What is more difficult, and more interesting, is how this could go right. If everything was to work out better than we imagine, or even better than we hope for. What would that look like?

I very much doubt that Andy Burnham has read Prosperity 2030, and so the alignment between his plan and the programme suggests independent identification of the foundations that need to be fixed to allow the country to grow into a better future. Based on that assumption, I’m going to propose a future history in which things go right.

Timing the next general election

The budget date has been brought forward to October 28th, and I don’t think that’s mere scheduling. If you look at where Starmer and Reeves left the government finances, with all the pain back loaded into the year before the next general election, that is a recipe for failure. The combination of the 2024 Labour Party manifesto and the “fiscal rules” paint the government into a corner that even a year of happy chappy announcements cannot escape. There is no point Burnham trying to build a new vision and reputation if it all runs into a wall at just the moment that the public are making their decisions about whether the country is on the right track or not. A new manifesto in 2028/29 will not stand against the austerity planned in. He has to move sooner.

Given a choice, then, between running sooner or later, the later option just runs deeper and deeper into the quagmire of compromises that Burnham inherited. Better to use the new guy bounce while it still exists. Reform weakening helps this case (see Manchester, twice. But the bounce is unlikely to last more than six months. The Hormuz Strait and El Niño effects will combine to push up inflation towards the end of this year. NIESR’s estimates are a peak in February 2027 and no reversion to mean until 2029. That means higher interest rate pain for the middle classes combined with cost living pressures for the working classes. Those will show up in the numbers in early 2027 and persist through the year, which is another reason to go early.

The new manifesto

What Burnham needs is a new manifesto that will allow him to raise the revenues we need for national renewal. Not taxes justified by what they get spent on, but taxes as contributions in return for dramatic and broad reductions in the cost of living and increases in local control. That is the sequencing that we put in Prosperity 2030 because it is sustainable and repeatable. Reduce the cost of living, claim some back in extra contributions, repeat.

So, budget on October 28th and general election December 10th. Expect the Budget to include no immediate effect measures but set out commitments to meet future obligations like NATO 2035.

The new Burnham manifesto should roughly follow Prosperity 2030, which you can read now to get ahead of matters. How to strengthen every postcode, build local democratic capacity, reform Council Tax, drive down the cost of living, and get Britain working again. Let’s just hope he got the message about a big bold move for Day 1: free buses nationwide paid for with raising duty on flights.

Last week I published what I think is the most comprehensive plan for the UK to get from where we are now to something vaguely more sustainable (let me know if you have seen others). It runs for 5 years, assuming we start in 2030 after the next general election, which is where the name comes from. Working with colleagues at the IGP I wrote, modelled Prosperity 2030. And with the help of Fran and Higginson Strategy, published and launched it last week. It’s all online, free and open access - see links below.

I admit, it’s big. It had to be to present the whole picture. A picture that emerges from a simple insight: we have to own our society, to free our economy and restore our balance with all life.

Prosperity 2030 threads a needle between the current conditions, the vital importance of re-establishing the social contract, and keeping on a pathway towards environmental sustainability. That means fiscal rectitude, social fabric establishment, and the grounding for lower energy and material use, all while maintaining the opportunity to flourish with joy.

We must paint a picture which is motivating, within a context that is realistic, and that takes us to a destination that is worthwhile.

The primary impetus is to re-establish the social contract because that is a necessary precursor to all other change. Until then we are simply a dysfunctional human society. That dysfunction leans into individual gratification and away from collective effort. And for a species which is individually weak but collectively strong, our current trajectory is terminal.

Thinking deliberately about how we move from our current state of dysfunction to one of a higher level of social function is what generates the policy framework in Prosperity 2030. Because we have to start where we are now, P2030 is fashioned within the current context, with all of its constraints. That means it has to start with a fiscally credible stance, which allows us to build the structures, that will re-establish the social contract.

Once the social contract has been strengthened, then it will be possible to start pulling together in the ways necessary to make much more substantial changes to the way that we live to fit in our environmental context. That will be an environmental sustainability programme but we can’t do that until we have first created the conditions. I think of P2030 as the first nudge of the trim tab that will turn our tanker around – it is, perhaps, a quarter of what we need to do.

Dip in, have a shufti, see what grabs you., use Ask in the top nav to ask your question and get referred to the bits you’ll be interested in. It’s 200k words describing 30 policies from WellFair to PaidFair wth the details in appendices. Click around, you can’t hurt it.

You can read the report here: prosperity2030.uk

You can see how it was covered in the press here: prosperity2030.uk/coverage/
^{(The one about turning the UK in Communist China is hilarious because it is so overboard. Still 3 articles in the Telegraph in 1 week is a win for any campaign.)}

The launch event recording is here (me from 15 mins in):

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Over the summer I hope to be inspired by your questions and comments to write around the report, talk about where it is weak and could be strengthened by collaborating with others, and where the project goes from here.

Apologies for the radio silence but I am beavering away on a new report that lays out a cunning plan to dramatically improve life. At my current rate it will be done late Spring ‘26.

Now superseded by the actual report and calculator https://report.prosperity2030.uk/calculator/

Because no one else seems to be able to develop a strategically designed and sequenced policy program that builds the society we all want, I decided to have a go myself. You can get the outlines of it by asking the Policy Analyst to explain it to you.

Fixing we are in this together and making it blinding obvious that the social contract is reciprocal means reforming how we provide support and how we contribute at the same time. In my language that’s Universal Services + National Contributions.

So, a big part of the groundwork for the new report is developing a detailed model of reformed tax: National Contributions. Basically everything everyone gets is taxed the same, irrespective of if you earned it, or didn’t. Merge Income Tax, NICs, Inheritance and Capital Gains taxes into one, simple income tax. I wrote this up in the 2021 National Contributions report and have now updated it for 2025 incomes and figured out the rates needed to properly update the UK for the 21st century.

So, what kind of tax would you have to pay to get?

• free local buses with twice the bus services

• £11/month credit at your communications provider of choice

• no TV License fee

• no standing charges for water or energy

• 10,000kWh a year free energy allowance

• 9,000 community food centres, 3 billion free meals a year

• 3,000 community service hubs (1 in every outward post code)

• properly resourced local democracy with well paid councillors

• an extra £55 billion (2% GDP) for your favourite priority not already covered above… defence? aid? hospitals? courts? trains? whatever, you pick

I’d wager that your guess is “a lot!”

I think you’ll be surprised – in a good way.

Keep this in mind before you head on over and check: at an absolute minimum, even if you never take a bus, or eat a free meal, and keep your thermostat whacked up to 28 degrees, you will still be saving about £1,000 a year.

So here’s your sneak peek at your new life living in a proper change society:

Was it worth it? Would you pay that to get a decent country you’d be proud to live in and raise your kids and grandchildren?

Please add your thoughts below.

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And please forward this to anyone you know who you think would be interested - or use the share button below.

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Introduction

The point here is to liberate contribution. That means creating safety. Safety comes from outside the individual.

You cannot make yourself safe. It is by definition something that you get from others. And that is why it’s collectively provided.

It has to be immediately available, which is why it’s unconditional, which means, so when we say universal, we mean unconditional. It doesn’t mean everybody’s getting it. Like not everybody has to move into social housing tomorrow.

But it should be available, the community food. You don’t have to eat there. You don’t have to use the bus.

All of this, right? So it’s not universal provision. It’s universal access, unconditional access to collectively provided services.

Hello and welcome to Planet Critical, the podcast for a world in crisis. My name is Rachel Donald. I’m a climate corruption journalist and your host. Every week, I interview experts who are battling to save our planet. My guests are scientists, politicians, academics, journalists and activists. They explain the complexities of the energy, economic, political and cultural crises we face today, revealing what’s really going on and what they think needs to be done.

Andrew is the co-chair of the Social Prosperity Network at the Institute for Global Prosperity, where he researches and publishes papers on the effectiveness of Universal Basic Services. Now, Universal Basic Services has been discussed previously on the show, within the context of degrowth. But my god, this is the first time in five years that we’ve had an episode just on it.

And I’m so, so glad to be introducing you all to it in such depth today, because Andrew completely reframes services from something that holds together the bottom of society, if you will, to something that facilitates relationships between people and communities so that they can make better collective decisions together. I think that’s a stunning reframe. That’s where we start, and it only gets better from there.

Andrew gives examples of Universal Basic Services, and they go far and beyond just health care or education, explaining how we could implement them tomorrow at no extra cost. He weaves this policy into a bigger picture of the problem of financialization and how the financial services are killing the planet, and by extension, our own communities, and gives a very clear definition of what sustainability means, both for finance and for these services. Painting a picture of what we could readily achieve tomorrow if we built up the political will.

This is a really, really exciting and tangible vision. And if you are based in the UK and you want to understand more about how UBS could impact you, I’ve linked this little AI chatbot that Andrew has fed their papers into. And essentially, you can sit down and say to it, you know, I am a single mother living in Manchester with three children. What will my life look like under UBS in 2030? And it will spit out what your life could look like. And how much better it would be, quite frankly, compared to living in this sort of neoliberal hellhole.

So if you’re in the UK, I encourage you to go and play around with that tool. And for everyone else, you can go and read the policy papers, go and look at the Institute for Global Prosperity more broadly and start to lobby your councillors and your politicians to begin marching towards this vision that puts human collective responsibility at the heart of solving our planetary crisis. I hope you all enjoy

Andrew, welcome to Planet Critical. It is a pleasure to have you on the show.

It’s a pleasure to be here, Rachel. Thanks for giving us the chance to talk about Universal Basic Services.

Well, I’m so excited to, because as we were just saying before we hit record, it was Jason Hickel years ago, the first introduced this to me when I interviewed him. It was when I was emailing you about this interview that I realised I hadn’t had the opportunity yet to discuss just this part because it makes up a significant part of de-growth. But just talking about UBS, how we would do it, how we would fund it, what the benefits of it, I think is so important and I think it makes intuitive sense to people, but they always get a bit nervous about something being too illusory or dreamlike to really put their eggs in that basket.

So let’s get into it. I mean, if you could just for people that don’t know, what are Universal Basic Services?

Fostering Prosocial Behavior

So I think that one of the reasons the conversation gets a little stuck sometimes is that people dive in at the bottom end of it, which would be the implementation piece. I think that what’s really important is actually to get the framing right in the first place. Like what’s the point?

UBS is a policy, but why? Policy is typically designed to achieve an objective. So the first thing I would say about UBS is that it is a modern language framing of what is a very basic ancient cultural norm, which is that in our society, we provide individuals with some level of safety, and that that enables them to basically use their individual capabilities and capacities to make a contribution back to the group.

So the reciprocal flow is a very basic ancient thing. There’s nothing new here. But the question comes, how do you do that in a modern industrialised society?

I guess that’s a framing that Universal Basic Services tries to say: okay, give you some clues about how we might do that within this kind of society. To do it, what I would call within the flow, rather than with the capital. Within the flow of energy and materials that are actually available on the planet, how would we create the social conditions that enable people to contribute?

Now, by accident or whatever, I mean, the historical analysis is somewhat academic at this point, and we are where we are. We have created societies in which we try really hard. I mean, we devote a lot of energy, effort, money, at trying to establish what we call social security or welfare systems.

But the reality of those is that they have become kind of individualized financial transactions, and they are actually feeding the destruction of the planet. So we’re trying really hard to do something very basic, and it’s resulting in really poor outcomes. And that’s collective global outcomes, as well as kind of really not being very effective on the individual level.

So my framing would be for a planet in crisis, is that that crisis is a human crisis, that we need to understand social. And where a lot of this started for me was in that kind of, around 2008, but before that as well, and I was living in California at the time. And there was a sort of existential rethinking within the ecological green movement in the United States, which had had so much of this success in the 70s, and Clean Water Act, and Clean Air, and all this kind of effort.

And then it hadn’t worked, it hadn’t got to where they wanted it to, and they started asking themselves the question, why? And the basic answer to that was, we didn’t pay enough attention to the humans and their social structures that were resulting in these problems. You run up against a kind of resistance and problems with implementation.

So we could sort of look at UBS as a way of saying, okay, so how would you structure a modern society to actually deliver the safety that would enable people to make contributions within the flow? And so I think that’s really important. Let’s get that straight.

So there is this overarching kind of objective. So what do we describe? So let’s just maybe talk a little bit about this.

It’s going to be very familiar to your followers. But I want to make sure that we’re clear about it, is that there are sort of two boundaries, and I really like Kate Rayworth’s configuration here, with the planetary boundaries that Johan Rockström and Potsdam have done so much to kind of define in a really kind of clear way as the outer boundary, the circle. And then Kate has very usefully put in this inner boundary of social minimums that need to be in place in order for humans to flourish in one way, but also just operate, right?

Then there’re basic mechanisms: we are a group species. You can’t tell an awful lot about humanity by picking an individual out of their group. You have to look at the group. We’re in relation. We’re very much a group species. So that social inner boundary is maybe the what, right?

So we got two whats. We got a what on the outside, we got a what on the inside. And I see UBS as **how** do we create that minimum basic set of social conditions.

Because I think there’s an important point here which comes up a lot in this whole existential critical times debate. People get actually to a very similar endpoint, which is basically what do we think human nature is? Are we fundamentally selfish, orientated people that when it comes down to it, there’s no such thing as altruism and that kind of analysis of humans, and there’s a lot to back that up. What backs that up is when you look at individual humans. I’m a big fan of David Sloan Wilson’s multi-level selection, that there are different levels of selection in the evolutionary process. For humans, that level is actually the group.

Yes, selfishness can succeed inside a group, but inter-group it’s prosocial that gives you the advantage. And I think that that tells us something about how we’re built as a species, and therefore what Universal Basic Services is about: how do you create the conditions that engender people’s prosocial natures? So I don’t think we’re bad or we’re good. We are in context, in the conditions that we’ve created. And in your last podcast, you referred over to the Antidotes group, and I had a look at what they’re doing. And there are just a thousand million examples in cultures all over the world of people who are doing really prosocial, fantastic things.

So I guess I would add maybe three things to that. What is the point of UBS? Well, it’s about how do you kind of engender these conditions that create prosocial inclination or bring out prosocial inclinations.

One of those is that, although we’ll probably end up talking a lot about how does this turn into a policy that intervenes now, I see it as a kind of eventual condition. It’s not a new idea. It’s how we’ve practiced being in groups for hundreds of thousands of years. And if I take your 2100 scenario, a sort of rebirth of humanity in a positive way, and I imagine that society is being substantially UBS based. That there are a set of unconditionally universally accessible basic safety services within which is not intermediated by money, markets. It is just a fundamental right. It’s kind of more than a right somehow. It’s kind of a universal bit about just being a human in a group.

So while this has some, and I think that there’s some debate here, depending on where people sit in the spectrum of, have we already gone too far? It’s just collapse. In which case, thinking about what to build afterwards, right? Because what’s quite important, Nate Hagens, who I know you’ve had on your show as well, talks about these “initial conditions for the great simplification”. I think there is value even if we think that the super-organism is going to dominate and we can’t stop this trajectory, and it’s all going to go in a very bad way in a relatively near future. There’s still value in what we build today. But I mean, both from a physical infrastructure, also from a social infrastructure, but also mentally, like what are the lessons we take into that future? Because God forbid, we get to 2100 and try and recreate some idea from the 1980s and because we thought it would rage. That’s going to be not right.

So I think there is some value, from my perspective, part of this is about how do we act now – but part of it is also like trying to surface truths that we can take into the next kind of thing. That’s another part of UBS that I certainly find useful. I mean, in these times, I think we all struggle a little bit, probably particularly people who are following Planet Critical, with how do we psychologically handle this time and space.

Meta v Poly Crises

I think that these two narrative possible ways of framing where we are, the sort of polycrisis or the meta crisis, that what UBS is part of understanding this as kind of cause, not just the symptoms. We get overwhelmed every day and heavens, what are we on? Day 12 for 2026, right? And it’s just, if you kind of just take that multi-polycrisis piece in, and there isn’t an understanding of what connects all of this underneath, and you don’t just kind of dig a bit deeper and say, well, are there kind of root causes of this activity and what’s happening? That if those are available to you, it’s easier to make sense, easier to hold on to your kind of mental state.

And the other thing that I think that we hoped at the IGP, when we kind of started writing about UBS as a kind of platform policy idea, which is how we had to present it at the time, was that we had hoped it would be a rallying cry, in the same way that kind of Jason picked it up or other people. I mean, I feel like that’s an area we’ve been less successful on. I think a fair number of people have heard about UBS, but you don’t see it adopted or it gets adopted for a bit.

Like the Labour Party under Corbyn had it as a core part of their, they produced a paper called Universal Basic Services, but then it disappears because Corbyn was the wrong thing and therefore, the next guy, the new guys say nothing Corbyn. But that’s happened in a lot of different places. Navarro Media were huge fans of it when we launched the report, and you don’t hear them talk about it anymore.

But there’s something maybe difficult about the idea of a collectively provided universal service that lands really hard. It’s a really difficult concept in a very financialized and individualized society. As you get into quite so many questions of choice, for instance, which is quite often where people are paternity.

A lot of these are what I would call implementation problems that we need to think through, and they’re not that hard. But anyway, that’s the third point. I mean, UBS, we would hope at IGP was a rallying point for all of these millions of organizations that are working quite often in specific areas.

In 2025, I ran some forums around the UK, we call them Flourish Forums, where we tried to bring together people who were working in different parts of the basic safety of society. Whether that was in care or transport or food, and we held them specifically all in community food centers to create the right atmosphere. One of the things that I think was most nourishing about that was how empowering it felt for these people who quite often feel like they’re working in isolation against impossible odds with lack of funding to go, oh yeah, we’re doing the same thing, right? You’re doing it from that way and I’m doing it from this way, and so we’d like to encourage more of that, and it’s an area that I think UBS should be seen also as a rallying point or a flag around.

Overcoming Implementation Hurdles

Definitely. It’s a wonderful umbrella under which to group all the different initiatives that are providing for people essentially where our bloated centralized state is failing. There’s so many different things to say to what you’ve just said, and I love for everyone listening, I love everything that you just said so passionately, you are doing in front of a whiteboard, like very obviously in front of your professional place of work, an educational institution, like it just warms my heart.

Because I think people forget sometimes, I get asked this quite a lot like, oh, but is there anything actually new coming out of academia? I’m like, go listen to every show I do every week, there’s loads of stuff coming out of academia. So I think I just wanted to point that out.

As to like the difficulty of adopting UBS, I find this to be such a strange phenomenon because we already have certain Universal Basic Services. I mean, in the United Kingdom, we have the NHS. I think in almost every country around the world, there will be education, if not free education.

You know, in many countries around the world, you get your roads built as part of the, you know, what your tax budget goes on. I mean, it’s actually very normal. Even our highly neoliberalised societies function on providing mechanisms for the citizens to go forth and fulfill their tasks.

Now, ordinarily, that is the task of can we get them to work? Can we make them useful? Can we make them functioning cogs essentially?

But it’s therefore not that big a leap to imagine just doing this for everything else that would facilitate a different kind of functioning for perhaps a more localized community, as long as we change the ideology behind which or with which we were making decisions. It’s really not that difficult. It becomes an ideological question more than anything else.

I couldn’t agree with you more. It’s one of the reasons that I think that the UK should be really such a fantastic place to bring this up a level. You’re talking about a couple of things, and maybe I alluded to it earlier as well

There are millions of organisations and people working at the bottom of society against the grain of the neoliberal, individualistic, financialised, world. But what is disconnected is they’ve got a limited ability, because we are in very large, intricate societies, that without support from the top, those just have inevitable ceilings on their capacity to really change the story. In recognising that, I think that’s why, at the IGP, we’ve tried to take this idea, not a new idea, basic services in society, and format in a way that is basically trying to pitch to the political class to say, this is not against reality… actually free buses. I was talking to someone in Wales, maybe seven or eight years ago, and they’d done this in the back of the envelope thing, which is the cost of conditional access to buses, was the cost of providing them for free. I mean, it was literally, there would be no difference. You could just tomorrow wake up and say, free buses for everybody, and it wouldn’t have made any difference to the budget.

And, you know, every time I wake up for the last kind of, since this government’s got in in the UK, and I wake up in the morning, and I go : free buses on day one! I mean, it just would have so fitted in the budget, and it would have changed everybody’s daily experience of who was there, who’s there for me. “Oh gosh, I’m getting this thing.” Well, you know, maybe there’s a reciprocal here. It would have changed the mentality.

So I completely agree with you. It really isn’t a practical issue. And not that it’s not hard work. I mean, let’s ask ourselves one of the reasons. So very roughly, in most of the industrialized societies, let’s kind of maybe even stick to Europe because America has some differences. We collect about 45 percent of total output every year, and we cycle it back through the government, and we push it back out. And about 80 percent of that is spent on trying to create social safety in one of these various areas, education, healthcare, transports, et cetera, information. About half of that 80 percent, we distribute in cash, benefits system.

Oh, wow. And about half we spend on building services. And as you mentioned, just about every country in the world has an education system.

That’s typically one of the first kind of things that definitely comes in. And UK kicked off the idea of a socialised medicine system, but that’s been picked up much more as the years have gone on across the world. But we do spend quite a lot of it on that kind of cash distribution piece.

What I didn’t want to take away from and because it is absolutely true and this is one of the reasons why hasn’t there been more UBS, it is harder work, right? Building a community food center and making sure it operates properly is way harder than sending everybody five quid.

Yeah.

And then go buy your food. And this scales, right? You get the really large societies like India.

And I was just talking to some people from King’s College last week about programs in Southern India where they’ve kind of combined cash distribution with services. Like the services piece is hard work. The free busses is fine, but you got to have the bus service.

You got to roll up your sleeves and build it. So one of the reasons that hasn’t been more implementation is because of how hard it is. And we look in our existing services and we’re very critical. Maybe because we’re taking it quite an individualistic, but some more empathy towards collective effort. It’s going to fail sometimes. I mean, we should have, as Roberto Unger says, I love him, he’s a Harvard Law Professor, almost impenetrable to listen to, but if you can get through the language: we should sit in a haven and a basket of securities, and then innovate wildly. That that’s how you build really fun, enjoyable, sustainable societies. But we’ve become, these public institutions, as we start to think of them as, when they start to have failings, we’ve kind of internalized that, and then can become quite negative about them. So you may ask a lot of people in the UK about the NHS, and I just think to myself, 70 million people every day were doing the health care! And people are going, oh, it’s failing, it’s dreadful, it’s falling apart. It has its problems, these things will, but some tolerance for the hard work, some empathy for collective effort, why isn’t that present?

Well, then now we’re back to this, what have we done since the 1970s to really… , I don’t know if you’re interested, I can give you a little snapshot of what I think happened, why it came to that. So there we are, post-Second World War, particularly in the West, and we’re thinking like, okay, let’s build some society, we were dying together weeks ago, let’s build a society that works for all of us. But unconscious of the fact that you’re sitting on the carbon pulse, that you’ve got this massive flow of energy from fossil fuels that is driving your economy, you’ve got growth, growth, growth, and you sit on this and you start growing your support systems, but in quite inefficient ways, using a lot more money than services, but also tons of services, and you’re not paying attention to the fact that a lot of the resources are coming from this one-time access to this massive source of energy.

Then you get to the 70s and what happens? Well, to me, it’s an epitome of the end of colonialisation. The people who have the resources in the country start to go, oh, actually, you know, they’re ours. You’re going to have to pay for them. And what happens to most of the Western industrialised societies at that point is they go, oh, damn, well, we can’t afford this any. So we got two choices here, right? One would be the harder one. Let’s make this work, but let’s do it with less resources. Let’s figure out ways of doing this more collectively, harder work.

And the other then is, oh, but here’s a really nice get out of jail card. Why don’t we just make everybody individually responsible for their own safety, encourage them to enter the financial system so that they can save money, which then creates the finance industry which destroys the planet. And once we’re caught in that, then it looks like all the services we do are just to catch the bottom of that system when it fails. That mentally, we’re stuck in that, say, for my pension. Now, I’ve never believed that my whole life. I have no private pension.

I would say the most radical act that you could do at the moment, at least legal radical act, would be to opt out of your pension, right? Just stop contributing. There’s a billion dollars a day arrives in Wall Street, with a little tag on it saying, keep me safe and make me grow.

Yeah.

So that’s how I think we got here. I think it’s kind of by accident. I don’t think we’ll look back in two or 300 years and say, it all went tits up because of this, this and this bad guy. I think we’ll say, we didn’t grow up.

Yeah.

We didn’t have the maturity to go, because the way I see it is, businesses are like children playing in a sandbox. We create the sandbox, we built it, we can change the rules anytime we want, but we don’t. We’re back to, I think you alluded to it just now, which I think is the foundational question, which is, what are the conditions that facilitate prosocial collective decision making?

And that’s the question.

Funding Collective Services

Well, while you’ve been talking, I’ve been thinking about the country of France, which I don’t know its reputation around the world, but certainly in Europe is considered the country of protest. You know, the French kind of don’t take anything lying down. And I lived there for a number of years, and I was there when the Yellow Vest protest took off.

And I don’t think I’ve ever put two together. I mean, I was so conscious of how well supported the French were relative to the Brits. It’s not quite Universal Basic Services, but I mean, it is radically discounted Basic Services. Higher education is incredibly cheap. The best health care system in Europe, apart from Switzerland, is incredibly cheap. And you can get all kinds of training for free. I mean, the French government is just throwing resources at its citizens all the time, and not just really in cash, but in a lot of services. And it’s just suddenly made me think that that safety net may very well be the reason that they are so able to protest so violently and successfully every time. And when I say violently, I mean radically , but sort of relentlessly.

Because when I was there, I kind of had the impression of many French people I came across being a bit entitled because of the safety net, a bit unimaginative, because the state was so ready to step in at any moment. And yet their relationships to one another and to their culture and to what they perceived themselves as deserving were so strong that they took that state to the ring. You know, regularly, at least once a year, there was a major protest and that has continued on.

And so it’s really interesting to think of like this beautiful framing that you have of what are the social conditions that we can create that facilitate pro-social behaviour. And the French people coming together to protest so successfully, so often, being a symptom of those social conditions and very effective pro-social behaviour, which I had just never considered before, and makes it such an interesting question that even when the thing that is providing to you is doing its job so well that communities are strong enough that they can still go and challenge it.

That’s a really interesting cycle around. I mean, we should talk a little bit maybe then, and this comes to the funding issue, which is where a lot of people with UBS get stuck, an early bump in the road for people as they come down this path.

Let’s look at France. It’s a nice example. They do have an exceptionally high expenditure on social. We can see that simply because the tax take is higher, 48%, 49% up, damn close to the 50% level that many societies, Scandinavians, previous ones, you go up to that level and they typically bounce out.

And it’s a not, I think it’s a fairly simple thing that if you figure that every time you go to work for every euro you get, you get less than 50% of it back, I will get to keep 50% of it, then you stop. There’s a motivation barrier there. And so when societies take a lot, they typically come back down.

So the second element to know about France at the moment is that they’ve had a very difficult political situation, partly because they’re trying to get their deficit down. They are consuming.

I think of money as planet. I like that analogy, right? GDP equals a dollar equals a planet. Our economies tend to be substantially based on flows of energy and materials. That’s what we kind of value in a money perspective. And so France is consuming more planet than it’s kind of contributing. And we maybe can see that in the deficit, right? The government not only takes close to half of everybody’s total output, they then go and borrow some more.

Yeah.

It’s not sustainable. Now, that’s a difficult thing to say for two reasons.

One is most ordinary people could look back over the last 20 years and go, hey, Great Financial Crisis, COVID, whatever. When we need to find the money, we make it up, we print it, whatever. The system can always find the money.

I think that’s flawed in a long-term perspective. We’ve also had this idea, how much is too much debt? And we can look at Japan and go to 300 percent. But in Europe here, we’re all kind of heading to about 100 percent. So France has got this really difficult political situation where really actually from most people’s perspective, right, they should stop spending so much. But they kind of really struggle to get that through in their parliaments and to get it done. So Macron’s reforms to pensions have been rolled back. They’ve had a really hard time doing a budget.

Now, what is the lesson here? So when we say sustainable, so let’s say there was even a possibility of intervening in the current systems, in the current societies, to make them not collapse, right? One of the things there is to live in the flow, to live within the means, to be not continually borrowing, right?

And that’s not a sort of moral thing about debt. It’s just a sort of really basic… somewhere in there, when we’re borrowing, we’re basically taking from the future and trying to use some of those resources now, and kind of promising the future to somebody else, right? Because every debt is also someone else’s asset. So our governments are massively in debt. Why? Well, because we’ve lent the money to everybody’s pensions. They want that later.

So if the trouble with France, so that’s a really interesting observation in France about how, yeah, I know you build prosocial actual community structure. They do have much more. I do spend some time in France and I always do love the fact. The community hall, A, exists, B, is well-maintained and C gets used a lot. They get together for meals and people come from that village and this village, and they talk and there is much thicker social fabric, at least in what I’m in to go down to rural southern France. That’s to be really appreciated. You see the same thing, frankly, in community food centres wherever they set up. We were in Squash in Liverpool in the summer for the Flourish Forums.

They are a social connection thickening institution. Just by bringing people together for food, they enable all of this that strengthens social fabric. When we look at places like France, or actually, frankly, the UK, many other countries, America massively, I don’t think we can call sustainable the systems that we have if they are dependent on debt, which is basically more financialisation.

This is a key part of Universal Basic Services, is figuring out how to build these systems without this dependence on finance, without more debt, right? Without assuming that there’s some magic part of tax money that we can go and get today that will fund our dream. Because after we did the UBS report at the IGP, we then did two more reports that came out kind of just at the end of COVID, end of 21. One was, how would you reform the UK tax system to actually pay for Universal Basic Services? And I’m very proud of that report, and it’s kind of just basically: simplify the system and treat everybody much more evenly. And you can generate some additional money, right? But it’s not a huge amount. It’s not, you know, that is, it’s kind of less than the NHS budget. So you’re still talking about incremental things.

And so when we talk about doing UBS, I think that if we’re sincere about that effort, and we’re going to stay away from finance, then we have to grapple with, and maybe this is why it becomes a difficult issue for people, but we have to grapple with the priorities that we have. What are we spending on cash distribution and why? And what are we spending on actually building the services that will be there for multiple generations, their shared use, their pro-eco, their pro-social, whereas money is atomising, individualistic, unreliable, can be withdrawn.

What’s the big advantage of cash? Well, you can wake up one morning, write a budget and go, I’m going to send everybody 20 quid a week. But you can write the same budget the other way a week later. I’m going to take away 20 quid. You can’t take away a community food center when it’s been built, just needs people and food, and some energy. I think that we really have to grapple with this, what is our priority in society? Do we think our social welfare systems, and this is back to the multi-level selection thing, which is what is the purpose of a welfare system? Is it to meet individual needs and satisfy desires and choices? Or is it to **enable higher function collective decision-taking**, which is its social purpose.

When we enable individuals with safety and we expect contribution in return, I see that as a flow that makes sense when you’re looking at it from a social level. It operates at the individual level, but almost unconsciously. You make people generally, satisfied, not hungry, able to access the means of contributing. People don’t sit on the couch or do nothing. We’re all motivated by something. We derive our greatest joy and happiness through contribution and relation. People do, and they will do that. But actually, that flow is really operating on the social level, on the community level. And so, I think that would require us then to really address this priority issue. What is the most important thing that we can be doing here? And if we did that, then I would say, and I think it’s possible to build this, exactly this kind of, like if you were really, okay, look, no, we’re going to fix this. We’re going to fix it now.

We could fix it in the next two parliaments in the UK. We’ve done some work on a sequenced set of policy changes over a period of five years that would take the UK with no more borrowing and virtually no extra taxes, right, is to a much more UBS kind of thing. And it’s a much more hybridized kind of offer. You know, we should be going to the energy companies and saying everybody should get a free allowance and set it at about two thirds of the average personal consumption today. And then above that, you’re going to pay quite a lot. But you get the first two-thirds for free. So come down to two-thirds, which is what a lot of people would say: if Europe can come down a third from where it is, we’re a lot closer to living in the flow. So there are, and that doesn’t cost anything to the fiscal budget, right? You don’t have to raise taxes to do that. You just say to the energy companies, you got to give the 10,000 kilowatt hours a year free, and you can charge what you like on top of that to get it back. No standing charges.

And you’ve, I mean, you know, you’ve transformed millions of people. And you’ve created an incentive to say, you’re going to fit within the planet. You’re still supporting everybody. You’re still enabling them to make their contribution. You’re doing all of this. But that’s the kind of priority choice that I think, I mean, it runs against the grain if you’re, if you kind of still, if, you know, a lot of people think we don’t really have any problems and it’s all going great.

Well, I know you don’t run into them. I don’t know. I know I don’t run into them. I run into, you know, I’ve had conversations with some of the wealthiest people I’ve ever laid eyes on. In fact, the wealthiest people I’ve ever laid eyes on, you know, after conferences are officially shut and everybody’s holed up in the bar, being like, oh, we know we’re fucked.

Yeah, I would agree with that. I mean, at a certain level of kind of people who maybe have an opportunity to put more of a finger on the pulse because they’re less concerned with the day-to-day survival stuff. But anyway, I would just let you know, I look at political results in elections and kind of, I think that there’s, anyway, it’s a side matter. I mean, the reality is we’re not electing governments that are making the kind of priorities and decisions that are necessary to build collectively functional, ecologically sustainable societies.

Indeed, indeed. But then again, we’re also electing people that are breaking their election promises and not sticking to their manifestos. So that’s not entirely, I think, I don’t think that necessarily shows the public opinion on a lot of things. I mean, the Labor government right now in the United Kingdom, I think, is an excellent example of that.

But this has all made me think of the wealthy, right? So because I think there’s a real rallying cry politically at the moment to, I mean, Gary Stevenson, tax wealth, not income. And there does seem to be this building movement in both the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe, these typically very wealthy countries where people are noticing how much is flooding to the top and they would like some of it back. And I think there’s increasingly a call to really redistribute gross wealth, be that, you know, profits that companies are making through exploitation or the inanity of a handful of billionaires in the world and their egregious sort of impact on us and the planet. So, how does UBS fit in with that building momentum there?

Is there a way to sort of combine those policies? Because if you say, you know, you get two-thirds of your energy for free and then you have to pay and the energy companies can charge what they want. Immediately, I think a lot of us go, but the wealthy will just pay it because they can. And that doesn’t actually facilitate a coherent social balance then of like opportunity or possibility or even interrelationality, even communal responsibility to one another.

The short version is that if we focus on thinking that there’s these wealthy guys and that if we go after them, that’ll fix our problems is just not true. That there is a limit to, historically, you look at wealth tax rollouts, you are talking about people who can quite often, the most able people on the planet to avoid any of that. Especially if there’s somewhere else they can go, Singapore, Abu Dhabi, whatever. But also it seems to me that, I guess I would flip the question around and go, well, but what are we going to change? Because, okay, great. I mean, it’s a bit like the, okay, imagine you had some magic future energy technology that was carbon-free and produced tons of energy. Have we finished our biosphere problem? No, we probably just made it worse. We just chewed through the planet faster. Right?

Okay. So there may be there is some money you raise from rich people. Right?

But you do that by changing the rules, right? I mean, we let rich people have the money. We have tax systems and we decide not to tax them, or not to control the flow. There’s all sorts of stuff that we could be doing. And I wonder, my question would be, if that’s the focus, are we really addressing the problem? Because the problem is bigger and it’s more, I think, is more personal. I’m back to my, we’re not going to look back in 200 years and say, you know, Elon Musk killed the planet. I think we’re going to look back and say, we didn’t live up to what we could have done. We actually had more power than we think we did. And I know that as an individual in a society of millions or hundreds of millions, it can feel really difficult. But, you know, there is power here. We could be electing different things. I don’t think that we’ll look back in 200 years and kind of forgive that too much. I think that what was, you know, what could we all have done? We’re going to go into an election here in 4 years time… There was an article the other day about mining rare earths or something in the Arctic.

Very sustainable!

Yeah, very sustainable. But the guy made this point, it was like this one thing, and he said, you know, politicians are never more courageous than their voters. I mean, I think he’s wrong, right? We’ve got examples in political history of individuals who did rise above that. But he’s right in another level, right?

You know, the French don’t want their pension reduced. Like, France is the only country in the world now where you get a pension, it’s bigger than the minimum wage, the average wage, right? We don’t want to lose. And I worry that chasing the rich is abstaining us from a personal responsibility and that if we took that responsibility more to heart, we would change the rules and going after the rich people would be the consequence, not the purpose.

All right. I would like to offer an alternative frame to that, which is that personal responsibility on any individual level is essentially insignificant, but the collective responsibility is the one that we have that generates power, as you were saying, and also facilitates this prosociability, which allows us to make these high-function collective decision-making processes effective. The rich also have to be part of that collective, and they also have to take responsibility.

And I think that there are some, such as that Disney heir who, in her sixties, kind of realized, you know, all of the terrible things that inappropriate wealth was doing, and gave a bunch away, and wrote this amazing piece, I think it was in the Atlantic, about how she had lived her life so cloistered, with her money being managed by these unseen accountant teams, that she just didn’t know. She was trying to sort of blow open, blow the lid off, if you will, on that reality. So it’s not that if you have money, you are inherently good or evil, or anything really boring, sort of religious value judgment on it.

But rather, if there are people who are not willing to take responsibility and a sort of outsized responsibility based on the amount of potential damage that they can do, then they are going to have to be brought in by the rest of us in some way. Absolutely. And I think that’s the call that I’m interested in, not the kind of like Slavish, you know, eat the rich TikTok meme, because we do genuinely have to kind of all be in this together.

But how can we frame it so that we literally are in this together, and we need you to make better decisions, and we need you also to allow us to make decisions with your money, because it can’t all be yours, because we help make it, and it’s already some of it’s going to have to come away. And we have examples from history of this. I mean, I had Amy Kerr on the show years ago, a brilliant, brilliant woman. And she was talking, she’s based in Birmingham. She does like some of these projects essentially that you’re discussing now. And she was talking about the industrialists of, you know, the 18th century, 17th, 18th century. And, I mean, not a fan of them. I don’t think anybody on the left really is. But she was saying, what is incredible is these men from this very morally different time were still managing to give more to society than our rich do today. You know, the first public libraries were set up, funded with private money from the industrialists. There were lots of services that they were creating. And yes, they were creating it because they wanted a more educated public to better, you know, supply their own workforce. Sure. But no matter the motivations, there was more private money coming into public needs then. And they were innovating with regards to, you know, basic services.

So if they could do it then at a time when it was still morally acceptable to send kids up chimneys, you know, why is it that we cannot, why is it such a difficult conversation to have and why does it seem at odds to the rest of the conversation with regards to how is it that we’re going to solve our problems together with the over consumption of goods, the overuse of our energy and material flows and the immense inequality that is creating an unequal and unstable society, which is making it even more difficult to get together and make these decisions that we need to take together. I think it’s absolutely part and parcel of the same thing.

I actually completely agree with you. If I had phrased it differently before. I’ll refer back to the next report we did after UBS, which was National Contributions. How do you make the tax system fit in exactly what we’re talking about here? Establish a generalized reciprocity that applies progressively across the society and does include these rich people. Well, that is well within our control. And it just requires what we advocated in National Contributions was fundamentally a simplifying of this. Like, why are we taxing capital differently than income? Why are people on wages paying higher levels of tax than people who make their money off money? None of it. So these are, we could, we, I’m going back to the sandbox, right? We build the sandbox and we can build it differently. And I agree, it’s completely integral to this that we have that corollary on the other side. We should have a tax system that resources the society we need and we can do that with reforms to the tax system. And so absolutely that should be part of it.

What, all I’m railing against is if anyone thinks that that’s going to cure the whole thing, it’s not, that’s part of it. It also is behaviour change, attitudinal change, re-creating structures and priorities in our society. But should we have tax reform?

Absolutely.

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Essential Universal Services

Great. Andrew, we’re kind of coming up to time, but I want to actually give people an idea of what Universal Basic Services could look like. Because I think people have an idea of, okay, health, certainly neat because we are experiencing health, education.”

But what other things could fall under this umbrella that might escape people’s possible imagination at this point because of growing up in this neoliberalized financialized system?

Okay. So when we wrote the original report, we started with this question: what does an individual need to maximize their contribution, their opportunity in our society. We came up with seven services. Now, sometimes people… don’t get hung up on the seven, right? This is just a formulation of it, right?

So housing, right? It’s something, and in virtually every single one of these, we can find examples in time or in place where this has been done to the max, and we can quite often mourn where it is not done so well now. So housing, we can look at Austria, we can look at what we did post-Second World War, we can look at all sorts of places, but housing as a right should be absolutely there.

Care, I call it, the health sector is really more, I think care is a better word because it expands to include care at all ages, care across conditions. I find health a bit of a modern militarised version of it.

Education, as we’ve already mentioned, it’s already done.

Now we get to two newer ones that we added into it, which is information, which is basically access to the communications and the information about… I loved your point about local media. I think it is one of the things that has obviously destroyed and is so obviously important. One of the things that came up in flourish forums is like, we need a notice board, just like everybody in the communities should know what’s going on.

Access to information. We would say things like, probably not paying for a TV license. Why isn’t the BBC free? It’s a public funded thing. It should be public information. There’s things like that, access to the Internet.

Transport. Typically, this is actually socialized to a large extent, collective transport, public transport, as we call it. I’m over a certain age, I get free access to public transport in my city.

Lucky you.

I do feel like, oh, this is my UBS card.

Yeah, totally.

That is something that is, again, completely socialised or completely collectivised in some parts of the world and some cities. Increasingly, that is a thing that people talk about, is making transport free. That’s what Mamdani is going to do in New York, free buses.

Then we’ve got my favourite of all of them, food,. We’ve supported the Right to Food Initiative, which is going to be a European Citizens Initiative this year, collecting signatures right now. It’s just such a brilliant place because it’s where this kind of, people have to really think it’s through, this nexus of community, food, choice, enablement, thickening of social relations. It’s just pretty lovely.

Then lastly, we call it legal, but it’s basically the set of basic legal infrastructures from police, fire, emergency services, actually the court system and the practice of law and all of that. And democracy. There’s a set of institutional frameworks that are necessary for in a modern society.

So there’s our seven: shelter, sustenance, care, education, food, information, transport, legal.

Now, how do you do that? Well, the answer, just to clarify, because people do get stuck on this.

The point here is to liberate contribution. That means creating safety. Safety comes from outside the individual. You cannot make yourself safe. It is by definition something that you get from others. That is why it’s collectively provided.

It has to be immediately available, which is why it’s unconditional, which means, so when we say universal, we mean unconditional. It doesn’t mean everybody’s getting it. Not everybody has to move into social housing tomorrow. But it should be available, the community food. You don’t have to eat there. But you need to, you want to. You don’t have to use the bus.

All of this, right? So it’s not universal provision. It’s universal access, unconditional access to collectively provided services.

And why is it services, not money? Well, we covered that a little bit earlier, right? Cash tends to atomising individualistic problem, and it doesn’t create the infrastructures that will allow us to handle whatever comes in the future better.

Political Will for Change

Andrew, this is so good. This is so good. And you know, when you said like, well, how do we do it? My brain is just like, we just do it. Like, it’s just a thing of you just do it. Our governments spend so much money as well, not even on our services, right? And that not being a necessarily efficient way to do it. But if you think about how badly like the PPE scandal during COVID, and how much money was just wasted and thrown at the wall, and you know, essentially their crony mates came along and like picked it off like little beetles. Like, we spend a huge amount of money all the time on things that don’t work, on projects that take 10 years longer than they should. Et cetera, et cetera. Like, how to do this? We just do it. We just do it. And there just needs to be a political will and a political momentum. And I think it is, like with degrowth, when you don’t hear the word, but you actually hear how the sort of the offer, it makes complete sense, like the three day weekend.

I do feel that this is a policy that people can really take to and envision how it would change their lives, even if they can’t quite envision how it would be done from the off. But as you say, we’re already doing so much of it all the time, just poorly, let’s just do it better. So I thank you so much. It’s a great way to start my week. I feel quite enlivened and invigorated from it.”

From Planet: Critical: Liberating Social Contributions | Andrew Percy, 29 Jan 2026

This material may be protected by copyright.

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Meta not Poly

One thing that helps me keep sane in the whirl of the news is to keep reminding myself that under the chaos of events are some really basic problems. To not get distracted by all the symptoms, which are bound to be confusing, and remember that until we address more foundational issues, this is the world we can expect.

There’s a meta crisis under the ploy crisis. There are some really basic things we need to work on before we will see “the news” calm down.

A Chance to Explain

I was really pleased to be given an opportunity to do just, that to explain what’s under the madness, by Rachel Donald on her Planet Critical podcast. Recorded earlier this month, we spend an hour exploring the deeper purpose of Universal Basic Services, Proper Change, and the challenges we have in making the transition.

I hope you get a chance to view (please forgive the scary staring!) or listen to the podcast on your favourite platform. Let me know what you think about how I presented the ideas and where you see opportunities to improve my messaging.

He explains the myths surrounding UBS which make both politicians and the public wary, the maths which proves it is sound financial policy, and the experiments going on around the UK and Europe which prove UBS changes not only the lives of individuals, but also the very social fabric of a community.

Prof Dieter Helm:

Western economies, especially the UK, prioritise consumption over production, rely heavily on welfare spending, and maintain incentive systems that discourage work. High taxes and borrowing further stifle growth, while domestic savings – critical for funding investment – are minimal. Unlike post-war economic miracles in Germany, Japan and China, driven by savings and production, the UK depends on foreign capital and supply chains, leaving its economy vulnerable. A fundamental shift towards production, supported by domestic savings and programme-driven investment, is prerequisites for sustainable growth.

Listen here: Soundcloud
Also available on Apple, Spotify and YouTube.

Sign up for Dieter’s Newsletter at the bottom of his web page: https://dieterhelm.co.uk/

OK, I do have one thing to add… the “fundamental shift” Dieter calls for requires a reform of the welfare and tax systems before the “shift towards production” will happen. It requires a new national mental attitude.

A.I.

Even the people building AI models don’t know how they work. They just follow the recipe and see what comes out the other end.

This bypasses a basic evolutionary puzzle that our species has spent 100s of 1000s of years trying to figure out. How do you get good decisions out a massive investment in processing capacity?

The answers that Nature has evolved are complex, multi-layered, and still a work in progress. The answers that humans have applied to AI are: Fuck it, let’s just see what happens!

What happens? Slop. The generic description of AI output. A hazy approximation of decent output that remains, inescapably, somehow, unbelievable and inauthentic.

Slop is flooding the world. 1000’s of slop “songs” are uploaded to Spotify every day. “News” organisations are starting to offer human-augmented slop as news. In the same way porn spurred video tape, so fake sexual content sucks up the world’s resources in anonymous data centers around the planet. Slop is everywhere. One of my sons is part of an effort to find corners of the Internet that are not yet enslopified, and will actively resist enslopification. That’s a hard task, as leveraged AI bets rack up obligations that enforce the engorgement of everything.

But what else should we expect of a MagiMix of humanity’s expressions and recordings? Human societies long left the principle that “all ideas are created equal” in the dust. Not all ideas are equal in any given situation. Some ideas are better than others in every situation. Figuring out who ow what to listen to in a specific context is the great challenge of every species that has elected to travel down the complex decision making optimisation pathway.

We have developed a number of stratagems to make complex processing work. We combine outputs of different models. We match capabilities with contexts. We simulate and virtualise physical worlds inside our wet matrices. We select from options using collective voting systems that leverage different perspectives and propensities in individual models. We encourage the proliferation of model variations. We constantly re-learn on framework designed to resist change. We balance impulsion against consideration across a spectrum. Oh count the ways that we have evolved to try and make a success of an irreversible commitment to biological complexity! It would take several lifetimes to map out all of the subtle and interacting mechanisms that humans have developed to degrade our potential for slop.

A.I., on the other hand, has only a few humans helping with “reinforcement learning”. They are slop machines without the conscious mind slop-filtering mechanisms we are still trying to evolve. And they have no actual contact with the physical world, so they have no idea (sic) of what the real world is.

But let’s pause a minute to think about where this slop-generating machine got its data from in the first place. It is an amalgam of all the data in the world. It is a mirror of us, or at least those of use living in societies that have been digitised. A.I.s demonstrate strangely human characteristics, like lying everywhere once they have learned to lie in once place. How can they not be a mirror of us? They are trained on us!

And if we were honest about ourselves we would recognise that we have sloppy views. We have lazy, non-sensical constructs that suit our desires and avoid our aversions. Listen to any politician on Question Time and you’ll see that what gets the greatest applause is anyone who is able to assemble impossibilities into plausible soundbites. We love it when someone with credibility tells us that we can keep our cake and eat it. Oh, thank god! One less thing to worry about then. 1,000,000 new houses will fix that, phew!

We have become slop eaters and slop promoters. We are slop. We love slop. Slop for ever, please. Give me slop, and then some more. Because, otherwise, I will have to confront the vapid shell of a potentially evolutionarily successful creature that I have become.

A.I. = slop = us.

De-slopification tip: go here and ask this A.I. to tell you what’s sloppy about your world view, and how you can correct it.1

e.g. a question like this: I think we can swap out fossil fuels for clean, green energy and everything will be fine. Is that sloppy thinking?

This was generated here using this prompt: “Write a story in less than 500 words of a day in his life, highlighting differences for Mark and his family. Mark is a lawyer in London working in family law and 75% of his cases are funded by Legal Aid. Married, with a child still living at home while they complete a Masters degree.”

Light up your imagination! Try creating your own story of someone in a particular position to find out how life would be (will be) different when we finally stop trying to make this old system work and switch over to a system that will actually work. The model has been loaded with real world, practical changes that the UK could make now.

Feel free to post examples of stories you get in the comments.

Mark stretched as morning light filtered through the curtains. The flat was cool but comfortable - since the energy supply obligations came in, the baseline covered their essential use, but he was still mindful about heating. At least the anxiety about standing charges and bill shock had gone.

“Coffee?” Sarah called from the kitchen.

“Please.” He pulled on his clothes, glancing at their daughter Emma’s closed door. She’d been up late working on her Masters dissertation again. At least she wasn’t burning through money on transport and data anymore - the free bus pass and digital services meant her student loan actually covered her academic expenses rather than just existing in London.

On the Tube, Mark noticed the difference in the morning crowd. Less of that tight-faced anxiety he’d grown used to seeing. The fare barriers had been removed last year - universal access now. An older woman with shopping bags took a seat without the mental calculation about whether a two-stop journey was “worth” the fare.

At chambers, Mark opened his case files. The legal aid transformation had been remarkable. Three cases today that would never have qualified under the old means-tested system - a grandmother seeking contact rights, a father navigating a complex custody arrangement, a young mother escaping domestic abuse.

“You look cheerful,” his colleague David observed.

“Just thinking how different this would have been two years ago. That grandmother - she’d have been unrepresented, fumbling through forms, probably giving up.”

“I know. Though my tax bill’s eye-watering now.” David grimaced.

“Mine too. But Sarah worked it out - between the energy costs, Emma’s transport, our water bills - we’re actually up about £250 a month. Plus Emma’s not asking us for emergency cash every other week.”

“Fair point.”

Lunchtime, Mark grabbed a meal at the community kitchen that had opened near the courts. £3 for a proper lunch - subsidised, nutritious, fast. Half the legal aid solicitors seemed to have discovered it.

Evening, back home, Emma was animated. “Dad, I’ve been offered a research assistant position! It’s only £18,000 but—”

“That’s great!” Sarah interrupted.

“But is it enough?” Emma looked worried.

Mark and Sarah exchanged glances. “Let’s talk it through,” Mark said. “Your rent at the social housing co-op, your transport and internet are covered... you’re not paying for basics anymore. If it’s work you want to do—”

“It really is.”

“Then the money’s for living, not surviving. Different calculation.”

After Emma went to her room, Sarah leaned against Mark. “Remember when we couldn’t have said that?”

“Every day,” Mark replied. “Every single day.”

Neither will make any difference.

We can’t fix our climate problem until we fix our social problem.

It’s human behaviour that has to change, and that means changing the conditions in which people find themselves in, so that they make different choices. That requires these kinds of changes. Radical reform of taxes and welfare have to go hand in hand, at the same time, in the same credible offer. Until then, nothing changes.

So when the Chancellor tells you it’s “two and done” tomorrow, just let it go. It’s not over by a long shot.

Here’s why:

COP30 idea

If they started counting backwards from now, then there’s some chance that we could get to real action by COP0…

There’s a lot of conflicting stories in the press. 1.5° still achievable! 2.6° on the way! Renewables taking over! And those are all in the same paper in one week! Admittedly its COP time so you have to expect more comment and coverage but the divergence and nuanced use of stats is really unhelpful.

It’s worth getting straight about all of this, so that we can have a clear eyed view of what can change, at what scale, over what timeframe?

Let’s start with a few facts (see Charts below):

• Use of fossil fuels is at an all-time high

• Fossil fuels provide more than 80% of the energy consumed today

• Emissions of climate warming pollution is at an all-time high

• Global temperature rise exceeded 1.5° last year

If those facts don’t agree with your view, don’t look away. Adjust your reality to fit the facts.

Choices

Our choices now are how far below 3 degrees to limit climate warming by the end of today’s children’s lives.

Let’s not pretend that the world is going to pivot on a dime and make the changes needed for anything below 2 degrees – see Likely Warming chart below. An 8% chance with current policies… will soon vanish with the current direction of travel in the big emitters.

Possible

Let’s just add up some rough timeframes:

1. If we start with some committed governments in the early 2030s,

2. and we give them 10 years to make really fundamental (proper) changes to our societies and economies,

3. we get to the mid 2040s before we are ready to stop making things worse.

4. Let’s assume that the lives of voters in the developed countries have stabilised by that point and concerted public pressure to limit and mitigate comes into play.

5. It then takes 10-20 years of behaviour change to start making a dent on emissions.

6. Welcome to 2060. The soonest reasonable start of the pollution downslope.

At that point we are quite likely committed to somewhere around 2.5°1 by 2100. That will add extra mitigation costs that we can only guess from here, but the key is to reach the point where we stop making things worse and start making things better.

To make even 2060 work we need to:

1. Elect a committed government by 2030 that has a realistic plan for proper change2.

2. Make really fundamental changes 2030-2040 than mean that by 2040 the vast majority of the populations of the advanced (highest polluting) societies in the world are living sufficiently secure lives that they can prioritise behaviour change aligned with planetary boundaries.

3. Actually change behaviours, en mass, in the 2040s and 50s. Including reshaped expectations for material and energy throughput at the individual, national and global levels.

4. Enjoy the new lifestyles. If it’s not fun, not enough of us will do it.

That’s possible. It’s tight and requires starting now on the politics of Proper Change that will win in 2030.

It’s also dependent on:

• Developing a detailed plan for the 2030+ Proper Change platform on which someone gets elected in 5 years time. The plan has to be electable and effective.

• Getting elected.

• Successfully implementing the plan for Proper Change at pace so that most people are pretty secure in their daily lives by 2040.

• Increasing the joy of living.

• People being their better selves.

So there’s that, too. I'm not saying it's guaranteed to work out, I'm just trying to paint a picture of what is possible and what that would look like if it was actually going to achieve the desirable outcome.

Time waits for no one.

Charts

Here are some charts snapped from three different publications over the last week or so.

1. AI + future tech will develop the solutions. Full steam ahead.

2. We have a plan to achieve Net Zero and just need to get on with it.

3. We’re doomed!

If you’re leftish you scoff at 1, and if you’re rightish you scoff at 2. Everyone scoffs at 3, because what else can you do!? And everyone is correct!

This is at the core of the populist attraction.

It comes down to this: the elites are trying to sell us 2 (above) but it’s a lie, and all that it will do is make my life worse while they build bunkers for themselves.

The elites (who actually hold to 1 above) leverage the dishonesty in 2 to generate the reaction that will give them more time living “full steam ahead” until their future-magic technology arrives.

The power to undo this knot lies (pun?!) with those promoting 2. If a more honest conversation is had about the reality of our situation, without straying into 3 territory, there would be nothing to react against. Extract the grain (of truth from the story) and take the strain (of having to explain real options).

Naked honesty

You don’t have to look very deep to see the deception in the plans promoted for Net Zero. I can take just one element and demolish the whole plan: Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS). CCS is essential, intrinsic, and explicit in every Net Zero plan. That’s because not having CCS would uncover the real issues we have to face. Easier to take a nascent and unproven technology and put it at the centre of your “plan” – to make the medicine go down. The IEA WEO 2025 report includes a scale up of CCS by 2,000 times to make its Net Zero plan work.

Let’s consider, for a moment, that this unproven tech (which the UK gov just committed £22B to) may not work and will not be scaled x 2,000 in 25 years.

Without CCS, you’d need an additional ~10% reduction on top of current NZE targets.

As illustration, here’s what this means:

• No new concrete buildings - massive shift to timber, retrofitting existing buildings

• Circular steel economy - 80%+ recycling rates (vs. ~30% today)

• Aviation rationing - perhaps 2-3 flights per person per decade in developed countries

• 25-30% less chemical/plastic production - massive reduction in packaging, synthetic materials

• 10% less electricity despite electrification - through strict efficiency standards

If CCS fails and we’re maxed out on supply-side solutions, we’d need to reduce global economic activity in heavy industry by 20-40% and aviation/shipping by 20-30% below what’s already projected in an aggressive net-zero scenario.

This is approximately equivalent to reverting to 2010-2015 levels of industrial output despite having 1 billion more people.

Stop scoffing

If you’re tempted to scoff at the magic futurists of the right, you might consider the flaws in your plan first.

And if you scoff at the leftie Not Zero plans, you might consider that you don’t actually have a real alternative to offer.

Listen to the signal!

Might doing the hard yards to figure out a positive way forward if none of the magic tech appears be the way to take the sting out of the populist tail? Shouldn’t we at least we talking about a contingency plan that does not rely on magic?

CCS isn’t even the half of it. Land use, mining, farming, food, and biodiversity just pile on the bollocks that it is at the heart of every major advanced country government policy. No wonder people are losing faith. And they lose faith in the general, not the specific. No, we won’t hear cogent arguments why this or that particular aspect of policy won’t work – that’s not how large scale human societies work. What you get is a generalised angst. You get “populism”: incoherent bleating from the back of the carriage. That is the signal. And that should be the prompt to be honest. And to do so before they rush to the drivers cab and grab the anything-except-that-lot handle. They don’t have a plan either. That’s not their role in the grand scheme. They are the back stop when democracy stops working. The break the system, not the society, emergency brake. Once that’s been pulled, the lights go out and we all have to cross our fingers till the train comes to a halt.

A plan

A joyful life for ordinary people is perfectly possible in a future without magic tech.

It would look like this: everyone is guaranteed at least access to the basics; everyone is free to work and express for whatever rewards anyone wants to give them. Raising a family, having a home, and enjoying your job would all be normal. That’s a world in which populism demands environmental protection, not destruction.

That is possible right now. Every advanced society on the planet could deliver that for every citizen and still reduce energy and material throughput back to early 21st century levels. Net Zero by 2050 is about as likely as 1.5 degrees on our current trajectory. But switching to higher satisfaction, lower throughput societies now would give us the runway to make 2070 or 2080 viable landing zones.

That is why Universal Basic Services is the essential and existential objective. To remain free, to have a chance at joy, to live on into a future that we want to live in, requires a different arrangement. And UBS is a general description of the foundation of that flourishing society.

Governments need to stop lying, stop pretending that the current system can be extended, and start being honest and earnest about a real plan to deliver better lives for ordinary people – without imaginary tech!

And those of us with the luxury of time and attention enough to understand where the lies are, what’s being ignored, what’s left unsaid: we need to step up and start challenging the bollocks and demanding honest, grounded plans for our common future. Do this before the swell of general angst overwhelms us, or else suffer though trying to build exactly the same outcome from a much worse starting point.

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As ever, if you want to find out more about how we can practically build this different society in the UK starting now: head on over to the Policy Analyst and ask your own questions.

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Analysis of CCS in the World Energy Outlook 2025 by the IEA

From the IEA’s World Energy Outlook 2025 report

This is the brutal arithmetic that should inform CCUS (CCS) investment decisions. Let’s work through the numbers:

How Much CO₂ Does CCUS Capture in NZE by 2050?

The IEA reports that CCUS can remove 1.6 Gt of CO₂ per year by 2030 and 7.6 Gt by 2050 in the Net Zero Emissions scenario.

Breaking this down by sector:

• Power sector: ~2.0-2.5 Gt CO₂/year (from the 242 GW fossil with CCUS plus some BECCS)

• Industry (cement, steel, chemicals): ~2.0-3.0 Gt CO₂/year

• Fuel transformation (hydrogen, biofuels): ~1.0-1.5 Gt CO₂/year

• Carbon removal (BECCS + DAC): ~2.9 Gt CO₂/year to offset residual emissions

The Critical Point About Carbon Removal

When net-zero emissions is reached in the Sustainable Development Scenario, 2.9 gigatonnes (Gt) of emissions remain, notably in the transport and industry sectors. These lingering emissions are offset by capturing CO₂ from bioenergy and the air and storing it .

This means:

• 4.7 Gt is capturing ongoing emissions from fossil fuel use

• 2.9 Gt is removing CO₂ to balance “unavoidable” residual emissions

Demand Reduction Calculation

If CCUS fails and we’re at the limit on supply-side solutions, we need to avoid emitting 7.6 Gt CO₂ through demand reduction.

By Sector:

1. Power Generation (2.0-2.5 Gt CO₂)

• At ~0.5-0.6 kg CO₂/kWh average for remaining fossil generation

• Need to eliminate: ~4,000-4,500 TWh/year

• NZE projects ~71,000 TWh total generation in 2050

• Reduction needed: 6-7% of total electricity demand

2. Cement (0.8-1.0 Gt CO₂)

• Process emissions are 0.5 t CO₂/t cement

• Global production in NZE: ~3-3.5 Gt cement/year

• Reduction needed: 30-40% of cement production

• Or equivalently: ~8 EJ of energy demand in construction/buildings

3. Steel (0.6-0.8 Gt CO₂)

• Would need to eliminate all coal-based and gas-based production without CCUS

• Shift entirely to H₂-DRI or scrap-based (which we can’t accelerate further due to supply of scrap constraints)

• Reduction needed: 25-30% of steel production

• Or equivalently: ~7 EJ of energy demand in manufacturing/construction

4. Chemicals (0.4-0.6 Gt CO₂)

• High-value chemicals and plastics

• Reduction needed: 20-25% of chemical production

• Or equivalently: ~5 EJ of energy demand in petrochemicals

5. Fuel Transformation (1.0-1.5 Gt CO₂)

• Eliminate all blue hydrogen (switch to 100% green, but can’t accelerate)

• Reduce biofuel production

• Reduction needed: ~3 EJ

6. Residual Emissions (2.9 Gt CO₂)

• Aviation: Oil accounts for around 20% of fuel use in aviation in 2050 in the NZE Scenario

• Long-distance shipping

• Some industrial processes

• Reduction needed: ~20-30% of aviation, ~15-20% of shipping

• Or equivalently: ~10 EJ

Total Demand Reduction Required

Energy demand reduction: ~43 EJ below NZE levels

Context:

• Total final consumption in NZE by 2050: ~400 EJ (already down from 620 EJ today)

• Additional reduction needed: 43 EJ

• Total demand in “NZE without CCUS”: ~357 EJ

This Means:

Overall: 11% reduction in total final consumption below NZE

By sector (beyond NZE levels):

• Industry: 20-40% cuts in cement, steel, chemicals production

• Aviation: 20-30% reduction in air travel

• Shipping: 15-20% reduction

• Electricity: 6-7% reduction

• Buildings: ~10% reduction (from less cement/steel in construction)

What This Actually Means in Practice

To put this in perspective, NZE already assumes:

Measures to reduce demand through increased energy efficiency, more efficient use of materials and behavioural change together accounting for almost 25% of emissions reductions .

Without CCUS, you’d need an additional 11% reduction on top of that.

This translates to:

1. No new concrete buildings - massive shift to timber, retrofitting existing buildings

2. Circular steel economy - 80%+ recycling rates (vs. ~30% today)

3. Aviation rationing - perhaps 2-3 flights per person per decade in developed countries

4. 25-30% less chemical/plastic production - massive reduction in packaging, synthetic materials

5. 10% less electricity despite electrification - through strict efficiency standards

The Harsh Reality

This level of demand reduction would require:

• Degrowth in material-intensive sectors (construction, manufacturing)

• Strict rationing of high-carbon activities (aviation, concrete)

• Lifestyle changes far beyond what’s politically feasible today

• Economic restructuring away from material consumption toward services

Bottom Line

If CCUS fails and we’re maxed out on supply-side solutions, we’d need to reduce global economic activity in heavy industry by 20-40% and aviation/shipping by 20-30% below what’s already projected in an aggressive net-zero scenario.

This is approximately equivalent to reverting to 2010-2015 levels of industrial output despite having 1 billion more people.

That’s why CCUS failure would be catastrophic for climate goals - the alternative demand reductions are politically and economically a stretch, to put it mildly, without fundamental rearrangement of our societies’ relationship to their economies.

This is a blog about Zohan Mamdani’s win in the recent New York mayoral election, and the battle to diminish the tide of populism sweeping the western world. But first I need to cover some basics, so bear with me for a few paragraphs.

Policitical Positioning

As far as I’ve been able to work out, there are three things pulling on us. Freedom, opportunity, and participation.

Those are words we use to describe essential elements of our evolutionary survival strategy: to make decisions as a group that leverage specialties of each of the individuals in the group as much as possible. Individuals need the freedom to be different, and that requires a degree of safety. Individuals need to be incentivised to make the effort to leverage their specialties, and that requires rewards. And there’s no point individuals being either free or rewarded if those benefits don’t flow back to the group, which is why we have laws. This is a 3D architecture.

Within each of those realms, there is a dichotomy. Freedom requires safety, and safety is only reliably provided by the group. Rewards are received as individual, but the real purpose is to stimulate contributions to the group. Participation is enabled by creating structures that enable perceptions, ideas, and implementations to be harnessed for the group, and so requires acquiescence and giving back. In order to keep all of these dichotomies in some sort of balance within a group, the effective evolutionary method has been to distribute propensities for one side or another of each dichotomy across the population of the group. It is fairly well established that what we call left-leaning or right-leaning political positions arise naturally across the spectrum within any group of humans. This distribution of propensities is core and critical to the function of groups. Because to take a position in one of the realms requires, in that individual, the construct of a pro and anti argument scaffolding.

Let’s take freedom as an example. If you have a left leaning propensity you are likely to believe that the safety provided by the group is the fundamental foundation for individual freedom. If you have a right leaning propensity, you are likely to believe that the freedom of the individual requires the group to get out of the way. Both are true. And both need to be represented in how the group structures itself. The structure is critically important because that determines how the group makes decisions. And it is the decisions the group makes, irrespective of the decisions of any of the component individuals, that are the primary determinant of evolutionary success.

So, distribution across a political spectrum is a fundamental feature of human societies. Any individual’s position on that spectrum is merely a point in a distribution emerging naturally and randomly, like a machine learning algorithm in an AI. We are all just a neural node in a matrix, politically.

UBS comes to New York

When I left America a dozen years ago, I never would have thought that the first politician to win an important election based on the provision of universal basic services would be a mayor of New York. But Zohan Mamdani has proved me wrong. On a ticket of free transport, community food, low-cost shelter, and universal care services, Zohan has stormed through with an enormous majority in one of the most capitalist cities on the planet.

Even more gratifying is that there is absolutely no evidence that Mamdani’s campaign has ever heard of “universal basic services” and would probably be confused, if perhaps tickled, to find out that what they have been advocating has any basis in academic literature. This suggests that the basic premise behind universal basic services is starting to gain traction because it arises naturally when considering how to address our challenges today.

But there is a dichotomy in the Mamdani platform, as has been pointed out by many commentators, which is while labour rates are so high it will be mathematically impossible to deliver on his promises without unacceptably high levels of taxation. He has promised to raise the minimum pay in New York to $56,000 a year. So if it costs that much to hire someone to pick up leaves, we can only imagine how much it will cost to hire someone with professional qualifications to look after children between the ages of six months and five years, for whom Mamdani has promised free childcare, without creating harm.

Bundled beliefs

This highlights that there is a bundle of positions that characterise particular positions on the two dimensional left–right political spectrum that we currently use.

Left

On the left, you should typically combine caring deeply about other people’s safety, with wanting them to have as much as possible. This will lead you to combining a desire for high levels of public services along with high wages. You are likely to believe that these are rights, as opposed to benefits that are earned. If you hold this position strongly you are likely to extend this to believe in things like open borders.

Right

On the right, you should typically combine caring deeply about your own personal freedom, with wanting to make sure that people don’t get in the way of your access to opportunity. This will lead you to believe strongly in deregulation and the removal of unearned support. If you hold this position strongly you are likely to believe in a very small state and the abolition of the minimum wage.

Dichotoclastic conundrum!

So what do we do if the real answer to the situation we are in is to have an expansive set of collectively provided services, that meets all of the basic needs that an individual has, which then makes possible an abolition of the minimum wage?

An impossible ask?

Could Mamdani have won the New York mayoral election by promising to provide free access to basic services in return for the gradual reduction of the minimum wage as the services came online? If the answer is “There’s no way in hell!”, then we have a long way to go before we are ready to face reality. We are playing 2D chess in a 3D world.

This is where I think we’re stuck, well, at least where I’m stuck. I believe that it’s absolutely essential that we adopt a package of policies that are simultaneously unacceptable to both the left and the right! The fact that they balance seems like a faint merit. Overcoming our internal dichotomies too difficult – even to neutralise the populist, reactionary wave.

What’s your position on the spectrum? Would you be prepared to accept the gradual reduction in the minimum wage (and benefits) in return for a correlated increase in the provision of basic services? Can you think of some way of expressing that trade that would be commonly understood and accepted? Add your answers in the comments.

It’s time to expand our little circle. The more we can share a common story of what ails us, the more clarity have about our predicament, the higher we can lift our sights to what’s possible.

In the last couple of months we have covered:

- Why the Labour government is trapped

- How not to fight populism

- How to build the most dynamic UK economy

- Why the UK’s political class has failed us

I am sure you know at least 2 other people who share your interest in finding a way out of these woods without resorting to the old left-right divides. Send them this email and they can sign up, or not, to get their own emails going forward.

If we are going to step over the, frankly dreadful, political options currently on offer we will need a deeper perspective on what really needs to change.

Proper Change requires a ground swell. It’s time to expand our circle one more layer and your help in achieving that is essential.

Thank you, in advance, for helping to do that.

Andrew

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• “One, have we improved living standards, do people genuinely feel better off?

• Two, have we improved public services? Is the NHS in a better place and people can feel it?

• And three, do people feel safe and secure in their home, in their neighborhood and that their country is secure?”

RIP Missions

Well, at least the “missions” have gone the way of the Dodo. “Missions” were a failed business strategy from the 1990s that never worked for business and were never going to work for government. All they ever generated were “mission statements” that aimed to communicate all the things that the executive team could think of at lunchtime on their away day (when the accounts were out of sight back on the horse-shoe tables in front of the flip chart). Diffuse, corporate-speak, word salads full of every intention and no purpose.

3 Things

I love “things”. Not quite sure if you mean an input, a condition, or an outcome? Let’s just call it a “thing”. Could be a policy, could be a result, not sure, but it’s definitely some thing that’s important to some bodies.

Genuinely better off

Better off presumably refers to higher discretionary spending. There’s two ways to get that: reduce the cost of living, or increase incomes.

The government came in all gung ho on the latter. Growth! Growth! Growth! Higher productivity! Globally competitive businesses! Well, a few advisors and productivity czars later, how’s that going? Hard? Difficult with the highest commercial energy costs in the G7/G20? Hiked employment taxes not helping? Food inflation still running hot? No (almost) free debt to spend? It was always a long shot. Five Missions didn’t help.

Back in, oh what was it now… 2023? The COST OF LIVING crisis was the real thing! Growth was just one of many possible responses. It was the cheapest, because it’s something that other people do with their money and you just sit back and rake in the taxes. Admittedly it was a better response than the silly market control impulses of the latter day lefties: regulate market prices (which also has that nice sensation of sticking it to the man while sitting back in the couch).

But the coach ‘n horses option doesn’t get a look in. How about actually driving the DOWN the cost of living? Not a week goes by when I don’t scream (inside voice) “Free local buses! Everywhere! Day One!” I mean WTAF! There are single, working parents in Liverpool paying for 6 bus tickets a day to get their kid to school, get back to work, go to pick up the kid, and get back home. Every day, in every corner of the country, millions of people actually experiencing a real fall in their daily cost of living as a result of obvious solidarity. Every day! A real down payment on “genuinely better off” for a cost that could easily be paid for by raising Air Passenger Duty a few quid per flight.

Oh well. Must not have focus grouped. Did anybody ask?

Improved public services

Thing two. I know what, let’s take the biggest, most complicated service, most certain to see sustained increase in demand from an aging population, and make that the yardstick by which we’ll be measured on this thing. I mean, I know it’s a big, swinging-dick department, but is the NHS a politically astute choice? I don’t think so.

It’s an impoverished mid 20th Century view to see public services as health and education. The public realm is so much more than that. And in so many areas we have let the market eat the people (So much easier than actually doing something).

More on food would have been good. Food inflation is what is hitting those with the lowest incomes. Again, a low budget impact but massive daily experience change would be to help fund actual community restaurants and super markets to replace the dismal food “banks”.

Safe & secure

Whoa, lots wrapped up in that thing! But not to argue with the point: if government can’t offer safety in return for its exclusive right to violence, then the most basic deal is dead.

To actually feel safe, people would have to have confidence in a guarantee of basic service provision, afforded from a balanced budget, that included sufficient funding of defence to actually deter aggression. That’s a whole lot more than a thing. That’s the kind of proper change you’d actually need to have figured out before you took the reins of government, not at your second annual conference.

Populism is a reaction, nothing more. It is the wisdom of the masses revolting against the lie that we can keep our current social structures and transition our energy systems. Because energy is the master resource and there’s no denying that.

So the most common proposal across populist movements is that we can, and should, burn more fossils to preserve the current system. That is: use the cheapest form of primary energy to keep the costs of being organised the way we are to a minimum. And if we don’t do that, then we can’t keep the current system.

That has a basic truth to it. That’s why it gets the tacit support of every conservative.

The common response from the “sensible centre” is that renewables (energy from minerals) are cheaper, so we can keep our way of life without burning fossils.

The centrist position is a lie. Which is why it is failing to hold back the tide.

So strong is the attachment to maintaining the current way of creating social stability, that the truth of an energy evolution is extraordinarily inconvenient. Skimping over the cracks in the story becomes existentially important. From that perspective CCS (carbon sequestration and storage) must work, and shovelling £22 billion at it makes sense. “Energy will be cheaper” (as long as we ignore the system costs) becomes a mantra. The alternatives are, apparently, unbearable. But the deception is not as successful as they think. It seems more effective on themselves than it is on others. Otherwise they wouldn’t promulgate these fictions.

What are the alternatives? Either burn the fossils, or re-base our social security systems. Reactionary populism, or progressive system change. Sitting in the middle and pretending we can have our cake and eat it is not a real option. Seeing through that pretence is not a moral failing. It is doing us all a favour. Right now the lie is that we can have the best of both worlds, and I can sympathise with those who don’t believe it.

New Tech

If we have any respect for future generations, we need to put on our big boy pants and face up to reality. Fossils are great, but we’ve got to stop burning them! We have the tech to replace them. Not one-for-one, but at sufficient scale to support a really joyful society. But it will not be cheaper than burning fossils!

Feeding, heating, cooling, moving, and housing large populations takes tons of energy. Because we have assumed that everyone can buy their basic needs in markets, the price of energy is a critical foundation of all prices – and therefore of our social stability. Because of that dependence, ignoring the real costs of fossil fuel burning has become essential to maintaining our social systems. We already cannot afford the welfare systems we have, and higher energy prices will break them.

So there are only two stories in play at the moment:

• One is that we must carry on burning fossils in order to preserve our way of life.

• The other is that the new-tech, mineral energy will be cheaper, and therefore we can carry on with our way of life.

The third story, which is the only real one, does not get a hearing. It is that we must transition to less polluting and destructive energy sources, and that, to do so, we must adapt our social security systems to build a better way of life.

As it stands, we are delaying the energy revolution. We are burning the future and throwing our great grandchildren under the bus. We don’t want to, but we haven’t figured how not to. Mea culpa?

New system

I have written extensively about what's wrong with our current systems for providing social security, and hopefully it's fairly obvious that what we have today is dysfunctional, ineffective, and unaffordable. But what would replace it? And why would that work better?

The new social security system will guarantee access to the basic necessities of life that we all know are essential to enabling anyone to step up and make whatever their contribution is. It will do this by directly providing access to those necessities. It will not intermediate access through a purchase. This will mean that in many cases there are less choices. But the payoff is that the needs are guaranteed to be satisfied. And by doing that, we enable a level of social coherence and economic performance that we can only glimpse from here.

I've called them “universal basic services” in the reports and literature that I have written. But the point is to provide access to shelter, food, transport, education, care, information and the basic infrastructure of a society (legal, safety, democracy) without condition. It may not be the type of shelter, food, transport, education, care, or information you would want but it meets the need.

Replacing our failing compensatory redistribution attempt at creating social security with a fully-fledged, real social safety net would take a little time. Maybe 10 years, probably less if we really tried. You can see how we would get started on this in 2030, and have made transformative progress by 2035, by interrogating the Policy Analyst (< that’s a link, click it!).

Responding to the moment

I urge you to realise that responding to the wave of populism with lies about maintaining the current system is a road to failure. For everyone.

The effective response is to promise a new world in which everyone’s personal freedom and safety is greater and better than it is now. We must offer proper change, not the slogan. That means grasping the nettle of entitled consumer gratification and yanking it out by its roots. In its place we offer an unconditional guarantee of access to life’s essentials. Nothing less, and nothing more. I think enough people are ready for that story, and many of them you would call “populists”. And the UK is the best positioned society in the world to lead this.

And on that base, with that promise made real, we can all make the energy transition together. Our current social security systems make the required energy revolution impossible. Pick a side.

Imagine a world in which everybody is making their personal contribution.

Imagine all the people, No need for greed or hunger, Above us, only sky, It isn't hard to do, You may say I'm a dreamer, But I'm not the only one, I hope someday you'll join us, And the Earth will live as one.

- John Lennon, 1971 (edited for brevity and clarity)

Current News stories this helps explain

• UK Labour budget woes

• German and French budget problems

• Slow progress on decarbonisation

We do feel trapped. Between social pressures, political drift, climate change, aggressive authoritarians, and the haze of digital tech dulling our focus. Finding clarity is pretty rare nowadays. What I hope to do here is zoom out a thousand miles and give you a view of what’s moving and why. That’s important for several reasons. First, it creates some space in which to think. Getting things into manageable chunks lets us arrange them in our heads. Second, clarity takes the sting out of it. We can see why it’s confusing, or why it's hard to change, instead of just being confused. Understanding why you can’t change something allows you compassion for yourself, and that’s a much calmer place to stand than just worrying about it. And it gives you a way of sharing, commiserating, and planning with others. If you can’t change it, perhaps we can change it. We are all on this journey together, and it is much easier when you join up with others walking next to you. To do that you need to be able to share stories of where we’re headed and how we might get there.

Social what-ever-you-call-it

A big part of understanding how things fit together is to get clear about how we support each other. Call it welfare, social security, benefits, or whatever you like. Developed societies have systems of social support, and for good reasons. But when they are not working properly, they affect pretty much every aspect of life. Half the people in the UK receive some form of direct social support at the individual or family level. And everyone is supported in some way by a fabric of publicly funded services provided from community to national levels. £8 of every £10 in taxes goes back out in social support in the UK and every other advanced society. It’s the second biggest and most influential system we run in our societies (the largest is taxes), so of course it impacts everything else.

I am sure you can think of some of the good reasons we have social support. But, if you really zoom out, there’s an overarching reason: to maximise the productivity and contributions of our population. That’s the evolutionary reason to do it. Yes, we use terms like fairness and happiness, which we personally identify with, but the larger purpose is making a functional proposition out of large groups of specialised individuals. There are many risks in large groups of people who are all different, and the way we organise ourselves is to minimise those risks and maximise the potential advantages.

Hopefully there’s nothing controversial about the statement that “social security systems aim to maximise the productivity and contributions of our population”. Because if we can accept that, then we can look at what we are actually achieving. Is that what we are getting? A million young people doing nothing (NEET), would say not. What about safety, security, dignity, productivity, meaning… anything useful? Chronic levels of really shocking social care failure, persistent levels of childhood deprivation, chart topping levels of stress and poor mental health, suggest we are failing quite seriously. A debater could make a pretty cogent argument that we have a social security system that suppresses productivity and minimises contributions. And we spend 80% of our taxes on doing that!?

Simulating responsibility & substituting effort

The real purpose of an activity is revealed in its outcomes (Revealed Preferences). If the real purpose was to maximise productivity and contribution, it would be doing that by now. It’s not. It is reducing productivity and minimising contribution. So what does it do? The real purpose of our fake social security system is revealed in what it actually achieves: simulating the responsibility and substituting the effort of actually creating the safety and security that would maximise productivity and contributions.

It allows those who don’t need help to tell themselves that they are doing what they can to help the unlucky. In the pursuit of that aim it takes the advantages the patrons see for themselves, and attempts to emulate those for others. That’s why it tries to incorporate non-existent rights (like choice) and deny real responsibilities (to contribute). Those are rewards from recognised contributions. They are not entitlements. They aren’t even the support people need. When we make “choice” more important than the need, we are projecting our own privilege as the ascendent purpose. Instead of actual support, we end up providing fake choices between things that don’t even meet needs! Think cheap food.

Now, before I get too high-horse about all of this I want to acknowledge the very functional role of low-effort achievements. If something can be done with less effort, that is, quite often, exactly the right way to do that thing. You might even call it efficient. So the fact that we ended up with a dysfunctional simulation of a social security system, whose predominant feature are that it looks like it works with relatively low effort, is not a personal indictment of our collective moral rectitude. But to not recognise that it's not working is a real problem. And to understand why we continue to perpetuate a failing system is the crucial step towards accepting that it has to change.

A real social contract

The actual social contract is extended self-interest in the function of the society. The real contract entails no guilt, only equanimous compassion. Maybe we should try doing what it says on the tin: maximise the productivity and contributions of our population?

As a guide to sorting out which bits of our social security systems are aligned with a real social contract, I suggest distinguishing between services and cash. In most Western democracies the split is about 50:50. Half of the money that we raise for social support in taxes we spend on compensatory re-distribution, and the other half we spend on actually creating the services that deliver the safety and security we aim to provide. In British parlance we would say: half on “benefits”, and half on “public services”.

We do the benefits bit for a combination of the reasons I have discussed above: it is low effort, primarily administrative, conscious salving, and supposedly dignity supporting through an effete pass at choice. And it's about as effective as you would guess that a low effort option would be: crap value for money, incentive distorting, insufficient, and riven with unintended consequences. It ticks a box on a multiple-choice exam, but would get a failing grade on a written one.

Where we have recognised, in the past, that a compensatory cash re-distribution system is a really bad way to do social security, we have instead implemented a public service. Education and health are the two big examples. And, as we all know, these are hard work and necessarily the subject of continuous improvement and disappointing outcomes. But they are also our pride and joy, and have proved to be incredibly successful in maximising the productivity and contributions of our population. However hard these are to get right, once we've started down the road on satisfying some aspect of social need with a collective service, we have not turned back. We may run out of puff on occasion, but that’s exactly my point.

I'm not saying that we can do everything as a service. Of course there are things that are uniquely individual and will be difficult to provide as a service. What I am saying is that we've got the balance wrong. We feed our egos with tax money and leave charities to try and pick up the real needs. We need to swap those around. And when we say we can't afford our social security, the answer is not to cut the already inadequate support we do provide, it is to put in more effort and less projection. Rolling out a set of services covering really important needs like transport, food, training, and shelter is not that difficult, and we can perfectly afford to do it if we are prepared to give up the ego we have invested in our compensatory cash re-distribution systems.

If we work towards 80:20 services:cash we would meet needs more directly, squash many of the divisions that are tearing us apart, and build a strengthened society that will be much better able to handle the challenges coming at us. My estimate is that would close the budget gaps, now and future, and take the wind out of the sails of reactionary populists in the leading Western democracies.

Interpreting the news

So when you read about the extra £40 billion Reeves has to find in November, or the protests in France, or the welfare dilemmas of the German government, remember that we do have a choice. We can carry on with a failing system that wastes 40% of the taxes paid, or we can make changes now (that I believe we will be forced to make eventually).

And when your heart sinks as yet another climate milestone passes and yet another COP fails to get anything actually done, remember that the reason we aren’t moving faster is because our social system is the impediment. Life without public service options is already unaffordable for a democratically significant portion of our populations. Until we drive down the basic cost of living we will not make any kind energy transition, let alone fund an adequate defence.

Next time: how energy (the master resource) intersects with all of this.

What would such a manifesto look like? What is it that politicians are too afraid to put in their manifestos? That’s going to be the subject of this post and quite a few to come.

Interrogate the policies for yourself using the Policy Analyst free AI tool.

The social contract

Top of my list would be reframing the social contract. The promise that we give each other is that in the event that our own efforts fail, we (the rest of us) will provide the necessary support to prevent anyone falling into destitution and to provide them with the foundation on which they can continue to make their contributions (what ever those are). Nothing more, nothing less. We do this because it is in our self interest that every member of our society is contributing. The fulfilment of that promise is basically a set of services: shelter, food, transport, education, information, care, and legal infrastructure. And, in theory, we get a choice: we can either provide the services, or we can give people money (so that they can buy those services themselves in a private marketplace).

The truth is: we do not have that choice. We cannot use money as a displacement for our responsibility to deliver on the social contract. Handing out money distorts incentives, will always be conditional (because that’s the nature of money!), and is, therefore, incomplete, ineffective, and actively discourages contribution, crushes ambition, and debilitates agency. On top of all that: cash benefits are eye-wateringly expensive. We have managed to create a “social security” system that actively destroys our social contract, and pollutes our politics to boot! Any society with millions of able people not enabled to make their contribution every day has a seriously dysfunctional system – that much should be bleeding obvious.

Policy: replace our “welfare” benefits programs with public services, phased in over 5 to 10 years.

Results: instant recognition as the only country in the world that has got a grip on its long term spending; at least 200 million more hours of some kind of contribution every year; soaring productivity; safe and secure population; an explosion in innovation; the most flexible, well trained labour in the world; and competitive businesses.

Incomes Taxes

Any tax system that taxes income from labourers and employees more aggressively than it does passive incomes and capital cannot possibly advertise itself as "making work pay". If we want people to contribute more and we want higher levels of productivity, then we have to stop taxing working people more than we do anyone else!

Merging the four primary incomes taxes (IT, NICs, IHT, CGT) into a single progressive system that is levied equally across all forms of income is obviously the solution. Marry that with a commitment to spend all revenues from that tax on public services and you have the basis for re-establishing strong reciprocity and the degree of social cohesion that matches the challenges of the coming decades.

Policy: National Contributions. See paper – I wrote that over Covid but it stills applies. Updated values and rates available at the Policy Analyst.

Results: a simple, obviously fair tax system that establishes a strongly reciprocal social contract. A clear and transparent political obligation to set the rates and boundaries of a common incomes tax that applies equally to everyone.

Property Taxes

Can there ever have been something so obviously ripe for reform as property taxes in the UK in 2025? This is commonly accepted across the political spectrum, touted by every think tank and academic, and yet never makes it onto anyone’s manifesto: reform Britain’s regressive and hated twins, Stamp Duty and Council Tax, the Poll Tax’s rotten cousin. A system born of sheer stupidity in the hazy miasma of the early neoliberal period. ‘Ooo, people consume local services, so let’s tax people!’ Fucking genius! (I guess someone said, at the time). A local property tax based on taxing people – what could possibly go wrong?! And now, after 3 decades of political cowardice, it just gets worse every year.

It’s not complicated to figure out how to bring in a straight 1% property tax across all property and land in the UK. It really isn’t! Can’t figure out how to deal with people who don’t have any income? Have you thought about a lien on the property? Can’t figure out how to help all the people who will have higher property taxes than they do now? Have you thought about reducing people’s cost of living by more than you increase their taxes? I mean, have we put even a little effort into making the transition work?! Some relief for those who grow our food and care for our ecology? Why not?

Policy: Scrap Stamp Duty and Council Tax and replace with a 1% property tax on the value of all property, including land. 2% on second homes. Liens available for everyone in any year where their income is less than 3X their property tax obligation.

Results: transaction volumes up 25%; productivity up by 0.4%; labour mobility; housing price affordability; sustainable local government finances1. And, importantly, everyone with an average valued property who uses the full gamete of new public services will save more in their cost of living than it costs in additional property taxes.

Next?

That's my top three, but there's plenty more. The basic principle here is that you have to look at how all of these policies interact with each other. You can't just look at increasing property taxes alone, without also considering how you might reduce people’s cost of living. Our social security policies must be part of how we modernise our tax system.

This failure of imagination is probably partly due to the hyper specialisation that we have developed since the Fossil Revolution in the 18th century. We've ended up with policy silos that prevent progress in any one of them because nobody understands that we live in a system in which all of the parts interact. It's called "system change" for a reason! (Many can’t even conceive of a whole system, and therefore what on Earth needs to be changed.)

Got questions about how all of this would work? Head over to the Policy Analyst and ask away. This entire policy framework is loaded in there and it stands ready to answer any question you'd like to throw at it.

The risk I run here is that what I describe below is so jarring or foreign to you that you are forced to look away. But I don't think there's any way around it, so here we go.

Status

Observation one: we're going into debt and wilfully ignoring real costs (environmental and others) to try and support ourselves, but failing to do so.

Observation two: that is causing instability and intra-society tensions.

Observation three: those weaknesses are being exploited by others who would like to reach the same level of unsustainable consumption that we have.

Truth

The truth is that our idea of society, and the whole system we have built to try and create a reality out of that idea, is wrong, unbalanced, and unachievable. The fact that other people are chasing the same goal does not support the idea, it simply reveals their ignorance.

No society ever has succeeded in attributing an economic value to all of the activity and effort that its population performs. And nor could any society ever achieve that. That should be easily obvious, but in case it's not, let's just review just a couple of examples.

No one is ever going to pay parents for all of the work and effort they put into raising children. No one is going to pay you to cook a meal for your friend. No one gets paid to help an old person cross a river or off a bus. Unless you're a recalcitrant teenager, no one is going pay you to clean up your bedroom, hoover the house, or do the dishes. You do not get paid to get to work, you do not get paid to eat your lunch, and you do not get paid to get home. I really could go on and on here, but I'm going assume that you've picked up the thread and can come up with your own examples.

All of those activities are useful, even essential. But that does not mean you get paid to do them. And there's a simple reason for that: economic activity is a subset of the total activity in a society. Therefore, there is never enough money to pay everybody to do everything that they do. Pretending otherwise is a highway to where we are now.

Money

If you have assumed that all valuable activity is compensated with money, then it may appear to you that it makes sense that everything anyone needs should be available to purchase with money. And once you have done that, then it makes perfect sense that anyone who does not have money has to be given money in order to access the basic essentials that they need to live.

And so we end up with the current "welfare" systems that masquerade as “social security” in the advanced countries today. People need money to live, so if they haven't got any money, we have to give them money. The entire premise was false to begin with and so we created a system that can never work. We cannot use money as a displacement for our responsibility to deliver on the social contract. Handing out money distorts incentives, will always be conditional (because that’s the nature of money!), and is, therefore, incomplete, ineffective, and actively discourages contribution, crushes ambition, and debilitates agency. We have managed to create a “social security” system that actively destroys our social contract, and pollutes our politics to boot!

Money is not essential to live, it is the compensation that is provided to those who create additional value recognised by someone else. Very few people create enough additional value to be compensated for everything they do. So pretty much all of us are spending some of our time putting in free effort to do the things we need to do and getting compensated for some of the other time we spend creating additional value.

Together

The reality of a human society is that we are interdependent, and we sink or swim together. The essential ingredient is that we create is a system of social support that enables as many people as possible to make as much contribution as possible. Anything that gets in the way of letting people make their contribution diminishes the effectiveness of the system, and, ultimately, that society's competitive stance with other societies.

Our problem is not that we have completely failed to recognise this essential structure, it is that we have created a confused, hybrid version and that is creating enormous tensions inside our societies. The reason we've got this mixed-up version is that we have not properly ingested the truth that not all activity has economic value. All activity has value of some kind, but that does not mean that it is entitled to monetary compensation. Just being alive does not entitle anyone to the receipt of rewards. Rewards are for added value contributions. And the core problem here is that if you have got yourself into a state where the only way you can understand "value" is by recognising it in the form of money, then you have created a trap for yourself in which you can never realise a society that fits your world view. Value exists in all sorts of forms that are not represented by money, and when we fully ingest that truth then we can build something that is balanced, productive, and sustainable.

If we had a system that recognised money solely as the contribution received for creating additional value, then we wouldn't be in the problem state we are in. We could do that, if it cost nothing to be alive. Creating that system, with less than we spend today on our benefits systems and with lower taxes, could be achieved in just a few years. It would cause very little disruption, and it would usher in a period of productivity growth that would be eye-watering by today’s standards.

Weak

We are weak. Because we cannot bring ourselves to face what is an obvious truth from the outside, we are just waiting to fail. Trying to run a society based on an unachievable level of financial redistribution, and an unsustainable exploitation of resources, is a foolish mistake. To carry on doing so is a fatal error. Only the rate of decline and the date of realisation are in question. And those who see advantage from our failure are encouraged to speed up the rate and bring forward the date.

If you value what we have built over the last few hundred years in free and democratic societies, then you need to take this seriously, now! Of course authoritarian competitor countries want the same levels of material wealth that the West has achieved. Along with that material wealth comes political power and military might. They could care less about the freedoms of individuals, but that is neither here nor there. This is a systemic competition and whole societies will win or lose. (A more glaring lesson in the vital intra-dependence of a society is hard to conjure.)

Stop digging!

So what's to be done? Well first, we could stop making the situation worse. Stop trying to make an unachievable system achievable! We are wasting time and advantage. If we don’t correct course in the next decade (possibly two) we will come apart at the seams and disintegrate. Personally, I have found the pace of populist progression surprising in both directions. It lurches forward shockingly at times, and then seems to linger like a bad smell outside a toilet before it actually comes into play. In any case, across the line from Germany, through France and the UK, to the USA, we can see very clearly the emergence of internally destructive political forces at various stages of advancement. These forces offer nothing positive because they are only the expression of failure. It is our collective failure to come to grips with the reality of our situation and rebuild our social structures to maximise the skills, ingenuity, and productivity of our populations.

Okay, so now you should have a better context for the changes we need to make. When I say we need tax and welfare reform, I'm not talking about tweaking the existing system because I think it's a little bit wrong here or there. I'm talking about a fundamental restructuring of our social conventions so that we maximise the efforts, output, and joy of our societies and all the people in them.

Next edition: three easy Proper Change policies that we could start doing now.

I have also commented on the rapidly disappearing option of more debt to Western democracies. And I do think that this is going to induce a serious reckoning. But there's an important caveat here: that there is positive option on which minds could become concentrated.

Reversion to mean

Among the many assumptions of our liberal elite, the notion that there is a hegemonic economic perspective is the most dangerous. We seem to be trapped in a world of "reversion to mean", in which the alternative to the current situation is always going to be to go back to how it was before. But that's not the way things work. The 80s, 90s, and the noughties are all gone, done, dusted. There is no reversion to pre-2008 or pre-Brexit – things have moved on and conditions have changed. People are more fighty, the planet’s a little warmer, and the runway a little shorter.

It would be a silly assumption that running into difficulties now is going to cause countries to revert to a set of standards and attitudes that were the norm in years past. I'm sure that the liberal elite would do their best to promote reversion as an option, but I am highly sceptical that that would be the option that minds would become concentrated on. I would say that even a cursory review of what's happening in most western democracies nowadays suggests that populations and politicians have largely rejected the notion of a return to anything like the late 20th C model.

So what options are there on which minds could become concentrated? Frankly, that's a pretty short list. With pulling up the drawbridge and getting rid of “foreigners” occupying positions one and two. The fact that neither are possible without collapsing back into something like a pre-industrial economy is not something that seems to be worrying anyone. Perhaps the proponents are not really serious? Perhaps the populations are grasping at what little they are offered, given that no one seems to have an real alternative?

The deep irony here is that the populist positions are, in fact, a version of reverting to mean – only they have picked a time even further back in history to which they want to return. I think that time can be pretty accurately described as when John Wayne was the leading actor in Hollywood. A time when white men were in their “natural position” and we had just got started on the fossil burning pathway. And John Wayne provided a bridge even further back into the late 19th century when men were men, and they had guns and freedom!

Proper Change

What is beginning to dawn on me quite viscerally is that the rise of populism betrays the absence of real alternatives in our public discourse. We are so trapped in the liberal elite’s confined imagination of a reversion to an inaccessible past that we have not properly developed a vision of the future.

We describe everything that we know we should do as something that no politician would ever get re-elected after doing. But how do we know that? I'm reminded of a global Pew Charitable Trust survey in which they ask people about their concerns for the environment. And the consistent result in the surveys, globally, is that people rate their own concern as much stronger than those of the people around them. Clearly, that can't be true.

It's just as likely that what we're seeing at the moment is the expression of a deep internal angst, a kind of broad wisdom, that has arisen in our populations. That angst needs an answer. It did not come from some intellectual understanding of the mechanics of what's going wrong, and it can't be addressed with rational and “sensible” arguments about what to do right. It's not a superficial feeling. It's a deep fear that there's something fundamentally wrong. The one thing that is probably clear, is that it's going to require real change. Not hopey change, not change in the name, and not slow and incremental change either. Proper change. And PDQ.

If we want minds to get concentrated around a positive and joyful future when the shit hits the fan, then we better start painting that picture pretty damn clearly and pretty damn soon.

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In my next instalment I'm going try and compile a list of all the things for which a politician would “never get re-elected” if they did and see if we can fashion that into a coherent manifesto. We should probably elect someone who's got that whole list in their manifesto!

In the meantime, if you've got some questions about what that kind of future might look like I strongly encourage you to pop over to the Policy Analyst at properchange.uk and ask away to your heart’s content.

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Now look where we are:

What you can see:

• six weeks ago every rate for 4 year and shorter debt was lower than a year before, now only the 1 year is appreciably lower. This is no longer a “rotation”, this is a migration or maybe even an exodus.

• six weeks ago the biggest gap between rates was less than 1%, now it is 1.2%. In six weeks! Remember this this a rolling time series, so we would expect to see the gap narrow if things were getting more stable.

The closing eye

The “eye” of the crocodile has moved back from 3 years to 2 years. And as the weather vane starts to point to a government that is endemically incapable of understanding that proper change is needed, we can expect the eye to disappear later this year. Rates across the board will be higher than a year ago because nobody believes that the UK can get a grip on its borrowing.

Stagflation and failing government, here we come!

Natural consequences

This is where societies end up when they cannot align their aspirations with reality.

If you can’t afford to do what you are doing you eventually end up with 2 options: bankruptcy or it’s slower cousin: financial repression. Financial repression is just a form of bankruptcy in which the value of savings is reduced by receiving lower interest than the rate of inflation. Either way, the false value in the society is destroyed, suddenly or slowly.

We have had 29% inflation since 2019. Have your savings, salary, house value or anything else of value increased by that amount in the last 6 years? No? Then you’ve been financially repressed.

Structurally unsound

The UK is structurally unsound. It has a weak social fabric that is causing a panic about immigration. It has the longest tax code in the world that is stopping people making their contributions of effort and ingenuity. And it’s decrepit democratic system is seriously susceptible to populist take over in just a few years from now.

It is time for Proper Change.