On Sunday the people of Saxony-Anhalt in Germany will go to the polls for the state elections. If polling is to be believed there is a chance that the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) the right-wing populist party will win an outright majority. If this happens it will be seismic event in German but also in European politics.

If they fail, then the mainstream parties will likely maintain their self-destructive cordon sanitaire forcing them to form another unpopular coalition leaving the public again with only one serious opposition party to protest via, the AfD. All this is happening as the grand coalition in charge of the federal government continues its downward spiral under the lack lustre leadership of Friedrich Merz.

Next April Emmanual Macron having served his two terms and having smashed the political centre in order to win will stand down and France will go to the polls to elect the next president. If polling is to be believed Marine Le Pen the leader of Rassemblement National will likely win and become the next president of the fifth republic.

This is a remarkable turnaround for a politician who has for the last 15 years fought the long shadow of her father’s name and words. She now polls as the candidate who has the most intense support which is vital for the first round of the election and is least disliked which is vital for the second. Should the centre hold then RN will be left as the only serious opposition and only major party untarnished by rule.

In Spain on Sunday there were mass protests against the left-wing government of Pedro Sanchez over its handling of the invasion of the Spanish colony of Ceuta in north Africa. The government has been proven to have lied when it said that all illegals had been returned to Morocco and the people of the territory have experienced an avalanche of attacks, breaks in and sadly rapes which Madrid has shown little interest in responding to until recently.

This has come as the government is already deeply unpopular due to the normalisation of over 1 million illegals which many believe will increase the pull factor whilst also seen as an effort to gerrymander the franchise in favour of the left. Furthermore, like across much of Europe the growing economy have mostly been driven by a swelling population which has not led to higher GDP per capita.

In June this year the European Central Bank (ECB) which oversees the Euro decided to raise interest rates in response to declared inflationary pressures. This is a decision that the markets are predicting will be repeated in the September meeting likely meaning that interest rates in the Euro area will have increased 0.5% in the last 3 months.

These are seen as strange decisions when all of the major economies in the zone are already struggling with growth and job creation. The inflation currently seen is being caused by higher energy prices which are a classic supply shock. Central banks can’t print energy and so they are effectively confirming they want to reduce aggregate demand which would in fact cause a recession at best.

It is worth noting that the ECB also did this in 2010 at the height of the Euro crisis raising rates directly into the catastrophe triggering a borderline economic depression across much of the south. It was and is a strange decision as energy supply shocks are normally deflationary i.e. cause prices to drop as energy is something we must pay for whereas other spending is largely discretionary.

Many EU member states are struggling with rising debt and debt servicing costs caused by the ructions in the bond market. So, any economic recession will likely cause further stresses as the automatic fiscal stabilisers i.e. welfare kick in as unemployment would rise and tax receipts would fall. So, the ECB is playing a very dangerous game especially when you have mounting political instability across many of the major states.

On Saturday the people of Iceland went to the polls for a referendum on whether to restart talks over joining the EU. Polling before the vote showed a clear majority for joining but when the results were tallied No was seen to have carved out a small but clear majority meaning that the talks will not be reopened.

The vote had money spent on it by assorted Pro EU groups and yet they were unable to tip the balance. Furthermore, polling seems to indicate that young people voted decisively no with over 60% likely to have gone against the idea indicating that support for the bloc is no longer assured demographically.

This is understandable when you dispassionately observe the bloc. This is no longer a project which is in good shape politically with tensions everywhere, it is economically declining rapidly as its share of global GDP shrinks fast and it is technologically no longer on the frontier but is increasingly reliant on China and the United States due to over regulation like GDPR and the AI act. Lastly socially like across much of the West friction over migration is continuing to mount.

The bloc is in a deep slow burn crisis with elites largely in denial over it. The Iceland vote was deeply symbolic for the EU as it was seen as a way to show that the project was still ideologically in demand. However, the rejection by the rich island country leaves only poorer countries who want to join including Ukraine, Bosnia, Moldova and Macedonia.

These all bring with them issues which a crisis ridden EU cannot agree over and has no solutions to. Albania has a large Muslim population, Bosnia is still sectarian, Moldova has the Transnistria problem, and Ukraine is at war and is so big it would likely mean the stripping of all EU money from the rest to pay for it.

This is all against a new campaign by the richer contributing nations to not just stop budgetary increases but actually reduce the overall number. So even those states who rightly see EU membership and money as a way to develop could well struggle in the future to access enough funds and that is without any fights with the current beneficiaries.

At this point it is worth noting that the AfD and RN are Eurosceptic parties which have both promised at minimum to not pay for the EU. This means that should either win nationally they will be able to wreck the bloc internally with the European Court of Justice (ECJ) and or European Commission (EC) having little come back. I mean it is pretty hard to threaten much when the other side can blow everything up.

However, neither actually needs to win to distort the elite consensus over the EU. Their national opponents are not stupid can proverbially read the room as well which is what this new campaign by the contributors can be seen as, an effort to cut off one line of attack by their own insurgent parties.

So, moving onwards from here one wonders where this will end. I have for many years predicted this and so it does not come as a surprise. If anything, I have been impressed at how well the bloc has held together however this has mostly been a function of elites simply ignoring the gathering storms whilst hoping something would turn.

This worked as a tactic when the insurgent parties were small and the problems were more manageable however you are now moving into an escalation in terms of seriousness and complexity, and it is very clear that elites have no answers but more of the same. This should not come as a surprise as you see the same in Britain and beyond.

If you speak to the experts, they will claim that more fiscal integration, a banking union and a capital market will solve many of the blocs problems. In fact, they may well do in terms of dealing immediate stresses and perhaps assisting by reducing the cost of capital on the margin.

However, these are non-starters for majorities in most of the bigger states and so the experts are calling for more of what is already starting to be rejected by the public everywhere - again, we see that elite denial in action. What none like to do is apply simple logic as once you exclude further integration and you accept that the status quo is unsustainable then you are left with de-integration.

This would mean stripping back the bloc so that it is less a hybrid confederation / federation to something more manageable in order to allow different models to more effectively emerge. Probably taking the single market back to dealing with just product standards or similar whilst effectively abolishing entire sections of the rest like the common foreign policy which is simply a fantasy.

The outcome which is also increasingly likely through few want to discuss it is the abolition of the Schengen zone which was a wonderful idea but has turned into a massive problem due to the collapsed state of the external borders but also the creation of the Euro which has increased migration in times of stress creating pressures for the recipient nations as Delors predicted in his 1989 report.

If you want to know why Brexit happened, then I would suggest you read it.

We are now entering a dangerous time for the bloc as elites will fight any effort to roll back even a little bit. In fact, it is quite hard to do as the project was only supposed to go in one direction as Monet always saw it as a way to strip democracy away from the nation state. It was not designed to adapt to the push or pull of democratic forces; it was supposed to be post democratic in nature.

However, with insurgencies across the bloc and darkening economic storms something will have to give as if not then the treaties will more and more rightly be seen as strait jackets limiting public demands for change. The EU may have been able to get away with that in Greece or Ireland where the public could be cowed into silence and acceptance but this won’t work in Germany and especially France.

Sitting on this side of the channel I hope that some progress can be made as the bloc remains a major trading partner and because of our idiotic elites we are reliant on it for energy. A sudden breakdown over there would impact us heavily though I am not predicting that now. However, I think a continuation of the slow breakdown and stagnation is which would be equally bad. Either way as an armchair social scientist I think it is going to be a genuinely fascinating perod.

I have never been into cars but over the years I have driven a mixture of alright, good and in some cases excellent ones. Currently I own a Zafira Turbo which is lovely to drive with all the relevant mod cons some of which I even understand. Traction control, adaptive headlights, turbo etc. It is genuinely highly pleasurable to use especially as it has a 2-litre engine which means it goes like the proverbially poo off a shovel.

Recently I inherited my brother’s old Hyundai i10 as I needed a second car. It is striped down to the basics in terms of add-ons and where it does have them, they largely don’t work from the speakers to aircon. It is the complete anthesis of the Zafira and I should dislike it by any measure. I should miss all the good stuff from the family car, but I just don’t – well except for the working speakers.

It is just very fun to drive as it is light, small and it is old enough and dinked up enough that hammering along country lanes is not a concern. I also like the sense of something that is not engineered to perfection with even the gear stick and transmission reminding me of an old Datsun that my mother used to own. It feels primitive but in a good and fun way.

I suppose it also dangerous in comparison as it doesn’t have ABS that I know of and to be honest it probably would not work if it did. But also, it is less chunky so if I had an accident I would fully expect to get hurt whereas the Zafira is big and solid. I would imagine in a head on between the two vehicles the Zafira would likely drive through the i10 like a knife through butter.

Randomly even parking is fun though it doesn’t have anything to assist with the process. Why would it when you can fit 3 i10’s and a pickled egg in any given parking space. You start reversing back and back and back and sometime around dinner time you realise you may just be about to hit the end of the space and must brake and then you have hike to the front to go and do your shopping.

Even writing this makes me smile and laugh. What is it is about the vehicle that seems to give me so much enjoyment. I mean it is hardly like I was bequeathed a Ferrari. No, I was given a 15-year Hyundai which has failing paintwork, a knackered radio and a boot that doesn’t stay open as even the gas rams are half shot and yet it does indeed give me pleasure, and I am not someone who is usually gets excited by things.

I think in many ways it represents the life I would really like now. It is simple, fun and slightly dangerous – when I get on the motorway I genuinely feel like I am having a bit of an adventure. This is completely different to how I feel most of the time which is why I sacked off my job 2 months ago. I hated it and was so very very bored. The little car seems to mirror my innate need to just feel something again.

We live in a world which seems to wrap us in cottonwool and removes chance and danger and along the way variety from life. No wonder so many people are bored and talk about life being so beige – it is. There are few mountains to climb because we are told that risk is bad and that safety is everything. But along the way we seem to have washed some of the joy out of life.

Look I am not claiming that I am climbing a mountain here, but I do feel more alive when I am out and about driving it and yes I like to drive fast. One of the fun bits of the Ratmobile which is my nickname for it is when you corner hard you can really get the wheels to squeal as they are tiny and so there is not so much rubber. It makes me feel like a cop in an American TV show – yes I am that juvenile.

I think in many ways the car represents a little of what I want for society as well. I want to start removing some of the social and economic safety features so people can take some risk and experience life which is about the ups and downs and not just monotonous beige until you retire and die.

Life is about living and that means you will get knocked about a bit – you must take risk otherwise you will never experience most of it. In that I am not talking about jumping out of planes or driving fast cars. I am talking about businesses, relationships, moving house or whatever you want to do. I think back on my life to date and the stuff that was worth doing was when I took a risk or tried something a bit dangerous.

I think this is a big part of why younger people are so screwed up. They have had parents and society telling them throughout their lives to never take a risk. I mean no wonder so many struggle with real life and even more with relationships which are the ultimate risk to reward games. Get it right and they will enrich your life – get it wrong and they will half destroy you but that is the point they are high stakes, dangerous and yet the most rewarding thing you can do.

You can’t protect yourself or others from everything and neither should you want to. Much like my little car your life is about having fun. Those dinks and scratches come from events that teach us and make us grow as individuals. The ones that hurt are the ones that are probably the most valuable even if they do seem like the end of the world at the time.

Anyway enough of this pseudo philosophy, I am off to drive the Ratmobile – speak soon.

I saw the news of the Berlin attack yesterday before bed like I have so many times before. It saddened but it no longer surprised me. That is where we are now – these things have become common place. After so long it is predictable, but it is also enraging that we have become used to such atrocities.

This is especially true if you are on Twitter or other social media platforms and swim in the right seas. You see daily the crimes like this big and small, from attacks on people on trains, to knifings, to rapes and more. That is why it is confusing when you speak to normies who only consume the mainstream media.

They live in a bubble created by said media which does not talk about most of the crimes, and they certainly do not make any effort to link them in anyway. No, they happily pick and choose and only discuss the largest and even then, they attempt to finesse the information given out to obfuscate reality.

Look at this very crime – the blood was barely dry before the BBC was out claiming the apprehended suspect was on the edges of Islamist groups or similar. You know he was not really in them but he just kind of hung out with some pseudo terrorists. A German media network went as far as to claim that German gays are far more worried about the far right than of Islamists though no evidence was provided to support this claim.

The media already trying to downplay the reality which is this is another horror perpetrated by Muslims which in due course will almost certainly involve fresh or second-generation migrants. There are many who have already shrieked racist at me for saying this, but it is almost certainly the truth.

Like so many before and at this rate like so many others to come people have paid with their lives because the West is governed by people who simply refuse to see the statistical and factual truth in front of their eyes as it effectively destroys their worldview.

For once you accept that there is a link between migration and crime big and small it kills the idea that all humans are the same once they step over those national lines on a map. It also kills the belief that everyone can be as a German, French, British etc as you and me. That is not say people can’t, but it is a lot more complex than the Kumbaya liberals who have governed Europe for decades.

This denial of reality means that it is the public that continues to pay the price in terms of lives ruined from the myriads of crimes many of which end in the loss of loved ones. Leaving grieving families of those cut down or must live with the physical and mental scars left behind from what was done to them.

Again, this is not being racist or xenophobic this is just stating facts and yet today the internet is littered with people who just won’t admit it. You see liberal gays across the board talking about homophobia, but they won’t utter a word about migration or Islam and yet the connection is so clear with even the German authorities talking about it.

The response from the liberal blob even now is to ignore, deflect and try and move on. You can see it in the number of MPs who are tweeting about the attack and yet none are willing to discuss these facts. I suppose many are waiting for more information, but you know they will never say anything further once everything comes out.

No, they will hide away like they always do and hope that the problem dies down for a little while longer and if people must suffer well so be it. They will play their normal games of trying to police language rather than engaging with reality – makes sense when your worldview and your voting bloc is in the crosshairs.

I just don’t think it will work anymore as too many people are now impacted on a near daily basis both in terms of crime and social damage but also because less and less people believe the media because what they push no longer seems to map to their lived experiences.

I mean it is easy enough if you live in some nice monocultural enclave or a filthy rich area to pretend that all is well. This is especially true if you continue to sup on the mainstream media like it is presenting the truth. But for the rest of us who live, work, travel around this country and continent we can see all is not well.

I mean just look at this data from Denmark – look at the statistical differences in terms of violent crime. You are not talking about a small difference you are talking about massive ones which as our cretinous elites continue to import more and more of these people means we will suffer ever more of it.

The ones for rapes are little better with a report in Sweden reporting that 63.1% of all those convicted of rape were of a migrant background. The stats are little better where they are released and this remains the biggest challenge as in many countries the authorities actively do not collect the data or fight its release. This is ongoing within Britain where the current Labour government is legally fighting to keep migrant crime data by nationality / ethnicity from being published.

I pause here to ask a rhetorical question – why would the state refuse to collect useful data like this and where it has refuse to release it? I don’t think it takes a generational genius to work that out though I am sure there are plenty who will list good reasons why this data should be kept away from the public who may come to certain conclusions about mass migration.

This is not a new thing by the way as the Pakistani rape gangs were covered up by the British state for decades with the police failing to record relevant data. This was confirmed by the Jay Report (2014), the Casey Inspection (2015), and the Casey Grooming Gangs Audit (2025) which said that the police systematically failed to record and address the perpetrators ethnicity.

The reviewers of course make a good fist of not blaming the police but again I would ask a rhetorical question – if most people charged with a certain crime come from one community would not this not be considered a clue? I know in the 80’s if you went through the airports with an Irish accent, you were more likely to be stopped for a very good reason.

This desperate urge to cover up the blindingly obvious is not unique to Britain by the way. The 2015–2016 New Year’s Eve sexual attacks in Germany is another good example of how the state attempted to cover up crimes of migrants. In this case the sexual assault of approximately 1200 women by mostly north African migrant gangs – there are plenty more examples out there.

Another way the state and elites like to obfuscate things is to try and balance every statement. You know we have all seen them do this time in and time out. Islamic attack “Oh but the far fight is awful as well”. There is in fact no comparison in Britain where 95% of all terrorist victims in the last 20 years and some 75% of all MI5s case load are Islamic related and don’t forget that includes the IRA and more who have not fully gone away.

In Britain, Germany, France and more reality is becoming harder for states to hide as the sheer number of crimes mean that more and more people are putting two and two together. My wife does not like going into London late now due to the hassle she gets from certain Asian gangs and the train she takes home had a sexual assault on by a migrant recently and we live in a very well-heeled Surrey market town.

Politicians need to start talking about this as do certain communities as this is now morphing into a political and state legitimacy crisis. When people see awful things happening day in day out and see a political class and state that refuses to even admit the link let alone address the crisis it collapses trust and we are there now.

My wife is French and civil war has always been a quietly discussed subject though I have always put it down to the sheer pessimism for which the country is renowned for. However, when even friends in Paris who work in hedge funds are discussing it, I take note especially when you spend time talking about clean units in the military like we did last year.

What is interesting is that this discussion has leaped the channel and apparently even the border as now I see the same debates happening here and even in Germany. This is what happens when people lose trust in the state to even tell the truth let alone respond forcefully to the continuing collapse of civil security which this continent has been blessed with since World War 2.

This is going hand in hand with a collapse in the national community as people no longer see themselves as British, German or French. You are instead seeing the emergence of them and us depending upon the group. Some are taking an ethno-centric view on this which I loathe whilst others are discussing cultural groups.

Fear of the other is sadly becoming the norm as states fail to protect borders, police the streets but also even now seem incapable of doing anything except backing minorities against native majorities. It is almost like after laying down the tinder for decades which could engulf their countries elites are now itching to spark the flame to start the process.

When you consider the riots that are now the norm whenever there is an incident in Britain, the growth of the AfD which is a borderline far-right party in Germany and more across this continent you would think that the clever people in charge would be desperate to change direction and try and head this off but they really do not appear keen to change tack.

I am not sure if it is arrogance or stupidity, but they are aware of the danger. Numerous media sources in Britain have reported that state security services are terrified over what will happen should things kick off. In France in 2021 a letter was published in the media by former and serving senior military / security officers about the risk of civil unrest / war. The French and British security apparatuses are surely not alone in highlighting the collapse of trust, social bonds and state capacity to contain unrest across Western Europe.

Either the current establishments do something to secure each nation, or they will be replaced by those that will. This will either happen peacefully via a democratic transition or because there is a violent one which will force change. With establishment forces fighting anything even vaguely radical I question more and more whether the former is likely let alone possible leaving just the latter.

I hope not as I think the longer this goes on the more unpleasant the resolution will be. Humans by themselves are normally sane, intelligent and logical. However, put into mobs and they are prone to be violent, extreme and utterly irrational. No one should wish to see forces like that unleashed onto our streets with all the horrors they will bring and the damage they will do our countries.

I am left hoping that change comes soon before people become too cynical about democracy. For once that happens, we truly are on the count down to something unpleasant. I remain a fierce supporter of democracy however even my patience is being tested now for those in charge just seem to live in denial about where we are. We can only pray that the centre holds for a little while longer – it is all we can do.

Burnham has finally made it to No 10 after many years of conspiring. The speech outside of the famous door sans a lectern was surprisingly nervous for someone who has been in the game for so long. One suspects the weird setting which he choose plus doing it without an autocue put him off. Either way he is in and the other guy…. what’s his name has gone.

To be honest I doubt the speech will matter as politicians across all the parties have yet to grasp that most people have turned off. Hell, I asked a few people about our new PM and several didn’t even know the changeover was happening and others had no idea who our Andy was, so I think the idea this is a moment of great historical importance and a big reset for the country is far of the mark.

Either way our now current PM then decided to get the largest political knife out and fillet the other guy’s cabinet like a fresh side of beef that had just come into the butchers. He was especially focused on cutting out anyone who had been even vaguely loyal to the other guy. That was his prerogative but coming just a few days after giving a speech about wanting Labour to move beyond factions was a bit much.

It was also counterproductive as all those people who had largely been a loose group of subpar politicians are now likely to coalesce into you guessed it a faction. Brilliant strategy there Andy – absolutely genius level thinking. This was then proved when the government announced that they would cut VAT on energy in the winter using the money from cancelling the digital ID system. Darren Jones formerly the other guy’s chief spod pointed out that the ID system was not actually funded and thus they would need to find the money – beautiful.

This is of course has been making me cry mostly with laughter. I have long since stopped expecting Westminster and the British political class in general to do anything useful. Instead, I now look on at politics as a form of blood sport where fuck ups are punches and career death is like a good old knock out only you don’t need to worry about permanent brain damage as most of them don’t have any.

Thus, watching John Healey be appointed Chancellor really got my blood going. For surely this had the making of an absolute cracker of a bout. This is a man who resigned as he didn’t think Peevy Reeves was giving him enough cash for our boys to defend these wind and rain swept islands. I mean any backing out of that position by Jon I am very serious Healey would be rightly attacked by everyone.

However, I underestimated the skill and cavorting crawling of Wes Streeting. A man who has morals and if you don’t like them then he will find some others that surely you will like more. He had been summarily dropped into defence as a thank you for not standing in the way of the King in the North and with barely time to warm up his MOD assigned sidearm nor reading any documentation announced that defence had enough money now.

Mad skills and apparently, he knows more than every other expert but then he is Wes Streeting a man with an ego that could sink a thousand ships which should come in handy should war actually break out as we have blessedly few frigates, submarines, men or anything else that might be useful in a scrap. Not to worry we can always threaten to send the other guy over to bore the enemy to death with his nasally voice as he is now currently unemployed.

In the meantime, our Andy has already started jumping in and out of the tax debate like mad frog on LSD. On Sunday he told the Times he wanted to raise the lowest threshold, by yesterday he was rowing back on it like Redgrave in the Olympics but today he is back on it again as apparently this is how the British state now does policy making. A continuous change of narrative by the man in charge which is ironic really as it reminds me of Orange Caesar - shhhhh don’t tell Labour.

Anyway, it is a good thing that our debt markets are not close to blowing up or the King in the North running his gob off could have really impacted Gilt yields and thus our borrowing costs. Ah bugger I stand corrected they are in an absolute state, and his flappy mouth has already added billions to the interest charges over the coming months and if not years. The other guys government was apparently supposed to be grown up so I guess that makes this one growner upper or something.

It is worth noting that during his entire coronation or crowning to those who don’t like the OED Burnham has barely mentioned the economy except to say he wants good growth in every post code. This sounds great and I wish him well but currently I think any growth would be a good start bearing in mind the British economy like most of Europe is stagnating and has done for years.

I am sure his mega plan will be forthcoming, but we will just need to wait for a little while as he needs to write it down. Yes, you read that correctly our Andy has a plan, but he has not written it down like some mad creative genius. This is understandable as perhaps the other guy would have stolen it as he clearly didn’t have one except to be a moralising git of the first order.

Whatever happens the easiest and probably only way to get the economy really going again is to get energy prices down lower and I don’t mean 5% over the winter. I mean sustained lower prices which bring us into line with the rest of the world. That means slashing them by 3/4s which means building cheap and reliable baseload instead of relying on the weather which as native of the isles I can confirm is rather changeable.

I think deep down many of the low IQers in Labour know this which is why Ed Wingnut Miliband was packed off to the Foreign Office. Back in the day it was a big job, but such is the collapse of British influence around the planet and to be honest substandard self-hating civil service in the FO it is mostly for show which in this case is probably a good thing. Let’s hope they can keep Ed busy with gibbon sanctuaries and stroking penguins, so he doesn’t do anything too idiotic like eating a bacon sandwich.

The only problem is that Burnham went through the rolodex of Labour MPs and managed to find the only one even more mental than Milivolts when it comes to climate change and the green agenda and then he made her energy secretary. Now I am not anti the environment, but I do think there is a trade off between doing nice things and having a functioning economy to pay for them whereas Miatta Fahnbulleh doesn’t. She wrote only in 2019 on achieving full net zero by 2035 which we probably could do if we just nuked the entire British Isles eradicating all life. I won’t suggest this to her as she may well push for it.

As you may have guessed I am currently deeply amused and it is only day 3 of this government – not administration, have some self-respect people. Shambles does not even come close to where we are and they have not even started on the really complicated stuff yet and so I think we are in for a deeply amusing run.

More than anything though I am struck by the disconnect of Burnham and co who think this is some sort of epoque defining event even though he has no personal mandate and the general public who is frankly sick of the lot of them. It creates a dissonance as Labour desperately tries to push this as a fresh start whilst using most of the same sub par cast of characters that infested the other guys cabinet and managed to achieve so little.

I can’t help but feel that the entire Burnham schtick i.e. just a normal guy like you is going to get very tiring very quickly. He is not like you and I and anyone who looks at his Wikipedia page knows that. He is Cambridge educated political careerist who has never had real job outside of politics and who has pined after this role for decades. He is not normal nor like the rest of us who do good and bad jobs and live in the real world.

But more than anything I don’t think that people want normal they want exceptional in the service of their needs and wishes which means sorting this country out and there I don’t think he has a clue as evidenced by his lack of plan on day one. But whether he comes up with a working plan in short order he will still be weighted down by a Labour party which now exists in a self-constructed group delusion which think it is a mixture of 1996 and 1936.

All we can do is keeping laughing and hoping that either some miracle happens i.e. like a monkey throwing faeces at a number chart this government quite by accident comes up with the right answer or we have a big enough crisis that wakes up the public and ejects this bunch of jokers out of Westminster for good. Alternatively, perhaps we could get Saddam’s super gun out of storage and fire them at the Russia lines to assist Ukraine either way we just need them gone.

The King in the North will shortly be coronated and then we can all relax as the land will bring forth food and honey and we will be showered with gold sovereigns. There will be so much wealth we will all install wood burners to annoy Ed Miliband and co and burn £50 notes to stay warm. If only this was likely, but we can all live in hope – well aside for the £50 note thing. If you can’t use at least £500 notes for kindling, then you are not even trying.

Sadly, I suspect that this is going to be another disaster. Certainly, the newspapers reporting today that infighting has broken out just days before he drives into Downing Street over who will be Chancellor does not bode well. I will be honest and say I had a quick giggle but then I am now pretty much the most cynical man in Britain when it comes to politics. This is tempered by a genuine belief that only a real crisis will get us out of the mess we are in, so I suppose in some ways this is bullish for me.

For I still think we are likely to get one sooner rather than later and so I am fortunately placed to be able to laugh enroute which is what I am doing now. You see the main issue that crash and Burnham just like Starmer has to contend with is that the Labour party is now so detached from reality that most of the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP) should be locked up in Bedlam as a danger to society. They should definitely not be in charge of a G7 country or any country including the really small pointless ones.

You see we are on a one-way train to fiscal disaster with benefit costs blooming, GDP per capita falling and an economy which is now in deep crisis with collapsing jobs and stagnate wage growth. We are in short in deep shit with millions now struggling for the basics whilst the British state achieves the impossible in hoovering in ever more taxes whilst providing ever worse security, services and quality of life for all.

Now there are many reasons for why we are here including horrific long-term planning by the British state over social care, crappy debt management, a useless central bank, piss poor public service reform, terrible trade policy and much much more. However, what I think we need to focus on is the economy. If anyone used to watch the series Heroes, they would remember the tag line “Save the cheerleader save the world”. Well in this case save the economy and save Britain.

For economic growth provides the cash to allow us to do stuff and it provides the state with resources to achieve its aims many of which are intergenerational in nature and so are not quick to resolve. Yes, we need to reform all of the above and yes, we need to stop pouring money into the triple lock and more however this is all much easier if you have money coming in to pay for said reform. A good example of this would be the NHS which needs massive change much of which requires up front funding.

Currently the British economy is staggering along growing at about 1.5% a year which is half (3%) of what we had before the Great Financial Crisis (GFC). Now this does not sound like a lot but if you take £100 and you run compound growth at 1.5% over 20 years you will get £135. Now if you do that with 3% you come up with £180. So, the difference is between an economy growing by a 1/3 in the period or more 4/5s. That matters when it comes to everyone having money and the state having resources to fix our plethora of problems.

It gets worse as if you look at the official British government figures then our population has grown by about 15% in that time. So, in fact our growth when you remove that skew in the figures is half of what it is officially. So basically in 20 odd years the British economy has barely grown in historical terms. It has stagnated whilst the British political class attempted to hide this fact via human quantative easing. This is why the country is busier than ever, and you are poorer than before as the pie is barely growing but there are more people eating it.

Now this growth issue was understandable immediately after the GFC due to the way that everyone’s balance sheets were knackered by the credit crunch. No one wanted to spend and the banks didn’t want to lend (Made worse by regulation). The end result was that the government had to keep spending as the only party with the space to do so. If they had not, then the economy would have cratered into a depression. The coalition if anything made this process more painful by attempting to cut across the board without a clear plan causing short term economic problems and massive long term social and security ones.

However, some 20 years later the balance sheets of the banking system, consumers and businesses are largely resolved. We are in a good place especially when you compare us to many countries across the West. It is no longer good enough to blame the GFC and say “Well that changed everything”. No, it changed a lot but any dynamic system like an economy would have long since adapted to the new normal and it has. Politicians need to take ownership of the battered British economy.

To start with you have heard for years about the mythical Brexit damage that is repeated ad nauseam across the liberal media. Well unlike them I am actually interested enough to look at some of the models and they are largely bunkum. One produced by the NBER is a case in point. They came up with their long-term GDP damage to Britain of between 4-6% which was trumpeted in and out of parliament as proof that this was indeed the reason for our malaise.

However, to complete their comparative analysis they picked out such winners as the United States being in a huge debt bubble and holding the global reserve currency, Ireland a global tax haven which even the EU excludes from its own data, Greece which has been going through catch up growth after the Eurozone debacle and Estonia a small and highly open economy. These were all indexed and this was used to prove that Britain had grown slower because of Brexit – yeah okay.

In reality when you just do a back of beer mat comparison of Britain and our genuinely nearest competitors of France, Germany and Italy you find out that Brexit was a macroeconomic non-event. You literally can’t see it such is the piss poor performance of all the countries over this period. This matters as it shows that the crisis is 1. Not about Brexit and 2. Is impacting all the big economies in Europe. This in analytic terms is called a correlation and now we can ask what could be combined causation.

I suspect the fact we were all part of the same sclerotic trade bloc for much of this period may well be part of the answer. This is not by the way an attack on the EU but simple analytic reasoning as the economies were tied together in this time with similar underlying legal and regulatory structures which would have forced similar but not the same outcomes on each one.

When you take this with our similar welfare systems you get economies which are highly regulated, highly taxed and with similar trade and energy issues. This I suspect is where our problems lie and it is important that we call it as politicians simply don’t want to admit this which is why they keep talking about Brexit. Sadly, because I have come to conclusion that most of them do not want to do the hard work required to fix things. I say that with genuine sadness because it underlines my personal collapse from someone who largely thought the best of politicians to one who thinks the worse.

How this ties back to Burnham and Britain is simple. With Britain leaving the European Union most of our problems are now domestic in nature. No amount of trade deals especially with countries which are also in deep crisis will resolve the ongoing economic and fiscal train wreck. No, we need deep domestic reform to try and knock the train onto a new line which will hopefully return us to the sunny uplands of economic growth and with it a more sane, safe and prosperous country.

However herein lies the rub – this kind of reform is a complete anathema to a Labour party which thinks welfare spending should only go upwards, that all regulation is good and that tax should be set at a level which makes sense for their spending requirements and not what will yield the best trade off between encouraging economic growth and maximising the tax take for those public services that we all use at some point and time.

Pat McFadden wonderfully exposed the paucity of intelligent thinking within the party in a WhatsApp message that was published due to the Mandelson affair. The PLP does not care about economic growth it only cares about shafting a few more quid out of Joe Public to transfer to their client groups. Well, that may well have been workable during the New Labour years, but it is not possible now as we live in different times.

“Every meeting I have is ‘who can we tax in order to pay benefits to others’. They’re asking the wrong questions.”

Burnham, is I suspect going to realise this very quickly when he gets and reads the books. There is simply no space for more spending on current growth trajectories – we have long since passed peak tax whereby new ones produce ever lower rates of growth and thus receipts. We are in a doom loop with British politicians trying to get more cash out of a patient who is dying ever faster the harder they squeeze.

He is going to suddenly realise that his many wonderful promises of good growth for everyone (whatever that means) and fairy dust for dinner etc are simply not possible without faster economic growth, but he can’t do much to get it. I mean does anyone seriously think that the Labour party is going to abolish tranches of the regulatory state to make it easier to do business? If you do I have a bridge to sell you!

What about the idea of reducing taxes in order to promote growth? I mean there are plenty of ideas about including changing Stamp duty which stops people moving through to getting rid of the many cliff edges in the tax system which put people off from working harder, earning more and thus paying more tax. I mean look at the VAT thresholds, child allowance and childcare stoppages and more. Does anyone seriously think the PLP will change these and in the short-term reduce spending whilst the growth comes - nope.

The same goes for energy which is the life blood of the economy. This is I believe a massive part of why we are here. Net zero sounded great on paper but the reality has turned out to be less than fantastic. Europe as a continent is de-industrialising at a fantastic speed. Labour still bangs on about Thatcher, but their policy has done more damage to British industry than Mags ever achieved. This not hyperbole but a statement of fact using the data – go check it out. But again, this is holy writ for the party and so we can expect more of it even as the EU waves off at least a little as the European car industry and more slowly circles the drain providing even more support and succour to the populists.

No, no, no, whatever direction he goes to find that growth Burnham will hit the hard wall of a breaking economy, mounting debt and a PLP which just won’t move. Thus, I think my wish and expectation of a crisis will likely bear fruit and I think sooner than many think. The most likely catalyst won’t be Ed Miliband becoming Chancellor but the first budget which will no doubt attempt to placate the left and soft left by plucking the public of a few more feathers of tax.

I mean Labour has already increased the tax take by nearly £70 billion in their first two budgets after promising not to do so before the election, so what is a few more billion between friends. However, this time the markets will be watching like a hawk especially after hearing Burnhams deep thinking on them - “get beyond this thing of being in hock to the bond market.” Global interest rates have been rising for months, and Britain is very exposed and though 0.15% etc may not sound like a lot when you owe just shy of £3 trillion then marginal changes to debt servicing costs really do add up not that your average Labour MP gets such basic arithmetic.

Thus, if I am right, I think the second half of this year will be a darkly funny comedy of errors by the last gasp of this Labour government as it staggers towards the end. Utterly unwilling to face up to reality it will go over edge whilst still moralising about how wonderful it is. It will inflict pain and hurt on millions because it is completely unfit to run a McDonalds let alone one of the biggest economies on the planet for make no mistake if things really go wrong then the outcome will be universal cuts demanded by those lending us the cash moving forward.

This will be the start not the end in my opinion as once you remove an even semi functioning economy then all our many social ills will spill onto the streets. No more will the state be able to buy off groups via higher welfare spending. That scares me as things are primed not just here but across the West for urban conflict and once things start, they create a momentum of their own.

Labour still has time – Burnham still has time. They could swerve – they could put country before party. They could put reality before worldview. We can all hope that they do but I have no confidence, why would I. At 46 years old it is easier to be cynical and be pleasantly surprised as I have seen enough expect the worst. Perhaps this time will be different but probably not.

These are just some of the issues that we are confronting right now but you would not know it from what is happening in Westminster. Instead, we observe a political class which is more wrapped up in who is up or down and trying to stab the other guys. It is simply not good enough and I think it bodes very badly for the future both in terms of protecting these isles but also in terms of public tolerance for a political system which is manifestly broken.

I worry about this more and more especially as public patience is exhausted with a system and governing class who simply will not focus on their priorities. It is telling that every new PM has a smaller and smaller bounce after they take power. For the record I don’t think Labour will even get one from Burnham taking over. But also, that the net favourability of all the party leaders is negative as the public has clearly decided a plague on all your houses.

This is understandable when the British state doesn’t seem capable or willing to fix anything that the public is worried about. You would think that someone in charge would look at the polling and the public mood and demand that they focus on resolving one thing to demonstrate the state is still competent but alas no one appears to be awake to the revolting mood amongst the British public.

Instead, we have our Andy talking about devolution as his signature policy moving forward. I don’t know about you I don’t know many people who are clamouring for more of it. I mean it is telling that its supporters always talk about Manchester as the example of how good it is whilst ignoring its dismal failure everywhere else. Worth noting that the success of Manchester has never really spread much beyond the city centre and that involved destroying the city skyline with high rise flats.

I mean just look at Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. Devolution managed the impossible – it took already economically left behind areas and made them worse. All whilst attacking the very fabric of Britain and ensuring that a load of third-rate politicians were given power and safe seats for life in modern equivalents of the rotten boroughs of the 17^th and 18^th centuries.

This is the polling by YouGov on public priorities. You will see that the economy and migration are by far and wide the two big issues that everyone is talking about. You will not see devolution or the constitution which randomly rarely makes a look in when people are concerned about keeping a roof over their heads and whether they will be attacked on the way home.

This dreadful disconnect is actually getting worse as people give up and walk away from politics. I hear this all the time now – I don’t vote as nothing changes. I sympathise for I didn’t vote in the last election as I didn’t think any of them were up to the task at hand. Swapping from the Conservatives to Labour has categorically proven that neither of them are. We will now swap from Starmer to Burnham which will I suspect categorically prove that neither of them are either.

There in lies the problem I think – we keep changing the government and even more regularly the Prime Minister, but we are not changing the actual MPs who sit in parliament and many of them are very low grade now. That is not me being hurtful, but a statement of fact backed up by numerous observers including many political journalists like Tim Shipman for the Spectator formerly of the Times.

Many of the MPs have never had real job let alone one in the private sector and frankly don’t even understand the basics and more worryingly don’t seem to have much interest in learning. I have previously talked about MPs asking trade experts to come in to brief them on the difference between a customs union and the Single Market after the Meaningful votes during Brexit. This is just one example amongst many.

An even more serious one was heard only a few months ago when an MP managed to confuse the debt and the deficit whilst being interviewed on Times Radio. Now I don’t know about you, but I think that is both pretty basic and very worrying that someone doesn’t understand the difference between the growth of debt and the total debt but that is where we are.

Now I know plenty of people will say “Why don’t you stand?” which is a completely fair question. I can’t – I had a very explorative youth where I partied hard and did everything I could get my hands on. It was great fun but also wildly damaging however it also would be dredged up by the media should I decide to throw my hat into the ring. To be honest think it is a good example of why we have the MPs we have.

Let me explain.

We have developed a deeply unserious political culture over years which focuses on personality and not policy. This has morphed under the pressure of the cancel culture period into a borderline sociopathic process whereby every person’s life is put under the microscope and examined for anything that can be attacked. This has become ever easier to do with the advent of social media which provides a rich vein for offence archelogy.

The outcome from this is that normal people don’t even bother applying as they don’t want that level of unpleasantness in their lives and the parties don’t want the hassle of having to explain that yes people make mistakes and say dumb things all the time. Especially if the events took place 20 years ago. The past is a different country, and we were all different people, but the modern media doesn’t seem to care about that.

What this all means is that the political system now sucks in some of the weirdest and most ignorant people in the country. People who have always wanted to be in politics and so have prepared their lives for that level of interrogation. They will have spent most of their youth saying and doing nothing interesting that may be found out later on should they get near to the political system.

It is not a trope but a fact – I mean look at our Andy. He went to Cambridge and studied English literature and then bounded straight into Labour and onwards through special advisors’ roles into parliament into cabinet and when he left, he didn’t get a real job but instead went to become mayor of Manchester. This is not an attack on him as this is quite normal – it’s a statement of fact.

No wonder parliament doesn’t seem to understand the country or even care about it. It is stuffed full of political junkies who have a completely deranged view of the world and who don’t understand the idea of consequences in terms of decision making. It also explains why so many MPs are ignorant – they are normally people who are domain specific after spending their lives soaked in the Westminster bubble instead of swapping jobs and learning new things.

Because of all of this the average age of a person in parliament is going down as the system now takes people straight from uni. They aren’t as parliament was originally envisaged and used to be people who have had full lives and who enter politics to try and use that experience for the betterment of the country. I mean long gone are the days when the Tory benches were full of former businessmen or military officers and the Labour ones were full of former union leaders and local authority heads – yes they are there but they are a minority.

This is a crisis and one that I don’t have an immediate answer for, and it is also not one that is not unique to Britain. It is being seen all over the West to varying degrees and I think it explains why our entire civilisation is in such a funk right now. We are largely governed by ignorant and out of touch people who because of their life journeys are totally different to us in terms of worldview.

This will change if nothing else as the crisis we are now confronting at home and abroad are more and more showing up the current elite as being useless and simply not up to the task. Truly hard times create hard men which in due course will lead to good times – the wheel never stops turning however it is depressing to be still stuck here after everything but also maddening.

To be fair to the media I do think there is a slow realisation that the public wants more in terms of analysis. Much like with many of our institutions they are in a race for survival – can they adapt to public demands, or will they be wiped out by the newer media which is coming up hard. I don’t know and I don’t really care anymore. I think some creative destruction would be entirely helpful across much of society.

The advert of newer media underpinned especially with podcasts has changed the world for politicians as they provide a long form structure. This has shifted the requirements on politicians. Gone is the ability to parrot a throw away line in your 3-minute section on Newsnight because there may be another hour to go on the show with even more questions. This is very rapidly exposing the politicians who actually do detail and their brief and those who don’t – this is a good thing for all sides.

I recently grateful to see Reform back their candidate in the recent by-election after some comments were dredged up from him. Let us hope this becomes the norm across all parties. We need to normalise the idea that people will say and do dumb things and if the pearl clutchers don’t like it well tough. I would rather have someone who gets the world but may have said something stupid in the past than the largely faceless and disconnected elite we have now.

Regime change is coming – under the surface a myriad of small changes are occurring. No single one will reverse up the problems in parliament, but I think taken together they are pushing it the right direction. If nothing else as the public is rightly less and less interested in personality and far more interested in policy outcomes. This makes sense when you live in a country which is visibly and rapidly failing in front of your eyes.

I suspect as I have written before that real change won’t come until there is a big enough crisis that pushes the system over the edge. I think we are nearly there. It is at that moment that we will likely reset the system and get people in parliament with the experience, grit and drive to push through the changes we need. Time is short but I remain hopefully depressed about the state of the nation and the direction of travel.

Whatever happens we the public have a massive part to play. Regardless of our political leanings we need to stop allowing ourselves to be wound up by pointless stories in the media. We need to become more clinical when confronted with new information and interrogate it fairly instead of through a party-political lens. We need to support MPs from across the house who are doing their jobs regardles of the party they are n. More than anything we need to focus on what policies each of us thinks the country needs and what the trade offs are.

The steam engine is probably the most important device ever devised by humanity with the first commercially available one being built in 1712 by Thomas Newcomen which was used to pump water out of coal mines. A perfect symbiotic relationship with the machine allowing the extraction of ever more black gold which in turn could be used to power the engine.

However, the technology was refined and sent main steam by James Watt in 1765 who introduced a separate steam condenser which reduced fuel waste by 75% and later he adapted the motion from reciprocating which is excellent for pumps to rotary meaning that it could be used in any number of locations from factories to mills to agricultural threshers. The rest is as they say is history.

Why the steam engine I can hear many asking when we have invented so many things of note. That is because it broke the relationship between work and human and animal effort. Machines took over the effort powered by hydrocarbons – humans could get on with other things and beasts of burden slowly disappeared from our lives though their final disappearance would take a few more centuries and the invention of the motor car.

The invention of the steam engine was epoque defining because it was a General Purpose Technology (GPT). A GPT is defined by three characteristics:

• Pervasiveness: They spread into virtually every industry and sector, fundamentally changing how goods and services are produced

• Potential for Continuous Improvement: They do not remain static but constantly evolve, becoming cheaper and more capable over time

• Innovational Complementary: They act as catalysts for secondary innovations, paving the way for new tools, products, and operational models to emerge

Because of these they tend to drastically change both the economy and society, and I would argue geopolitics as well. Look at the steam engine – it accelerated the industrial revolution and made Britain the preeminent global power for 200 years. Not bad for something invented and refined in someone’s shed.

Fast forward to now and quite clearly Artificial Intelligence is a GPT and it is one that I believe is going to be more socially impactful than any GPT including electricity or the internet. For what AI is offering is not just further automation of physical labour but also intellectual work. We have never seen this before and I think the disruptive impacts are going to be profound.

I know – don’t believe the hype and I don’t in the short term. The companies that are busy sacking entire departments will learn the hard way as some already are in terms of cost and outcomes. However, to pretend that the technology is a passing bubble which will pop without a trace is to misunderstand how we advance.

If you look at the Dotcom bubble then it was a huge waste of money at face value. You know the classic stories of pets.com and more. However much of the cash invested then created the expertise and infrastructure that built much of the internet we use now. Certainly, many of the companies then are still with us like Amazon and more.

However, with AI I am already seeing the impact personally after spending the last 23 years working in digital. I have seen how the jobs are disappearing as AI is simply making companies slowly but surely more productive by allowing them scale more aggressively. My friend who works for a cloud services company has said they will likely never expand their sales engineering team again because of AI is allowing them to do more with less.

For the last two years I worked for an automotive sales AI company whose product responds to inbound leads. Currently this is just text based i.e. email and WhatsApp etc but voice response is coming within months. The OEMs and dealerships that use this product won’t sack all their sales staff, but they will likely decrease the size of them quite rapidly and don’t forget this technology is new – it will only improve from here.

What I mean by that is we are still at the beginning of the exponential development curve which comes with any new technology. At this stage of the rollout the advances come thick and fast which you are already seeing with the AI models. The newest ones are Ferrari’s when compared to the Skoda like models from only 12 months ago.

But the nature of the technology means that curve may well be steeper than anything we have ever seen and may even look like less like a J and more like a straight wall such will be the speed of the developments for as I said what makes this technology so different is that it is capable of helping us with not just with our physical labour but also our intellectual.

Take Anthropic’s Claude AI which is heavily used by computer programmers, but anyone can make use of it. I am no coder, but I have built software packages in a matter of minutes using its interface which happily works using natural language processing. You literally describe what you want, and Claude will even suggest additional features which may be useful.

Well Anthropic recently said that about 80% of Claude’s code is written by the AI itself with human oversight. Software is now building software, and each development cycle will likely increase the speed of the output but more importantly the quality of the code. I recently asked a friend who is a developer what he thought of the output and he said it was average but he also said that within months it will be better than anything he could write.

Where this gets genuinely scary is when you think about the next level on from this which is the intersection of the digital and real world and that is the roll out of robotics. I remember watching the Hondo ASIMO robot from 2000 which could barely walk but was still impressive. Then a few years later watching the film i-Robot based on the Asimov book and thinking how far away that future looked – well go check out Boston Dynamics as it is here now.

You now have companies rolling out robotic helpers for everything from agriculture through to home help and all the way through to chefing. The good, the bad and the very ugly are suddenly available. Yes, most of them will fail but many won’t and their development will now be accelerated by AI which will help with the design and development of them.

I will pause here to ask how long until we see robots building AI enabled robots in factories all being designed or at least co-designed by AI systems. It sounds so futuristic but in China there are factories already running in the dark because robots don’t need lights. We are very much in the Cambrian explosion period of robotic and AI evolution.

I don’t think anything will be the same again though few are even thinking about it. How will society and the economy cope with changes this profound? I mean to start with let’s just consider the economy. If enough people lose their jobs in a very short period how will consumption which makes up 65% of GDP hold up?

This sounds ridiculous but it is not as much of the West already suffers from a K shape economy with the better off moving away from the rest who are struggling. That top bit of the K is the only thing keeping much of the economy alive and well it is their jobs which are most exposed in the initial wave of AI rollout.

I mean long before robotics replace a plumber you are going to see AI hit the knowledge economy like a speeding train because when you breakdown many roles, they are simply humans who have databases in their heads. They are simply taking inputs, running it through the knowledge they have acquired in university or work and coming up with outputs.

You know like accountants, solicitors, financial market traders, coders, doctors and much much more. It is these roles which will killed off first as they are expensive and it is quite easy to train AI to do them. You are about to see a bloodbath in the professional classes unlike anything we have ever seen. As I said it has already started in digital and it is coming to a profession near to you soon. Yes, some will stay to oversee the AI’s but many will not. Their comfortable little career moats that they have spent decades in training to excavate just got filled in.

The impact for them will be profound as many have spent decades climbing the social ladder and basing their entire social status on their professional roles. They have also built-up financial commitments around them. You know that nice big house in Reigate with the kids in a private school etc and well that is likely all going away.

You see there is not going to be much call for burnt-out high-end accountants whose entire career is now over. Their £200k a year is not coming back and that means their spending will need to collapse to the new norm for them. Where is that I don’t know but just look at average wage in this country.

The impact on broader society will also be felt as their wages are spent on trains, in cafes, in bars, on cars and much more. But also, that nice big house is soon going to be unaffordable and that means they will need to move. Everyone who is being fed directly and indirectly from that salary is going to be impacted as that is money lost to the economy not redirected.

For the salary saved will not be spent on more staff but will instead go to the AI companies and as increased profit in the short term for the company. Good for those but bad for society because a loss of a few people would not be a problem, in fact it would be positive as would increase productivity, but we may be looking at hundreds of thousands and quickly.

If you live in a global city like London or one of the small towns nearby which feed them then you may be about to feel the economic pinch and worse than that for home owners collapsing prices as fire sales rarely only impact one part of the market they spread and spread pulling everything down – negative equity anyone?

I will be honest as someone who comes from a working-class background, I am torn between concern for the economy and society and an urgent need to laugh and point. For again I am old enough to remember the utter contempt rained down on the working class over concerns about wage suppression from mass migration and then the China export shock. I guess everyone will now feel what it is like to be unceremoniously scraped.

However, it is not just people who will be impacted. For the modern state is reliant on higher earners to pay for all the good stuff like benefits and healthcare. Lose enough of them and you are looking down the barrel of a severe fiscal shock at a time when debt is sky high, borrowing is nonstop and the economy is simply not delivering enough growth to keep up with ever increasing demands. Thow in contracting consumption on top of this and things start to look very dicey indeed.

The systemic shock will also hit the universities hard and will hopefully be the end of most of them. Kids are already working out that most degrees are a waste of time and money and when you strip out stuff like law and more there is unlikely to be much demand for degrees for professional reasons. The universities are going to need to return to the hard sciences and doing research.

This will be a small loss to society as standards within them have long since collapsed as they have chased money and expansion as part of their business plans. Chalk this up as another catastrophic coalition decision. However, unless plans are put in place the collapse of the sector will likely negatively impact many towns and cities which rely on the money from students to keep going.

More positively fewer kids going to university will likely mean a much less progressive younger generation as studies show that the universities have become vectors of political radicalisation as the university staff have skewed ever more to the left. Hence why I think their closure would be a good thing. People should find their own politics and not have them stuffed down their throats by lecturers etc who should know better.

What will be interesting to watch will be how this intersects with any mass collapse of the careers of the middle classes. As nothing is quite as radicalising as working for decades only to be tossed on the scrap heap because of a computer box whilst finding out that your life you had built up and taken for granted is now gone.

Could we see a moment approaching where young and old, working and middle class all unite against an economic system which has been failing for decades but may just be about to go over the edge. I think it is highly likely to be honest which I why I find it weird watching all the Thatcherite hang outs who think a spot of de-regulation and tax cutting is going to fix everything.

Don’t get me wrong I think we need to do that but only as part of a broader programme of national renewal which would help to blunt some of the worst outcomes of the above. However, currently I am not seeing much in the way of thinking from the political class who as usual seem utterly oblivious to the cluster of data centre sized asteroids hurtling towards the British economy.

This is very serious stuff to be honest as these kinds of events come along once every 100 years. Is it really too much to think that perhaps the people in charge might show a modicum of interest and forward planning before things get too serious? I mean apparently so which is why Westminster now looks and feels so utterly irrelevant to most people.

Either way historically most political revolutions happen when:

1. There are a lot of young people with no jobs

2. The middle class think life is awful and throw in their lot in with the working class

{Checks what he has just written}

Right, so nothing to worry about then.

What would this even look like?

Would this be the masses against the rich especially those who own the AI and robotic companies and the elite in some sort of armed insurgency with the latter trying to buy people off with Universal Basic Income (UBI). Alternatively are we about to see some sort of new luddite movement with attacks on data centres and robot factories making their use increasing impossible?

I don’t know but it is less of a hurdle to go from law abiding citizen to someone throwing a petrol bomb at a substation or factory than it is to organise a protest and march on the centres of power. So logically we would likely see attacks on infrastructure as a warmup act though if there really is a big enough social / economic disruption don’t discount a sudden event like we saw during the Arab spring which snowballs out nationally and internationally as this is a global issue.

Another thing that keeps me awake at night is the impact on developing countries which historically have used an export driven model of growth for development. They start out exporting commodities, then primary goods and slowly but surely, they move up the value chain. Well, if things go the way I think they are going to then we have reached the high point of trade in stuff. Instead, the future of trade will be mostly digital in terms of people exchanging how to build things.

This is because AI and robotics will see the wholesale reshoring of industrial capacity into most countries. I mean why wouldn’t this happen when the main advantage to outsourcing collapses which is wage arbitrage i.e. salary differences. Well robots don’t get paid, don’t take breaks, don’t unionise and you don’t have to worry about their pensions. India which has a huge outsource IT and consultancy sector may well be doubly hit. There could well soon be an economic crater where Bangalore used to be.

What does that mean for migration which is already a problem for developed nations? Imagine the political implications if this flow suddenly increases due to emergent economic crisis in the developing world. I shudder to think what the reaction would be especially if you have a jobs crisis in the West as well and people are at best sullen and at worse out and out enraged. Suddenly the calls for gun boats in the Med and channel may well become overwhelming and with little concern for the corpses left floating.

I know this is all very depressing, but it doesn’t have to be. I think this could lead to a world of plenty unlike anything we have ever seen. I mean look at the amazing advances being made in food production using drones to treat plants or within natural resource production where AI is being used to find, model and extract stuff. Look at the newer drugs coming out made possible by rapid gene processing and AI assisted drug design. We could be on the cusp of a golden era.

Longer term I wonder if we are going to become a post scarcity society which will end capitalism. I don’t know but it is probably worth rereading Jeremy Rifkin’s The Zero Marginal Cost Society in which he says that as the marginal cost of production moves towards zero then this drags profit down with it. This means that capitalism just kind of breaks. This seems far fetched but then so did i-Robot in 2004 and people should remember that capitalism is simply another socio-economic system amongst many humanity has made use of.

What would that even mean for most people? I mean it sounds great the idea that no one would ever struggle again but I wonder if humans would even cope with that. It comes down to whether you think people would happily do something productive with their time or just lose all interest in a life without challenge.

I have to say I suspect a lot would lose interest and we would end up with huge social problems. Humans are doers which is funny really as we have spent thousands of years designing and building stuff, so we don’t need to do them. It would be deliciously ironic if we finally built the final level boss tech that meant we would not need to do anything else and then just got depressed and gave up.

Regardless, that is a problem for another time and perhaps another generation. In the short to medium term the implications are serious and very complex because they involve first, second and third order impacts on societies and a globe which is already fragmenting in every direction and with people who are already worried about their future but more importantly their children’s. I have friends with kids leaving school now who keep asking me what I would advise – I have no answer.

What I do know is that the state has huge resources and power to bend the direction of travel. We need serious people in charge who realise what is going on and are willing to embrace radical change to prepare society for what is coming. That means yes building out the regulation and hard infrastructure necessary to use AI and robotics but also to help people to learn to use and adapt to life alongside these newest of technologies.

AI and robotics are not going to take every job and certainly not soon. That means we need to reduce the friction for people to change careers and start again. Since Blair and then the coalition the state has done the inverse with its commercialisation of education and push to get more people into university. By the time someone has invested 3 – 4 years of their lives and a minimum of £50,000 they are unsurprisingly loathed to change.

So, start with the basics and kill this off and pump money into shorter term courses so people can flip from one career to the next as disruption occurs. If the state doesn’t want to pump cash in now, then simply make the courses tax deductible against future earnings so people can crack on. Alongside this make a degree requirement outside of set circumstances illegal. This won’t solve all the pain, but it will help to reduce it a lot.

More than anything though we need to be honest with people that disruption is coming and they must be prepared to duck and dive and try and find a new place as the economy flexes. I know this is something that I am doing now. I resigned from my last job as was deeply unhappy. But as I said to my wife “My job is going to be gone sooner or later anyway so I may as well get on with rebuilding now”. Yes, I am lucky I have some money and a loving family around me. We have also been careful to live a relatively modest life, but it is still a shock.

However, the alternative is doing what I see on LinkedIn day in and day out now. People who have been unemployed for 12, 18 or even 24 months or more begging for a job. Not all will have lost their jobs because of AI but I am confident that many can’t get one now because of it. I read the posts and really want to just tell them it is over and beg them to move on with their lives as they must be mentally and financially dying. They are stuck though as they are denial over the loss of their old life and status – sadly there are many more who are going to join that club soon.

Keir Starmer has fallen on his sword, starting the countdown to the end of his premiership. I won’t spend much time on the man himself as most people who follow me know I loathe him. I have in my 45 years of life on this planet rarely come across a bigger liar and more incompetent politician. Frankly I am relieved that I will soon likely never have to hear his voice ever again.

The herd in Labour has clearly fully stampeded over and it looks like crash and Burnham will be coronated after Streeting withdrew his Potemkin leadership bid. This matters as it means that the Labour membership but more importantly the British public will have no ability to actual find out what the King in the North believes (if anything) before he steps into No10.

The media will have to do its job which it singularly failed to do before the last election and that is to hold Burnham to account. I say this as clearly it did not do this pre 2024 with Starmer as even the journalist Michael Crick publicly stated. The liberal media had clearly decided that anyone was better than the Tories mirroring the public mood – alas currently it looks like everyone was wrong so let’s hope journos show a modicum of professionalism this time.

This matters because as Crick has pointed out today every Prime Minister since at least 1945 came to power having held one of 3 great offices of state or has been Leader of Opposition. Burnham has not held any of these and his big political contributions to date has been to hold a series of positions in the New Labour government achieving little of note, losing the leadership contest to Corbyn and then flouncing off up north to start banging on about “Manchesterism”- answers on a postcard if you know what that even means.

In case you are left wondering as my writing is so subtle, I think Burnham will be an utter disaster. An opinion backed up today in the FT which ran a piece on him and had this great quote from those who worked with him in the New Labour government. Hardly a ringing endorsement of someone who will barring an act of God be shortly the Prime Minister of a nuclear armed G7 economy.

However, as poor as Burnham and most of the political class certainly are it’s important we do not lose sight of the real crisis within our democratic system right now. Bluntly that is the parties have consistently refused since 2016 to deliver what the British public wants which is to basically stop illegal and legal migration, reverse much of the damage of the last 25 years and to get the economy growing. No wonder political volatility is through the roof, polling is on the floor, and parties are cycling through leaders like pub football teams switching in subs on a Sunday morning.

This is why you now see near universal disdain for all the political leaders but also each Prime Minister is coming in and getting less of a bounce and having their polling falling ever quicker. You can see that with Starmer especially whose personal polling fell faster than a speeding bullet and unlike Superman never pulled up. I will be honest this amused me as every time I thought he would bottom out he kept ploughing into the ground like a fat drunk who had fallen over after 8 pints.

This is why I don’t think crash and Burnham will change Labour’s fortune as bluntly he clearly has no analysis of why we are here. The fact that the newspapers were reporting he wanted the summer to come up with some policies sums it up nicely. This is not someone who has spent the last 16 years looking at the post-crash world and really knows what he wants to do and how he will do it. No, he is coming in blind and Labour are hoping that his “cheeky” persona will win the day – I think not.

For set against this is the fact that the British public can see what political failure looks like daily. They see the minor and major break downs in law and order from barrier jumping at stations through to phone thefts and all the way up to the major stuff like knifings and even more. To use a progressive term this is their lived experience, and no number of dodgy statistics and cheerful smiles from politicians will convince them otherwise.

But I think even worse is the fact that they see the collapse of the realm. I was this last weekend in Windsor Park and drove around the local area which is so wealthy they burn £50 notes to stay warm in winter and even there you see the same crisis. Broken barriers, patches upon patches on the roads, filthy streets with bushes growing out of the gutters and of course the omni present high streets of empty shops or vape / barber money laundering businesses. This is what people have to contend with now – all whilst getting poorer because of a knackered economy and too high taxes.

Labour doesn’t get this and they certainly don’t get that most people only marginally care who the PM is. For most normies they just want to get on with their lives. Hell, I do as well. I wrote the below a few days ago and I mean it. Though I love politics I don’t actually want to think about it anymore – I just want some competent people in charge who are able to get on with fixing our plethora of problems and I want to see results ASAP.

That is exactly what I do not think Burnham will do as bluntly he can’t. If you have no analysis of why we are here then how do you come up with coherent policies to fix anything. But also he will in the end still get squashed between a parliamentary Labour party which is utterly disconnected from reality and is not willing to continence cuts to create fiscal space for investment or changes to the net zero agenda and a bond market which rightly see’s Britain as badly run as a 1980’s banana republic only without the drugs, bananas and good weather.

It is going to be a long summer, and I suspect even longer end of the year. I have to be honest and say that just leaving the country for a while is very tempting. Not because I think much of the world is any better currently but at least it would not be my political system and my country and thus I could chuckle about it rather than just getting depressed.

Anyway – enjoy the heat – we spend most of the year complaining it is cold and wet.

Reform offered a tax cut which is pretty much unheard of in our politics now but more than anything it is demonstrated a willingness to engage a growing portion of the public that rightly feels overtaxed and that the state wastes our money on an industrial scale. It is important because it drew a line which the rest of the political class will now have to engage with – do they offer up more tax and spend which more and more people are cynical about or get real over what the state must and should do. I know there is plenty of criticism over whether the policy is even doable – I sympathise with this, but this comes secondary in my mind to the simple fact it was put out there forcing all parties to engage with and respond to.

Blair by comparison reheated the 1990’s in terms of centrism whilst welding on AI for good measure. I mean why not he is getting paid enough by some of the tech bros – one thing you can say about Anthony Blair is that he knows who butters his bread. However, he also took out his favourite overly priced platinum plated revolver and calmly shot both EU membership and net zero through the head.

On the EU he said the quiet bit out loud – the EU regulatory system is a bin fire which has destroyed its own tech industry. Plenty of us have said this for some time – I worked in digital for over 20 years, so I know but this has not been something the media and the political class who are mostly Europhiles have been willing to discuss. One only has to look at the lack of EU tech giants to see the impact. Yes, yes, they have ASML, SAP and Spotify (they are always mentioned because there are so few) but then compare these to the size and number of giants in the US or China. It is not so much the EU lost the tech war – more they shot their own team in the back as they advanced onto the battlefield.

On AI it is even worse where the EU has created a regulatory framework expecting the world to copy it only the economic clout of the bloc is now so diminished that no one has. The end outcome is that the EU is an AI backwater with little serious research taking place. It has all mostly left for a mixture of the US, Singapore and yes, you guessed it Britain which for its size punches well above its weight in terms of AI research and development coming in a comfortable third in the world. This is of course only possible because we are outside the bloc though of course the clever people in the media and politics don’t like mentioning it whereas Blair put it front and centre.The other thing that Blair took to pieces was net zero by rightly pointing as again many of us have been saying for some years that successful economies must have cheap and abundant energy for both manufacturing but also to power the technologies of the future like robotics and Artificial Intelligence. Expensive energy means that our industrial capacity will keep shrinking as it is now with a knock-on impact on jobs, social stability but also national security as we simply won’t be able to produce chemicals, steel and even drugs. Furthermore, there will be no next generation manufacturing and digital revolution here – it will like biotech and the earlier digital one still happen just elsewhere. Which is what happened last time to the EU including the UK. We can continue to chase net zero but on current trajectory this will make zero impact to global CO2 emissions however it is, and it increasingly will negatively impact our economy to the point that unless we change direction the public will simply say “enough” and force a full reversal.

Neither of these interventions will by themselves change the political weather. Blairs appears to have just made the Labour party even more deranged something I thought was not possible. The internet is now littered with op-eds and tweets from Labour MPs denouncing him whilst failing to engage with the detail of his work. This is sadly the norm for a political class which appears to have replaced rational thought and policy making with emoting and virtue signalling. However, it caught the eye of the media who have at least started to dig into the detail of these issues which can only be a good thing. It is vital that the country debates things openly so that trade-offs can be discussed and the public is better educated. This has not happened to date across much of the media including the BBC where EU membership has always treated been treated a good thing and Net zero is an unavoidable event rather than a policy choice.

The tax and spend one I think is going to take more time, but it is a good thing that it has been raised now with the Makerfield by-election on going with Burnham attempting to re-enter parliament. I personally suspect that he may lose but he is still currently the favourite. If he does win, then there is a fair chance there will be a coronation with him being brought in as Labour leader and thus PM and he is clearly someone who wants to tax and spend even more – which would be going some when you consider the size of the tax rises and borrowing that our Rachel has already put through to date. You may well be favour of this but again there are pros and cons that should be debated including the impact on households and a threat of a bond market strike due to the increasingly precarious fiscal position of His Majesties government.

I suspect that whatever happens the last week will be looked back on as being a bigger moment than many think as finally, we are starting to shake off the cozy unspoken cross-party agreements that have infested Westminster for decades. You may as I said favour one policy outcome or another however we should all agree that choice is a good thing in a democracy. I personally believe that lack of choice is a big part of the reason why the country finds itself in the position it does now because policies have been presented as fait accompli’s to the public instead of being rigorously debated and interrogated by real opposition politics. This has led to lazy reasoning and even worse a failure to acknowledge let alone counter the trade-offs which are inherent in any choice.

It is now up to the media and the political class to get into the trenches and fight these issues out with the public being the final referee on who wins. That is exactly how democracy should function and I look forward to seeing and joining in on the debate. I hope if nothing else that this will force the clever people who helped to get us here to actually explain why and how instead of hiding and pretending that the poor state of the nation is in some way just one of those things instead of being down to policy choices some of them going back decades.

More please.