You Can Declare an Emergency. You Can’t Invent the Powers

The United States Supreme Court has just performed an act so shocking, so constitutionally outrageous, that it may cause permanent injury to the modern political psyche. It has read the law.

Not skimmed it. Not waved it around at a rally. Not squinted at it through a haze of grievance and capital letters. Actually read it.

And in doing so, it committed the gravest sin imaginable in contemporary politics. It noticed that the word "tariffs" does not appear in a law being used to impose tariffs.

This has caused understandable distress. After all, the International Emergency Economic Powers Act sounds exactly like the sort of thing you would use if you wanted to do absolutely anything at all, simply by declaring an emergency. The clue is in the title. It contains the words "emergency" and "powers," which in modern political dialect translates roughly as "do what you like."

Unfortunately, the Court has now pointed out a tedious technicality. Tariffs are taxes. And under the US Constitution, taxes are the responsibility of Congress. This is not an obscure footnote or an interpretive flourish. It is the entire point of having a legislature.

The dissenting judges, to their credit, took a more modern and imaginative view of language. They essentially argued that when Congress authorised the president to "regulate" imports, it might well have meant "tax them arbitrarily, in unlimited amounts, for as long as he feels cross." This is a refreshingly creative approach to statutory interpretation, and one that could be usefully applied elsewhere. One imagines bank customers would be fascinated to learn that "account management" now includes confiscation.

But the majority remained stubbornly anchored in the dull world of words meaning what they say. Their ruling has now crystallised the law, which is deeply inconvenient. It means that presidents cannot simply rummage around in the constitutional toolbox, pick up the largest wrench labelled "emergency," and start swinging it at global trade.

Naturally, this has prompted howls of outrage from those who had grown accustomed to government by proclamation. They had assumed the presidency had evolved into something between a medieval monarch and a disappointed hotel manager, empowered to impose penalties on foreigners for failing to admire the curtains.

What makes this episode particularly instructive is that the Court’s conservative majority largely agreed with the liberal minority. This is deeply unsettling, because it suggests the decision was based not on tribal loyalty, but on law. And law, as we are increasingly discovering, is a profoundly unreliable instrument when your strategy depends on ignoring it.

The ruling does not mean tariffs are impossible. It merely means Congress must authorise them, which is where tariffs have always lived. This is rather like discovering that only the owner of a house can sell it, rather than a man who has loudly declared himself in charge of the neighbourhood.

In the end, nothing has changed, except one crucial thing. The emergency powers toolbox has been closed, labelled properly, and returned to its shelf. And somewhere, deep in the machinery of American government, a dusty and neglected concept has stirred briefly back to life.

Just After Opening Time

You know how, when there’s a bombing in parts of the Muslim world, reports often say it happened just after Friday prayers? The phrase does a lot of work. It tells you the place was full. It tells you it was timed. It tells you the weekly rhythm had peaked.

It got me thinking what the British equivalent would be.

We don’t really have a single weekly religious congregation any more. If something happened “just after evensong”, most of the country would assume it was a Radio 4 scheduling mishap. Our predictable mass gatherings are secular.

So the British bulletin would read: “The bombing occurred just after Wetherspoons opened on Saturday morning.”

You can picture it. Nine o’clock. The doors swing open. The early congregation files in with quiet resolve. The laminated breakfast menu is studied with monk-like dedication. Coffee for some. A pint for others. The carpet pattern defies science. It is ritual without theology, but it happens every week.

And if you wanted the full, grim symmetry - the so called double tap - you would wait.

“Another device detonated just after the 3pm kick off.”

Now you have the second congregation. Scarves raised like hymn sheets. Chants replacing psalms. Entire towns gathered because the fixture list demands it. Hope, despair, indignation at the referee - all delivered on schedule.

The joke, dark though it is, rests on structure not belief. Friday prayers marks the weekly moment when large numbers gather. In Britain, our weekly congregation points are the opening of Spoons and the 3pm whistle.

We have not stopped assembling. We have simply changed the altar.

And if a newsreader ever did say, in solemn tones, that something happened just after Spoons opened and again just after the 3pm kick off, the entire country would understand immediately. Not because of doctrine. Because we know exactly where we would have been.

R v Brother, and the Curious Case of the Bone-Dry Defendant

There is something magnificently British about the possibility that one day, in a courtroom smelling faintly of damp carpet and quiet authority, a clerk might rise and announce, “Rex versus Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor.”

Not Prince Andrew. Not His Royal Highness. Just Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor. Defendant.

And Rex, of course, meaning the King. His brother.

It would not be Charles the man prosecuting him. Charles would be elsewhere, unveiling a plaque or examining an anachronistic shrub. The prosecution would be brought in his name but entirely without his involvement. This is the genius of the British constitution. The monarch is everywhere in theory and nowhere in practice. The law proceeds with perfect indifference to family Christmas seating plans.

In the eyes of the court, Andrew would simply be another name on the docket. No titles. No ceremony. Just procedure. The same quiet machinery that deals with unpaid taxes and unfortunate scaffolding disputes would turn its attention, briefly and without emotion, to a man who once saluted from the quarterdeck.

It would be a moment of remarkable levelling. Because when titles fall away, what remains is simply the name and the evidence.

Or, in Andrew’s case, the absence of perspiration.

His most famous defence was not legal but biological. He explained, with straight-faced conviction, that he could not have been sweating at the relevant time because he did not sweat at all. A condition, he said, brought on decades earlier during the Falklands War. It was a bold strategy. Not alibi by witness, but alibi by epidermis.

He missed a commercial opportunity there. In a country that spends millions trying to suppress the faintest hint of underarm anxiety, he alone possessed the ultimate solution. Mountbatten-Windsor Dry. Guaranteed protection, even under intense public scrutiny.

Instead, the claim entered folklore. A reminder that confidence and plausibility are not always close acquaintances.

History offers less subtle precedents. His distant predecessor, the Duke of Clarence, allegedly resolved his own constitutional difficulties by falling into a butt of Malmsey wine. One hopes modern Britain would opt for something less medieval. Perhaps a vat of sherry. Something measured. Something bureaucratic. A quiet administrative misstep near a label marked “Property of the Crown.”

But no such drama is necessary. The real genius of the system is that nothing so theatrical need occur. The Crown does not rage. It does not seek vengeance. It simply processes.

And if ever the words are spoken - Rex versus Mountbatten-Windsor - they will carry no emotion at all.

Just the quiet, inescapable suggestion that even a man who never sweats cannot remain dry forever.

How a Tax Exile Becomes a Patriot Overnight

I have noticed a behavioural change on Facebook.

I have already written about Jim Ratcliffe and his pronouncements on immigration. His comments were revealing enough. But what has been more revealing is what happened afterwards. The shift has not been in Ratcliffe. It has been in the behaviour of those now rushing to defend him.

The man who physically removed himself from the UK tax system is suddenly being praised as a patriot. Nothing about his economic behaviour has changed. Only his rhetoric has.

This is a man who moved to Monaco. Not for the weather, but for the tax regime. Monaco does not tax personal income. It is a convenient place to live if one wishes to retain the benefits of British enterprise without the inconvenience of British taxation.

Ordinarily, this would provoke outrage. Social media is usually full of anger at billionaires who "don't pay their fair share." But something curious has happened.

Ratcliffe entered the immigration debate, using language that aligns with a particular political narrative. And suddenly, his tax exile status evaporated. The Monaco residency, the detachment from the UK tax system, and the asymmetry between public subsidy and private contribution, all quietly forgotten.

It is obvious, apparently, that Jim Ratcliffe, that famously patriotic UK taxpayer now resident in Monaco, has embraced Reform's rhetoric purely out of civic concern, and absolutely nothing to do with their enthusiasm for slashing taxes on the very wealthy.

After all, when a billionaire relocates to a tax haven and aligns himself with a political movement promising unfunded tax cuts tilted toward people exactly like him, the only reasonable conclusion, we are invited to believe, is coincidence. A remarkable coincidence that aligns perfectly with his financial interests.

Whether intentional or not, the alignment is unmistakable. The public response to it has been even more revealing.

His industrial empire has benefitted from substantial public support, funded by taxpayers. That cost does not vanish. It is transferred onto the public balance sheet. And if every wealthy individual behaved the same way, relocating their tax residency while retaining the benefits of the system that created their wealth, the burden would not disappear. It would shift onto those without the means to leave.

In defending the behaviour, people are legitimising a system that, if widely adopted, would worsen their own financial position.

This is not an economic calculation. It is an identity calculation.

Ratcliffe has not changed his contribution. He has changed his signalling. And that has been enough.

Humans filter reality through identity. When someone signals tribal alignment, inconvenient facts recede. Behaviour that would otherwise be disqualifying becomes forgivable, even admirable. Moral standards are not abandoned. They are applied asymmetrically. Identity does not erase judgement. It redirects it.

We have seen this before. Brexit provides the clearest example. Faced with economic harm, reduced trade, and weaker growth, many of its strongest supporters did not reconsider. Instead, the explanations multiplied. It was the pandemic. Global inflation. Ukraine. Sabotage. It was not the right Brexit.

Anything except Brexit itself.

This is not because the evidence does not exist. It is because accepting it would require abandoning an identity that has become psychologically important. Like a football supporter defending their club through defeat, loyalty becomes untethered from outcomes.

The same mechanism is visible now. Ratcliffe’s tax exile status, once disqualifying, becomes irrelevant once he signals alignment with the tribe. The facts have not changed. The identity has.

The contradiction is stark. A migrant who works and pays tax is framed as a burden. A billionaire who removed himself from the tax system is framed as an asset.

The difference is not economic. It is psychological. Contribution becomes secondary. Alignment becomes primary. The man who left the system is embraced as its defender. Those who sustain it are treated as its threat.

It reveals something uncomfortable, but important. For many, the debate was never really about economics. It was about identity all along.

Straight from the Horse's Mouth

Trump has been circling the Chagos Islands like a man trying to remember why he walked into the room. When Britain first agreed to transfer sovereignty to Mauritius while leasing back Diego Garcia, he called it weakness. Later, he conceded it might be the best deal available. Now, once again, it is a catastrophic surrender. Meanwhile, the United States government itself - the part staffed by admirals, diplomats, and people with maps - has formally backed the arrangement because it guarantees continued military access. The base remains. The runway does not dissolve simply because the paperwork changes hands.

Faced with this latest presidential lurch, Karoline Leavitt stepped forward and delivered what sounded like a clarifying statement but was, in reality, something far more revealing. When Trump posts on Truth Social, she said, it is “straight from the horse’s mouth.” In other words, this is not commentary. It is not impulse. It is policy. The President is speaking directly, and the world should listen accordingly.

This was not a casual remark. It was an attempt to elevate Trump’s latest Chagos pronouncement above the inconvenient fact that his own State Department had already endorsed the deal. It told allies to ignore the formal machinery of American foreign policy and focus instead on the President’s personal feed. The signal was clear: the post outranks the paperwork.

But this presents an obvious difficulty, because earlier this month the same “horse’s mouth” posted a video depicting Barack and Michelle Obama as monkeys. At that point, the White House’s enthusiasm for direct authorship cooled noticeably. Now there was talk of staff. Of process. Of material that had somehow slipped through. The pure, unfiltered presidential voice became, briefly, a shared administrative responsibility.

Yet Leavitt herself had already defined the terms. If Truth Social is the direct voice of the President when criticising Britain’s handling of Diego Garcia, then it is the direct voice of the President at all times. You cannot promote it to an instrument of state authority when it suits your geopolitical argument and demote it to a staff-managed accident when it becomes embarrassing. The mouth cannot be presidential on Monday and clerical by Friday.

What this reveals is not merely inconsistency, but function. Truth Social serves as both amplifier and shield. When the message projects strength, it is presented as authentic presidential leadership. When the message creates discomfort, it becomes a misunderstanding, a technicality, a staff matter. Authority is claimed when useful and diffused when necessary.

And that leaves allies in an impossible position. When Trump declares Starmer is making a historic mistake over Chagos, are they hearing US policy, or are they watching performance? His own government continues to support the base lease. The strategic reality has not changed. Only the rhetoric has. Yet his press secretary insists the rhetoric itself is the true signal.

The result is a communications system that asserts absolute authority while retaining absolute deniability. It is designed to sound definitive without ever being binding. The President speaks directly, except when he does not. The platform carries the full weight of statecraft, except when it suddenly carries none at all. Truth Social, it turns out, is straight from the horse’s mouth only when the horse likes the sound of its own voice.

A Winter Olympic Apology

I owe the Winter Olympics an apology.

This is not a sentence I expected to write, and certainly not one I intended to write voluntarily.

A couple of weeks ago, I dismissed the entire enterprise as a niche festival of sliding about in specialist sleepwear, observed mainly by Norwegians and the sort of Britons who own breathable base layers. I regarded it as an athletic sideshow conducted in temperatures normally associated with freezer burn and poor life choices.

This position remained intact until it was undermined by an administrative error. While attempting to locate the news, I watched it accidentally.

This was the beginning of the problem.

Because once you actually see it properly, stripped of commentary and preconception, you realise that winter sport is not theatrical. It is contractual. Gravity makes an offer. The athlete accepts the terms.

Take downhill skiing. A human being voluntarily accelerates towards frozen ground at motorway speeds, balanced on two narrow planks, relying entirely on reflex and nerve to remain upright. There is no negotiation available once committed. Only competence.

Biathlon is worse. An athlete arrives at the shooting line in a state of cardiovascular revolt, lungs and heart conducting a private argument, and is then expected to shoot with microscopic precision. And somehow they do. Five shots. Five quiet demonstrations that control can be reimposed on chaos.

And then there is Big Air, which I had previously assumed was a recreational miscalculation. It is not. It is deliberate. A skier accelerates towards an enormous ramp, launches into open space, and rotates repeatedly with such calm authority that the act appears briefly to suspend consequence itself. Four spins. Sometimes five. The body behaves as if gravity were a guideline rather than a law. Then comes the landing. Clean. Final. Undeniable.

There is no panel to persuade. Only physics to satisfy.

Even curling, which I had categorised as competitive tidying, reveals itself to be something colder and more exact. It is not about effort. It is about inevitability. Once the stone leaves the hand, the future has been decided. All that remains is to watch it arrive.

What makes the Winter Olympics so compelling is its indifference. The environment does not care who you are. It responds only to what you do, and whether you do it correctly.

Britain, naturally, remains better suited to observation than participation. Our national winter discipline continues to be switching on the heating and issuing cautious statements about road conditions. We do not negotiate with ice. We avoid it entirely.

And yet, by accident, I witnessed something precise, unforgiving, and completely absorbing.

I regret the experience and will take greater care when operating the remote control in future.

As an amusing aside, I saw a Facebook reel where someone had set their circular, robotic vacuum cleaner off on their kitchen and started sweeping furiously in front of its path with a broom as an homage to curling.

A Moral Decision for You

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

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

So ask yourself what you would rather have.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The question is simpler.

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

That is the decision.

Trump's Ideological and Geopolitical Enemies - a Paradox

We used to think the map was straightforward.

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

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

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

Yet the loudest quarrels often involve allies.

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

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

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

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

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

The consequences are practical.

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

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

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

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

In Search of the Lost Crisp

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From Bent Spoons to Bristol Referrals

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And that is before the referral.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ownership

I have been thinking about ownership.

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

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

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

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

Which brings me to my house.

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

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

And yet.

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

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

That is the quietly comic discovery.

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

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

The plural, it seems, requires paperwork.

The Revolution Was Never Entirely Sober – Or Entirely Successful

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

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

I thought the answer was protesting.

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

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

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

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

But that was not the answer.

The answer was drinking.

Which, on reflection, is entirely consistent.

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

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

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

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

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

The revolution, it seems, was never entirely sober.

Jim Ratcliffe III - the Art of the Non-Apology

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It is not remorse. It is maintenance.

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

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

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

Not the offence. The cause.

The Tyranny of the Decimal Place

Politics now runs on decimal points.

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

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

Yet the performance repeats every quarter.

The problem is that we confuse weather with climate.

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

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

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

But climate is dull. Weather is dramatic.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Growth, Illness and Political Arithmetic

We keep talking about growth as though it lives entirely in tax policy, trade deals and planning reform. Meanwhile, around 2.7 million working-age adults are economically inactive because of long-term sickness. That figure rose sharply after 2020. Mental health accounts for a large share. Musculoskeletal illness remains significant. Post-viral conditions are now part of the increase.

This is not monocausal. But it is structural.

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

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

Now compare political treatment.

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

Yet dementia commands sustained funding and strategic framing.

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

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

That contrast matters.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And arithmetic, eventually, intrudes.

Jim Ratcliffe - Continued

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

Because how, exactly, is this alleged colonisation detected?

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

And that is where the logic begins to wobble.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now add the arithmetic.

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

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

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

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

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

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

So here is the honest fork in the road.

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

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

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

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

Expendable Today, Rival Tomorrow

I have long suggested – and I make no apology for pattern recognition – that Nigel Farage’s real talent lies in getting close enough to power to shape events, but never so close that he has to shoulder the grind of governing. Build pressure, dominate the airwaves, then pivot before the Treasury tables arrive. Influence without responsibility. I have watched the cycle repeat often enough to recognise it when it comes round again.

Which makes his embrace of former Conservative Party MPs rather revealing.

These are the same Conservatives he has spent years condemning as cowards and Brexit saboteurs. Yet once they defect to Reform UK, they are rebadged as people of principle who have suddenly located their courage. It is less a conversion than a reclassification.

The opportunism is mutual. Many defectors are not seized by ideological revelation. They read the polling. They see their associations thinning. They sense the brand decay and calculate that standing still may be worse than jumping. Political survival instinct is rarely dressed up honestly.

History is not kind to them. The Social Democratic Party split from Labour with Cabinet rank and vast excitement. Most were gone at the next election. Change UK briefly filled studios and then disappeared. Under first past the post, personal reinvention rarely defeats party machinery.

Defectors have a habit of becoming footnotes. I have seen that pattern before as well.

Farage knows this. He is not naive about electoral mechanics. So welcoming them is unlikely to be an act of long-term institutional planning. In the short term they are useful. They generate headlines. They pad out Commons numbers. They wound the Conservatives. They create the impression of gathering force. They reassure donors that momentum is building.

But they are not durable parliamentary capital.

And here is the sharper edge. If some of these defectors understand the odds, if they suspect they are being used for short-term theatre, then their incentives change. An MP who believes he is on borrowed time has little reason to be cautious. In a small parliamentary party, the only serious prize is leadership.

If office is unlikely, control of the vehicle becomes the goal.

That is where pattern recognition starts to matter. Insurgent movements built around a dominant personality can look cohesive until ambition compresses inside a small caucus. Loyalty becomes transactional. Survival becomes competitive.

Farage may be using defectors as accelerants. But accelerants do not always burn in neat, predictable lines.

Westminster has seen defectors fade before. It has also seen small parties turn volatile once the spotlight grows brighter. Whether this cycle repeats exactly remains to be seen. The outlines, however, are familiar.

Sir Jim Ratcliffe

Sir Jim Ratcliffe has decided that Britain has been “colonised”. Strong word. Loaded word. The sort of word that normally appears in YouTube thumbnails next to arrows and red circles.

This from a man who lives in Monaco for tax efficiency while lecturing the rest of us about the burden on British public services. One might admire the financial prudence. One might even admire the candour. But it does rather undercut the moral thunder. It is difficult to warn about national strain while arranging one’s own fiscal lightness.

Then there is the small matter of the football club.

Manchester United is not a parish team from Saddleworth. It is a global corporation in red shirts. It scouts in Africa, South America and Europe. It files work permit paperwork as routinely as it files transfer bids. Its broadcast revenue comes from Jakarta as much as Salford. Its shirt sales depend on Lagos, Seoul and Sao Paulo. The modern Premier League is global labour mobility with floodlights.

And yet we are told that demographic change is somehow an existential trespass.

Let us be clear. No one is obliged to support high levels of immigration. One can argue about housing supply, GP capacity, wage compression, planning failures, or visa design. Those are policy questions. They require numbers, trade-offs and grown-up language.

“Colonised” is not grown-up language. It is cultural alarmism. It suggests displacement rather than management. It implies invasion rather than administration. It trades in emotion, not arithmetic.

Footballers, we are reminded, are temporary. They will not necessarily settle. Quite so. But that rather proves the point. The entire Premier League model rests on temporary immigration. Work visas. International contracts. Global recruitment pipelines. Short-term presence is still immigration. If mobility is good for balance sheets but bad for Britain, that is not an argument. It is a contradiction.

There is also a deeper irony. The Premier League is one of the most successful export products this country has. It projects British soft power across the world. It is diverse, multilingual and commercially ruthless. It thrives precisely because it is open. If that is colonisation, it is a curious form of self-harm that seems to pay remarkably well.

The uncomfortable truth is this: global integration is profitable when it fills stadiums, but politically toxic when it fills classrooms and surgeries. That tension is real. Infrastructure planning has been poor. Housing supply has lagged. Governments of both stripes have failed to align migration with capacity. That is an administrative failure, not a civilisational one.

If you wish to argue for lower net migration, make the case in those terms. Talk about numbers. Talk about absorption rates. Talk about fiscal contribution and local strain. Do not reach for the language of siege while cashing cheques from a globalised enterprise built on exactly the flows you condemn.

Because when the rhetoric turns apocalyptic but the business model remains international, people will notice. And they are entitled to ask whether this is policy seriousness or simply political theatre with a Monaco postcode attached.

As for Farage getting in on the act, it's only yo be expected.

The 5:30am Firelighter Tea Ritual

There is something quietly heroic about a man creeping round his own house at dawn like an amateur cat burglar.

I rise between 4:30 and 05:00. Not because I am virtuous. Not because I am disciplined. But because at that hour the world has not yet started shouting, and it feels like borrowed time.

Our place is open plan, with minstrel galleries at either end, so any sound travels as if announced by town crier. If I drop a teaspoon in the kitchen, it echoes like a musket shot at Trafalgar.

So I pad about, silent as a mouse with a pension pot, and begin the ritual. Half an hour on Flipboard, digesting the decline of Western civilisation. Occasionally I will compile a blog post while the rest of the house remains blissfully unaware that it is being intellectually improved.

The cat is fed, and reacts as if I personally engineered Brexit. The fire is lit. Firelighters are deployed with the sort of calm deliberation normally associated with naval gunnery.

Then comes the tender domestic act. I make Hay her morning tea and around 05:30.

This is where the confession lurks.

I squeeze the teabag. Yes, I know the spoon would suffice, but no. I go in with fingers and determination, extracting every last drop of flavour like a Victorian mill owner determined to maximise output.

And those fingers, moments earlier, have often handled firelighters.

Paraffin. Kerosene. A suggestion of rural forecourt.

I present the mug and announce, with the confidence of a man who has never read a toxicology report, “Your morning cup of firelighter.”

Over the winter I have probably been running a low level domestic experiment. Not enough to trouble the NHS. Just enough, perhaps, to give the tea a faint aftertaste of camping weekend in 1978.

The science suggests the risk is negligible. The theatre of it, however, is magnificent. We agonise over seed oils and air quality while quietly introducing a hint of petrochemical character to breakfast.

Hay remains alive, lucid, and fully capable of dismantling my arguments before 7am, which suggests either the dosage is minimal, or she has developed resilience worthy of the Royal Navy.

If she ever acquires the ability to self ignite during a particularly heated political discussion, I shall accept responsibility.

Until then, I continue my dawn patrol. 4:30. Silence. Cat. Fire. Tea. A Regency gentleman with a box of firelighters and a slightly questionable approach to beverage hygiene.

When Truth Became Optional

There was a time when a lie at least had the decency to blush. Now it books a studio slot and accuses its critics of censorship.

“Post-truth” is the tidy label for a grubby condition in which objective facts carry less weight than emotion, identity and grievance. Truth still exists. It has simply been demoted. Whether something is accurate matters less than whether it feels right. Evidence becomes optional. Loyalty does not.

This is not a complaint about losing arguments. Nor is it confined to one ideology. Whenever identity outruns evidence, the same erosion begins. The problem is structural, not partisan.

Trust in institutions took repeated knocks - Iraq, the financial crisis, expenses, bailouts. Some scepticism was earned. Institutions are imperfect and should be scrutinised. But scrutiny is not the same as dismissal. Demanding evidence is how institutions are corrected. Declaring them corrupt whenever they deliver unwelcome conclusions is how they are hollowed out.

Economic stagnation widened the crack. When wages stall and official graphs show recovery, people assume the graphs are fraudulent rather than incomplete. That gap between lived experience and aggregated data became fertile ground for louder, simpler explanations.

Then social media industrialised human bias. Platforms optimise for engagement, not accuracy. Anger travels faster than nuance. Repetition inside algorithmic echo chambers begins to feel like proof. Corrections arrive late and limp. This is not conspiracy. It is incentive design.

The UK press operates within a concentrated ownership structure - a handful of proprietors control most national circulation - and commercial pressure rewards provocation. Serious journalism survives, but outrage is efficient. The incentives align again.

In that environment, politics shifts. Bold assertion outperforms careful qualification. Institutional pushback becomes sabotage. Judges are activist. Regulators are partisan. Markets are hysterical. The referee becomes the enemy.

Boris Johnson should have been a warning. The £350 million Brexit claim was widely challenged and widely effective. Constitutional limits were tested. Criticism was reframed as obstruction. His fall showed that arithmetic and law still matter. Yet for some, the lesson absorbed was not caution but method. Narrative stamina can win.

This dynamic is not uniquely British. Donald Trump demonstrated at scale how repetition, dismissal of unfavourable facts as “fake”, and framing legal scrutiny as persecution can sustain loyalty even when claims collide with verified outcomes. Once narrative and identity fuse, correction feels like attack.

Science feels the strain. Proper science is cautious and self-correcting. That nuance is weaponised as weakness. The existence of uncertainty becomes proof of conspiracy. A meme with a chart outruns peer review. Courts feel it too. They are not flawless, but they operate through evidence and procedure. Undermining that framework because an outcome is unwelcome is different from reforming it.

Where does this lead?

At first, to dysfunction. Policies unravel on contact with arithmetic. When fiscal claims ignore basic sums, borrowing costs rise. When court rulings are framed as partisan, compliance weakens. These are measurable consequences, not rhetorical ones.

Further on, to institutional fatigue. Expertise becomes suspect. Elections are framed as existential contests in which defeat must mean fraud. The system still operates, but less reliably and at greater cost.

Who benefits? In the short term, political opportunists untroubled by contradiction. Media actors who monetise outrage. Wealthy interests who prefer distraction to scrutiny. Foreign adversaries who thrive on division.

Who does not? Citizens who rely on functioning services, predictable rules and enforceable law. In other words, most people.

Post-truth is not destiny. It is an incentive structure. It persists only if rewarded. Voters can demand proof. Media can privilege verification over provocation. Institutions can defend evidential standards without claiming infallibility.

Truth is not glamorous. It is inconvenient and often dull. But it is structural. Remove it, and everything still looks impressive for a while.

Until it doesn’t.

Protect Women - Unless They Complicate the Story

A Reel drifted across my Facebook feed the other night. As usual, my first instinct was scepticism. Most Reels are flim-flam designed to provoke before anyone checks the facts. This one was labelled Hull, 27 September 2025 and showed a woman at a “Protect Women and Children” rally being booed and having her microphone taken from her.

So I checked whether there was actually a protest in Hull that weekend. There was. Humberside Police logged a planned demonstration in the city centre on 27 September. The location in the clip matched Queen Victoria Square. So the setting was real.

In the footage, the woman says she was groomed at 11 years old. Not 16. Not 18. Eleven. She speaks about abuse. She speaks about what happened to her. And then she says the men who abused her were white.

She is booed. Someone shouts, “Fuck off, bitch.” The microphone is taken from her.

Pause there. A rally branded around protecting women and children has just silenced a woman who was abused as a child.

Now, could the clip have been trimmed? Possibly. Social media edits everything. But the reaction was not synthetic. It was not a caption added later. It was a crowd responding in real time to the fact that her abusers did not fit the preferred storyline.

If safeguarding were the true purpose, the ethnicity of her abusers would have been irrelevant. She was 11. That should have been the only morally salient fact in the square that day.

Instead, her value in that space depended on whether she confirmed a racial narrative. The moment she did not, she ceased to be a victim to be protected and became an inconvenience to be removed.

That is where racism and misogyny begin to overlap. Both are hierarchical ways of sorting people. Both decide whose voice counts and whose does not. A movement that claims to defend women, but only when those women reinforce a chosen ethnic villain, is not centring women at all. It is centring grievance.

Child sexual exploitation in Britain is a serious, multi-layered problem. It has involved offenders of different ethnic backgrounds across different regions. It has involved police failures, social services gaps and institutional cowardice. It does not reduce neatly to a single demographic storyline.

But rallies do not thrive on complexity. They thrive on clarity. They require a defined villain. And when a woman stands up and complicates that clarity, the crowd shows you what really matters.

You can argue about immigration policy. You can argue about policing. You can argue about whether the Reel was curated for effect. But this is harder to evade: a rally claiming to protect women turned hostile to a woman when she disrupted the script.

The boos answered the question.

Tea, Coffee and the Permanent State of Manufactured Crisis

I’ve come to the conclusion that we now measure national stability by beverage selection.

“Prime Minister, tea or coffee?”

“I think I’ll have tea… actually, coffee.”

BREAKING NEWS: Downing Street in turmoil as PM flip-flops on hot drinks. Senior aides locked in emergency talks. Pound wobbles. Democracy trembles.

You can almost see the banner now: CAFFEINE CRISIS.

The modern political “emergency” often turns out to be a human being thinking aloud. A leader walks six feet from car to door while a flock of journalists jog backwards in front of him.

“Prime Minister, will you resign?”
“Prime Minister, is this the end?”
“Prime Minister, are you clinging on?”

If he says nothing, it’s stonewalling. If he says “No”, it’s defiance. If he says he’s focused on the job, it’s refusal to deny speculation. If he adjusts a policy after consultation, it’s a humiliating U-turn.

Politics used to involve negotiation. Now it involves headline choreography. A minor amendment becomes civil war. A polling dip becomes terminal decline. A shouted question down a pavement becomes evidence of collapse.

I’ll be frank: I’ve largely lost faith in journalists. Not all of them, but the pack behaviour and breathless framing. Every tremor is inflated into an earthquake because drama sells and context doesn’t.

Of course governments wobble. Of course leaders misstep. But there’s a difference between volatility and implosion. The news cycle barely recognises it.

Which brings us to the alleged “crisis”.

Starmer inherited tight fiscal constraints and a very broad political coalition. Labour’s majority was built largely on a shared desire to eject the Conservatives. That creates a broad church. Broad churches win elections, but they are unstable in government. Internal factions and competing priorities mean there is constant pressure to dilute policy. Drift is the default risk.

So beyond fiscal restraint, there is a deliberate positioning tactic.

He sets out reforms slightly beyond the minimum outcome he ultimately needs. That isn’t recklessness. It’s anchoring. In sales you open high knowing negotiation will bring you down. In legal strategy you plead broadly expecting trimming. Politics works the same way. If you want to end at B, you open at C. Pushback from Parliament, the Lords and internal factions is anticipated. If you opened at B, you would likely finish at A.

What critics call a “U turn” is often a controlled landing. The direction of travel remains. The settlement is still further than the old baseline because the overreach was leverage, not the destination.

The first two years aim to push through those structural changes, stabilise credibility and rebuild fiscal headroom. In parallel, he improves relations with the EU through practical friction reduction and regulatory cooperation. That lowers business uncertainty and supports growth at the margins.

If that creates headroom, the second phase follows: more popular, visible policies from year two onwards, funded by the improved position created earlier. Pain first, dividends later.

Mid-term council losses may sting and cause PLP jitters; however, any leadership challenger would face exactly the same structural constraints, so they must hold the line with Starmer.

If opposition parties win councils on bold promises, governing exposes the arithmetic. Over two years that can work to his advantage and is a calculated tactical sacrifice. Current Reform councils are already proving the point.

In reality, given the constraints, there isn’t a credible alternative strategy. The other options are overpromising, overborrowing or deep immediate cuts. All carry greater risk. This approach is slower, but structurally safer.

Meanwhile, somewhere outside No.10, someone is still shouting about tea.

The Thorn Crocs

There are moments in a man’s life when he realises that irony is not a literary device but a gardening implement with a point.

Yesterday I fell foul of what I call my “safety boots”. This generous category includes flip-flops, Crocs and anything with the structural integrity of a sponge pudding. They provide precisely zero protection, which is why I reach for them whenever a job plainly requires something heavier, reinforced and vaguely adult.

On this occasion I was wearing the Crocs. Not the flip-flop welding boots, which are a separate chapter in my risk management portfolio. The Crocs are for horticultural engagements and light mechanical optimism.

I was outside, “just fixing something”. Those three words should trigger an insurance premium increase. I stepped on a thorn of heroic ambition. It went straight through the base of my Lidl Croc facsimile and embedded itself in my foot with the confidence of a planning application in a conservation area. There was hopping. There was language. There was a short but heartfelt attempt to blame the shrub.

Foam, it turns out, is not armour. It is a rumour.

Extraction required a dignified limp indoors and a rummage through Hayley’s drawer of precision implements. Nothing restores humility like standing in the kitchen, one foot raised like a mildly ashamed flamingo, asking which tweezers are the “good ones”. The thorn was removed from my hoof with due ceremony.

Then came phase two. The base of the thorn had snapped off and remained lodged inside the Croc itself, like shrapnel in a war memorial. Escalation was required. Needle-nosed pliers were deployed. There is something faintly absurd about performing delicate mechanical surgery on footwear that cost less than a sandwich. I stood there gripping the fragment like a bomb disposal technician, easing it out of the foam carcass while contemplating the immaculate steel-toed boots in the garage.

For clarity, the flip-flops are reserved for welding. Yes, welding. Molten metal descends in cheerful orange droplets while my toes consider their life choices. There is a particular choreography to shaking a glowing bead out of a sandal before it makes permanent contact. It is not covered in the training manuals.

And yet, the actual safety boots remain untouched. Heavy. Sensible. Built to withstand both thorns and physics. I shall probably use them for a wedding. Or when going out to dinner. One mustn’t waste good footwear on something as trivial as personal safety.

The thorn has been evicted. The Crocs have been debrided with needle-nosed pliers. My pride has taken a light sanding.

The proper boots still sit in the garage, pristine and judgemental, waiting for an occasion suitably formal. In the meantime, Hayley’s tweezers and a set of pliers remain the true backbone of domestic health and safety.