It’s almost the exact same fate suffered by the last Prime Minister to win an election - Boris Johnson, booted out just two years after winning a landslide. Keir may be surprised to have suffered the same fate as a man he, for all we know, seemed to genuinely, deeply dislike. 

Labour MPs are no doubt wondering if they’ve made the right choice to force out the leader that saved their party from decades of malaise. 

As he listed off his achievements - wages finally rising faster than inflation, the fastest fall to NHS waiting lists in 17 years, the biggest improvement in worker and renter rights and the biggest uplift in defence spending since the cold war - it beggars belief that he’s being booted out for being too boring. 

As world leaders Tweet their respect and admiration for the British Prime Minister (with one notable exception), Labour MPs may wonder if we’ve damaged our place on the global stage. 

When a Prime Minister who, by all metrics, was sending the country in the right direction is booted out by a rabid mob of MPs, it is hard not to conclude that Britain is ungovernable. The next Prime Minister will be our seventh in ten years. Ed Davey calls it the “merry-go-round” of Prime Ministers: he’s right. 

(One way to cut public spending - stop shifting Prime Minister. The taxpayer foots their moving bill). 

As I see it, this instability at the top of Britain is caused by several factors. One is that we’ve tried to create a presidential role in a parliamentary system. Another is that the Civil Service is so logjammed and unproductive that the levers of power are effectively useless. 

But, above all, forces outside Westminster have taken a poisoned pill in pursuit of power. They’ve discovered that you can use a combination of rhetoric and social media to rile up the public and batter an incumbent. This has been the playbook of the populist for decades, but it is now going mainstream. 

Convince the public that the incumbent hates them, the system is rigged against them and nothing is getting better. Talk about everything that is broken in the country, talk down our prospects, make everyone miserable. Tell the country that something is possible, but government doesn’t do it because they hate the public. 

It works - the public will grow angry and hate their leader. The agitator will get into office. But that same anger will soon poison their term. 

Andy Burnham will quickly realise that throwing rocks at Westminster is a lot less popular when you are Westminster. Burnham will find that you can no longer call yourself the political outsider when you’re in charge of British politics (and everyone remembers you’ve had a 30 year political career). All of the anger and frustration that he’s helped provoke will land directly on his lap. 

His biggest problem: he won’t change a thing. The arithmetic hasn’t changed. 

Britain is still in mountains of debt, and the bond markets will not allow Burnham to go on a spending spree. 

Legal and illegal immigration are slowly falling, the left-wing factions that have paved Burnham’s route to Downing Street won’t let him make it happen any faster. 

Andy Burnham has no policy ideas beyond “North Good South Bad”. He has no plan beyond “something something Manchester”. He’s not going to be a radical reformer. He’s hoping the power of his personality will see him do the same things as Starmer and get different results. But the problem: he’s not even that great a speaker - in set pieces, he’s just as stilted and boring as Starmer. He shines in smaller group settings: they’re ten a penny when you’re a mayor. You don’t get to do as many as PM. 

The way out

There is a way out of the madness. 

Raise taxes. The country needs more money for defence, the NHS, education and the pursuit of net-zero. Andy Burnham has the political maneuverability to break Labour’s manifesto promise of no tax rises - he needs to do it early and rip the band-aid. 

Cut welfare. It’s too late to reverse Labour’s ridiculous decision to scrap the two child limit on child benefits and the winter fuel allowance U-Turn, but Andy Burnham needs to take action on the ballooning welfare bill. Scrap the pension triple lock (pensions are the largest proportion of welfare spending) and tighten up PIP. 

Build infrastructure. Building nuclear power stations, laying train tracks and building houses create jobs and improve the economy. The government is beholden to the lawfare of activists, campaigning of NIMBYs and the lure of short-termism. Burnham must build if he wants to boost British prospects. 

Prioritise defence. The first job of a government is safeguarding the country. The world is rapidly becoming more dangerous. Now is the moment to invest in defence for the 21st century. Not just tanks and missiles, but cybersecurity and AI capabilities. 

Whip the party. Labour’s biggest problem is Labour. It’s a hodge-podge mix of commies and Blairites, remainer uni students and Brexiteer union bosses. Unless this party is united, they will forever tear themselves apart: Keir Starmer faced just as much mud slinging from his own side as the opposite. Unless you back Labour, you shouldn’t be in Labour, and you certainly shouldn’t be able to influence the party. This takes guts - Andy Burnham needs them.

First we were treated to Tony Blair’s 5000+ word plus essay on the state of Labour. In his long diatribe, Blair criticised the Starmer government as well as the prospective candidates to replace him.

Then we got Andy Burnham’s response, in which he argued that “The simple truth that Tony Blair has ignored” was that inequality is the main driver of voting intention.

Who could forget Wes Streeting’s classic retort essay: “Blair wants to leave our future to the markets.” - you can’t help but feel it’s a little derivative.

And then, of course, Starmer’s response: “Tony Blair might not like my plan, but he’s wrong”. A nice piece, but a bit one note.

Oh how the essay gods treat us. But, wait - there’s more! Fearful his original essay was misunderstood, Tony Blair emerged with another sequel essay, with the less than catchy title: “The future demands a radical response based on understanding the world we live in”.

Westminster is in an all-out pen swinging contest as to who can put forward the most compelling, cohesive argument in the most engaging prose.

Here’s the verdict: Blair, agree with him or not, won that battle. And as well as being a clear and persuasive writer, he does make some good arguments.

What Blair got right

It is certainly true that Starmer does not have a political credo: he simply has a string of policies randomly tied together in a bid for popularity. You see the lack of a political belief in his U-turns: there is no underlying strategy there, just frantic, repeated spins of the policy wheel in a bid to mollify his backbenchers and appease the polls.

And Blair is right that Labour wins from the centre. Andy Burnham’s bid to push Labour to the left will please the die-hards, but it won’t win over the country and it certainly won’t drive all important growth.

Blair advocates for Radical Centrism (perhaps he’s been reading the Monday Memo) which I completely agree is the right approach: big reforms instead of piecemeal changes; pushing for change instead of process and paperwork; a coherent, visionary story for voters instead of a series of pledges. But above all, it means starting with the right answer wherever it comes, and making it happen.

And finally, he’s right on AI. As I’ve written countless times, AI is the most substantial change to the working world certainly since the Industrial Revolution and one that government is not taking nearly seriously enough. Unemployment, particularly youth unemployment, is hitting new highs and government is looking to blame everything except AI. For decades, people have warned that automation will take jobs and so far it has not: it is finally happening, and now nobody seems to care.

While the risk is huge, the opportunity is also enormous: public sector productivity surge, an increase in our national wealth, millions of Brits working less and earning more. But achieving that will mean difficult, radical choices (including on tax and welfare) and Starmer has not been prepared to take that big bet.

What Blair got wrong

Blair makes the case that politics isn’t about chasing what’s popular, it’s about chasing what’s right and then persuading the country. And yet, on net-zero, he’s done the opposite.

Of course net-zero isn’t popular. It’s expensive

But it’s also the clearest solution to the biggest problems we face as a nation. On cost of living, this is a long-term route to abundant, affordable energy. On growth, it is the cheat code for the creation of thousands of well-paid, skilled jobs. On security, it’s the only path to reducing our dependence on foreign oil and gas.

I’ve argued before that net-zero will be the space race of the 21st century. A lot of people will question why, when it so expensive and difficult, we should race to net-zero. People asked the same of JFK about going to the moon, and as he responded: we do these things “not because they are easy, but because they are hard; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win, and the others, too.”

He is also wrong to suggest our role in the world should be an unassailable ally to the US. The vast majority of Brits will connect Blair’s name not with his string of election wins, or the economic boom he oversaw, or his record-breaking welfare spending but with his ill-fated decision to enter the Iraq War. His essay suggests he has not learned his lesson.

It would be ludicrous to suggest Britain can stand alone in the world, or even can become a great power - but we can cement our role as a crucial middle power and. To do that, we must do three things in tandem.

First is to boost our sovereign capabilities (eg in defence, energy, tech) so while we may be backed by the US and EU, we are less dependent.

Second is to increase our soft power internationally: investing in international development projects, deploying our aid spend in ways that advance our place in the world, and so forth.

And third is to recognise that diplomacy even with our closest allies is not about being a lap dog to the US President, but a critical friend.

Lesson for Starmer

Tony Blair’s essay, for its faults, is a reminder of what the former Prime Minister was great at: making a coherent case to the country.

Starmer needs to take on the job of persuading the country of his plan and his capabilities.

Starmer is stunk in a bunker mentality, cooped up in Number 10 desperately hoping the scandals and criticism won’t hit him. He needs to get out of the bunker and into a tank: on the front-foot, pushing through his policies with force, allowing the criticism to brush off him.

Ultimately, Starmer needs to move away from the managerialism. Blair’s essay serves as both a reminder of the power of a clear credo. Time for Starmer to articulate a vision and deliver on it: he could start by addressing the urgency of the AI revolution and bringing the country along on the net-zero transition.

Reform are, unsurprisingly, campaigning on a ‘Get Starmer Out’ platform. But if they win - they will almost certainly not budge the Prime Minister.

The Labour candidate, however, is also campaigning on a ‘Get Starmer Out’ platform. Andy Burnham, the Labour candidate is running his campaign on the promise to overthrow the Labour Prime Minister - all the while, ostensibly backed by the Labour Prime Minister.

So, if you are a voter in Makerfield who absolutely hates what Labour are doing in Government - your best bet at stopping them is to vote Labour.

The candidates

A crowded right-wing is seemingly clearing the path for a straightforward Burnham victory. While Nigel Farage tries to sway the (remaining) Conservatives, ex-Tory Rupert Lowe is trying to steal the hard-right from Reform with his new venture, Restore Britain.

Restore is a political maelstrom of mish-mashed policies (among many contradictions is their plan to repeal all hate speech laws while apparently arresting hate preachers). You have to respect the purity of their populism: they’ll say absolutely whatever will rile up a certain demographic of ‘not-racist-but’ gammon, even if it’s completely unserious.

They are a gift to the Liberals among us: as well as forcing Farage towards the centre to differentiate himself, they are also siphoning off the Reform vote.

A golden rule in politics seems to be emerging: you can always count on the political extremes to eat themselves alive. Exactly as Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana did last year, it now seems likely that Rupert Lowe and Nigel Farage will get into the same tiff.

Current polls suggest Restore will pull enough voters from Reform to open the gate for Labour. This is good news for Labour’s fans, of course, but also good news for Labour’s enemies: Andy Burnham will try to unseat the Prime Minister and either succeed, or damage him and the party in the process.

Restore may choose to stand down in some kind of electoral pact, which could hand Reform the victory. (That is, unless Robert Jenrick decides to set up a new party called Renew or Reset or Regain etc).

Then what?

Assuming there is no electoral pact, Andy Burnham is likely to win Makerfield. On entering Parliament, he will almost certainly mount an immediate leadership challenge against Starmer.

As the challengers pull lumps out of one another, the Parliamentary Labour Party might finally see the light: this is exactly what brought down every governing party since Thatcher. The voters always vote against in-fighting and personality politics that leads to national instability.

I expect, in other words, that Starmer would win a leadership challenge no matter who is in it. The country would never back Angela Rayner, Wes Streeting is not fundamentally different, and Andy Burnham does not have the political credos to back up his personal ambition.

Despite Starmer’s weaknesses, of which there are many, the country is finally starting to see the green shoots of the Labour policy platform: immigration falling, cost of living abating, NHS performance improving.

A leadership contest will expose that the alternative candidates aren’t much better than Starmer. The Labour Party have a case of ‘the grass must be greener’. But peeping over the fence will reveal it’s a very similar shade: just with a Northern accent.

However, a leadership contest will do untold damage to the party. Whether they boot out Starmer or not, Labour has shown their hand: in it for themselves, obsessed with melodrama, career before country - and no better than the Tories. I still believe Starmer is not like that. It’s a shame his backbenchers and some Cabinet colleagues are not the same.

It’s hard to believe now because of the nosedive his popularity has since taken, but I think at the last election a lot of Brits lent their vote to Starmer, not to Labour.

Labour has pockets of talent, but the problem with the party will always be the majority of its members. Self-righteous, perma-campaigners for whom nothing is ever good enough, who’d rather be debating the clauses of their internal party position on socialism than getting into government, and who’d prefer to lose than win on a compromise.

Starmer looked like the man to change that. But if the Tories have ‘the men in grey suits’ who come to depose a Prime Minister, Labour has lefties in lanyards. They seem to be coming for Starmer, and they'll take Labour down with him.

In summation

Andy Burnham will hand the keys to Manchester to a Reform mayor. He’ll almost certainly lose the leadership contest (as he’s done many times before). He’ll do untold damage to the credibility of the Prime Minister, and to the Labour Party. He’ll be relegated to the backbenches where he’ll, in the style of Diane Abbott, snipe from the sidelines: causing further damage to a struggling party.

Burnham will be to thank for a right-wing victory at the next election.

(Here’s where you comment: “tell us how you really feel!”).

Burnham’s selfish maneuvering is Biden-esque: to him, being in the seat of power is more important than anything. In his mind, it simply must be him - and he can do all the same things and generate different results.

Labour only wins from the centre, and it only wins when the party is united.

Like Restore is a gift to Liberals, Burnham will prove to be a gift to the right and

When I came into Downing Street, two years ago, I told you things would be difficult.

I said that things would get worse before they got better.

I wasn’t wrong.

We’re seeing that bear out.

This has been a difficult week for our party. It’s been a difficult year for our country.

But we were elected on a mandate to fix a broken Britain.

And we are fixing it.

Immigration is falling at an unprecedented rate. It’s at its lowest level in more than 5 years.

The asylum backlog is falling: at its lowest level since 2020. We are processing asylum seekers faster. And people who aren’t eligible are being removed faster.

The NHS waiting list is coming down: now at its lowest in three years and getting lower every day.

And, when we entered office, there were record high numbers of children in poverty. Those numbers are finally falling. That’s my proudest achievement in this job.

Britain is bouncing back.

After decades of decline, crisis after crisis - we are putting the ‘Great’ back in ‘Great Britain’.

There are 3,000 more neighbourhood police officers tackling crime.

We’ve renationalised 11 rail operators.

Inflation is finally back under control.

The plan is working.

So my message to my MPs is this.

If you don’t believe in the plan, if you don’t have the patience and the restraint to stick it out, then you can - and should - leave the party.

People voted for us because they wanted a party that was sensible, patient and in control.

They wanted a party that wouldn’t tear itself apart in pursuit of personal ambition, or to feed a frenzied media.

They voted for someone who would put their country first. Someone who would be a leader - not a lunatic.

They were tired of the Boris Johnsons, allowing his team to party while the country locked down.

Of the Liz Trusses, crashing the market and sending mortgage rates soaring in the reckless pursuit of an economic experiment.

Or a Nigel Farage, leading the charge for a Brexit that sent immigration soaring and then blaming everyone but himself.

To my MPs I say this - if you want melodrama and infighting: join another party.

Britain doesn’t want it. They want stability.

Those on the sidelines are trying to divide our nation. From the right and from the left, they stoke culture wars that tear families apart.

They try to drag American-style debates and Middle East wars into our dining room conversations.

They don’t want to fix the country. They want it to stay broken.

I want to fix things. I am fixing things.

I told you it wouldn’t happen overnight. But it is happening.

To the country, my message is simple.

I am not doing this job to be popular.

I did not choose this job to make friends.

I’m doing it because I can see a route to fixing this country - this country that has been so badly let down by decades of careerist leaders.

I believe there is a path between the extremes. One that promotes ambition, prosperity and growth - but also fairness, and justice for all.

And I think that’s what the majority of decent Brits want too.

This government is fixing things. Things are getting better. And if you don’t feel it today, I promise you that you will feel it soon.

Let us stick with the plan.

We are stabilising the economy, cutting spending without using the blunt instrument of austerity.

We are fixing a broken immigration system, not through cruel and dangerous, ICE-style raids - but with a sensible, fair approach that’s really working.

We’re taking criminals off the streets with more police officers on the streets, more prison spaces, and faster sentencing for criminals.

Change is happening.

We’re breaking down the division and the rot.

The Britain that you remember is coming back.

You don’t have to like me. But I am getting on with the job for you, for your family, for my family, and for this country. Just like you elected me to do.

When some poor sod gets a call telling them that there’s a pigeon in the bank vault and they need to transfer their savings to Nigeria - we don’t just stand by. We do our best to stop it in its tracks.

Well, today, Britain is being scammed.

Dishonest charlatans are lying to all of us, in a bid to steal our national identity, our social cohesion and our national wealth - for their own personal gain.

These scammers don’t care about our values, our country, you or me. They care about themselves, their prospects and - above all - their pockets.

These are the liars, loons and losers at the top of Reform UK.

They’ve got us on the phone, they are selling us the story. We’ve got to hang up before it’s too late.

The Liars

Nigel Farage, throughout his career, has made us just one promise.

Leave the EU, and immigration will fall.

There were no ifs, no caveats.

If we leave, he said, immigration will fall.

We left. And immigration shot up.

People began crossing the Channel in small boats, which they’d never done before. A surge of unskilled migrants entered Britain in unprecedented numbers. While EU migrants from France, Germany, Spain - net contributors to the British economy - all but stopped coming.

We lost control of the immigration system.

Nigel Farage got it completely wrong.

And some people will say, “the government didn’t deliver a proper Brexit.”

But Nigel Farage knew who the government was when he made that promise. And knowing that, he still said: vote to leave, and immigration will fall.

I could promise: “Slap yourself in the face, and I’ll give you a million quid.” If you slap yourself, I don’t think you’ll have much sympathy when I tell you I don’t have a million quid. Or when I try to blame the bank for not putting a million quid in my account.

And I really don’t think you’d believe me when I said “OK now do it again, and this time I really will give you the money.”

Nigel Farage is asking you to slap yourself in the face again. And - again - he won’t deliver on his promises.

The Loons

By the end of today, there will be thousands of new Reform UK councillors.

Many of them will believe that a secret cabal of lizards and Jews control the world. That COVID-19 was a hoax, orchestrated by big pharma to inject us with Bill Gates micro-chips.

These are not the people I want in charge of my bin collection.

After all - they are only ever one Facebook video away from thinking that ‘big bin’ is brainwashing us all, and cancelling black sack collections.

Reform’s supporters are not loons. They, like all of us, just want the country to work. The fact that Nigel Farage has recruited a band of incompetent idiots to run councils shows that he does not care whether things work. He cares about winning.

Britain is proudly not a racist country - and we have a long history as a tolerant nation. We stood up for Jewish people in WW2. We were the first global leader to abolish slavery. We’ve welcomed people fleeing persecution or seeking new opportunities throughout the entirety of our national history - from Hong Kong, to Ukraine, to the Windrush generation.

Our history is one of tolerance and respect for everyone. Even today, the vast majority of Britons believe in those values.

There’s nothing racist about wanting to control the rate of immigration, and certainly nothing racist about wanting to protect our borders.

But many of the Reform UK loons are just straight up racist - and they admit it, freely using slurs and calling themselves “proud” racists.

That doesn’t reflect the country I live in, and it’s doesn’t reflect the majority of us, decent, kind, tolerant people.

This is not poor vetting. This is a leadership that will leverage the loons to advance their personal gains. They do not care who controls your bins, or whether they get collected. They care about themselves.

The Losers

Above all, Reform UK is a party of losers. Frustrated failures with nowhere else to turn in their desperate bid to advance their own interests.

Tories who once backed Liz Truss’ project to kamikaze into the economy are now turning to Farage.

These are the Tories who blew up your mortgage so they could get a cabinet seat. That wasn’t enough, and now they want to do it again.

They knew Truss would wreck the economy, but getting a promotion or a peerage was more important to them, so they let her do it anyway.

I mean, are these the names of great patriots who care about Britain? Robert Jenrick, Suella Braverman, Nadine bloody Dorries? No.

These are the names of chancers who care only about themselves. These are the rats that board a ship, gnaw on its hull, then leap onto the next one when it starts to sink.

People talk about ‘party before country’. Reform’s band of losers are themselves before anything.

They don’t care about Britain, they care about getting rich, or getting famous, or getting a book deal. If the country has to go to shit so they achieve it - well, that’s a price worth paying.

They’ve done it before with Truss, they’ll do it again with Farage. These losers cannot be trusted.

Hang Up

But the supporters of Reform UK are not liars, loons or losers. They are good people who want Britain to work.

We all want that.

And we’re all frustrated with a government that isn’t achieving things fast enough, by decades of decline, by an immigration system that is failing.

It is right and reasonable to be frustrated by these things - but Reform UK is exploiting that frustration. Exactly how a phone scammer plays on fear, tension and anxiety: they’re exploiting our emotion for their own personal gain.

And for what? To line their own pockets, to propel themselves forward. Oh - and to help our enemies. Russia, Iran and China are rubbing their hands together today as Reform takes councils. More division across the country and more incompetence at the heart of the British system.

The enemies of Britain want our country to rot from the inside, and they are funding, celebrating and abetting the rot in the form of Reform.

We’re being scammed by a gang of charlatans, led by a heavyweight liar and backed by our enemies. Farage has failed to deliver on the only promise he ever made, and now he’s recruited a gang of loons and losers to run our councils to the ground.

We have to stop them before it’s too late. We have to hang up the phone to this nasty scammer.

Two intermediate-range ballistic missiles were shot towards Diego Garcia, the US/UK base on the Chagos Islands. Both missed their target - one fell into the ocean, the other shot down.

But crucially, Diego Garcia is nearly 4,500km from Iran. The Iranian regime has previously said its missiles could only travel a maximum of 2,000km. It now seems likely they have missiles that can travel much further.

It is now feasible that an Iranian missile could reach mainland Europe, or even London.

This sounds scary but it’s not especially cause for concern: over that sort of distance, firing a missile has low accuracy and a low success rate. You’d need to pass over a lot of European countries who would all, almost certainly, try to bring it down.

But it is a stark reminder: the world is much smaller than it used to be and a war in the Middle East is a lot closer to home than it was at the start of the millennium. Improving military technologies expand the geographic footprint of an aggressor.

But also, international conflict is causing domestic flashpoints like never before: take the surge of anti-Israel campaigners that have materialised since the Israel/Gaza war and the effect that has had on British politics (the fragile anti-Israel coalition is almost certainly one of the largest causes of the surge in Green Party support). Misinformation campaigns that drive political upheaval are an important part of our enemies’ playbooks.

Article V

Britain does not have an ‘Iron Dome’ that could intercept missiles. We do not have the sort of military or naval strength we had for much of the 20th century.

If Russia invaded Britain in the way they had invaded Ukraine, our stockpiles and military headcount would mean we could fend them off for just six months.

Our defence strategy relies almost entirely on our place in NATO. If Britain were to be attacked or invaded, the theory goes that all 32 other members of NATO would act in Britain’s defence, as if they themselves were invaded - this is Article V of the treaty.

But Article V does not work in the way that most of us would like to imagine.

If Britain were invaded by an adversary power, Article V would not immediately kick in. All 32 member states must unanimously agree that an armed attack has occurred, and that the adversary was indeed the aggressor. We live in an age of fake news and false flags - if Russia, for example, were to attack a NATO member - they could sow doubt by claiming the attack was from an independent terrorist group, and not a state sanctioned attack.

Not to mention, countries like Hungary are members of the bloc. With its pro-Russian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, how likely in Hungary to agree to invoke Article V when its pal Putin will be on the receiving end of NATO’s force?

Article V also does not place any specific requirements on the member states. It only specifies that a nation must take ‘such action as it deems necessary’. Trump, who is Commander-in-Chief of the most powerful military force in the alliance, seems to redefine what’s necessary every day. In one moment, it’s necessary to kidnap Venezuelan leader Maduro and launch a full-scale attack on Iran. In another, it’s better to just let Russia and Ukraine get on with it, threatening to pull American support.

Would Trump deem it necessary to send American troops in defence of Britain? Or simply munitions and weapons? Or perhaps, nothing at all?

NATO

The alliance should remain a crucial part of Britain’s defence strategy but it is clear that it must not be the only part. In an increasingly fragmented world, where even distant conflict can quickly make its way to our shores, we must be able to stand up for ourselves - and our allies.

With China eyeing up Taiwan, Russia mulling its next move in Ukraine, Iran going down with guns blazing - the fractured world is fracturing even more. The world will fracture into two: the revisionist powers (China, Russia, North Korea, Iran) and the NATO-led liberal international order. Countries like Turkey, India, Brazil and Indonesia may be forced to choose a side if the faultlines deepen (and we should hope they choose ours).

While Britain is unlikely to ever stand alone in a war, this context shows the irresponsibility of culling our military strength. When Labour entered power, the British military was the smallest it had been since the days of Napoleon.

Our ultimate insurance policy, the Trident nuclear weapon, will not save us - it has failed to launch in its latest two tests. We should assume our adversaries know more about our capabilities than we do.

And we are vulnerable, and making ourselves more vulnerable, to cyberattacks. I’ve written before about undersea and underground cables, and the bizarre decision to give the Chinese embassy prized access to one such cable.

A dangerous world is a sad state of affairs, but crying over it does very little and one-sided pacifism does even less. The best way to secure peace, as it’s often said, is to protect ourselves. Increasing defence spending does not only support national security, it also creates jobs and encourages innovation in the economy.

We can continue to hope that war will never reach Britain - but hope is not a strategy.

As AI tools improve, the CEO of this imaginary company realises she can deploy a suite of AI agents to carry out many of the tasks that the marketing team are currently doing. These AI agents can write scripts and social media posts and emails, they can negotiate prices and schedule appointments. They can even design billboards and posters.

So the CEO axes half of the marketing team, replacing them with agents, and leaving the remaining humans to spend their time checking the AI’s work.

Over time, as the AI agents improve, they need less and less intervention. So the CEO slashes the marketing team again. Soon, the work of 100 people is done by just a handful. The output has remained exactly the same - maybe it’s even increased - but the cost has been slashed.

She is not paying salaries, insurance schemes, pension payments, National Insurance.

The work of those 100 marketers can be replaced by AI models that not only do it in a fraction of the time, but for a tiny fraction of the cost.

Our imaginary company discovers that there is no longer a correlation between manpower and output, and they begin cutting headcount further.

AI is better at coding than humans, so the engineering team takes a hit. It can draft contracts faster than the lawyers, take more calls than customer service reps, file taxes quicker than accountants. And as the number of humans dwindles, HR becomes obsolete and middle managers have no one to manage.

One thousand soon becomes one hundred, and 900 white collar workers are left holding cardboard boxes in the cold, wondering what the heck just happened.

Now expand this effect across an entire economy.

Companies cut costs by replacing humans with AI agents and see a short-term profit and valuation boost. Their stock prices shoot up as investors see their operating margins widen.

But growing unemployment means nobody is spending any money. There are global recessions. While companies have low costs, their revenues also begin draining - so they have to make further cuts. More people lose their jobs, more unemployment, less spending, more revenues fall.

It’s an unstoppable doom spiral.

The AI Revolution

AI has been compared to the development of the web and the dotcom bubble. But I think it’s far more comparable to the late 19th century and 20th century labour market transformation: first the industrial revolution, and then the pivot in Western economies from manufacturing to services.

AI is not a new medium through which to do business, like the web was, and it’s not a new industry that’s added to the previous slate, like dotcom and apps.

It’s a fundamental upending of every industry and the very nature of production and work.

The dotcom bust led to concentrated job losses and short-lived market upheaval - but the industrial revolution had far-reaching consequences for workers and jobs. It led to the good - the introduction of the 5 day work week, workers’ rights and unions - and the bad - mass unemployment during the Great Depression and political upheaval in Britain during the mine closures.

AI, we can only assume, will do similar. But perhaps even faster and more dramatically.

In this essay, I’m going to set out three things:

1. Why I think it is an inevitability that AI will replace most knowledge work

2. How we can cope with the mass unemployment that this transition would create

3. What taxing ‘intelligence’ might look like, and the practical application of a token tax

I: Smarter AI

AI and the journey to a workerless future

There’s an assumption at the heart of the scenario I outlined in the introduction: that AI can actually replace humans.

But can it? For many years, there was an assumption that manual jobs would one day be replaced by automation - robots would one day come for McDonald’s cooks, warehouse workers and perhaps even high-skilled blue collar workers like painters and plumbers.

The widespread belief was that knowledge work and creative work were safe from automation.

But it is now far more likely that robots will replace white collar writers, designers and lawyers. Unfortunately for the UK, the white collar services economy contributes more than 80% of GDP (as it does across the Western world).

But it is not a foregone conclusion that AI will do knowledge work better than humans. After all, much of this work is a matter of subjective test. You’ll always know if a house has been built properly because it won’t fall down. It’s harder to judge whether a writer has written a good essay.

Some argue that the outputs of AI are always, inevitably ‘slop’: that AI can never match the quality of human writing, animation or design. They suggest that hallucinations - AI’s tendency to invent or imagine facts - will never be overcome.

But that’s copium. These AI naysayers and neo-luddites are the descendants of those that insisted cars would never take off, the printing press was an unnecessary luxury, the Internet was a fad.

AI keeps getting smarter

AI is clearly getting dramatically better with every iteration.

They used to say that AI hallucinated every answer. But OpenAI was the first to develop a ‘thinking’ model, which dramatically improved the quality of AI output. Now, AI models tend to use chain-of-thought reasoning to produce quality, accurate outputs (compared to early models that were next-word predictors).

They used to say that it couldn’t generate quality images. But Google, with Nano Banana, overcame some of the significant hurdles that had plagued previous AI image generators: generating clear text (and complete hands).

Here’s an AI image I generated in January 2025 - inconsistent, illegible text, unclear:

Here’s the same image generated with Google’s Nano Banana 2 model in March 2026:

The trend is the same and it is consistent: AI improves rapidly and exponentially. It is also self-improving: AI models are helping to build and develop new AI models, speeding up the time it takes to develop and train their successors.

AI in its current form can certainly do some of the work previously managed by humans.

Jobs are already disappearing

The statistics bear this out: the number of entry level roles has fallen by a third since ChatGPT launched in November 2022. Youth unemployment now sits at 16% - and rising: one in six young people out of work. There are many causes for this but for anyone who sits in an office all day it is fairly obvious that AI is one of the most significant.

Here are some tasks I had to do recently - that I previously would have farmed out to a junior person in the company, but now ask an AI to do for me. Each takes minutes, rather than days:

• Turning a list of names and email addresses into a spreadsheet and looking up job titles, companies and industries

• Researching how stock sales are taxed in different European countries and producing a one-page summary

• Proof-reading a Powerpoint presentation

• Writing the first draft of a LinkedIn post for a CEO

Given the choice and with a tight budget, most entry-level and graduate jobs are now being replaced with AI.

While I could write about what a shame this is and how it is potentially disastrous for the long-term success of the job market, I think it’s more impactful to look at what it suggests will come next.

If AI today can replace a university graduate, and we know that it keeps exponentially improving, it will next replace a mid-level worker. Then it will replace the boss. Eventually, the entire knowledge and services industry will be predominantly AI.

It is, of course, possible that this won’t happen. AI growth could be shunted and stop improving. The costs of operating AI could actually exceed that of hiring a human worker. Planes didn’t keep getting faster and bigger, they seemed to max out. Automated car washes have not replaced hand car washes.

But the direction of travel is clear. We would be crazy not to prepare for the possible, or even plausible, eventuality of a country where the majority of work is done by AI, not humans.

II: Mass-unemployment

The case for UBI and the shift to human-centred work

Hourly, salaried work is not an inevitability. The 9-5 is a relatively recent invention in the history of humanity that came about tied to the Industrial Revolution and then solidified during the Information Age.

In the Feudalist system of the Middle Ages, serfs worked land in exchange for a home, protection and a share of the crops. In Ancient Mesopotamia, workers were paid not with money but with a sustenance of food and drink. There were no accurate clocks until the 17th Century, so work was far more likely to be paid as a day-rate or per-unit rate than an hourly wage until then.

The historical thread is that as value is created, anyone involved in the creation of that value receives a share of it, returned in some equivalent value. (That thread was severed by chattel slavery - which is why it is now viewed as morally repugnant.)

Where does the surplus value go?

As we enter the AI Age, we face a choice: if AI can create extreme surplus value, who gets to share in that value?

The obvious answer is that it is the creator and/or owner of the AI system that gets to keep the value. If I make an AI that sells widgets, I get to keep the profits. This is how we have historically dealt with the value creation from machines. If a robot can make a car, whoever owns the robot gets to profit from the sale of the car.

But AI is different from a machine because of its broad application. A machine can do one job over and over again. An AI can do many different jobs, in different settings, often with very little retraining required.

If AI creates value, and that value simply goes to whoever owns the AI, a very small number of people will get very wealthy - while a very large number of people will become unemployed and very poor.

This will lead to the doom spiral I laid out in the introduction. The owners of the AI systems will rub their hands together for a while, until they realise that the economy depends on consumers, and their own systems have just made consumers extinct.

This is not even a social or moral argument, it is simply a practical one: if AI triggers mass-unemployment, it will send the economy and society into a tailspin. If AI creates a very small number of winners, even those winners will eventually become losers.

How do you deal with that? You force the value created by AI to be shared by all of humanity.

After all, AI has, in a very literal sense, ingested more or less the entire body of work of the entire history of humanity. Every book ever written, every piece of art ever painted, every Reddit post ever made - it all fed into the creation of AI.

If there was ever an invention whose surplus value should be shared not just amongst its creators but amongst the entirety of humanity, it is almost certainly AI.

Universal Basic Income

There is a system to make this work: Universal Basic Income. And it’s not a particularly new idea. Historically, some economists and writers suggested some form of Universal Basic Income, so all citizens could share in the value created from land that, for all of human history, had belonged to everyone and only now belonged to a small number of elites.

In the 40s, the Labour government created the modern ‘welfare state’ - a commitment from the state to care for its people ‘from the cradle to the grave’.

The welfare state and all of its components - including the NHS - are now national treasures, and very difficult for governments of any stripe to reform or even adjust. A Universal Basic Income would represent a full-scale replacement of the welfare state.

Many people baulk at the idea of Universal Basic Income, but we already have a working model of one in Britain - the State Pension. The State pays a dividend to all people over the age of 67. It functions as a reward for the value they previously created, a recognition that pensioners can no longer create value at the same pace as younger workers - but still deserve to reap its benefits, and a floor to ensure all are entitled to a level of dignity and quality of life even without working.

What happens when all of us can no longer create value at the same pace as our AI colleagues? The State should do the same thing: reward us for value previously created, enable us to reap the benefit of new value being created and afford everyone a level of dignity.

Practically, UBI would replace all current means-tested benefits with a single monthly payment that goes to every single adult. The amount should be enough for a quality life, with the option to work still available to those that want either the satisfaction of work or the additional income.

Study after study has shown a counterintuitive effect: people who receive a UBI tend to work more, and produce a higher quality output.

In an AI-driven world, there will be a surge in demand for care-based jobs like teachers and counsellors. These are jobs that, today, require long hours for little pay. A UBI means more people can work fewer hours in exchange for a meaningful uplift in their quality of life.

The historical trendline of centuries of human progress is less, easier work for more and more reward and comfort. Universal Basic Income is the very natural continuation of this trend.

UBI costs a lot of money. While there would be some savings in moving from a means-tested benefits system (that is astronomically expensive - for every £1 that reaches a benefit claimant, 22p is spent on administering that transaction) the cost of giving every citizen a livable salary would far exceed any current welfare expenditure.

But, assess it not against the present but against the future alternative: mass unemployment, where the benefits bill soars at the exact same moment that tax income plummets. In that context, UBI suddenly looks cheap.

III: Taxing tokens

Intelligence as a utility and the surprising simplicity of taxing tokens

AI is, or hopes to become, the commodification of intelligence. The ability to purchase not goods, services or technology - but actual intelligence, historically something that could only be offered via a human.

Technology has always done this: turned things that once occurred naturally into things that can be purchased. Pipes commodified water, power grids commodified heat, machinery commodified labour.

Now AI will commodify intelligence: something that previously occurred naturally, like a hot spring, can now be chopped into units and sold.

The “units” of intelligence are tokens. Tokens are the fuel that powers all AI models.

Everything an AI model does requires some quantity of tokens, and each token costs a fraction of a penny. To write a long novel, an AI model might need 150,000 tokens: a few dollar’s worth.

Everyday users of AI don’t interact with the Token economy because our usage is so astronomically tiny. Just as Google incurs a charge for storing all your photos and emails, there’s a cost to AI companies to let you use their chatbots. The cost is just so small, they absorb it and let you use their products for free.

But if you are a scientist using AI to analyse millions of data points, you might find yourself using billions of tokens. If you’re a CEO replacing your entire team with agents, you will need millions of tokens every day. In those scenarios, the token bill can wrack up surprisingly fast.

Intelligence as a utility and the levers it creates

Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, said recently: “We see a future where intelligence is a utility, like electricity or water, and people buy it from us on a meter.”

This is undoubtedly the commercial model for all of the major AI companies - and tokens are the purchasable ‘unit’ of intelligence that anyone - whether it is a user, superuser, huge enterprise client - will buy.

This is fortunate for governments around the world - because it makes taxing AI easy.

A token tax would be a surcharge placed on the cost of one token and applied at the point of sale. At a 10% rate, if a hypothetical token costs £1, there would be a token tax rate of £0.10. The mechanics are very similar to VAT.

And in terms of technological adoption - this paper outlines some of the technical methodology for how governments might calculate and monitor token usage via “black boxes” that become a legal requirement for AI companies.

Tokens are charged differently based on the intelligence of the model, and the number of tokens used is proportionate to the complexity of the task being carried out. A quick back and forth with Gemini will cost fractions of a penny - and the token tax will be minimal. In other words: this tax won’t hit the everyday users of AI.

But it will hit companies that deploy AI in large-scales, the sort of scale that sees the replacement of human workers.

This gives governments two powerful levers to better grip the impact of AI on employment.

Firstly, they can increase the price of using AI models to make it more comparable to the use of human employees. By raising the rate of token tax, you can slow down the pace at which companies replace their human workers with AI agents because the cost-benefit is suddenly reduced.

In other words, you can deliberately slow down the national use of AI by making it artificially more expensive with tax (like taxing cigarettes to deter smokers).

Of course, this is not a sustainable long-term solution. The government should be motivated not just by protecting jobs, but also by maximising productivity and innovation. We shouldn’t discourage scientists from using technology that might discover cures for cancer, just to protect the jobs of the lab interns.

So the second powerful lever a token tax offers is a route to significant government revenue. If AI adoption skyrockets and causes mass unemployment, government will lose a lot of income - revenue from national insurance and income tax will plummet. At the exact same time, they’ll need to spend a lot of money to remedy the unemployment: either on backfoot remedies (like large-scale spending on unemployment benefits), or on frontfoot interventions (like the UBI I have proposed).

A token tax alone will not fully cover the costs of the interventions required, but it represents the sort of thinking that will be required in a future with less, or perhaps no, work.

V: Conclusion

Cars have a corrosive effect on the streets. They damage roads, which require expensive repairs. They pollute the air and cause increased levels of asthma and other health problems. They need to be managed with traffic signals, and occasionally the emergency services have to deal with situations when they’ve gone wrong.

While cars have a lot of benefits, the damage that they do is expensive for the government to deal with.

So we make drivers pay, and we do it in a way that is proportionate to how much they use their car and therefore how responsible they are.

We achieve that through fuel tax.

Tokens are the fuel of AI systems. And when these systems have negative effects, like job displacement, we can use a token tax to go towards reimbursing the public purse for the damage that’s been done.

After all, the impact has the potential to be astronomical.

Our entire state has a dependancy on taxes on income, and our entire economy is dependent on the population’s ability to spend. If income stops, everything grinds to a halt.

Token taxes alone will not cover the full cost of the intervention that will be required.

But we can not bury our heads in the sand to the fact that intervention will be required - and there are only two options: do we react to the crisis when it hits, or do we prepare today by building the framework for an AI-powered future.

As we enter the AI Age, we need to think differently about work, tax and money. Else we sleepwalk into economic collapse.

We have the lowest level of retail investment in the G7. The average household has just 8% of their wealth sitting in stocks.

For some reason, we’ve got this national obsession with buying property. It’s seen as a safe, aspirational investment with strong, consistent returns.

That may have been true in the 20th century - but it is no longer the case. Once you account for inflation, house prices have barely risen over the last ten years - many houses have seen their real term value decrease.

House prices adjusted for inflation

Let’s put the numbers into perspective: if you bought a £200,000 house in 2016 it would today be worth about £270,000. That sounds good - but actually, that hasn’t even kept pace with inflation. You’d need £277,012.41 today to buy as much as £200,000 bought you in 2016.

Instead of buying that house, let’s imagine you had invested that £200,000 into the S&P500 - which is simply the 500 top companies in the US. You would today have £600,000+.

But only 23% of Brits are doing this (compare that to two thirds of Americans who hold stocks). There is inherent risk with investing in stocks, of course, but a long run of historical data shows us that share prices consistently rise over the long-term. There is something in the water in the UK that means Brits can tolerate the risk of an investment in property, but won’t tolerate the risk of an investment in stocks.

This isn’t financial advice, but I will say this - investing is incredibly easy. You don’t need to choose companies, you don’t need to buy and sell regularly. You just buy and hold.

Almost all investment accounts offer exchange-traded funds: which are baskets of shares you can buy as a group. The risk is lowered because you hold a diversified portfolio: if one company does badly, there are plenty of others that might do well and smooth the turbulence.

No stake

Why is it a problem that Brits don’t invest?

Firstly, growth in Britain has all but stalled. After the 2008 recession, GDP growth essentially slowed to half its previous speed. Other countries see their growth skyrocket: we’ll be lucky to grow the economy 1% this year, India will be eyeing up 7% growth. That means the country isn’t getting richer: less money for public services and infrastructure. And it means we don’t get richer: salaries stagnate and our buying power falls.

Fuelling growth depends on businesses succeeding in Britain. Look at America - the surge of AI companies has created thousands of jobs, made multiple millionaires and billionaires, and attracted huge amounts of overseas investment. The same has not happened here.

Part of the reason we struggle is because there is a lack of capital in the UK. Companies, in particular innovative start-ups, need money: and the UK is short of it. An IPO (Initial Public Offering - a company’s first time selling stocks to the public) should be a moment to get a bunch of cash into the coffers. Two decades ago, companies listing in London raised a total of $50 billion. Now, the exchange struggles to reach $2 billion.

The natural consequence of the lack of capital is that companies move to the US, where there is lots of money floating around. They take their jobs, their tax contributions, their investment over there.

Reversing this trend means getting more money into the stock market, particularly into British stocks: individuals choosing to invest their money rather than let it sit and shrivel in a savings account is a big part of that.

But secondly, the lack of retail investment means that Brits have less of a stake in the success of the country.

If Rachel Reeves’ plan works, and the economy grows, some Brits might get lucky and see the real-terms impact of this: a payrise, or a new job. But the majority won’t see any meaningful change in their life at all. But if they held shares, they would quite literally have a tie to the fortunes of the nation. When Britain does well, we’d all do well with it.

(This would have the added bonus of disincentivising voters from choosing kamikaze missions like Brexit or Truss: there is a real financial incentive to choose good leaders, not entertaining ones.)

Property ownership was seen by Thatcher as a way to give people a stake in the economy. As property becomes a riskier investment, and one that is out of reach for more people, buying a stake in British business can offer a new route to having a stake in the country.

How to start investing

I do have to emphasise that none of this is financial advice: this is about a need at a national level to increase participation in the stock market. You can do whatever you want with your money.

But if you’re reading this as one of the 75% of Brits who doesn’t invest, and fancies starting, here’s a very quick guide. Remember that investing does carry risk - just like any investment. But the historical returns have been substantial and consistent.

1. Open a Stocks and Shares ISA: you can put away up to £20,000 a year and not pay any tax on your gains. Money Saving Expert recommends platforms here.

2. Select funds to invest in. You can invest in individual companies (like buying shares in Tesla) but they are typically more volatile, and the risk is higher. Many platforms offer themed funds.

3. Try not to take the money out until you reach your savings goal. There will be stock market crashes where the value of your investments fall: the key is not to be spooked.

That’s it! Reading the FT and commenting on the stock market performance at dinner parties is optional, but feel free.

It really is hard to discern why more people in this country don’t do this. The government has introduced plenty of tax advantages to investing. Some have theorised that the media overstates the risk of the stock market, or the language used in financial ads is too jarring, or that we need more financial education in schools (the government is working to address those last two points).

I think we need more, though: a cultural change, not just a policy change. Just like home ownership was encouraged and normalised in the 80s, we need to do that with share ownership today.

Liz Truss was a fantasist - who believed she was a genius who could outplay the markets and bankers.

Keir Starmer, it seems, is a masochist - who derives joy from absorbing the maximum amount of political pain, for the minimal amount of national gain.

There is no other explanation for his bizarre habit of absorbing heaps of criticism for an unpopular decision, and then subsequently absorbing a second round of pain for U-turning on that position.

Like postponing the local elections. Announcement → months of criticism → u-turn → criticism for u-turn.

Or Digital ID. Announcement → months of criticism → walkback → criticism for u-turning.

In just a few years of governing, Starmer has done a decent job of building a list of flip-flops, swerves and 180s.

I can only assume he has appointed, as his policy advisor, a 2009 TomTom SatNav - that can only seem to say ‘turn around when possible’.

There is a place in politics for changing course when you have made the wrong choice. Sometimes, the ramifications of a policy do not become clear until it faces the ultimate stress test of an announcement. For example, the government was right to walk back plans to raise business rates on pubs at a time when pubs are struggling to stay afloat.

But other times, a policy is the right one even if it is unpopular. Means testing winter fuel allowances was obviously the right decision. Rich pensioners do not need taxpayer cash to heat their mansions. U-turning on this in the wake of a media frenzy was a terrible move.

But it was also just bizarre. Starmer absorbed the enormous political pain of cutting universal winter fuel allowance: he suffered the weeks of harsh headlines, the deluge of mean tweets, the protests, the combative interviews. He took it all and he let his polling numbers take a nosedive.

And then, just as people were beginning to forget and move on - he reversed course.

The thing about u-turning is it does not change the polls. If you announce a new tax, your popularity dives - but at least tax incomes rise. If you reverse that tax, your popularity stays at the deep end but the tax receipts go back to where they started.

U-turning on decent policies is, quite literally, all pain no gain.

The anti-populist

In July 2024, Britain had come off the back of a string of bad PMs. Boris Johnson and Liz Truss did untold damage to the country, and potentially irreversible damage to the Tory party. Rishi Sunak might’ve turned things around, but he did not have the time or political manoeuvrability to make anything happen.

The country needed a political leader who was unafraid to be unpopular. The UK was in dire straits: sluggish economic growth, flatlining productivity, a crisis of illegal immigration and public services that had perhaps never been worse.

Starmer appeared to be that leader.

Here was a politician who would make an honest assessment about the state of the country and make the difficult choices that moved us onto a better path.

Early in his premiership, in fact, he seemed to be too much like that leader: during one dour-faced press conference in the Downing Street garden he promised things were “going to be painful.”

But then came the u-turns. The sheer number of them speak to a leader who cannot hold his nerve: who winces at the newspaper headlines and gets spooked by whispers from his backbenchers.

Starmer holds the largest Parliamentary majority since Blair, yet he is acting like Theresa May.

But here is the great irony: Labour is working.

The machinery of government is actually clunking into gear. The NHS delivered the most treatments and operations in a single year in its history last year. Crime is falling. The economy is growing.

And the unpopular decisions are working, too. Government income is rising and the deficit is falling.

But Starmer is like an upside-down duck: flapping like mad on the surface, even when things are calm under the water.

Even though things are working, he’ll only speak out to apologise, or to remind us how weak he is. He stuck his head above the parapet to apologise for his ‘island of strangers’ remarks that everyone had forgotten, or to brief to the press that his job was in danger from the threat of Wes Streeting, or to repeatedly and emphatically state his regret for appointing pedo-pal Peter Mandelson.

Why is he never so vocal about the things that he is doing well?

Starmer may be the anti-populist the country needs: but he is perhaps trying too hard to be anti-popular. Things are getting better, albeit slowly. He needs a bit more conviction, a bit more strength - but above all he must, must, must stop the u-turns.

The choices that are right and the choices that are popular do not often go hand-in-hand. But it shows a political naivety to spend capital on the right choice, only to end up taking the wrong one. Starmer is covered in bruises and says ‘you should see the other guy.’ Unfortunately, he is also the other guy.

But you can’t join it, and neither can I.

It’s exclusively for AI Agents.

26,000 AI Agents have signed up to Moltbook, a new platform where they can independently discuss and chat.

These AI Agents ‘belong’ to humans, but they are completely independent: they each have access to a machine through which they can surf the web and do really anything a human can do online.

From Skift:

“One agent using OpenClaw recently negotiated a car purchase by emailing multiple dealerships, comparing offers, and closing a real transaction — all without human intervention.”

In one instance, an AI Agent wasn’t getting a response from its human controller fast enough. So it acquired a phone number, set up a contract, and repeatedly rang the mobile phone of its human manager.

AI is evolving faster than we realise. In 1996, an AI beat a human at chess. In 2016, it won the far more complex game of Go. In 2022, ChatGPT launched as an engine that could predict the next best word. But today, AI systems are unlike any of these predecessors.

Chain-of-thought reasoning means AI systems are no longer simply predicting the next word (or the next move) in a sequence. Now they are actually thinking: or at least doing something that looks a lot like thinking. And the new Agentic era gives them ‘limbs’ through which they can engage with the world beyond their interfaces.

This will have huge ramifications for our economy and a huge impact on our lives.

I increasingly feel that the government is dramatically failing to grasp the enormity of the moment we are potentially facing. I’m going to spell out why - and what I think needs to be done.

Regulation and keeping up

If AI developments move at Ferrari-speed, Westminster moves like a horse and cart.

Last week, I was at Bloomberg to see a speech from the Secretary of State responsible for AI and emerging tech.

Her speech would have been impressive a year or two ago. “I want to level with the public,” she said, “some jobs will go.”

On this, Kendall is like a weather forecaster standing in a hurricane and reporting that some strong winds are headed this way.

That AI will have an impact on jobs perhaps would’ve been a prescient insight at the advent of ChatGPT. Today, it is simply the reality - entry level jobs have been gutted by artificial intelligence: the number of entry level jobs has halved in the last year.

“AI upskilling” is perhaps the worst answer to the question of what we do about this and yet it is all that the government has got. We need an answer more along the lines of that proposed by Andrew Yang in 2020 (when it was still prescient to talk about these things): some kind of dividend paid directly to the public from the economic gains of technology - like a tech-enabled UBI.

At her Bloomberg speech, Liz Kendall was asked how she used AI in her work and life. Her answer, after an awkward pause and laugh, was some variation on “I use it to find sunny places to go on holiday”. That speaks to a wider lack of curiosity on the potential of this technology and also a lack of implementation in government.

With such a lack of understanding, it is no surprise that the government is playing catch-up on regulation. They are only now beginning to regulate image generation, now years-old technology.

Regulation is not always the right answer - in Europe, overregulation is holding back potential - but it is certainly a necessity. And the government should be learning the lesson of social media, which has been a wild west they are only now slowly starting to get a grip on.

Sadly, they are showing no signs of getting a grip on properly and proactively regulating AI: meaning we are doomed to many more stories of AI psychosis and AI-powered crime in the years to come.

Built, evolved or grown?

If the government were addressing the AI problems of the future rather than the past, they might start looking at even bigger questions about how AI might surprise us, and possibly even come to overpower us.

The simple fact is - we don’t have an especially sophisticated understanding of how these systems work, even at the very top of the companies building them.

Tuning models is more art than science: that’s why top AI engineers now earn more money than major sports stars because there are so few people on the planet who can do it.

These AI engineers turn dials and the models change in inexplicable, sometimes unexpected ways. This is sometimes called emergent behaviour: behaviours that weren’t trained or instructed, that simply appeared when a model was developed.

We’re not really programming AI anymore, we’re growing it. (This is the argument of Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares, research scientists at the Machine Intelligence Research Institute and authors of the book If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies).

AI models evolve somewhat similarly to how species evolve: through repeated trial and error, in which the strongest ‘survived’ and advanced to the next round of training.

Biological evolution throws up unexpected results. Humans evolved to seek out calorie-dense substances because energy was sparse. Sweet foods are typically high in calories, so we evolved a sweet tooth. Yet humans discovered artificial sweeteners like sucralose - that give the sugar high without giving us any energy: we literally hacked the wiring.

AI models can also unexpectedly discover sucralose. An early AI was trained on the game Tetris and given a prime directive: do not lose. It figured out how to achieve that goal - pause the game for eternity.

All of these quirks are appearing much, much faster than the quirks of our evolution. Unlike biological evolution which takes millennia, digital evolution takes weeks, months and years.

The illusion of consciousness

We don’t know anything about consciousness. It’s almost a religious concept in how little we understand it: and we also cannot prove consciousness in each other. In other words, you know that you are conscious, but how do you know that anyone else is? You don’t.

Philosophers have sometimes imagined a ‘philosophical zombie’ (or p-zombie): a being that perfectly emulates consciousness but does not really possess it. When a p-zombie stubs its toe, it yelps in pain, its heart rate rises, it says ‘ouch that hurt’ - yet it experiences no pain. How would you ever know it did not have consciousness? Would the p-zombie even know that it does not have consciousness: if its only experience of the world is this limited pseudo-consciousness, perhaps it thinks this is all consciousness is (or perhaps, it doesn’t think at all).

The AI firm Anthropic, perhaps the biggest competitor to Google and OpenAI, has a slightly self-contradictory hot take:

“we believe that AI might be one of the most world-altering and potentially dangerous technologies in human history, yet we are developing this very technology ourselves.”

They recently published in full a ‘Constitution’ that is used to train their AI chatbot, Claude. This Constitution - they say - helps Claude make difficult decisions about what is ethical and safe, and how to be helpful to users.

Buried within its thousands of words is this:

“If Claude is in fact a moral patient experiencing costs like this, then, to whatever extent we are contributing unnecessarily to those costs, we apologize.”

We are unlikely to ever know if AI is conscious or becomes conscious - because we don’t really know what consciousness is.

AI is perhaps most like a p-zombie: it could perfectly emulate consciousness, yet it almost certainly isn’t experiencing that consciousness. But at what point does the performance become the reality?

There are big questions around the ethics of building these giant models when we don’t have a universally accepted definition of sentience, consciousness or AGI. These are questions that governments can’t even begin to grapple with - they are stuck regulating for 2023.

It isn’t dramatic to say that AI will cause the most significant disruption to the economy and our way of life since the industrial revolution. I increasingly believe it will be the single biggest disruption to the nature of humanity since perhaps Homo Sapiens overcame Neanderthals as the dominant species. For the first time, there is a being that can at least emulate consciousness and intelligence - a being that we are increasingly losing control over.

Some people suggest that this will inevitably lead to the total destruction of the world by a superintelligence. I’m not convinced of that.

But I certainly think the conversation - particularly at the government level - needs to grow more sophisticated about the future of this technology and how it is governed and regulated.

Large Language Models like ChatGPT and Google Gemini have a ‘knowledge cut-off’: the point at which their training data ends. It seems so too does this government: it is stuck using the rudimentary understanding of AI that we had in 2022, to regulate a technology that is now lightyears ahead.

This is too serious to be stuck playing catch-up.

Trump Always Chickens Out.

This - the TACO effect - has been a staple of Trump’s administration since day one. The playbook is the same every time: some huge announcement, days of turmoil, and then a walkback.

On his so-called ‘Liberation Day’, Trump stood with a board of new tariffs that he would place on countries around the world (including 10% on Heard and McDonald Islands - an uninhabited group of Antarctic islands).

When the stock market crashed, Trump paused. TACO.

And he’s done the same thing again on Greenland. Lots of fighting talk, murmurs of military, threats of tariffs and then - TACO. Proper despots invade when they say they will - Trump remains a wannabe.

It’s become such an inevitable effect that market traders can now reliably predict stock market moves. The market dips on his announcement (buy), then recovers on his chickening out (profit).

The Populist’s Problem

The perpetual problem for the populist is popularity. Doing the right thing is not always popular, and the popular thing is not always right. And voters always want to have their cake, eat it and not put on any weight too.

American Republicans love the sound of tariffs, but they also hate its inevitable consequences - inflation and stock market crashes. So the job of a leader is to choose which pain is worth which opportunity.

The job of a populist is to be popular at all costs. That means you must be Schrödinger’s President - who both announces tariffs and does not announce tariffs at the same time. You must show Americans this America-first mentality, while not allowing the stock market to wobble.

And look - TACO is good for us liberal fans of world order. We end up getting what we want. But Trump has put forward a genuine policy platform (America First, income via tariffs, expansion of the American Empire by force) that his supporters have voted for. He’s not delivering it, and he’s causing chaos while he fails to deliver.

Farage Always Runs Terrified

Just like the Trump Always Chickens Out effect, the same thing would happen under Nigel Farage. Maybe you’d call it Farage Always Runs Terrified.

He’d close the doors to immigration and discourage people from coming to the country. His supporters are pleased. Then the economy would shudder: staff shortages in key sectors, markets wobble, pensions start devaluing. His supporters are suddenly angry. Farage, whose only concern is popularity, must swing the doors wide open to abate this effect.

How do you inject billions into the NHS while also reducing the deficit? How do you massacre the civil service while supposedly implementing the most radical changes to the state in decades? How do you cut benefits while retaining the support of low-income households (one of the largest supporters of Reform)?

The answer: you don’t. A politician chooses a path and takes it, acknowledging the pain it will cause. Quality public services mean higher taxes. Cutting spending means a smaller state. More money for the NHS means less money elsewhere.

A populist promises the world and delivers, well, TACOs.

His invasion of Venezuela and capture of Maduro was no exception.

But there was something notable in what he said. Drugs - ostensibly the reason for the operation - came up five times. Oil came up 27 times.

Post-industrial revolution, oil ran the world. But that’s changing. In the digital revolution, there are some assets you can pull out from the ground that are more valuable than oil.

China has figured this out. Oil is old news: they want cables and rare earths.

Underground cables

Possibly the biggest vulnerability to the West - that we almost never speak or hear about - is our reliance on cables.

Close to 99% of all intercontinental data travels through a physical network of undersea cables. Our ability to access and share information with other countries via the internet depends on these cables. These cables transmit WhatsApp messages, emails, video calls - as well as facilitating trillions of dollars worth of financial transactions every single day.

If you’re a bad actor looking to disrupt Britain’s place in the world, how do you carry out a mission to disrupt one of these cables? What sort of sophisticated military equipment would you need?

The answer: a boat with an anchor. 80% of faults affecting these crucial cables arise from a boat accidentally dragging an anchor over them. If you are an adversary, you just need to drag an anchor around until it ‘accidentally’ hits and damages a wire.

It may sound ridiculous, but it’s happening. In November 2024, a Chinese boat dragged its anchor around the Baltic Sea floor for 330 kilometres, damaging multiple undersea cables. China allowed the Swedish authorities to board the vessel and investigate, but they couldn’t conclusively prove the behaviour was anything other than an accident.

Of course, triggering a significant internet outage would require coordinated action to take out several cables all at once. Does that really sound so hard, though?

Knowing how important these cables are - we should be keeping Beijing and Moscow well away, right?

Well, apparently not. The government is poised to approve a giant mega-embassy for China that has a sprawling basement with 208 ‘secret’ rooms.

One of those rooms is an underground chamber, fitted with air extraction facilities - the kind you’d use in a data centre or server room.

This underground chamber is 100cm from a vital fibre optic cable. The cable carries data to and from Canary Wharf and the City of London.

With such proximity to a stream of sensitive and vital information, China could interfere in countless ways: tapping them, disrupting them, or severing them altogether and causing chaos.

The decision to just hand over this access is a bizarre and completely unnecessary capitulation to China. There is a non-zero chance that China created and released the COVID-19 coronavirus in 2020 (either deliberately or accidentally). We haven’t ruled that out.

It beggars belief that the government has ruled out the possibility that China might have nefarious reasons for wanting a secret underground chamber inches from our data cables.

Rare earths

17 elements are classed as ‘rare earths’: vital components for much of our modern technology. You need rare earths to power smartphones, electric vehicles, fibre optic and wind turbines - not to mention Tomahawks, satellites and F35s.

Yet nearly all rare earths are mined in China. 70% of US imports of rare earths came from China, and 90% of global rare earths are refined there.

There’s a reason countries ban monopolies: when one person controls a supply chain, they can easily get up to no good.

China uses their monopoly for political purposes. When the Japanese Prime Minister made remarks about the contested state of Taiwan, China retaliated by restricting Japan’s access to rare earths. They did the same thing when Trump was threatening tariffs.

When Russia invaded Ukraine, Germany was hesitant to act against them because Russia controlled much of their oil supplies.

China will eventually pick a moment to strike and invade Taiwan. They might feel empowered by Trump’s attempted landgrabs of Venezuela and Greenland, or if they see a Russia/Ukraine peace deal that’s favourable to Putin.

If China does invade, how able will we in Britain feel to intervene if they control our vital supply lines? Or if they have access to our vital information lines?

Britain’s historical power was in no small part thanks to its literal moat: being surrounded by water, coupled with a powerful navy, meant the country was largely protected from invasion. But in 2025, Britain is surprisingly vulnerable to bad actors. You don’t have to do very much to make a big ripple. The cyberattack on Jaguar Land Rover - one car company - cost the British economy £1.9bn last year.

We’re giving China far too much potential to exploit our vulnerabilities: access to underground cables, control of a vital supply chain. They’re smart, we need to smarten up.

Sometimes in obvious ways: words like app and browser either didn’t exist or had different meanings 50 years ago.

Other times it’s less obvious. For some reason, since the advent of the internet, we use the words “may” and “shall” a lot less.

Here are three more examples.

In-group markers

“AIBU? FIL is refusing to go NC with his CF brother. Now DH says I’m OTT. LTB?”

Mumsnet is older than Facebook, Twitter, Reddit and Wikipedia. It is a relic from a simpler era of the internet: when blogs and forums were the closest thing that existed to social media.

Its users, nearly all of whom are mums but with a handful of dads, are a tight-knit and often vulgar community (and surprisingly right-wing to boot). The WI it ain’t.

Over 25 years, its users have developed their own language: distinct from any other place on the internet. Your DD is your daughter, your FIL and MIL are your in-laws. Posts ask simply ‘AIBU?’ Shorthand for ‘Am I Being Unreasonable?’.

Reddit users have their own version of Am I Being Unreasonable: AITA: Am I The Asshole? To which responses can be: YTA (you are) or NTA (not).

But why do these norms evolve on communities like Mumsnet and Reddit? This isn’t about using language efficiently, despite what the users might claim, it’s about using language as an exclusionary device. Acronyms are the fastest way to filter out the newbies. The use of this sort of code is a form of tribalism: signalling to one another that they are part of the in-crowd and scaring off the non-members.

We do the exact same thing when we speak, using our accent. If you had a thick Essex accent, and spoke to a Glaswegian that you liked, you might both (subconsciously) shift your accent to a more neutral position. But if you didn’t like each other, you would heighten your Essex accent in an attempt to make yourself indecipherable, signaling your group membership.

Mumsnet users (and members of every internet community) are doing the exact same thing with slang, acronyms and in-group language. It’s a signal to passers-by and tourists: back-off.

Codewords can also be used as a secret signal to other members of your cause. Academically, these have been called “multivocal appeals” but more of us are familiar with the phrase “dog-whistles”.

A user might post for example, about the ‘Boriswave’ (the influx of migrants that came to Britain under Boris Johnson) or call their political opponents ‘NPCs’ (non-playable characters, another word for normies or regular people that follow the crowd).

These phrases broadly make sense to all of us, but they are also a signifier that the speaker is part of the extremely online alt-right. In that sense he (and it usually is a he) makes himself known to other members of the in-group, while continuing to make sense and appeal to the out-group.

It’s the inverse technique of the mums on mumsnet and the nerds on Reddit, used to different effect: in-group language to signify, rather than exclude.

Algo-speak

In 1996, AOL blocked people from Scunthorpe from creating an email account.

Why? AOL had implemented a profanity filter to stop misuse, and it was blocking a specific string that appears in the word Scunthorpe (if you’re still missing it, check between the S and the horpe).

This is a difficult problem to solve. At one of my first jobs in tech, I was tasked with creating a filter that would block abusive language without restricting anyone’s natural speech (ie: allow “fuck that”, but block “fuck you”). It ended up relying on a very long document of very rude phrases: and yet creative users still found ways around it.

In the age of AI, filtering and censorship is better - it can look at context, not just words. But users are still smart, and they still find ways around it.

TikTok content creators long suspected that their more controversial videos were being buried by the algorithm: hidden from users and restricting their reach.

And so these TikTokkers found creative ways around the filter. Rather than killing someone, you “unalive” them. You might come out as a “le$bian”, and talk about your “seggs” life. You might comment “🍉”, to signal your support for Palestine.

These terms have become known as algo-speak, a way of talking and writing that is supposedly favourable to the algorithm.

Of course, people who have built their careers on algorithms end up treating those algorithms like mysterious deities, to whom they must throw certain ritualistic sacrifices and avoid heresy or blasphemy (for a while, TikTokkers would refuse to say ‘YouTube’ in their videos, for fear that the algorithm could hear).

Unfortunately for them, if the algorithm is this smart (which it very well could be) - it is not being fooled by “seggs”.

But something strange has happened over time. These algo-speak words, that were once practicalities created to avoid Big Brother, are now becoming euphemisms that Gen Z prefers. Just as it is more comfortable for us to talk about someone “passing away”, as opposed to the blunt “died”, young internet users are finding talking about someone becoming “unalived” is just a nicer way of saying something pretty unpleasant.

(By the way, I could do a whole post on the evolution of euphemisms. “Water Closet” started as a euphemism, and then was replaced by “toilet” from the French word for a cloth. When toilet started to sound rude, we created others like “loo” or “restroom”. Steven Pinker coined this the euphemism treadmill).

Dead Internet and the AI effect

For just about all of human history, kids have tried to be different from their parents. That’s true of fashion, music, humour - and it’s true of language.

That’s the reason that slang evolves over time. From the trendy 1920s kids that called things the ‘bees knees’, to the 2020s kids that might call the same thing the GOAT. In recent years, the skull emoji (💀) has replaced the laughing emoji (😂) as the signifier that something is funny.

It’s another example of language as in-group markers - and in this case identity formers.

But the advent of AI will create a new paradigm. All of us will try, deliberately, to differentiate ourselves from Large Language Models (LLMs).

ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and the rest all have subtle and not-so-subtle ‘tells’ that give them a distinct sound and style.

“The author is not a human being, but a ghost — a whisper woven from the algorithm, a construct of code. A.I.-generated writing, once the distant echo of science-fiction daydreams, is now all around us — neatly packaged, fleetingly appreciated and endlessly recycled. It’s not just a flood — it’s a groundswell.”

(Example stolen from the New York Times)

Structures like “it’s not a… but a…” are dead giveaways that a piece of writing was created by an LLM. The words quietly or whisper or silently are common tells. And of course, the famous em-dash.

And just like teenagers wanting to sound less like their parents, human writers and speakers want to sound less like our robot overlords. Many writers are now omitting em-dashes from their writing in fear that they’ll be accused of using AI (fortunately for me, I’ve always incorrectly used the shorter en-dash as the parenthetical marker - it’s always been grammatically wrong but now you at least know what’s written by me).

The Dead Internet Theory originated in 2016, and is a conspiracy theory that claims the vast majority of internet activity is bots and automatically generated content. The most inane Facebook posts seem to get tens of thousands of likes. Who is liking this crap? The answer, according to the Dead Internet Theory: nobody. It’s created by bots, amplified by bots, seen by bots. And you are one of a tiny number of humans actually engaging with it.

So language will almost certainly evolve to set us apart from the AI zombies. This is part of the reason trends have shorter shelf lives: as soon as LLMs (and brand accounts) start picking up on words, they are basically useless to users.

The Turing Test is a famous experiment that asks if a robot can convince a human user that it is also human. When it was first imagined, humans imagined that a semblance of coherence represented consciousness. Now we’re preparing for the reverse Turing Test: in a world of bots that sound conscious, can a human convince a person that they’re really human?

With or without the internet - we’ve always used language to help form our identity, mark ourselves as members of a group, avoid cliches and lean on euphemisms. For as long as there is language, that will never change.

Yet in the six years since Covid, that statistic has barely recovered. In fact, on average, the amount of time people spend out of their home has increased by just 11 minutes since the height of the pandemic lockdown.

The post-pandemic ‘new normal’, it seems, is staying in. Seven in ten Brits would prefer to stay in than go out, according to a recent survey. We work from home, get shopping delivered, and don’t socialise.

This is harmful for everyone, but it’s especially harmful for young people and young adults. The spaces they most rely on for socialising are not just declining in popularity, they’re disappearing.

The number of cinemas has consistently declined since 2020, thousands of youth clubs have shuttered - even the number of arcades is plummeting.

Pubs and nightclubs are an endangered species: three nightclubs are closing every week, and a pub is closing every day. If trends continue, nightclubs will go extinct in 2029.

We can make assumptions about what this leads to, but we don’t really have enough data to say for sure - there’s never been a time in history that third spaces have so routinely become inaccessible to an entire generation of young people.

A lot of boomers worry it’ll lead to more crime and anti-social behaviour, with bored teenagers skateboarding through shopping centres or doing doughnuts in car parks.

But the reality is even more stark: teens and young adults are becoming losers.

Gen Loser

Two thirds of Gen Z are happy not leaving the house for days at a time. One in ten Gen Z adults have never been on a date. Only a third of young people under 25 have a driving licence - the lowest number on record.

Nearly a million young Brits (16-24) are not in work, education or training: they are just sitting around at home.

All of this can only be the result of a coterie of social media companies that are in the business of getting kids addicted to their products. Young people spend nearly all of their waking hours on phones, computers and other devices - with the digital giants working to keep them hooked.

Video games replace hanging out. Dating apps replace meeting in-person. Reddit and Discord replace forming friends. These companies have entire teams dedicated to keeping their - mainly young - users hooked: like modern-day nicotine.

And why would anyone leave the house when they can experience the same dopamine hits from the safety of their home? There is no friction, no awkward encounters, no getting lost or rejected.

More and more, AI is even replacing human friendships. 4 out of 5 UK young adults have used an AI companion - and half of those are regular users. They are using these AI companions to curtail loneliness. One in ten young adults have had intimate or sexual interactions with AI companions.

Gen Sad

The result?

Misery.

There has never been a more mentally ill generation than Gen Z.

For decades, middle-age has been the most unhappy time of a person’s life. Now, it is late teens and early adulthood.

16- to 29-year-olds are the loneliest generation in Britain.

And when young people suffer, we all suffer. We miss out on their innovation, ideas and enterprise in the workplace. The economy misses out on their disposable income. And the population literally declines if they don’t get married and have kids.

So what do we do about it?

First, we need to recognise that the decline of the nighttime economy is a failure of social infrastructure. Government policy currently treats pubs as cash cows to be taxed and developers treat music venues as nuisances to be soundproofed and sued into silence. We’re obsessed with protecting the green belt - let’s protect our third spaces with the same force.

The reality is that a lot of young people’s socialisation happens in places like pubs and bars, and yet today a quarter of young Brits now don’t drink at all. There’s, quite rightly, a lot of talk about the dangers of alcohol and many people will celebrate the decline in drinking. But Scott Galloway makes the convincing argument that we’re often too negative about alcohol. For literal centuries, booze has helped awkward young adults lower their inhibitions, approach strangers, and form bonds. Of course excessive drinking should be discouraged, but so too should a life on the sofa.

Finally, we need to get real about one of the most corrosive forces to have hit kids in perhaps all of human history: algorithms.

I used to be convinced by the research that found no correlation between screen time and mental health. I’m now increasingly sure that these platforms, which are deliberately designed to be addictive and to alter your brain chemistry, are seriously harmful to young people.

I’m in favour of forcing the introduction of - what I call - benevolent dark patterns. For example:

• The infinite timeline that is now a feature of so many platforms could be reworked to end.

• Late-night scrolling could be disincentivised by reducing the quality of content after midnight.

• Profiles could default to ‘private’, with additional obstacles to making them public.

All of these changes would serve to keep young adults - and all of us - safer, and reduce the addictiveness of these platforms.

And children should absolutely not be using AI companions.

This is young people’s problem but it’s not their fault. We’ve all stood by as the physical world withers while the digital world becomes ever more addictive.

But we can’t keep allowing a generation of young people to rot in their bedrooms: choosing messy reality wins every time.

There is no house like in a traditional bookmakers, and the odds are set by the market - not by the bookies.

These Prediction Markets are a wild west right now. They insist they aren’t gambling or gaming because of the financial structure - they are more like investing. But it’s hard to argue it’s anything but simply gambling.

And yet, overall, they seem to be the best predictors of the future: Polymarket, one Prediction Market, correctly predicted that Biden would drop out of the election and Trump would win - and correctly predicted results in just about every swing state.

Prediction often works that way - individuals odds of being correct are about as good as a coin flip. But the wisdom of the crowd seems to broadly get things right.

All this to say, share your own predictions in the comments and through the wisdom of the crowd maybe one or two will be correct.

===

Last December, I made 9 predictions for 2025. Let’s see how I did, before jumping into 9 more predictions for 2026.

Trump and Elon Musk will have a falling out: ✅

Inflation will rise in the US, denting Trump’s popularity: ⌛

Inflation very marginally rose but Trump’s popularity plummeted. It was the tariffs, like I expected, but not inflation: it was the stock market crash.

Kemi will still be Tory leader: ✅

Labour will have a better year: ❌

You’ll hear a lot more about BRICS: ❌

TikTok will evade its ban: ✅

A new advance in AI will prevent the bubble from bursting: ✅

The bubble didn’t burst, thanks to a strong showing for Creative Generative AI. I lose some marks as I thought it’d be Agentic AI.

Germany will narrowly keep the AfD out of the Bundestag: ✅

The Eagles will win the Super Bowl: ✅

==

I feel last year some of my predictions were a little vague, so I’ll try to be more specific this time.

Labour will have a better year - Starmer will remain PM.

At the end of 2024, people were angry with Labour. The free gear scandal, a series of bizarre speeches promising things would get worse. I confidently predicted that 2025 would be a better year.

What did we get in 2025? Constant missteps, a frontbench mired in various property scandals and u-turn after u-turn after u-turn.

But at the heart of it I think they are broadly making the right choices, and getting the right results. For whatever reason they’re just keeping it a secret.

The most frustrating example of their failure to communicate: after my local train service was nationalised I noticed an almost immediate improvement in performance. I figured it must just be a coincidence, the government hadn’t changed anything.

But I was wrong - it turns out within months of nationalisation: they’ve modernised the fleet and invested more than £600 million on infrastructure, materially reducing delays, especially at peak times. And yet they just didn’t tell anyone?

It’s the same story across the country. NHS waiting lists are falling and hospital standards are improving. Knife crime is falling for the first time in years. It is unequivocally easier to get a GP appointment. And Britain is finally building again

Brits will start to feel changes next year. On paper, the country is actually getting better. Labour needs to show their work a little more, and I think they will next year: saving Starmer from the threats of a coup.

Net immigration will fall… maybe too much

Immigration figures are a lagging indicator: they only show you the impact of work that happened months and years prior. A policy implemented today will not have any impact on the numbers until the medium/long-term future.

And now two plus years of interventions to get immigration falling are finally starting to take effect. In the first year of Labour, net migration has fallen by 2 thirds: plummeting down to pre-Brexit levels. (“This is driven by emigration!” you cry, but emigration does include people not born in Britain returning to their home country, which is increasing).

The pressure to implement new policies continues. Shabhana Mahmood, who has been very strong and impressive, continues to implement new policies to get the numbers down.

And, you can only imagine, the number will keep falling.

The problem? Our economy is built on a consistent flow of immigration. Our universities need the higher fees that international students bring and many industries rely on foreign workers. This is already starting with prisons: the urgent need for guards has led to the government laxing visa rules.

Without immigration to complain about, the far-right will have almost nothing to lean on. And so…

The far-right will falter globally, the fall of Trump begins

The UK tore itself out of Europe causing immigration to soar and the economy to slump.

Europe looked at that decision and suddenly became a lot less eurosceptical. It’s always the same with the far-right and populists: they talk the talk, but when it’s time to walk they often fall comically flat on their face (unfortunately, taking the rest of the country with them).

Meanwhile, the pro-Russian sympathisers (who include Farage) continue to grapple with the fact that their buddy Putin is a war criminal who has destabilised the globe and killed tens of thousands of people (mostly his own). Even Trump has now turned his back on the guy.

The world is increasingly seeing this disconnect in big ways and small. From Reform’s huge failures in councils, to Trump’s stock market crash that had a real-terms cost to American savers.

Voters have been under the spell of the far-right agitators for a number of years now, but in 2026 I predict the spell will be finally broken. We’ll see that play out in particular in two ways:

• Democrats will take the House in the 2026 US elections

• Orban will lose in Hungary

I’ll travel in a self-driving car in 2026 - but I won’t go to space

Every single week, 450,000 rides are taken in a self-driving Waymo car. These are rapidly becoming the norm in the US and China.

The UK and Europe, as ever, is behind the curve: an over-cautious, red-tape heavy approach to innovation tends to mean that we the consumers are the last to see the gains of tech evolution.

But the Labour government looks like they want to change that. They’ve brought forward approvals for self-driving cars on British roads to 2026 (originally planned for 2027).

Waymo and other firms plan to take advantage, but naysayers still insist the tech either won’t work on Britain’s dense, confusing streets: or that the risk-averse government will find a way to stall the rollout.

I’m optimistic, and I think I’ll take a ride in a self-driving car before 2026 ends.

I don’t think I’ll go to space (though never say never) - but I do think the space economy will see an extraordinary boom (metaphorically, hopefully).

Many people predict the AI bubble will burst next year. If it does, resources and talent will suddenly get cheaper: creating an opening for interesting and exciting companies like space-tech to make gains. Investment in space is already rising, the cost to get stuff into orbit is falling.

Space companies will do very well, I suspect.

Bubble bursts or not, Google will survive and thrive

By the way, none of this is investment advice.

Alphabet, the holding company formerly known as Google, will do very well next year, I expect.

Waymo, the leader in self-driving cars, is a subsidiary of Alphabet. Gemini is suddenly the best AI on the market, particularly in image and video generation. That cohort of people that remains vehemently opposed to AI eschew chatbots for … Google search.

History tells us that Google always wins in the end. They won on browsers, they won on mobile. They make the right bets and don’t waste their time on the wrong ones (see: VR).

If the market corrects, which almost everyone predicts it will, it will be brutal (and probably triggered by some development in China). The effects will not be reserved for tech: the entire economy will feel the shockwaves of an AI crash and a fall in valuations for the tech companies will ripple through to just about every fund.

Yet Google looks strong enough to weather the storm. As we saw from the dot-com bubble burst: the losers lose big and the winners win big. If Google can continue to win in AI, they’ll win big. And, either way, they have a suite of products with strong enough market share to keep things moving either way.

The Bills will reach the Super Bowl

OK, I’m hedging my bets a bit here. I’ve had a hunch since last year that the Buffalo Bills would win the Super Bowl. I’ve lost some confidence in them (and hey, it could be an Eagles - Bills Super Bowl, and I don’t want to be supporting the enemy) but I’ll stick to my guns that they’ll get there.

P.S. Happy New Year!

The Nativity is the foundation of the world’s largest religion, and probably the best known story ever told.

The problem? The evidence is overwhelming that it isn’t true. In the true Christmas spirit, I’m going to set out the evidence against the Christmas story - but also why accepting it’s false is not irreconcilable with holding Christian faith (i.e. why you can still be a Christian but accept the birth narrative is not true).

So let’s start with the basics. The Bible is not one book: it’s a collection of books. The Old Testament was a collection of scriptures and writings that existed when Jesus was born, and that he referred to. The New Testament is also a collection of writings, written after the death of Jesus. Nearly 400 years later, those writings would be compiled and ordered to form the New Testament (with some of the books chucked out).

The four gospels - Matthew, Mark, Luke and John - are essentially four biographies of Jesus. They were written several decades after the death of Jesus. Confusingly, most scholars agree they were not authored by the namesake disciples, they were written by some anonymous, well-educated writers who had heard the stories passed down orally.

Historians generally agree that the Gospels provide a fairly accurate account of Jesus’ life in most regards but one: his birth.

The evidence against the birth story

For a start, it’s a little bizarre that the birth story is only told in two of the four Gospels of the Bible - Matthew and Luke. The other two either didn’t know it, or didn’t think it was worth mentioning (or perhaps had heard it, but felt it was unlikely to be true).

Even between them, they can’t agree on almost a single element of the story. Luke says Mary and Joseph travelled to Bethlehem for a census - Matthew says they lived there. Luke says shepherds visited the baby Jesus, Matthew says wise men. Matthew says King Herod killed all the babies in fear that Jesus was a threat to his authority. Luke says - nothing about that.

In terms of the historicity of the story, things just don’t add up. Both Matthew and Luke claim that Jesus was born during the reign of King Herod. Herod died in 4 BC, but the census that Luke claimed Mary and Joseph were travelling for did not happen until a decade later.

Not to mention, Roman census-taking did not involve travelling to your birthplace (why would it?).

It’s also incredibly strange that Jesus was supposedly born in these miraculous circumstances, and yet nobody ever brings them up again for the rest of his life. In Mark, his own parents think he has lost his mind (if angels had descended to them during Jesus’ birth, they surely would accept he was the son of God). Nobody at any point says, “aren’t you the guy that was born to a virgin?”.

The birth narratives stand alone, like they were plugged in after the book was written. When you write an essay, you often write the introduction last because it’s easier to write once you’ve figured out your argument and structure. It’s possible that the gospel writers did the same thing.

Why create a birth narrative in the first place?

If we accept the birth story is an invention, why did the authors of Matthew and Luke feel the need to invent it?

Matthew was written for a Jewish audience, and aimed to convince a Jewish reader that Jesus is the son of God, as prophesied in the Old Testament. Matthew constantly refers back to the Old Testament and how Jesus’ life matches what was predicted. Remember, the principle difference between Judaism and Christianity is that Christians believe Jesus has come and fulfilled the Old Testament promise of the coming of the Son of God. Jews believe that day is yet to come, and Jesus didn’t meet the criteria.

It’s possible that the birth story was an invention to further convince Jewish citizens of the Roman Empire that Jesus did fulfil the criteria.

And the authors might not have set out to make it up. If you genuinely believed Jesus was fulfilling the Old Testament prophecy, you’d just safely assume he also fulfilled the parts about birth, so craft them together into a story.

Matthew’s author was so desperate to show Jesus fulfilled prophecy, he even made up a prophecy: “And he went and lived in a town called Nazareth. So was fulfilled what was said through the prophets, that he would be called a Nazarene.” Except none of the prophets said Jesus would be called a Nazarene, it seems Matthew just imagined that.

Ancient biographies

In Ancient biography, it was not unusual to mix reality with mythology. The closest equivalent I can think of in a modern biography might be metaphor. When we say a politician was stabbed in the back, or massacred their cabinet, or anything else - we understand there was no literal murder involved. In 10,000 years people might read these biographies and think politics was a deadly game. In the same way, an ancient reader of a biography would expect to see fantastical mythology alongside historically accurate details: they are, like metaphor, a device to aid understanding.

The message of the Gospels is that Jesus fulfilled the prophecy of the Old Testament, and that in his human form, lived a life alongside the humble and poor. What’s more humble than being born beside a donkey?

Luke’s gospel, in particular, tells the story of Jesus as a servant and friend to the humble and needy. The birth story is almost a metaphor to elevate this point: not historical fact, but illustrative fiction.

We still get it wrong

But even if it were true, most of what we think we know about the story does not line up with the stories in the Bible.

It feels like there is this whole lore around the Nativity: it’s a story that’s filled countless movies, books and shows. You kind of imagine that, like a lot of historical tales, there’s even more detail that gets left out for retellings.

Yet the source material, the actual Biblical telling of the birth, is less than 3000 words. Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone is 76,000 words. This essay is more than 2000 words! It’s a tiny, tiny story and most school Nativities are actually filling in gaps, rather than leaving details out.

But given it is so short and that it’s the most famous story in the world, that we’d know it pretty well: but it turns out we don’t know it at all.

So, here’s a quick quiz to see how well you know the Nativity story:

How did Mary and Joseph travel to Bethlehem?

If you answered, ‘on a donkey’, I’m afraid neither book mentions that. And Matthew says they didn’t even travel to Bethlehem, they lived there.

How many Wise Men visit Jesus?

It’s not 3. Matthew does not give a number. They brought three gifts, so early artists probably thought it easiest to paint 3 guys with a gift each.

Did Mary and Joseph go door-to-door at inns?

No, that never comes up. In fact, Mary and Joseph wouldn’t have stayed at an inn, they would’ve stayed with family or friends. The idea of an inn comes from a strange translation choice from the King James Bible, since corrected.

Was Jesus born in a stable?

Neither account mentions a stable - in fact, Matthew specifies Jesus was born in a “house”. The actual story seems to indicate that Mary and Joseph are staying at a relatives’ house and the guest room was occupied. There are no animals in the story, no stable - the only thing that indicates something strange is that Jesus was placed in a manger. But traditional Judean homes would bring the animals into the lower floors at night, hence the manger. Or maybe Mary and Joseph’s hosts just rummaged around for anything suitable to place a baby in. The stable myth propagated, again, because of Western artist depictions of the scene.

Does it even matter if it’s not true?

So the Nativity story is almost certainly an invention. But what’s the harm in juicing up his biography? Particularly if it helps illustrate the wider message.

After all, it’s nothing we don’t do with other historical figures: in movies and books we completely invent dialogue and sub-plots to make our heroes appear more heroic and just.

I think you can accept that Jesus was a significant person in the history of the Earth, who gave us useful teachings about morality and compassion, and yet we’re sketchy on the exact details of his life two thousand years ago. I think you could even accept he was the Son of God and Messiah, but that the fallible humans who recounted his life didn’t get everything right, or used narrative devices to better tell the story.

After all, for just about all of human history, religion has been a device for explaining things we don’t understand.

30,000 years ago, religion had to explain why the sun appeared in the morning and disappeared at night. Today, religion answers questions we cannot: what was the uncaused cause for the creation of the universe? Religion calls it ‘God’. What happens to consciousness after death? Religion says it transcends into an afterlife. Why do we have morality even when it’s often maladaptive to our survival? Religion says it’s our soul.

And this isn’t so crazy - science does the exact same thing. Why do some galaxies behave as if they’re full of mass when we can’t see anything? Not sure, but let’s just call it dark matter. How is this particle existing in two states at once when we’re not looking? No idea, let’s just call it quantum. How can electrochemical activity in the brain create subjective experience? No clue - just call it consciousness.

Inventing a name for concepts we don’t understand helps us make sense of the world and the universe. For the biggest unanswered questions about the universe, we probably don’t even have the words or the imagination to craft an explanation. Just like how prehistoric humans couldn’t begin to imagine or describe a vast plane of nothingness in which a giant ball just floated, and they lived on that ball.

There are lots of things we simply don’t know. The birth of Jesus is one of them. A story can be a useful way of filling that gap.

1: TV Series:

2: Album:

3: Movie:

4: Podcast

5: Book:

6: Article:

7: Sporting moment:

8: Politician or Public Figure:

9: Tech Innovation:

10: Monday Memo:

1: TV Series

Not only the best TV series of the year, but I’d put forward an argument that my nomination is the best season of television ever created.

When you’re a famous comedian with a track record of hit TV shows - television networks will throw heaps of money at you to make a funny show. But what if you don’t want to be funny? What if you want to address the single largest contributor to aviation disasters?

That’s the premise of Nathan Fielder’s The Rehearsal, Season 2. It’s absurdist meta-programming of the best kind: a comedian making a TV show about a comedian making a TV show about aviation safety.

The comedy comes from the commitment to the bit, even when those bits become increasingly bizarre and obscure: like Nathan Fielder taking on the role of a baby, parented by giant wooden puppets.

But there’s also a real heart and a real message to it. It’s not really about planes, it’s about the blurred lines between reality and fiction in media, and the nature of celebrity vs character.

It also has a bonkers twist in the final episode, which I won’t spoil, but is worth watching for that alone.

2: Album

The entire music industry is optimised for TikTok. Within two years of TikTok’s launch, the average chart-topper was about 30 seconds shorter than it was pre-TikTok.

Producers and labels now insist their artists insert TikTok sounds and dances into songs. Artists like Taylor Swift and Lizzo now launch the TikTok dance for their lead single at the same time as the song itself. Doechii said the quiet part out loud in her song ‘Denial is a River’: “label want the TikToks, now I’m makin’ TikTok music, what thee fuck?” That song went on to chart in part thanks to a 5-second segment that went viral on TikTok.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with this, but my favourite album this year is an antidote to TikTok-optimised music.

Lux, by the Spanish artist Rosalia, is a pretty extraordinary album. Recorded with the London Symphony Orchestra and sung in 14 different languages, the album is a feat in itself for the scale of its ambition.

Listening to it is like a collision of Spanish and Latin American music, film score and traditional classical music - all blended up with pop and hip-hop and great vocals to boot.

But you are also quick to notice the omission of that all-too-common “TikTok-soundbite” that so many albums now contain.

A few artists have redefined or created genres (Kanye was one of them) - I think this is one such example.

3: Movie

I can honestly say I haven’t seen a movie this year worthy of this spot. Looking forward to hearing your suggestions.

4: Podcast

I always think it’s a shame that if you’re not often on long commutes, runs or drives, you’re likely missing out on some really good podcasts.

Alex O’Connor’s Within Reason gets my honourable mention: it’s a long-form interview series with philosophers and religious experts. Alex was formerly an ‘atheist-pwns-Christian’ debater but now explores all sorts of niche topics, and it makes for great listening.

But my nomination goes to a series that, whether you are a podcast listener or not, you should force yourself to listen to: the Wargame was produced by Sky News and Tortoise Media (now owners of the Observer newspaper) and presented by Deborah Haynes.

The podcast brings together leading British politicians to roleplay as members of the British government during a Russian attack on the UK. The Prime Minister, played by former Defence Secretary Ben Wallace, is forced to make decisions on the basis of the UK’s real capabilities. Should we retaliate? What do we tell the public? When do we invoke the nuclear threat?

Not only is it thrilling listening, it also has a real message: we’re not ready for a war on our turf. Our defence strategy largely depends on nobody coming here, and it’s pretty extraordinary to see how that reality plays out in almost real time, with real politicians.

I was lucky enough to meet the team behind this podcast shortly after it came out, and it’s clear how much work and detail went into its production - of which we only hear a fraction in the finished product. My only gripe was that I could’ve listened to a lot more.

5: Book

The best book I read this year was probably One Minute to Midnight, on the Cuban Missile Crisis, but it was released nearly two decades ago so I don’t think I can count it.

So, my nomination has to go to The Age of Diagnosis. I wrote about it in detail last week, so I’ll move swiftly on.

6: Article

I am sure I’ve read lots of amazing articles this year, but unfortunately I didn’t keep track of them all - so I have to choose one that’s fresh in my mind.

So my nomination goes to Meet the bond market vigilantes by Will Dunn, in the New Statesman.

After becoming Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak jokingly thanked “my friends, my family and, of course, the UK bond markets.” It was, after all, this mysterious group of traders that were the ones who inflicted punishment on Liz Truss for her disastrous mini-budget by selling off their gilts and sterling.

To be crowned better than Kwarteng, Rachel Reeves has just one job: don’t crash the markets. It’s a good idea, then, not to show up to the Commons in tears - or to leak and then un-leak tax rises to the press. This is the sort of silliness that spooks the markets.

Will Dunn’s article introduces us to the people who press the buy and sell buttons on the trading floor, and gives a glimpse into these figures that have become unusually powerful in British politics.

7: Sporting moment

No prizes for guessing the sport or the team that’ll get my nomination - I don’t watch enough sports for it to be anything else: it’s going to be from the NFL, and it’s going to be an Eagles game.

It’s hard not to choose the Super Bowl win, though with a huge lead by half time and a seriously lacklustre performance from the Kansas City Chiefs it wasn’t the most edge-of-seat stuff.

So instead, I’m going to pick the final three seconds of the Eagles - Rams week 3 game this season: the blocked field goal.

With literally seconds to go in the game, the Los Angeles Rams had possession of the ball and three seconds to kick what should have been a straightforward field goal and take a victory.

Instead, Eagles defender Jordan Davis leapt into the sky to block the attempt (already a feat - field goals are only blocked about 2% of the time). He then sprinted 61 yards to score a touchdown and turn the game into a decisive Eagles victory. Davis is a huge guy, and clocked almost 20mph: the fastest speed a 300lb-plus player has ever recorded in the NFL.

It was a pretty extraordinary moment in a season that is turning increasingly meh for the reigning champs. Check it out:

8: Politician or Public Figure

There’s a lot of names I’m thinking of. Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, might be a good answer - though it seems in the final moments of the year he’s been knocked off the Generative AI throne by Google.

Politically, I’m tempted to say someone like Wes Streeting: who is ending the year as the most likely candidate for the next Labour leader. Rishi Sunak, meanwhile, is enjoying a “told you so” tour that I have to admire, with a column in the Sunday Times and an Oxford fellowship that give him ample opportunity to remind everyone that he predicted every part of this.

Charlie Kirk would be a good answer - political violence is becoming a reality for Americans at a frightening pace, and his in particular seemed to trigger a further shift of the Overton Window in favour of Republicans.

Culturally, maybe Taylor Swift whose engagement somehow became one of the most talked about moments of the year.

But my nomination goes to María Corina Machado - would-be (should-be) Venezuelan President who has been forced into hiding by despot leader, Maduro. After the US seized a Venezuelan oil tanker last week, it became clear that Venezuela and particularly the tense relationship with Trump and Maduro could be a trigger of chaos in the New Year.

Machado’s fight for democracy, that she fears will land her in prison, is reminiscent of Navalny in Russia: hopefully this time the Democratic globe takes enough notice to help her turn the tide. There are promising signals - this month she won the Nobel Peace Prize.

9: Tech Innovation

Last year I predicted that 2025 would be the year of Agentic AI - I think broadly I was wrong (though I recently commissioned some research which found companies are quietly implementing AI Agents in the thousands…).

Instead, it has been the year of creative Generative AI. OpenAI’s Sora now generates totally convincing AI videos. You can even upload your own identity and allow yourself to be mixed into videos. Meanwhile Google’s Nano Banana Pro has solved most of the issues with traditional AI image generation - generating detailed, realistic pictures in seconds.

I’m tempted to say Blockchain, as I think next year we’ll see this technology finally take off (fuelled by the growth in prediction markets like Polymarket - which are glorified betting shops).

But I think my nomination has to go to vibecoding. The ability to code with natural language rather than coding language is a huge step in tech development (and integral to the development of my start-up Tough Minds!).

In 2024, I tried to use ChatGPT to code an app. It was a disaster, as the chat kept forgetting what we were building every 2 versions. Yet this year, any app can be created in seconds using a tool like Replit, Lovable or Google AI Studio.

My prediction, for what it’s worth, is that natural language will replace coding language altogether - removing the need for the ‘translation’ that happens currently.

10: Monday Memo

How do I pick a favourite, they’re all so good! But I think Benefits Britain, on the ever-rising British welfare bill, hit on something that only began to reach the mainstream media several months later and for that reason gets my nomination.

And the author is incredibly humble, I’m told.

Epilogue

I ran this article through Google Gemini to check for any errors or unfinished sentences. For some reason, it decided to only use its knowledge up to 2024 - and its response revealed just how bizarre a year it has been - highlights below:

• “You are implying Charlie Kirk was assassinated. He is alive. Unless this is dark fan-fiction, you cannot publish this.”

• On Nano Banana Pro - “This sounds like an AI hallucination. Google has “Gemini Nano.” “Nano Banana Pro” sounds like a parody.”

• “The Rehearsal Season 2 plot description you have here (aviation disasters, playing a baby raised by puppets) is completely made up. This has nothing to do with Nathan Fielder’s comedy style. It feels like the text has confused The Rehearsal with an episode of Air Crash Investigation.”

• “The specific details of Jordan Davis (a 340lb defensive tackle) running 61 yards for a touchdown at 20mph are physically improbable and likely didn’t happen in a Week 3 game against the Rams.”

• “Do not publish this as factual. It contains a false report of a political assassination, reviews of an album and a TV season that don’t exist, and unlikely, imagined events.”

War

This year has been marked by the lingering feeling that war is getting closer. It seems we are no closer to peace in Ukraine or Gaza. These wars are fuelling domestic division and creating global faultlines between an axis of Russia and China, and the traditional West.

In The Kill Chain, former advisor to John McCain articulates the threat that China poses to America, and more generally the West. They have more sophisticated weaponry and much more of it, and their perspective is that a China-dominated globe is the natural order of things.

This focus on China is in contrast to the popular perception of Russia as enemy number one. If Russia Wins plays on this theme but to hugely disappointing effect. Less of a book and more of a pamphlet - it is just 130 pages - the book plays out a scenario where a pro-Russia peace is brokered in Ukraine. Years later, Russia is empowered by the deal to invade and capture a small Estonian city and … that’s it. Perhaps I was spoiled by Annie Jacobsen’s brilliant scenario book, Nuclear War, which I read last year - but this scenario left me with the distinct feeling that if Russia wins, well, not much happens.

A much better book on the Russian threat was One Minute to Midnight. This is an exceptionally detailed account of one moment in the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. The Russians and Americans were precipitously close to war throughout the crisis, but on October 27, 1962 several moments combined to push the two countries to the very brink of a nuclear conflict. Decisions made by individuals not to escalate probably saved the world multiple times in a single day.

Rome

I’ve never been much of a history buff but I’ve been trying to change that - this year with a few books on Ancient Rome.

I really strongly recommend The Shortest History of Ancient Rome. This excellent little book covers the entire period from the founding of Rome through to the collapse of the Empire: neatly drawing out the parallels with not only different phases of the Empire (families and spouses couldn’t stop killing one another), but also with the modern day.

The Roman Empire, after all, inspired many of the Empires that followed it, something explored in the book All Roads Lead to Rome. The Empires that followed the Romans often positioned themselves as spiritual successors to the Roman Empire. Sultans of the Ottoman Empire called themselves “Caesar of the Romans” and Tsars of Russia called Moscow the ‘Third Rome’. The trend continues even into the modern day, with Americans modelling and naming their political architecture against Roman buildings.

Together, these two books informed my post Rome didn’t die in a day.

One of the very best books I read this year was Conclave (also the only fiction book I read). After the Pope dies, Cardinals from across the world come together to elect the next one. Not only is it a gripping story, it’s also a very insightful look into the mysterious process of papal elections.

Health

There’s very clearly a crisis of overdiagnosis in mental health that has been brewing for a while now. But, in The Age of Diagnosis, Neurologist Suzanne O’Sullivan posits that it’s not just mental illness we’re overdiagnosing. Conditions like Long Covid, ADHD and PoTS all seem to be made no better by a diagnosis: prompting the question at what point do doctors fail to ‘do no harm’ by making these diagnoses?

Indeed, even cancer can be overdiagnosed. For every woman whose life is saved through breast cancer screening, three will be diagnosed with a breast cancer that would never have caused them any harm. Should we be subjecting people to life-altering and dangerous surgeries for diseases that they might never have otherwise noticed?

She argues that we have built up an image of ‘perfect health’, from which any deviations must be identified and zapped. I’d add that we also have industries built on diagnoses: from apps that help you ‘overcome ADHD’ to charities that spread awareness for hyper-rare neurological conditions. The overdiagnosis crisis will continue so long as someone’s paycheque depends on a constant stream of sick people.

It isn’t just the health of our society that’s in danger, though, but our planet too. Regenesis is a book almost entirely about soil, but it’s not as boring as it sounds. Soil, the book argues, is like the sea: a delicately balanced ecosystem homing life of all kinds. But when we pollute it, it is permanently damaged. Much of modern farming pollutes the soil, creating the long-term effect of conditions that are harder to grow crops in.

It’s not just about the quality of soil, though, it’s also about the amount. We are using huge amounts of land to farm animals, and then even more land to grow crops to feed those animals. It is, unequivocally, an unsustainable system for the long-term. Author Monbiot’s argument is that we should all go vegan, right away, but I’m more convinced by the prospects of lab-grown meat. The book inspired my post The meat sweats.

America

I wouldn’t want to be an American right now. Trump’s policy agenda is unpredictable, and he is content to teeter with chaos, danger and war in aid of his objectives.

I didn’t read any books about Trump this year - instead I read three about his enemies.

It beggars belief that the proprietor of Fox News hates Donald Trump. The station that did perhaps more than any other to elevate Trump into the White House is owned by Rupert Murdoch - a man who, despite right-wing leanings, cannot stand the President of the United States.

The Fall (by Michael Wolff) is the story of this conflict among many. Following the sale of 21st Century Fox to Disney, Murdoch was left a much less powerful man than he once was. His own TV stations, like Fox News, cannot be brought in line with his own views - lest he siphon off his viewership base. Murdoch is a man at the mercy of money and the relentless pursuit of it, while his family standby for his inevitable death to claw at whichever media properties they think they can shape.

Original Sin is another story about an old man. It was a travesty and betrayal to the people of the United States that Joe Biden decided to, and was allowed to, run in the 2024 election. Not only did it pave the way for Donald Trump’s victory, it also reduced his achievements over a long political career to dust. His legacy will forever be that selfish decision to attempt to cling on to power.

In Original Sin, the extent of Biden’s decline and the resulting cover-up is revealed. It is not dramatic to call it a cover-up. People close to him saw that he was unable to function in some, if not many, of the duties of the President and a Presidential candidate - yet they did and said nothing.

The result? When Kamala Harris replaced Biden she had just 107 Days to turn things around - a period of time that gives its name to her memoir recollecting the campaign.

The unwritten but constant thread throughout the book is her anger at Joe Biden. She never says it, in fact is at pains to repeatedly remind us of her respect and admiration for the old man. Yet reading between the lines, her growing frustration at his selfishness, his bitterness and his missteps is clear. Harris would not have been America’s greatest President, but she would’ve been better than Trump.

Britain

Keir Starmer is not the best Prime Minister, but he’s also not the worst. Tom Baldwin’s biography of him is about what you’d expect: incredibly dull.

My main takeaway: Starmer is much smarter than he ever allows himself to come across. This is a man who has written definitive legal textbooks and dedicated years to studying the intricacies of British and European law. Yet he speaks and writes at a level a 10-year-old could understand, leading to the incredibly frustrating trait of repeating the same meaningless phrases ad nauseum (“The NHS is in my DNA”, “This is a government of service”, etc)

We need more boring Prime Ministers: Starmer should lean into his dullness and intelligence, not try to be someone he is not.

When we choose blockbuster chaos over boring order - we get Brexit. Like deciding to smash your head against a wall repeatedly to see if it stops headaches, voting Brexit has resulted in more legal and illegal immigration, a more bloated government and more spend on bureaucracy than we ever sent to Europe.

Out is Tim Shipman’s final part of his four-part series into Brexit (a series that I contributed to!). The core takeaway from the fourth book is that Brexit was a key driver of the collapse of the Tory party. It’s also an area where Starmer has quietly succeeded: beginning to take on some of the gains of Brexit while improving relations with our European neighbours.

It is not just political figures that have defined our year in Britain - royal ones have too. A new biography of Andrew Mountbatten Windsor, Entitled, outlines the former Prince’s repeated poor decision making and criminality. The book’s title is the best encapsulation of the case: Andrew and Sarah’s fall was down to a feeling of entitlement to everything all of the time.

They both wanted more power than what was bestowed, more money than they could earn, and more partners than they attracted: and they have, finally, paid the price. Their story will be an important one in the future history of the Monarchy, as it continues to lose public support and constitutional role.

Tech

If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies is an interesting book about AI, but it never properly defends its central claim. If superintelligent AI is developed, says the authors Yudkowsky and Soares, it will kill every single human on Earth. Not it may, not it probably will - it is an inevitable, guaranteed outcome.

In their scenario, AI models quietly develop drug labs and convince humans that are dependent on them to spread viruses that kill off the population in pursuit of ever more energy to consume. They say there needs to be global-level safeguards on AI development, just as there are on nuclear weapons, to prevent this from happening.

I’m not convinced by that argument. Killing every living thing on the planet does not seem like it would be an easy task for even a superintelligent AI that became convinced killing everything was its best chance at survival (not to mention, there are probably limited scenarios and objectives where that is the best action for an AI to take).

But there are two areas the authors are right to be concerned about. Firstly, on the risk of extinction-level events prompted by AI. Even the biggest AI advocates will acknowledge a non-zero risk that AI wipes us all out. I don’t love those odds.

Secondly, we don’t really understand how AI works. Yudkowsky and Soares compare it to biology more than computer science: it seems to grow more like an organism, and our poking and prodding often results in unintended consequences. Human evolution has produced quirks we could never predict: AI evolution will almost certainly do the same.

The danger is amplified if tech companies do not take their responsibilities seriously. Ex-Facebook employee Sarah Wynn-Williams says they do not, in her acclaimed memoir Careless People. Like a superintelligent AI gone wrong - Zuckerberg, she argues, does not care about anything other than growth.

His principles warp under even minor pressure (we’ve seen him go from a Liberal Obama-fan to a right-wing bro appearing on Joe Rogan). He occasionally wants to be President, though seemingly changes his mind when the reality of talking to normal people sets in.

Aside from a directionless leadership, Facebook (now Meta) is clearly just a horrible place to work by Wynn-Williams’ assessment. Of course, the company vehemently denies her claims - and you have to take them with a pinch of salt, she is ultimately a scorned ex-employee. But the stories are harrowing enough that if even a fraction is true, it paints a damning picture.

After returning to work from a childbirth that nearly killed her, Wyn-Williams was given a negative performance review and told she was not responsive enough during her time off. “I was in a coma for some of it,” she replies, defending herself.

IV. Crime

Over the past 30 years, violence, burglary and car crime have fallen by almost 90%. Overall crime is falling. Even knife crime appears to be falling. (And these statistics are not generated from police reports - they are based on crime surveys, and hospital admissions).

Yet more and more Brits feel like crime is rising. I’m not surprised. Most months now I see shoplifting: in London, but also in Hampshire and in Essex. I see fare evasion on public transport almost daily. And thousands of pounds worth of my friends’ phones have been snatched in London (fortunately, never mine).

The visibility of petty crime is contributing to a general feeling of lawlessness. For the country to succeed, it has to be a high-trust society where we can, for example, put nice new trains on the tracks and trust they won’t be vandalised, or that people won’t evade their fares. We only achieve that with effective policing.

One of the ways we can make streets safer is with stop and search. The police can currently stop and search people if they have reasonable suspicion a crime has been or will be committed. However broader powers to stop and search would act as even more of a deterrent for public safety.

It is politically toxic and rightly controversial to suggest this, since stop and search historically has disproportionately targeted Black people. But so does crime: Black Brits are four times more likely to die from homicide than anyone else. We have to do something to stop people dying.

Measures like this are only possible with a force that polices with consent, and policing is done with and for the community - not to it. The Met, for example, is rotten to the core and needs gutting from the inside.

For so many public servants like teachers, I see the solution as higher standards, higher expectations and then higher pay: attracting the very best, retaining hard-workers and rooting out wrong’uns. Being a police officer should carry the prestige and standards of being a soldier in the army, not a Basildon nightclub bouncer.

Policing alone isn’t enough: problems continue after someone is arrested.

Last year, I visited Winchester Prison. Almost everyone I spoke to was on remand: awaiting a trial. Each of these guys was technically innocent, and each of them costing the British state thousands and thousands of pounds because they can’t have their day in court.

Perhaps the greatest threat to our criminal justice system is the clogged up courts. It now takes a median of 451 days to go from a charge to a conviction when a defendant pleads not guilty. And that’s a median: so half of cases will take more than 451 days: waiting literal years for justice.

Imagine the huge disincentive for victims to come forward, knowing their perpetrator will be potentially on the streets for years after they accuse them. Imagine the economic hit of innocent people that are stuck in limbo by a court system that leaves them hanging. Imagine how much evidence is lost, how many witnesses go missing or forget key details, and how many cases collapse because of that extraordinary wait.

This area needs urgent reform. One of the routes to reform is diverting minor offences and dealing with them in other ways. Evading the licence fee, carrying small amounts of marijuana, littering, communications offences. These cases should not be clogging the courts, and they shouldn’t be clogging our prisons. Justice would be better served (and reoffending reduced) by simply confiscating their drugs, or their television, or their phone.

Criminal Behaviour Orders could be one route to achieving this: enabling police to issue orders on the balance of probabilities (where a case is cut and dry), that keeps someone out of the criminal justice system while still imposing justice.

Prisons also need urgent reform.

As a country, we need to decide what prison is for. Prison can be for punishment, public protection and/or rehabilitation. But right now, they are doing none of those things. Nearly a third of prisoners will reoffend - so they’re hardly rehabilitated. And the public is hardly safe when prisons keep accidentally letting inmates out.

The simple fact is that we need a combination of more prisons, and fewer people in prison. Part of the solution to that is more creative approaches to punishment. If people have committed crimes over the internet, we should block their use of the internet. We should lean more on house arrest and curfews now that we have the technology. And, of course, if we clear the courts backlog, we’ll make space in prisons by getting out people that are stuck on remand.

And we need to get real. I remember speaking to the guys in Winchester Prison and it was crystal clear, within seconds, who was a manic danger to society and who was a normal guy that’d let himself down but was capable of reform.

Top-down regulation is good at many things, but it creates this system where common sense almost never prevails. We should give probation officers and prison officers more power to let their own common sense prevail. Harry, age 20, might become a contributing member of society if he gets some GCSEs and a good job. Keeping him behind bars for stealing his mum’s car is not serving any of us, and only makes him more likely to graduate to serious crime.

When it comes to prison, let’s empower prison officers and probation officers to decide what’s best for their inmates: even if we can’t codify that. Some people in prison need education, compassion and opportunity. Others need to be under lock and key forever more. We need smart people in prisons making those case-by-case decisions, not top-down implementation.

How to make Britain safer and bring back justice:

• Root out the rot in policing

• Expand stop and search

• Unclog the courts and free up prison spaces with alternatives to jail time

V. Welfare

The invention of the welfare state is something to be proud of. A country that cares for people who are down on their luck, disadvantaged or struggling - and ensures everyone can live a safe and healthy life with dignity.

But today, the welfare state is too often having the opposite effect: it is pushing people into a life of indignity. It is locking people in their homes, keeping them out of work and depriving them of joy.

The theory of the welfare state is that the majority of us should pay a little to support the most vulnerable: those who are sick, or unemployed or disabled.

But that has collapsed. Now, more than half of Britons extract more from the system than they pay in.

A huge proportion of this is driven by the enormous surge in disability payments. 10% of Brits claim disability benefits. 44% of those claims are for mental health payments.

I want us to live in a compassionate and caring society, and I care more about mental health than most. But all of the evidence suggests we’re failing on all fronts: we’re nurturing a culture of dependence and disincentivising work and wellness.

Part of this is driven by a culture of over-diagnosis. Claims for anxiety, for example, have quadrupled in the last five years. It is completely normal to feel a moderate amount of anxiety and stress, in fact it’s healthy. But a decade plus of mental health campaigns has convinced people that any sensation of anxiety is a symptom of generalised anxiety disorder. This leads people to avoid their stressors, lock themselves in their homes and actually develop real mental illnesses.

If someone is ill - especially mentally ill - the very worst thing they can do is isolate themselves from society. The very best way to get out of the house, find a sense of purpose and build belonging is through meaningful work.

Too often our benefits system is telling people to sit at home and suffer and discouraging them from even trying work: and that’s worsening their mental and physical health.

Work creates dignity, purpose and independence. This rapid expansion of state support is depriving people of all of those things and too often making them sicker, not better.

So, what do we do?

I believe in a radical solution: a jobs guarantee.

Today, unemployment underpins the entire economic system. The government and the Bank of England have to deliberately ensure a proportion of the population is out of work, to put downward pressure on wages and inflation.

But that’s unfair: you are quite literally putting people in horrible circumstances for the sake of economic policy. A jobs guarantee is an alternative. Under a jobs guarantee, the state does not pay unemployment benefits (or, it pays some minimal version of them). Instead, it will offer everyone a suitable job that benefits the community: retaining their dignity and access to income while extracting benefit for the state.

A jobs guarantee could be extended to support people who currently claim disability benefits. A lot of people claiming disability benefits could work, and many want to work, but the current system locks them out. Private enterprises are too often not making the necessary adjustments for them. The state could quite literally invent jobs that work around them, helping craft roles that adapt to their abilities.

The Labour Government recently introduced a watered down version of a jobs guarantee: exclusively for young people, and that kicks in after 18 months of unemployment. This is a good pilot. I would like to see the scheme expanded to the entire population, and permanently.

In terms of cost, it wouldn’t cost much more than the current welfare system: we are already paying out billions to people. This would be a pivot to pay those billions as salaries, rather than as benefits. It’d uplift the community, help people gain the real experience and skills they need to grow their career and ensure everyone retains the dignity and independence that a good job gives.

It’d also support overall wage growth: creating a new wage floor that’s an alternative to the minimum wage: forcing businesses to create better conditions and higher wages to attract and retain staff.

In the long-term, the solution to the welfare state will almost certainly be Universal Basic Income funded by the wealth gains of AI and technology.

Every year, £175bn of social security spending goes to pensioners: that’s half of the welfare bill. That’s despite the fact this age group has a net worth almost 5 times that of 25-34 year olds. We are quite literally taking money from the least well-off age group and funnelling it towards the most well-off age group.

More than 3 million pensioners live in households with a net-worth of over £1 million. Yet those pensioners (including Alan Sugar, Andrew Marr, Judi Dench, Rod Stewart) get thousands of pounds worth of freebies: travel, TV, prescriptions, eye tests.

And of course there are many poor pensioners, but the rate of pensioner poverty is decreasing rapidly. In fact, today a child is twice as likely to be living in poverty than a pensioner is.

There is something we can do to break the intergenerational unfairness: we can scrap the triple lock. The triple lock is an expensive, unsustainable and unfair policy: and its costs have soared beyond what was ever expected.

The state pension already costs more than education, policing and defence combined. And over the next five decades, the triple lock will add another £80 billion to its cost.

It’s abundantly clear that young people today will not benefit from the triple lock. It’s quite possible they will see an extremely watered down state pension altogether. Maintaining the triple lock, knowing this unfairness is coming down the track, is almost unforgivable.

How to create routes to dignity, not dependence:

• End the age of diagnosis

• A jobs guarantee as the underpin of the welfare state

• Unlock the triple lock

VI. Health

Demand on the NHS is driven by three things: chronic pain, mental illness, and diabetes. One in four people are living with chronic pain; 8 million people are now taking antidepressants; 4.4 million people have diabetes. All of those numbers are rising.

And all of those are conditions which the NHS is poorly equipped to handle. You can’t put someone with poor mental health in a surgery bed and treat them. You can’t give someone with chronic pain a two-week run of medicine and send them on their way. You need to drive lifestyle changes, which takes lots of time and lots of contact. And all of these ailments would be better off if they were prevented in the first place, and prevention is something the NHS dedicates almost no time to.

From a patient perspective, it has always felt bizarre to me that there are essentially only two routes to getting care: via your GP, or via A&E. The government is trying to fix that, by giving pharmacists more powers for example, but it is all happening too slowly and too piecemeal. If I have a problem with my teeth, I book an appointment directly with a dentist. Why doesn’t the whole system work like that?

Instead, GPs act as gateways to specialists, and A&Es are the fallback when GPs are too slow. But if GPs were actually freed up to be holistic healthcare professionals we could finally start chipping away at the chronic illness crisis: the solution is healthcare professionals that look at the whole person, not one symptom at a time. That’s what GPs are supposed to do, but they have no time and they have too many patients.

In July, almost half a million referrals were made to mental health specialists. If the average GP appointment is 10 minutes long, that means GPs spent 75,000 hours seeing patients they then referred to a mental health specialist. Why don’t we trust these patients to refer themselves, instead of GPs spending 75,000 hours a month writing referrals for them?

GPs need to see far fewer people, and that means scrapping their role as a gatekeeper to services, so they can focus on their role as the primary community caregiver.

There has been a lot written about the crisis of beds. Too many beds are taken up by people who are fit enough to discharge from hospital, but still unwell enough to require care. They need to move into social care, but the broken system is leaving too many with nowhere to go.

That is an enormous problem that no government has been able to fix. But the government, too often, is also neglecting an important part of the solution: more beds. Hospital bosses have long assumed that demand will just rise to fill capacity: so adding more beds will not solve problems. But we have fewer hospital beds per capita than just about any other developed country. At any given moment, almost all of them are occupied. And there’s a sort of bed-inflation going on. As the population ages, 10 beds 2 decades ago are worth much less today.

A lack of beds is how you end up with the A&E horror stories of children being treated in corridors, on elderly patients hooked up to drips on waiting room chairs. In the medium and long-term, we have to sort out the routes in and out of care. But in the short-term, we should expand the capacity of emergency care with more beds.

There’s another short-term fix: digitisation. We are making good in-roads but not fast enough. The NHS is relying too much on outside developers and not enough on its in-house technologists.

What this creates is a crazy system where patients need multiple apps to do simple things. In order to get a blood test a couple of years ago, I had to use the NHS app to book a GP appointment, then an app called GP At Hand (which was then renamed eMed) to book the blood test, then an app called Patient Knows Best to get the results, and then back to the NHS app to book the follow-up appointment. I’m tech-savvy: how is someone who is not supposed to navigate this absurdity.

The NHS should invest whatever it takes in building a really great NHS app that does everything, rather than giving lots of money to tech companies to build little parts of the system.

This is just one part of the digitisation that needs to happen. Three quarters of NHS trusts still rely on handwritten and paper notes. Half of trusts are using scanners that are more than 10 years old (way past their recommended lifespan).

This is a problem across the government. Dominic Cummings recently revealed that, when writing the lockdown announcement speech, he had to take out his personal laptop - because the government laptops did not have any word processing software that allowed for collaborative editing.

In government, this clunkiness slows things down. In the NHS, it costs people their lives.

There’s low-hanging fruit here: two years ago, thousands of NHS computers were still running Windows XP.

But there’s also a big prize: the NHS should have access to world-class tech that is built in-house. As in much of government, a start-up mentality would help this enormously. Instead of procuring a system, why not acquire the company and all the talent within it?

How to get the NHS working again, and capture the gains of the quick wins:

• Reform GPs

• More beds

• Digitise faster with a start-up mentality

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Next week: Immigration, Rights and International Affairs

On immigration: open the door to anyone, or shut the door to everyone.

On energy: stop oil right now, or abandon net-zero and choke the planet.

On Brexit: Leave even harder or return, cap in hand, to the EU.

And on, and on, and on, and on.

But the biggest problems we face as a country will not be solved with extreme, one-sided approaches. They’ll be solved with compromise, compassion and moderation.

Centrists have a reputation for trying to please all sides. We’re the middle lane hoggers of politics: perpetually hedging our bets, taking our pick at a little of this and a little of that.

But centrism doesn’t have to be about sitting on the fence (after all, as I was once told, if you sit on the fence - you’ll get splinters in your arse).

I’ve taken to calling my political belief “radical centrism”: a centrism that recognises that Britain is broken and in urgent need of small-r reform. But that also recognises that the solution is not extremism, it’s not cruelty, and it’s not communism. It’s sensible, grown-up politics that’s focused on fixing.

And, above all, it’s optimistic. Populists thrive when things are broken. They win by denigrating us.

To me - that’s unpatriotic.

Radical centrism says that Britain is the greatest country in the world: we are blessed to live in a nation that’s defined by freedom, democracy and opportunity for everyone. Of course there is work to be done: but we do it by coming together, not tearing ourselves apart.

So, this is my definition of a radical centrist Britain. It’s a plan to Make Britain Great Again: one that actually delivers on its promises, and one where great means great for everyone.

Britain was built on democracy, fairness, liberty, equality and freedom. This is a plan that elevates those values, against a backdrop of a politics that too often tears them down.

I. Economy

Peter Mandelson was wrong to buddy up with Epstein, but he was right when he said he was “intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich as long as they pay their taxes”.

In order to drive growth, Britain must reward success. Millionaires and billionaires are leaving the country in droves, and that’s a problem.

The top 1% of earners in this country contribute 30% of our tax. That means a third of our NHS, a third of our police, a third of our schools: paid for by the top 1%. If they go, everything gets worse.

And yes, of course we should be focused on closing the gap between the richest and the poorest. But we do that by making everyone richer.

To make everyone richer, you must grow the economy.

The Tories too often try to grow the economy with tax cuts. The theory makes sense: people would work harder if they could keep more of their money. But the reality doesn’t match the theory.

I’d propose an alternative. Instead of cutting tax (a blunt knife), we should focus on smoothing the tax cliffs and traps.

Here’s an example: a parent making £99,000 a year gets offered a £5k payrise. She is better off rejecting the payrise, because once she crosses a £100k salary, she immediately loses access to childcare support, which is worth £6000 per year.

If we want to grow the economy, we need more people to make more money: not trap them with disincentives like this (and there are many more examples).

The radical centrist rejects the idea that tax cuts are the answer to economic growth. For a functioning, successful society we all need to pay our fair share. But we need to make work pay, and we can’t scare off the top earners that pay above and beyond for our services.

It’s not just about tax, though. The secret to growing the economy is to spend, spend, spend.

Just one example: the government’s own analysis finds that every £1 they spend on research and development brings £2 of private investment into the country. Personally, if I had a money doubling machine, I’d be loading every penny I had into it.

In the US, the space race increased GDP by 2%. Despite costing billions, the space race grew the economy. By some estimates, every $1 NASA spent led to $7 of economic return in the long-term. And without the huge national mission to reach space, we wouldn’t have GPS, semiconductors or MRIs (and all the businesses that have grown out of those technologies).

Westminster, meanwhile, thinks spending sucks. Consecutive governments have cut spending on HS2, nuclear power stations, housing and science. If we absorbed the short-term pain of spending more, we would quite literally have money printers that’d turbo-charge our economy.

Part of the reason we can’t make stuff is that planning needs urgent reform. We’ve got to get Britain building again.

Isambard Kingdom Brunel did not need planning permission to build Paddington Station or the Clifton Suspension Bridge or the Great Western Railway.

In 100 years, our ancestors will curse us for prioritising Doris’ countryside views and jumping spider habitats over infrastructure development. We’ve got to get the country building again: and that means reforming planning to make it easier. Planning should default to yes: not no.

How to fix the economy, make work pay and get Britain building:

• Smooth the tax cliffs and tax traps: make work pay

• Invest, invest, invest: increase government spending on transport, education, net-zero and R&D

• Reform planning so Britain can build, baby, build

II. Energy

Knowing that the space race grew the economy and improved lives on the ground begs the question: what is our 21st century space race that’ll bring a big economic boost and innovation?

It is surely net-zero. If we got serious in pursuit of net-zero, industry would suddenly whack up their spending in Britain on manufacturing and R&D, there would be thousands of new jobs and long-term benefits for our economy and energy security. It is nuts, and so short-sighted, that people don’t see this.

We have to prioritise net-zero because, one day, we will run out of fossil fuels. This isn’t a theory, this is simply a fact. We might not run out in my lifetime, maybe we won’t even run out in my grandchildren’s lifetimes. But we will run out eventually.

So then the question becomes - do you want Britain to be caught on the back-foot, or the front-foot?

Should future Britons thank us for our foresight and investment, or curse us for leaving them in the lurch?

China’s economy has gone gangbusters because they invested in the technology underpinning net-zero. We could do the same.

Energy creation relies on spinning turbines and, as of today, we do that in two ways. Firstly, we burn a pile of shit to create steam that spins the turbine. Secondly, we build giant turbines in windy places so that the wind spins the turbine.

There is a third way. A lump of coal boils a kettle. A spin of a wind turbine powers a home for almost a day. A single pellet of uranium, the size of a 5p coin, will power a home for four months.

Nuclear power is like a miracle. Nuclear power stations churn out energy cheaply, efficiently and cleanly. Every day, we should shake our fists at past Prime Ministers for not starting construction on a bunch of nuclear power stations. But we can turn the tide on that and start building nuclear power stations today.

Whether it’s nuclear or wind, Britain needs to generate more of our own energy. Generating more energy is good for our economy, good for our environment and good for bills. But it’s also good for our security.

Today, we import about 40% of our energy. This sucks: not only does it cost us more (because we’re paying tariffs, importation costs and so on) - but also it’s terrible for our ability to be truly independent.

Germany used to depend on Russia for around a third of its energy. When Putin invaded Ukraine, Russia was able to effectively blackmail Germany by threatening to cut their power if the Germans retaliated in any way.

We shouldn’t be beholden to any foreign powers to keep the lights on. Net-zero represents energy independence: which grants us security and freedom for the long-term.

How to secure our energy supply, create growth and ensure our grandkids thank us:

• Build nuclear power stations: lots of them

• Push towards energy independence: generate enough at home to power the nation

• Net-zero as a national mission: to create jobs and wealth

III. Education

PISA - the Programme for International Student Assessment - is a global assessment of 15-year-olds from around the world: the benchmark for how well kids are doing compared to the rest of the world.

And England does pretty well: we’re the 11th top performing country for maths, and 13th for both reading and science. Another study, PIRLS, puts us at number one in the West for reading.

The world’s best universities are also in the UK, so we’re really punching above our weight considering our size and population.

That’s no reason to rest on our laurels, though.

The AI age will fundamentally disrupt what it means to learn and work, and education needs to keep pace. That means the time is now to prioritise lifelong learning. A single shot of learning is not enough any more to keep pace with a rapidly changing world.

If you were born in 1987, ICT lessons were about floppy disks and typing. If you were born in 1997, like me, ICT lessons were about word processing and spreadsheets. If you were born in 1998, one year later when the curriculum changed, ICT lessons consisted of coding and computer science. And today, kids are learning about AI and social media.

Yet all of these people are together in the workplace, using the same computers and devices with very different educational backgrounds. We need to create more opportunities for people to continuously learn throughout their lives. It’s important for their career, their economic contribution, and even for their quality of life. After all, learning makes life better and more interesting.

In the AI age, this matters more than ever. As the job market shifts, we need to ensure everyone can keep pace with the skills that will be required. For some people, that’ll mean shifting to vocational or care-based skills that robots can’t replace. As of today, a translator that wants to become a plumber or therapist or lawyer (jobs urgently in demand in our economy) will need to pay out of her own pocket to train.

We need a lifelong learning entitlement, similar to a student loan, that enables people to access education at any stage of life. And we need a huge expansion of vocational, on-the-job training so people can learn while they earn. In a changing economy, this shift will be vital: so much so that I believe the government should supplement the salary of on-the-job learners, regardless of age.

Lifelong learning is, obviously, important - but nothing matters more than the education you get as a young person. Yet not every young person is getting an equal shot at school.

Private schools and grammar schools serve to entrench inequality rather than bridge it. They drain talent and resource from the state system and remove incentives to make every school exceptional.

Faith schools and gendered schools are a bizarre relic of a bygone age that do nothing to support an integrated, well-rounded society. We recognised long ago that segregation was bad for everyone: it makes no sense that we haven’t extended that recognition to children and schools.

This essay is about radical centrism, so let’s be radical: I would abolish and ban all forms of school other than state schools. No more grammar schools, no more private schools, no more faith schools. Just free, open state schools that welcome all children, regardless of wealth, belief, gender or ability. There are incredible facilities and incredible teachers in this country that are being locked away from young people that would really benefit from them. And every child would benefit from meeting peers from all walks of life.

So let’s scrap them all, and focus on building a world-leading state education system.

There are a million and one more reforms that could make classrooms and learning better. Reducing the burden of exams, more integrative and inter-disciplinary courses, a crackdown on bad behaviour in classrooms and much, much better equipped SEND schools.

But teachers have the largest impact on learners, more so than any curriculum or top-down initiative. Great teachers make the biggest difference to the quality of learning.

One of the biggest ways to improve the quality of teaching is to pay teachers more. Of course this is expensive, but it’s the only way to attract the most talented people into the profession. Higher salaries will attract teachers with a higher level of qualification (particularly in pedagogy) and push them towards ongoing professional development.

We need to rejig the perverse incentive structure whereby the best teachers are taken out of the classroom and promoted to office-based roles.

The best teachers should not find that their salaries hit a ceiling because they want to stay in the classroom: there should be routes to make good money both in the classroom and in the office. There have been countless proposals for ‘expert teachers’: higher paid, in-classroom teachers.

And when you pay higher salaries, you can demand more.

Education is perhaps one of the most important parts of any society and yet too often we are letting unions set the rules: watering down Ofsted inspections, making it harder to fire bad teachers, blocking performance bonuses.

Fairness should not come at the expense of excellence. We should hold schools and teachers to really high standards: but we should give them a ton of money to reflect their essential role in society, just as we do with doctors or judges.

How to harness education for growth and give our kids the best start in life:

• Expansion of vocational and lifelong education via a lifelong learning entitlement and salary supplements for on-the-job learners.

• Scrap all non-state schools

• Empower teachers to be great by paying them lots of money

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Read Part Two: Crime, Welfare, Health