he is unpredictable, but that is not quite right. He is predictable in the way a roulette wheel is predictable. You cannot tell where the ball will land, but you can tell it will land somewhere expensive, loud, and slightly rigged. His outcomes are not driven by strategy, they are driven by whatever makes him feel powerful in the moment. That is not chaos, it is a system. A stupid system, but a system.

The most impressive part is how he can be in two places at once. He is always the victim and the victor. He is always persecuted and unstoppable. He is always under attack and also the only man strong enough to save the nation. It is like watching a man argue both sides of a court case while also demanding the jury applaud.

And then there is entanglement. Once Trump says something, millions of people become instantly linked to it. Their beliefs update in real time. Yesterday, tariffs were bad. Today, tariffs are brilliant. Yesterday, Russia was a threat. Today, Russia is “misunderstood”. The facts do not change. The narrative does. They move as one, like a flock of starlings, except with more shouting and less grace.

The rest of the world is left trying to apply classical logic to a quantum object. Diplomats turn up with briefing papers and red lines and mutual interests, and Trump turns up like a bloke in a pub who has just discovered he can rename the rules mid - game. You cannot negotiate with that. You can only watch it, measure it, and hope it does not quantum tunnel through the next set of constraints.

And the really unsettling bit is this. In quantum mechanics, the weirdness is small and the rest of the universe behaves sensibly. With Trump, the weirdness is the whole system. The probability cloud has access to the levers of state. The waveform is carrying the launch codes. The Schrödinger’s cat is the global economy, and someone keeps shaking the box for entertainment.

So yes, Trump is quantum.

Not because he is profound.

Because he is unstable, over - energised, and best handled with protective equipment and a very strict containment protocol.

The Collapse of Political Trust

If the question is trust, then it matters not just who might rebuild it, but who corrodes it further, and who simply lacks the heft to matter either way.

Trust in UK politics was badly damaged by the Conservatives, who normalised rule breaking while insisting nothing was wrong. They governed as if accountability were an optional extra, then acted offended when the public noticed. That did not merely disappoint voters. It taught them that politics operates by a different moral code. Once that lesson is learned, it is hard to unlearn.

Labour, for all its irritations, is at least trying to reverse that damage. It talks about limits, fiscal rules, and institutional repair. It does not promise pain free solutions. It does not pretend Britain is richer than it is. That may be dull, but dull is what responsibility looks like after chaos. Trust is not rebuilt with charisma. It is rebuilt with consistency and restraint.

Reform sits at the opposite end of the spectrum. It would not fail to restore trust so much as obliterate the concept entirely. Its politics depends on the claim that complexity is a lie and constraints are treachery. Courts, civil servants, treaties, budgets, all are recast as enemies of “the people”. When nothing is ever allowed to limit power, nothing can ever be held accountable. The result is permanent grievance, not government. Trust cannot survive that environment because responsibility itself is treated as a con.

The Liberal Democrats and the Greens sit somewhere else again. They are not corrosive in the way Reform is, nor compromised by a recent record like the Conservatives. On trust, their problem is not bad faith but scale.

The Lib Dems generally respect institutions and speak a recognisably adult policy language. They are serious where Reform is theatrical. But they remain a party of influence rather than control. Voters struggle to trust a party with national repair when it has little chance of holding the tools required to do it. Fair or not, credibility in government is still tied to the prospect of governing.

The Greens face a different version of the same problem. On values, they often speak to real public anxieties, particularly on climate and environmental decline. But trust is not built on moral clarity alone. It also depends on credible delivery, economic realism, and an acceptance of trade offs. When proposals appear detached from fiscal or institutional constraints, trust stalls. Good intentions are not enough.

So the balance is stark. Conservatives damaged trust through abuse of power. Reform would destroy it by rejecting the idea of responsibility altogether. The Lib Dems and Greens may be sincere, but lack the scale and, at times, the realism to carry the burden of national repair.

That leaves Labour. Not inspiring. Not heroic. Often frustratingly cautious. But currently the only party even attempting to reintroduce the idea that politics is about governing within limits rather than performing certainty. In the present wreckage, that is not nothing. It is the minimum price of trust.

Reform UK: The Recycling Bin for Panicky Tory MPs

Farage says Reform isn’t a rescue charity for panicky Tory MPs.

Correct. It isn’t a charity. It’s a recycling centre.

And we know that because he said it, then immediately took another one. Rosindell turns up with a speech about “managed decline” and Farage is already calling him “a great patriot”. So the “no more defectors” line isn’t a principle, it’s a press release. It’s what you say while you’re still opening the door.

The Conservatives are in this state because Boris Johnson purged the One Nation lot and replaced them with the career-seeking clappers who’d sell their grandmother for a ministerial car. He didn’t just change the party’s direction, he changed the quality control. Personal loyalty mattered. Competence didn’t. Shame was treated as a hobby.

So now we get the inevitable second act. The very people Johnson promoted because they were pliable and loud are looking at Reform like it’s the last lifeboat off a sinking ship. No principles, no loyalty, no embarrassment. Just that frantic little scramble to stay on the payroll, while still insisting they’re “serious” and “experienced”. They’ve been “threatening to defect for months”, denying it as recently as Saturday, then suddenly discovering conscience the moment a turquoise rosette appears.

Rosindell’s excuse is the usual defector theatre. The Conservatives are “irreparably bound” to their mistakes, so his solution is to join the party that is currently collecting those mistakes like Panini stickers. He even drags in Chagos, because it sounds statesmanlike and patriotic and saves him from mentioning the NHS, housing, or the fact most voters are mainly worried about whether they can afford the weekly shop.

But the real irony is this: the Conservatives have spent years chasing Farage with their policies. They’ve borrowed his framing on Europe, immigration, courts, protest, “woke”, and national decline, then acted surprised when it all went wrong. Brexit has damaged trade and investment, the state is frayed, public services are brittle, and the party looks unserious because it has behaved unseriously. Yet the surviving Tory leadership still seems convinced that implementing even more of Farage’s politics is what will rescue them. It’s like watching someone try to cure a hangover by ordering another bottle of gin.

And that’s why Reform works. Farage isn’t building a governing machine. He’s running an outrage engine.

Governing is where slogans go to die. It’s budgets, courts, treaties, civil servants, procurement, and the awkward reality that you can’t “common sense” your way through trade-offs. The moment you grab the levers of power, you own the consequences, and half your policies evaporate on first contact with reality. The other half end up in judicial review.

Farage’s business model depends on never getting pinned down. Permanent outrage, permanent blame, permanent campaigning. Every week a new enemy. Every month a new betrayal. Every time he’s asked for details he points at a dinghy, mutters “woke”, and waits for the cameras.

That’s why the Tory defectors are useful. They’re not joining a team, they’re joining a performance. Farage gets to parade them as trophies, make them confess that the Conservatives “broke the country”, and then use them as props in the next round of grievance politics. If they cause trouble, he purges them and claims it proves he’s “different”. Either way, he wins.

And here’s the bit people keep missing: Farage doesn’t need to win a general election to win.

His real job is to poison the centre ground and drag everyone else to the right. Keep the country in a constant state of manufactured panic so Labour spends its time triangulating, tightening, “getting tough”, and chasing the right-wing headline of the day instead of fixing the plumbing. Immigration, protest, policing, “British values” - the carousel never stops, because the moment it stops people start asking awkward questions about living standards, public services, and who’s hoovering up the money.

That’s what he’s paid to do. Not necessarily with a brown envelope and a wink, but in the way the outrage economy works. Media platforms, donors, backers, grifters, think tanks - everyone gets rich and influential off a politics that never threatens wealth and power, but keeps the public furious about boats and flags.

So yes, he’ll happily drain the Conservatives of the last scraps of credibility. He’ll strip-mine them for names, money and attention. Then, if Reform ever gets too close to actual power, there’ll be a nice controlled detonation. A row, a purge, a scandal, a mad pledge. Anything to keep Reform as the loud disruptor, not the boring administrator.

Because if Farage ever had to deliver, the act would die.

The sad part is the defectors don’t even see it. They think they’re marching into government.

They’re marching into a studio.

Top Cat

I spotted a neighbourhood policing notice in Chipping Sodbury Waitrose and immediately realised I was no longer the intended audience. Not because of the policing, but because of the name. Cheryl Dibble. PCS O Dibble. Printed, laminated, and displayed without the faintest awareness that for anyone of a certain age this is not a name, it is a cartoon.

This is not some vague echo of British slang or Carry On policing. It is Top Cat. Officer Dibble. New York’s least effective lawman, eternally outwitted by a yellow cat in a bin. A cultural reference so specific that it bypasses rational thought and goes straight to the hindbrain of anyone who watched television before colour was compulsory.

Anyone under 60 will walk straight past. Anyone over 60 will pause, reread it, and hear a tiny internal voice saying “Top Cat!” before feeling faintly embarrassed about having done so. No disrespect is intended. None is possible. This is pure cognitive reflex.

Of course, this is not nominative determinism. Avon and Somerset Police are not quietly recruiting based on Hanna-Barbera casting logic. Cheryl Dibble did not join the force because of her surname. But the surname did arrive first, decades earlier, and it has been patiently waiting for a moment like this.

What makes it funny is the complete innocence of the poster. It is modern community policing to the core. Friendly faces. Baptist church hall. Tea, probably biscuits. Meanwhile, half the shoppers are mentally overlaying a cartoon policeman chasing a cat with a traffic cone on his head.

This is how cultural ageing actually works. Not through grand debates about values, but through the slow accumulation of references that no longer land. To younger shoppers, this is just a name. To older ones, it is an ambush by Saturday morning television.

No offence. No mockery. Just one of those rare moments when public information accidentally collides with a shared cultural memory. Community policing meets Hanna-Barbera. And somewhere, quietly, Officer Dibble is still shaking his fist at a cat.

The Spare Car Battery

There is a particular species of man (and I am entirely representative of the species) who cannot throw away a dead car battery. Not because he thinks it is still any good, either. He knows perfectly well it is as dead as disco, and he has tested it with the sort of solemn attention normally reserved for a doctor confirming time of death.

He keeps it anyway, because a dead battery is not a dead battery. It is a “spare”. It is “probably recoverable”. It is “worth keeping hold of, just in case”. It is, in short, a small rectangular lie we tell ourselves about our own competence.

The modern world has tried to stop us doing this. It has tried to shame us with sleek lithium jump packs, AA membership apps, and the quiet smugness of people who simply “call someone”. But we are not those people, because we have started cars with less than a volt and a prayer, and we have bump-started things that should not have been bump-started. We have once driven home at night with no headlights, purely by faith and vague memory of the road.

A dead battery is also a talisman. It represents self-reliance, even when it weighs 18 kilos and sits there like a small anvil with terminals, quietly turning the garage into a shrine to stubbornness. Every now and then you glance at it and think, “I really should do something about that,” and then you do something else instead, like reorganise a box of screws you will never use, or spend twenty minutes looking for a 10mm socket that has clearly joined a witness protection programme.

Then there is the glorious delusion of “reconditioning”. This is the part where you attach a charger, watch the needle twitch like a patient on life support, and convince yourself you are basically an electrical engineer. The battery gurgles slightly, and you interpret this as “coming back to life”, not “off-gassing in a manner that suggests I should step away and stop being an idiot”.

After 24 hours you test it again, and it fails. But you do not throw it away, because that would be admitting defeat, so you simply change the story. It is now “holding some charge”, which is like describing a collapsed souffle as “still technically edible”. You even start negotiating with yourself, like a man trying to justify buying another tool. “Well, there might be a time when I need 6 volts rather than 12 (or 3 if it's a 6 volt battery).”

The real reason we keep dead batteries is because we are haunted by one specific scenario. It is always the same: a cold morning, an important appointment, and the car turns over once then gives that awful half-hearted click, like a man who has been asked to lift something heavy and immediately regrets his life choices. At that moment you do not want solutions, you want vindication.

You want to stride into the garage, reach into the shadows, and pull out your emergency battery like a wartime ration tin. You want to connect it with jump leads you bought in 1997 and have never trusted, and you want the engine to fire into life so you can look at your wife and say, calmly, “There we are. Sorted.” That is the dream, and it is a powerful one.

It has never happened, of course. Not once. The dead battery has never saved anyone, and the best it has ever done is provide moral support, like keeping a blunt pen in your pocket because it once wrote a shopping list. Yet we keep them anyway, because the fantasy is worth more than the scrap value.

We line them up like old soldiers. Some are half-hidden behind paint tins, some are under the bench, and some are in a “temporary” pile that has been there since the last Labour government. They are labelled in our minds with vague biographies, like “that one came off the Volvo”, “that one was the GT6 battery”, and “that one is definitely dead but it might take a surface charge”, even though we do not know what a surface charge is. We say it anyway because it sounds like science.

Eventually, we do dispose of them, usually after tripping over one and swearing loudly. At some point you realise you have reached an age where falling over in the garage is no longer funny, it is a potential NHS waiting list. So you take them to the tip, solemnly, as if returning medals, and you drive home feeling faintly virtuous.

Then, two months later, you acquire another one. Not because you need it, but because the point was never the battery. The point is the feeling that if civilisation collapses, you will still be able to start a 1993 Mercedes with a set of jump leads, a battered charger, and sheer bloody-mindedness. In a world full of people who cannot change a wiper blade without a YouTube tutorial, that is not the worst fantasy to have.

I've just thrown one out labelled 'Old Galaxy battery', which became old over a year ago. The replacement battery then quietly became the replacement 'Old Galaxy battery' soon afterwards, mainly because I've inherited two other old batteries and I need the space. I've also got an old jump pack which wouldn't start a pedal car and should go straight in the tip bucket, but I can't bring myself to do it - despite having two perfectly serviceable jump packs a fraction of the size.

Culture War Glossary

The culture war works because it sells you a set of comforting stories about how the world works, and then swaps them out whenever they stop fitting the facts. It’s not a coherent worldview. It’s a rotating display of grievances, designed to keep you angry while nothing improves, and demagogues thrive on it.

The big one is always “free speech”.

They shout about “free speech”, then demand bans, sackings, deplatforming and police action the moment someone says something they don’t like. It’s always “I should be allowed to say anything” paired with “you should be silenced for saying that”. If you only defend speech that flatters your tribe, you’re not defending a principle. You’re defending your own right to heckle without being heckled back.

Then there’s the permanent fantasy budget.

They want a “small state” and low taxes, but also want more police, tougher sentencing, more prisons, mass deportations, bigger borders, more surveillance, and courts that run like clockwork. You can’t have a lean state and an expensive enforcement machine at the same time. Law and order costs money. If you don’t want to pay for it, you don’t really want law and order. You just want the theatre of it.

The same trick is played with public services.

They insist “Britain is full” and migration must be cut, then demand an NHS that works, social care that exists, and care homes that aren’t staffed by ghosts. If you want Scandinavian outcomes, you need workforce planning and funding at scale. Either you train and retain, or you recruit internationally. What you can’t do is strangle both and then blame the people doing the actual work for being “woke”.

Housing is the same con in a different suit.

They say we can’t house “our own”, then oppose the planning reform, public investment and housebuilding that would actually increase supply. Instead they blame migrants, which is politically convenient because it requires no competence, no delivery, and no admission that the last fourteen years hollowed out local government and turned housing into a speculative asset class. It’s the political equivalent of setting fire to your kitchen and then blaming the cat for the lack of cupboards.

Then you get the “protect women and girls” routine.

Suddenly they’re all feminist, usually the same people who’ve spent decades voting for parties that cut refuges, legal aid, youth services, and court capacity, and who presided over prosecution and conviction rates that have been nowhere near good enough for serious sexual offences. Women only exist in their politics when they’re useful as a battering ram in an argument about trans people. That’s not safeguarding. It’s opportunism with a ribbon on it.

And when they say “protect the children”, it’s the same move.

They’ll scream about drag queens and rainbow lanyards while opposing the boring, real world things that actually protect children: properly funded schools, mental health services, social workers, youth provision, safeguarding capacity, and poverty reduction. They fight imaginary threats because it’s emotionally satisfying, while tolerating real harm as “personal responsibility”.

On climate and energy, the contradictions are almost elegant.

They claim to love British farmers and British countryside, then deny or minimise the climate driven flooding, heat stress and crop disruption that will hammer agriculture and infrastructure. They oppose renewables on the grounds of “protecting land”, while ignoring that climate change is what actually destroys productive land. And the numbers make the land argument look even sillier: solar takes roughly 0.4% of UK land, and even a major build out of onshore wind plus solar could come in at under 3% of England. Meanwhile, around 13% of England’s agricultural land is in flood risk areas, and about 59% of the highest grade farmland is at risk from river or coastal flooding. Renewables use a sliver of land. Climate change threatens vastly more of the good stuff.

Then there’s the “support our farmers” flag waving paired with the obsession with US trade deals.

They demand loyalty to British producers, then cheer the deregulated trade agenda that undercuts them. You don’t get thriving domestic farming while importing cheaper food produced under different standards and different cost bases. That’s not patriotism. That’s a bumper sticker.

Sovereignty is another one they can’t keep straight.

They shout about “taking back control”, then swoon over foreign strongmen and imported culture wars, usually from the US. You don’t defend British sovereignty by treating Trump as a prophet and Brussels as a demon. That’s not independence. It’s outsourcing your personality.

And the “anti elite” pose is almost comedy.

They rage about “the establishment”, then follow billionaire backed politicians, billionaire owned media, and think tanks funded by wealthy donors. It’s not a revolt against elites. It’s a hostile takeover by different elites, with better marketing and worse morals. They don't realise they're being fleeced - again.

They also claim to be pro meritocracy while yearning for hierarchy.

They talk about hard work and fairness, but their version of “traditional Britain” is deference, inherited advantage, and knowing your place. They want meritocracy for themselves and a pecking order for everyone else. That’s why “common sense” always seems to mean “stop questioning people like me”.

Another core contradiction is personal responsibility versus conspiracy addiction.

They preach self reliance, then explain every failure as sabotage by migrants, judges, lawyers, the BBC, universities, civil servants, “globalists”, or “woke”. It’s a perfect closed loop. If you’re always the victim of a plot, you never have to admit you were wrong, or that your side made bad choices.

That brings us to “woke has gone mad”, the all purpose fog machine.

“Woke” means anything from “I saw a black person in an advert” to “someone asked me not to be a knob”. It’s not an argument, it’s a vibe. People use it when they want to sound serious while avoiding anything serious. It’s a way of declaring victory without having to prove anything.

Then there’s the “British culture” routine, which is always paired with contempt for British institutions.

They wrap themselves in patriotism while attacking the courts, the BBC, the civil service, universities, regulators, and the idea that public standards matter. They love Britain as a costume, but hate the mechanisms that make Britain function. It’s nationalism as branding, not nationhood as responsibility.

And here’s where the “Christian country” performance belongs, because it’s the same costume cupboard.

They bang on about Christianity as though it’s a tribal ID card, then cheer figures like Tommy Robinson (Stephen Yaxley - Lennon) as culture war saints while they do the opposite of what Christianity actually asks of people. Humility, charity, truthfulness, restraint, love of neighbour, care for the poor, judgement reserved for God rather than Facebook. All swapped out for rage, scapegoats, and a permanently clenched jaw under a St Georges Cross. It’s not faith. It’s vibes, with a bit of stained glass branding to make the nastiness feel respectable.

Immigration is where the whole thing goes from incoherent to poisonous.

They claim it’s about culture and “concern”, but it always ends up as collective blame. It’s never “this specific policy failed”, it’s “those people are the problem”. That’s a direct rejection of the most basic British legal principle: individual guilt, not group guilt. When you start treating whole communities as guilty, you stop doing politics and start doing something uglier.

And the final contradiction is the one that makes the whole culture war look like an avoidance strategy.

They claim to want national unity, then keep half the country designated as enemies: Remainers, teachers, students, London, “woke”, Muslims, trans people, anyone who reads a book, anyone who asks for evidence. Unity is impossible when your politics depends on a permanent internal enemy.

That’s the point of it all. Culture war politics is what you do when you can’t fix housing, can’t fix wages, can’t fix the NHS, can’t fix productivity, and can’t admit Brexit shrank the room you’re trying to renovate. So you keep the audience angry, point at a scapegoat, and call it “common sense”.

It isn’t common sense. It’s common distraction. And a lot of people fall for it because their critical faculties have been hijacked by conmen who want to fleece them.

Vets' Bills

We have arrived at the point where owning a pet feels like signing up for another child, complete with mounting, unpredictable private medical bills and a corporate business model that treats compassion as a margin driver.

Veterinary practice used to be a straightforward, local profession. You built a relationship with a vet you trusted. They knew your animal’s quirks, they offered sensible advice, and if something went wrong you felt their clinical judgement – not a balance sheet – shaped your care. That model is collapsing under the weight of private equity and consolidators who now dominate the sector.

These companies wave statements about “not pursuing profit” like a talisman. Yet behind the PR, they impose production targets on their clinicians – quotas for scans, for dental procedures, for revenue per head of cattle or cat. That is not subtle. Targets are the language of commerce, not medicine. When a vet has to justify why they did not hit a numerical target for advanced diagnostics, the clinical compass tilts towards the financial one. Reassurances about quality ring hollow when the remuneration frameworks embed targets that mirror high-street sales metrics.

Prices have soared. Simple consultations can cost a small fortune; diagnostics and procedures quickly add four-figure sums. Pet insurance helps, but premiums are rising too, and excesses bite. For many owners it no longer feels like caring for a companion; it feels like servicing debt. You start budgeting for “that inevitable vet bill” the way you would for university fees – only with less certainty and greater anxiety.

The defenders of the corporate model point to investment and modern equipment. Fine. Upgrading X-rays and ultrasound machines is good. But investment is not a virtue if it comes with a compulsory quota for their use. A bit like insisting that every child must sit five extra exams a year to justify the school’s new sports hall.

The real scandal is not simply that vets are expensive. Good clinical care should cost money. The scandal is that the financial incentives under the new ownership structures actively shape clinical pathways towards more, and more expensive, interventions. Targets on medical procedures are a profit mechanism wearing a clinical coat.

Pet ownership should be a joy, not a ledger exercise where every sneeze leads to a quotation and every limp triggers a target-driven scan. If we want to preserve trust between owners and clinicians we need to call out the rhetoric for what it is: a corporate gloss on what is essentially a commercialised health service with all the perverse incentives that entails.

Until that truth is faced, “loving your pet” will continue to mean planning for another child with none of the love but all of the bills.

Tariffs, Threats, and Farage on a Lead

Tariffs. That is the story. Not Greenland, not Arctic maps, not “national security”, but the fact the President of the United States is now openly using tariffs as a punishment for political disobedience.

And not just against Denmark. The threat, as reported, is aimed at any country that refuses to “go along” with his plan to control Greenland. In other words: if you oppose me, you pay. That is not how alliances work. That is how protection rackets work.

This matters for Britain because it blows up the last surviving Brexit fairytale: that we could drift away from Europe and thrive by cuddling up to America instead. Under Trump, America is not a partner. It is a lever. If he is willing to threaten tariffs against countries for refusing a territorial grab, he will use the same weapon for food standards, medicines pricing, digital tax, defence procurement, anything where he wants submission.

Tariffs are not clever, either. They are a tax on consumers and businesses, sold as patriotism. They trigger retaliation, distort supply chains, and make trade less predictable. Big economies can swagger through that sort of self harm for a while. Medium sized ones get battered.

So Britain’s interest is obvious. We need to be anchored to the EU, because that is where our trade actually is, and because the EU is the only structure in our neighbourhood with the economic weight to resist this kind of nonsense. You do not counter a bully by standing alone in the playground. You do it by standing with the other kids who can hit back.

And then there is Nigel Farage, standing in the corner like a man who has just realised the dog he has been praising is not a noble wolf but a guard dog that bites everyone, including the owner.

Farage has spent years selling Trump as Britain’s great ally and a US trade deal as the Brexit jackpot. Now Trump is threatening tariffs against any country that refuses to fall in line over Greenland. That is the model Farage admires: sovereignty for America, obedience for everyone else.

It is humiliating. Not just for Farage, but for anyone who swallowed the idea that “taking back control” meant swapping Brussels for Washington. If Trump can economically threaten allies over a land grab, Britain is not going to be treated as an equal partner. We are going to be treated as a client.

So yes, Greenland matters. But the bigger point is the tariff threat itself. It tells you exactly what Trumpism is: power without restraint, deals without loyalty, and punishment as policy.

If Farage still wants to hitch Britain to that, he should at least have the honesty to call it what it is. Not independence. Not sovereignty.

Trans Rights - Allegedly

I have a trans friend and I have been watching the Darlington NHS Trust case with interest. Honestly, it is the perfect example of how Britain now handles anything remotely complicated. We take a real, messy clash of rights, we refuse to admit it is a clash of rights, and then we act shocked when it ends up in court and everyone is furious.

Because that is what this was. Not a pantomime villain story. Not a purity test. Not a chance for Twitter to scream “Nazi!” at strangers. It was two sets of people saying something completely normal, but we treat the answer as binary because we're led to believe it's a binary world - it's not.

The nurses were saying: this is a women’s changing room. It exists for a reason. I should not have to undress in a space I understand to be single sex, and then be told I am some sort of medieval bigot for wanting privacy. That is not an exotic demand. It is the baseline expectation that created female facilities in the first place.

And the trans woman, meanwhile, was saying: I am a colleague. I am here to do my job. I should not be treated as a threat just for existing, and I should not be shoved into the men’s changing room where I am more exposed to humiliation, hostility, or worse. Again, not exotic. Just basic dignity.

So what did the Trust do? It did the classic modern institutional thing. It picked one answer, declared it morally superior, and treated everyone who had a problem with it as a nuisance. Then it looked baffled when the nuisance turned into a tribunal.

This is where people start doing the lazy comparisons. “Well you’re no more naked than at a beach.” Fine. But nobody is being ordered by HR to go to the beach at 7am with their colleagues and a manager hovering nearby. Context matters. A workplace changing room is not a leisure space, it is a functional space where privacy expectations are baked in.

Equally, the other lazy move is to say “single sex means single sex, end of story.” But if your solution to every trans person is “use the other room”, you are not creating inclusion. You are creating a daily ritual of exclusion, and then congratulating yourself for being practical.

The truth is that both sides are right about the bit they are talking about, and wrong about the bit they are pretending does not exist. Women’s privacy matters. Trans dignity matters. You cannot solve that by shouting one of them off the stage.

The synthesis is painfully simple, and that is why it drives everyone mad. This is not mainly a philosophical problem. It is a design problem. You stop treating changing rooms like a battlefield and you build privacy in by default.

Lockable single occupant changing rooms. Proper cubicles. A genuinely separate option. The kind of thing that would make the whole argument evaporate overnight. It protects women’s privacy without turning trans staff into a permanent exception, and it stops managers trying to do equality policy with slogans and a straight face.

Because that is what went wrong here. Not that people had feelings. People always have feelings. What went wrong is that the employer acted as if only one set of feelings counted, then discovered that the law is not a customer satisfaction survey.

And that is the wider lesson. If you want a functioning workplace, you do not force colleagues into a moral cage fight in a changing room and then call it “inclusion”. You design the space so nobody has to surrender their dignity for someone else’s comfort.

It is not hard. It is just more effort than issuing a policy memo and hoping everyone shuts up.

If Youre Not Orange, Youre a Target

I heard it on LBC, and I nearly spat my tea out.

Sadiq Khan was having another pop at Trump and said something along the lines of: if your skin colour is different to President Trump’s, you might feel nervous about “a tap on the shoulder” from the authorities.

Now, I get what he meant. Under Trump, plenty of non-white people and immigrants feel more exposed. The rhetoric shifts, the enforcement gets nastier, and suddenly the state feels less like a referee and more like a bouncer with a grudge.

But “different to Trump’s skin colour” is a magnificent choice of words, because Trump’s skin colour isn’t even the same as most white people. He’s not a reference point for whiteness. He’s a reference point for whatever happens when you let a man marinate in fake tan for forty years and then put him under studio lighting.

So you end up with the accidental truth hiding inside the joke: if you’re not orange, you’re a target.

Not literally, obviously. ICE aren’t wandering about with a colour chart like they’re choosing tiles for a bathroom. But politically, that’s what Trumpism does. It draws a circle round “people like him”, then treats everyone else as suspicious, expendable, or useful as a warning to the rest. It’s not really about legality, it’s about hierarchy.

And that’s the bit people miss when they try to sanitise it as “just enforcing the rules”. When enforcement becomes theatre, it stops being precise. It becomes a performance of power. It sweeps wider than it needs to, it makes mistakes, and it creates fear as a feature, not a bug.

So yes, laugh at Khan’s line. You should. It’s genuinely funny. But it also lands, by accident, on the reality: Trump’s politics isn’t a careful system of law. It’s a loyalty test with uniforms.

And somehow, in all this, it’s never the orange bloke who gets the tap on the shoulder.

UK Peacekeeping Force

The comforting fiction was always that British troops could be sent to Ukraine as “peacekeepers” and that this would somehow avoid the risk of fighting. That illusion barely survived contact with reality when imagined as a purely British deployment, and once a multinational coalition is added it collapses entirely. A coalition presence does not soften enforcement, it sharpens it, because any breach immediately carries wider political consequences whether ministers like it or not.

If a peace deal is broken, the most likely culprit is obvious. Russia probes, tests, and pushes just far enough to see who blinks. The real question is not whether that happens, but how the response is structured so that it deters escalation rather than inviting it. The least dangerous model is also the least sentimental. Ukraine holds the line, and coalition forces sit behind it.

Ukraine already has what Britain and others largely lack: mass, experience, and unquestioned legitimacy to defend its own territory. Asking foreign troops to take the first hit would be politically explosive and militarily unnecessary. Ukrainian forces would remain on the frontline, responding immediately to any breach. That keeps responsibility clear and denies Moscow its favourite propaganda trick, because it cannot plausibly claim it is “fighting NATO” if Ukrainian soldiers are doing the fighting on Ukrainian soil.

Behind them sits the coalition as a strategic reserve, and this is where euphemism becomes dangerous. A reserve is not a decorative afterthought. It exists to move. Its purpose is to plug gaps, reinforce weak sectors, stabilise breakthroughs, protect key infrastructure, and ensure that a local Russian success does not remain local for long. The signal is deliberately blunt: you may test Ukraine, but you will not be allowed to exploit Ukraine.

This structure has real advantages if people are honest about them. It preserves escalation control by ensuring coalition forces are not dragged into firefights by accident or provocation, but move forward deliberately, on pre agreed triggers, with political authority already baked in. It denies Moscow the fog of ambiguity it thrives on. It also matches capability to role. Ukraine supplies the manpower and resilience. The coalition supplies intelligence fusion, ISR, air and missile warning, logistics depth, cyber attribution, and command integration. Britain’s asymmetric strengths finally make sense in this framework, amplifying Ukrainian power rather than pretending to substitute for it.

It also raises the cost of a breach without the theatrical exposure of lining foreign troops along the contact line. A reserve that can move is often more stabilising than troops permanently in the trenches, because it tells Russia that any attempt to widen a breach risks immediate internationalisation of the conflict, without handing it the easy headline of foreign soldiers firing first.

None of this removes risk, and pretending otherwise would be negligent. A reserve that deploys becomes a fighting force. If coalition units move forward, they become combatants. Casualties become possible and escalation becomes real. The distinction here is not between war and peace, but between controlled response and chaotic drift.

That in turn places a hard requirement on the coalition itself. This only works if everyone involved stops lying to themselves. Shared rules of engagement. Pre agreed triggers. Integrated command. No decorative contingents with caveats so tight they turn into liabilities the moment anything happens. A coalition that mixes enforcers and observers is not a deterrent, it is an invitation.

There is also a political trap waiting to be sprung. Governments will be tempted to sell this model as safe. It is safer than pretending peacekeeping means observation, and safer than scattering flags along a frontline, but it is not safe. A reserve that is never allowed to deploy is a bluff. One that deploys too late because politicians hesitate arrives not as deterrence, but as crisis management.

So if Britain and others are serious about enforcing a settlement in Ukraine, this is the only credible architecture. Ukraine fights first. The coalition stands behind it, integrated, loaded, and unmistakable. Call it what it is, not peacekeeping, but peace enforcement with escalation control. Anything else is theatre, and theatre has a habit of getting people killed.

One Nation or Oblivion: The Tory Choice

Robert Jenrick is a neat little case study in modern Tory politics. He came up through the “serious” briefs - Treasury, then Housing and Local Government - the sort of jobs where you might actually fix something tangible, like planning or housing supply.

Then the party ran out of results and doubled down on performance. Jenrick pivoted accordingly, reinventing himself as an immigration hardliner. That’s not a personal quirk, it’s the Conservative Party’s default setting now. When governing fails, they don’t change policy, they change the volume and hope nobody notices the difference.

Now he’s been kicked out of the shadow cabinet, with the whip removed and his membership suspended, on the claim he was plotting to defect in a way designed to do maximum damage. Which tells you everything about the state of the party. They’re not rebuilding, they’re eating their own, in public, again. It’s less “government in waiting” and more “WhatsApp group that’s gone feral”.

As expected he's ended up in Reform, and it wasn't a principled conversion. It’s a career move. Reform is where discarded Conservatives go when they still want airtime but no longer have a route back through their own party. Farage doesn’t mind because he’s not building a normal party, he’s building a brand, and defectors are basically free advertising with a human face. Kemi, however, shot his Fox.

The bigger problem for the Conservatives is that chasing Reform is suicide. “Reform Lite” doesn’t win Reform voters because they can always get the full-fat version from Farage, now with extra shouting and fewer numbers that add up. But it does repel the people the Conservatives actually need: the boring, pragmatic centre-right who want competence, stability, and a government that doesn’t behave like a comment thread under a Daily Mail story.

Their only hope is to put clear blue water between themselves and Reform. Drop the culture-war cosplay, stop trying to out-Farage Farage, and go back to something vaguely recognisable as One Nation Conservatism: grown-up economics, functional public services, and immigration policy that’s firm but sane. Otherwise they’ll just keep shrinking until they’re reduced to a recruitment agency for Reform with a nice logo and a long memory of better days.

The decline of the Tory party can be laid at the feet of a certain Boris Johnson, who purged the sensible, One Nation Tories and replaced them with incompetents who were loyal.  

Breaking news, 2026: Kemi Badenoch defects to Reform, citing “principle”, “common sense”, and a sudden desire to never answer a serious question ever again. However, Farage has rejected her as she hasn't failed seriously  - yet. "A financial scandal would help though," a close associate of Farage told this reporter.

You have to laugh.

A Trap of His Own Making

Elon Musk has a problem, and it’s one he created by trying to sell two incompatible ideas at the same time. He champions nationalism, borders, sovereignty, and the idea that nations should control their own rules and destiny. Fine. But he also runs a supranational communications platform and markets it as the “global town square” (more like a global Wetherspoons), meaning one borderless space where his definition of free speech applies to everyone.

Those two things can’t both be true. Sovereignty doesn’t just mean waving flags and feeling important. It means each country gets to make and enforce its own laws, including laws about harassment, intimidation, incitement, and criminal content. If you genuinely support sovereignty, you don’t get to squeal when sovereign states insist your platform follows their rules.

And this isn’t theoretical anymore. The UK is probing X under the Online Safety Act over AI deepfake content, and X is moving to comply with UK law. Musk has basically said he’ll comply where things are illegal. Which is an odd thing to present as a concession, because that’s what “law” means. It’s not an optional extra like heated seats. You don’t get to run a platform in a country and then act surprised when the country expects you to obey its laws.

What makes it funnier is that he’s complaining about censorship at the same time. So he’s demanding sovereignty for nations, while fuming when sovereign nations enforce it on him. It’s like insisting everyone should have their own front door key, then having a tantrum because you can’t wander into their kitchen whenever you fancy.

That’s the trap. “Free speech within the law” sounds perfectly reasonable until you remember there isn’t one law. There are hundreds. What’s protected speech in the US can be unlawful in Germany, actionable in the UK, and politically explosive elsewhere. So “free speech” stops being a principle and turns into a compliance spreadsheet, with inconsistent enforcement and permanent accusations of bias. The more “global” you are, the less coherent your rules become.

The pantomime ends completely when the platform is implicated in something plainly criminal. AI generated sexualised imagery, including minors, isn’t “debate”. It’s police work, liability, and enforcement. There’s no heroic free speech posture that survives contact with criminal reality, and Musk has already had to do public damage control on that front because even his most loyal fans tend to go a bit quiet when the subject is child abuse material.

Then there’s the grooming gangs rhetoric, which he’s leaned into because it’s the perfect culture war accelerant. “Protect the children” is emotionally irresistible, and it’s also the oldest censorship lever in the book. Once you start swinging that hammer, you don’t get to act shocked when governments pick it up and use it on your platform, especially when the harm is real and the law is engaged.

So Musk ends up trapped between two outcomes. If he complies with national law, his free speech fans call it censorship. If he refuses, he’s effectively claiming a private company can override sovereign democratic states, which is political authority without consent. Either way, the “global town square” fantasy collapses into what it always was: a private power deciding what speech gets amplified, then pretending it’s neutral because it sounds nicer.

Musk wanted to be the man who liberated speech. Instead he’s discovered the oldest political fact there is. Once you control the biggest megaphone on earth, you don’t get to pretend you’re not part of the state. You’re just doing politics in a hoodie, with a ban button.

Supersonic, Uneconomic, Unrepeatable - Very British

A new 50p to celebrate Concorde. Very British. We’ve always loved commemorating the magnificent failure. We don’t do triumph in this country unless it’s slightly haunted, faintly uneconomic, and wrapped in nostalgia.

Concorde was an engineering miracle. Needle nose, supersonic, and completely uninterested in what accountants think. Britain and France basically saying, if the Americans can put a man on the moon, we can at least get a businessman to New York before his drink warms up and he starts asking questions.

And it worked. That’s the irritating bit. It wasn’t one of those “great idea, shame about physics” projects. It actually flew, it was safe, it looked magnificent, and it made a noise that suggested it was personally offended by the concept of quiet. If you lived under the flight path you didn’t need an alarm clock, you needed ear defenders and a sense of humour.

It also didn’t make any money. Or not enough money to justify the whole thing, anyway. Which is where it becomes properly British. A beautiful, expensive, impractical triumph that turns out to be a commercial disaster. The sort of thing we’re brilliant at, right up until we have to pay for it.

Concorde was the perfect machine for a world that never quite arrived. Too costly, too noisy, too politically awkward, and too early. The future took one look and said, “Yes, lovely, but can you do it with budget airlines, plastic seats, and a sandwich that tastes of damp regret?”

So now we’re minting a coin. Of course we are. We can’t resist turning a mad, glamorous, slightly embarrassing chapter of history into something you can lose in the washing machine.

And I don’t even mean that entirely as a dig. It’s not just nostalgia, although there’s plenty of that. It’s the fact Concorde reminds us we used to do big things without immediately asking if they’d pay for themselves by Tuesday. We’d argue, we’d overspend, we’d get stroppy with each other, and then we’d build something astonishing anyway.

These days we still talk about being “world-leading” at everything, but mostly we mean “world-leading at announcing things”. We’ll spend a decade arguing about a railway line, or a reservoir, or whether a town is allowed a bypass without upsetting a badger, a hedge, and three different committees. Meanwhile the big ideas get filed under “too difficult” and quietly die of paperwork.

So yes, Concorde failed as a business model. But as a statement of intent it was magnificent. It was Britain and France doing something hard and glamorous because it could be done, not because it made sense on a spreadsheet.

Now it’s on a 50p. Which feels about right for modern Britain. Something extraordinary, reduced to something you find down the back of the sofa while looking for the remote.

The Least Bad Decision - and the Worst Paperwork

West Midlands Police banned Maccabi Tel Aviv fans from the Villa match, and the country immediately did what it always does: it argued about the morality, the politics, and whether the police are secretly Nazis or secretly Hamas, depending on which end of Twitter you fell out of this morning.

Here is the boring truth. It was probably the most pragmatic decision available.

If you genuinely believe there’s a credible risk of serious violence, and you don’t have the resources or certainty to control it, you don’t “stand firm” for the cameras. You remove the flashpoint. It’s standard military logic. Deny the engagement. Don’t offer the enemy a target. Live to fight another day. Not because a football match is a battlefield, but because the risk maths is the same.

That’s not cowardice. It’s force protection. It’s the difference between a controlled operation and an inquiry with a lot of candles and a photograph on the news.

The scandal isn’t that the police made a hard call. The scandal is that they tried to justify it with material that turned out to be a dog’s breakfast, including an AI-generated false claim that should never have made it into anything with a crest on the letterhead. If your decision is driven by uncertainty and capacity, be honest about that. Don’t pretend you’ve got a watertight evidential case when you haven’t.

And this is where the modern stupidity kicks in: the transactional AI trap. Which, as it happens, I’d only just been banging on about a few days ago, because it’s become the default failure mode of modern institutions.

Someone, somewhere, has treated Copilot like a vending machine for facts. Put question in. Get answer out. Paste into a report. Job done. No checking. No primary source. No adult supervision. Just a nice confident paragraph that looks official enough to survive a meeting.

Except AI doesn’t “know” anything. It predicts plausible text. And when you use it transactionally, it will happily invent a supporting example with the same calm authority it uses to recommend a Malbec you should only drink chilled. The result is what we got here: an official justification padded with a hallucination, like a school essay written at 2am by a teenager who hasn’t read the book.

AI didn’t sabotage the process. The process sabotaged itself by treating AI output as evidence.

Then Chris Philp - the cosplay Farage of the Tory Party - wades in, declaring there would have been violence from “Islamist extremists”. Not “there was a risk”, not “there were concerns”, but effectively “it was going to happen”. With no public evidence. No chain of reasoning. No operational detail. Just certainty, served hot.

And here’s the thing. Philp isn’t in government. He doesn’t have access to live intelligence. So when he declares that violence was inevitable, he isn’t briefing the public from the inside. He’s guessing from the outside, using the scariest label available, and presenting it as certainty.

Which is classic Philp. He’s always struck me as the sort of man who is permanently auditioning for his next job. I’m fully expecting him either to challenge Badenoch for the leadership, or to defect to Reform and start talking about “common sense policing” from a lectern in Clacton.

Fine. Let’s take him at his word. If violence was inevitable, how exactly would he have policed it?

Because once you declare inevitability, you inherit responsibility for the counter-plan. And the options are brutally limited.

Option one: remove the target. That means excluding the away fans. It collapses the whole thing because there is no objective. No target, no spectacle, no confrontation.

Option two: remove the crowd. Play behind closed doors. Ban the home fans as well. Reduce it to a televised training session with stewards and a lot of empty plastic seats. That might reduce the risk inside the ground, but it doesn’t stop trouble elsewhere in the city. And if the target is still in Birmingham after full time, you’ve still got the same problem, just with different timings.

Option three: throw vast resources at it. Mutual aid. Public order units. Sterile routes. Transport hub control. Escorts. Rapid arrest teams. A full-scale operation. Eye-wateringly expensive, massively disruptive, and still with no cast-iron guarantee that you’ve stopped the one determined actor who only needs one gap.

That’s the real world. That’s what policing looks like when you’re dealing with a politically charged threat in a crowd of tens of thousands. It’s not solved by saying “extremists” louder.

So yes, banning the Israeli fans “worked”. Of course it did. It didn’t solve extremism. It just stopped this particular match becoming a stage for it. Removing the target reduces the likelihood of confrontation. It denies the hostile actors their moment. Remove the objective and the operation collapses.

A decision can be operationally correct and administratively indefensible at the same time. That’s what happened here.

And this brings us to the simple question everyone is now dancing around: should the Chief Constable be sacked?

On the facts in the public domain, yes. Not because the force made a hard decision under pressure, but because the leadership allowed that decision to be justified with sloppy, inaccurate material that collapsed under scrutiny. That is a failure of competence and a failure of standards. If you can’t trust the evidential basis for a major public order call, you can’t trust the leadership that signed it off.

There is one complication, and it matters. The Home Secretary can say she has “no confidence” until she runs out of breath, but she cannot just fire him. Under the current rules, that power sits with the local Police and Crime Commissioner. So the political theatre will continue, but the actual decision rests locally.

Sometimes the least bad decision is the only one left. But don’t pad it with AI hallucinations and then act surprised when the paperwork collapses in public.

Compulsory? No. Just “Voluntary” - Until It Isn’t

I'm on my favourite hobby-horse again - strategic overreach to get what you want.

Starmer has “backtracked” on compulsory digital ID. Or, more accurately, he’s stopped saying the quiet bit out loud. Because if you want to introduce a mandatory ID system in Britain, the quickest way to kill it is to announce a mandatory ID system in Britain. The country goes into instant civil liberties panic, the newspapers do their “internal passport” routine, and half the population suddenly remembers the Blair-era ID cards fiasco with the clarity of a war veteran. So the clever move isn’t to charge straight at compulsion. It’s to step back, call it voluntary, and let the thing walk in through the front door like a harmless convenience.

And to be clear, a voluntary digital ID could be genuinely useful. Less paperwork, fewer admin errors, quicker checks, easier access to services, less of that uniquely British misery where you spend forty minutes proving you’re you to a system that still thinks fax machines are cutting-edge. If it works properly, people will adopt it because it saves time and hassle. Not because they’ve suddenly become keen on government databases, but because most of us would rather not spend our remaining years wrestling with identity checks that feel like they were designed by a committee of damp cardboard.

But that’s exactly why my theory of strategic overreach makes sense. Labour reached too far by floating a compulsory use case, hit the predictable backlash, then “retreated” to voluntary while still achieving the practical effect: building the infrastructure and normalising the idea. It’s tactical in the short term, strategic in the long term, because once the system exists and uptake is high, it becomes far easier to turn it into a default and later argue for it to become a requirement, than to try to impose compulsion from day one.

Once the infrastructure exists and uptake is high, the argument changes. It stops being “should we have this at all?” and becomes “why wouldn’t we standardise it?” The opposition starts to look like it’s blocking something that works, rather than defending a principle. And once employers, landlords, banks and service providers start designing their processes around it, “voluntary” begins to mean what it always means in modern Britain: technically optional, practically unavoidable. Like self-checkouts. Yes, you can always go to a human till. If you can find one. If it’s open. If it’s staffed. If the queue isn’t halfway to Wales.

That’s where the civil liberties concerns aren’t melodrama, they’re realism. Mission creep isn’t a conspiracy theory, it’s a predictable pattern. Once you’ve built a national identity rail, every department will want to run something on it, and every contractor will want to sell something through it. Today it’s right-to-work checks. Tomorrow it’s right-to-rent, age verification, benefits access, healthcare, travel, who knows what else. Each step will be sold as “common sense”, and each step will be easier because the system is already there, already normalised, already embedded.

There are also hard practical risks that don’t vanish just because the intention is benign. A big identity system becomes a very attractive target. It’s a honeypot for hackers, scammers, hostile states, and anyone who fancies making money out of other people’s lives. Even if the technology is solid, the prize is enormous, and when it goes wrong it won’t go wrong politely, one person at a time. It will go wrong at scale. Then there’s exclusion. Britain isn’t made up entirely of people with the latest phone, stable housing, tidy paperwork, and the patience to navigate apps and verification loops. If “voluntary” becomes the default route, those who can’t or won’t use it don’t get freedom, they get friction. They get delays, suspicion, and the slow punishment of being permanently on the awkward path.

So yes, in the narrow sense it’s a backtrack, because the compulsory framing was politically toxic and they’ve pulled it back. But it’s also the smarter route if the long-term ambition is to build a system that can later be made mandatory, or at least become mandatory in practice without ever needing to say so. That’s why “voluntary” is not the reassuring end of the story. It’s the beginning of the normalisation phase.

If Labour want to prove they’re not playing that game, the test is simple: keep genuine non-digital alternatives, keep strict limits on scope, and make any expansion require explicit primary legislation rather than being expanded quietly as “just an upgrade”. Otherwise voluntary is just the warm-up act, and the main event will arrive the moment the public stops paying attention.