As Lord Hannan himself pointed out on a recent Economic Affairs podcast: “Two clicks can verify if [something] is true... and yet nobody wants to do those two clicks. They’d rather nurse their grudges.”

There is no ‘honest misunderstanding’ anymore, just people clinging to their prejudices. This is most exemplified in the wilful ignorance of senior political figures: “Bond Markets will have to fall into line.” It’s one thing when language like this is uttered by some bewildered backbencher; it’s another when you have incoming political leadership (Burnham et al.); stewards of this nation; throwing around pseudo-economic platitudes such as ‘good growth’ as serious policy points. How in God’s good name is this meant to encourage or entice investors? At a time when external investment is at an alarming low, companies are fleeing the London Stock Exchange, further prospect of tax hikes are already scaring investors, and now those same investors are worried that their ‘growth’ might not be deemed the right type; how does this inspire confidence?

For a man preaching ‘Manchesterism’ as the beacon to follow through Britain’s current Dark Night of the Soul, Burnham seems to conveniently leave out the importance of neo-liberalism in much of its success. As Maxwell Marlow from the Adam Smith Institute pointed out on his recent appearance on Radio 4, “What we’ve seen in Manchester is quite a lot of Neo-Liberalism. Removing a lot of regulations and obligations on developers, to build up the amazing skyline Manchester has now. He has removed much of the social housing requirements, the affordable-housing requirements; he has worked very closely with the private sector.”

Public ownership costs, or indeed the consequences of ‘greater public control’, are not being fully discussed. No one is thinking about the secondary effects of all of this. These are not long-term solutions, but band-aids on an already gaping wound. Reindustrialisation is being tossed about by figures (from most parties) as some sort of definitive answer to all our woes. The government has now fully nationalised British Steel, which, according to the National Audit Office, is already costing British Taxpayers £1.3m per day. It all feels a bit Groundhog Day?

Luckily, the Overton Window is starting to shift. It is most notable when you are witnessing bedfellows as strange as Tony Blair, claiming ‘the state is too big.’ There is now a huge opportunity for someone with the chutzpah to grab the bull by the horns and really push this message to the masses.

Now more than ever we need a bold vision. Many voted for Brexit with the vision of a deregulated Britain, a thriving economy free from the shackles of European overreach; one which could capitalise on our already comparative advantage of the services industry. Sadly, this never materialised the way many of us foresaw. But one can still hope that the baton can be picked up by those with the political will and daring to do so.

It’s important to note that London’s status is not fixed. Dubai was little more than a desert 50 years ago. Singapore was little more than a backwater. Cultural capital is important, but it’s not enough to ensure long-term prosperity.

Yes, stagnation is not a problem unique to this country. It’s an existential question nearly all Western democracies are currently racing to answer. But if we give up on growth, we give up on Britain. I am no economist and never claim to be; but anyone who can see past their own hubris should be able to realise the economic miracle that is the city of London. We need to build on this. Not try and rewire it. It’s about trust, simple as that. As a colleague from the IEA recently remarked to me - “there’s a reason why no one buys Zimbabwean bonds...”

The state is not merely underperforming; it is structurally imbalanced. If we fail to address this properly, we will prolong the current malaise we are in and deepen the risk that this becomes Britain’s century of humiliation. We have sold the family silver and are about to tear out the copper piping too.

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Robert Dalton is an MA student of Modern History at King's College London, a former Conservative Councillor Candidate, and an incoming intern at the Institute of Economic Affairs.

After just a few days, the Burnham government looks a circus.

With weary inevitability, the reshuffle has created resentment and voices off, with rumours of a Starmerite parliamentary faction establishing itself. Reducing the cap on bus fares is a leading announcement, alongside about 86p a week off energy. The new Defence Secretary has rightly apologised when caught making light of early prisoner release. Putting Ed Miliband in the Foreign Office is a smart move I predicted – to get him out of the country so he can’t wind up his colleagues. And we have had our first U-turn: the personal allowance won’t be going up after all.

Some of the new front bench remains tainted by recent scandal. Angela Rayner returns to Cabinet with the housing brief, a year after resigning over an underpaid tax bill on her own flat. Louise Haigh, sacked by Starmer after a fraud conviction came to light, returns as First Secretary of State and effectively deputy prime minister, with a responsibility for ethics.

It is a familiar pattern: attractive but ill-considered and damaging ideas, sometimes rolled back, familiar characters return with a fresh chance to fail, ego over public service and a manifest belief governing is easy.

This is the context in which they seek to further their ideas for an “active state”: more public spending, more official control, more direction of the economy, and more power for mayors and ministers over people freely cooperating.

Read more

Introduction

This is published as I speak at CPAC GB on surveillance and civil liberties. In arguing there is a serious problem and we need to change our approach, I will be considering AI-enabled surveillance from the state’s point of view.

To flesh that out, I had Perplexity AI generate a fictional memo from the Chief of MI6 to the new Prime Minister. Using open sources, it explains what MI6 is about and that AI-enabled surveillance in target countries is now so capable it has shattered the two pillars of espionage: cover and tradecraft. In those countries, to hide is to stand out.

This memo is fictional but its open sources are real. They are set out in the document linked below. The memo is intended to illuminate the power of total surveillance in combination with AI. That these documents were AI-generated further illustrates the power of that technology.

My interest began under the last Labour government. I thought their reaction to terrorism – including the Iraq war, alleged complicity in extraordinary rendition, draconian new powers and rising surveillance – was a repudiation of that for which our institutions are supposed to stand: freedom under law.

Some of my prior work:

• Speech on the National Security Act, 6 June 2022.

• Speech on Extraordinary Rendition, moving amendments, 7 March 2013. See also Account Rendered: Extraordinary Rendition and Britain’s Role.

• Notes and articles on stevebaker.info, such as 2008 and 2009. Follow the tags on the articles for more.

For the avoidance of doubt, there is no privileged information in this memo. There have been some helpful reforms over the years: this article is not about them.

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The following fictional memo was generated by Perplexity AI entirely from open sources which are provided in the linked document. My light edits omitted the Chief’s name – which did not seem right to include – plus a paragraph which was in error on Burnham’s pro-EU record and some trivial edits for style.

• The fictional memo from C to our new Prime Minister

• Sources

The memo – fictional from open sources

FICTIONAL UK EYES ONLY (ETC)

SECRET INTELLIGENCE SERVICE
85 VAUXHALL CROSS, LONDON SE1 2JH

TO: The Rt Hon Andy Burnham MP, Prime Minister
FROM: Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service
DATE: 20 July 2026
REFERENCE: SIS/C/PM/2026/001
CLASSIFICATION: FICTIONAL
COPY TO: Cabinet Secretary [by hand only]
SUBJECT: The State of the Service: Mission, Priorities, and the Challenge of the Age

These notes accompany the classified oral briefing given to the Prime Minister by the Chief and the Director General of MI5 on the morning of his first day in office. They are intended as a reference document and should be read in conjunction with the Joint Intelligence Committee’s current assessment of the threat picture, already delivered separately. They are drafted by the Chief personally and reflect her institutional assessment as well as her professional judgment.

This document is not to be minuted, summarised, reproduced, or retained beyond the Prime Minister’s personal safe. It is provided under the authority of the Intelligence Services Act 1994.

PART ONE: WHAT THE SERVICE IS TRYING TO ACHIEVE

1.1 The Core Purpose

The Secret Intelligence Service obtains and provides intelligence on the capabilities, intentions, and activities of people and organisations outside the United Kingdom where this is necessary in the interests of national security, the economic well-being of the United Kingdom, or in support of the prevention and detection of serious crime. That statutory remit has not changed since 1994. The world it operates in has.

The mission resolves, in practice, into five collection priorities.

Hostile state activity. Foreign intelligence services — principally, but not exclusively, those of Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea — are conducting a sustained range of operations against British interests. These include espionage against government, defence, and commercial targets; sabotage of critical infrastructure; political interference and disinformation; assassination and transnational repression against diaspora communities; and the corruption of British public life through financial flows. The National Security Act 2023 has at last provided a modern legal framework to disrupt and prosecute such activity. The Act’s provisions replace legislation that was designed for the world of early twentieth-century Germany, and the improvement is real.

Counter-terrorism. The threat from Islamist terrorism has not diminished; it has metastasised. State sponsorship of terrorism — particularly by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which is now operationally indistinguishable from a foreign intelligence service in its methodology — requires treatment under both counter-terrorism and state threat frameworks simultaneously.

Counter-proliferation. The Service maintains collection against programmes to develop or acquire weapons of mass destruction. The overlap with hostile state activity has grown acute: Russia’s nuclear signalling during the Ukraine conflict and Iran’s uranium enrichment programme both require intelligence collection that spans traditional collection categories.

Economic and technological intelligence. The theft of trade secrets — in artificial intelligence, advanced manufacturing, civil nuclear technology, defence systems, and clean energy — is now the primary mechanism through which hostile states seek to close technological gaps with the West by means other than legitimate competition. This is not corporate espionage in the traditional sense. It is a strategic campaign, state-directed and generationally planned.

Strategic warning. The Prime Minister will, on occasion, need to know what is being decided in adversary capitals before its effects are felt. That requires sources at or close to the point of decision-making. No technical system — however capable — provides this.

1.2 What the Service Does, and Why Human Judgment Cannot Be Replaced

Soon after I took up this appointment, I spoke publicly about what I believe defines this organisation. I will not pretend that a classified memorandum requires different language: I believe it because it is true.

This Service operates through human beings — case officers who build relationships of trust with people in difficult places, and the agents those people become. An agent is someone who chooses, at personal risk, to share with us what they know. They may be motivated by belief in democratic values, by money, by grievance, or by a calculation that the world will be safer if they help. Whatever their motivation, the relationship with a British intelligence officer is the thing that sustains them. That relationship demands time, language, cultural immersion, patience, and — above all — integrity. The moment a source believes we will not protect them, the intelligence stops.

I have spent a career recruiting and running agents in hostile environments. I have sat in rooms with terrorists who chose to tell us where the bomb was because they trusted that we would act on it without destroying them in the process. I have worked with proliferators who were willing to betray their programmes because they feared, in the end, what those programmes would do to their own children. These are not abstractions. They are the work.

I raise this because the Prime Minister will encounter, very early in office, arguments that artificial intelligence has either made this kind of intelligence collection redundant or, alternatively, has made it so dangerously visible as to be no longer viable. Neither proposition is correct. What artificial intelligence has done is make human intelligence collection dramatically more expensive, more technically demanding, and more dangerous — particularly in the target environments that matter most. The implications are set out in Part Two.

PART TWO: THE OBSTACLES — A TECHNOLOGICAL RUPTURE WITHOUT PRECEDENT

2.1 The Collapse of Cover

I want to be direct with the Prime Minister about something that is not widely understood outside the intelligence community, and that my predecessor Richard Moore and I have both addressed in public, precisely because the severity of it requires acknowledgement at the level of political principal.

The two operational pillars on which covert human intelligence rests are cover — the ability to conceal who an officer is — and tradecraft— the ability to conceal what an officer is doing. Modern AI-enabled surveillance has placed both under sustained attack. In the operational environments where intelligence collection matters most — China, Russia, Iran — the two pillars have been, in practical terms, shattered.

China operates more than 700 million networked surveillance cameras. Russia is integrating its camera feeds into a unified national recognition network, including facial recognition across Moscow’s metro system. Iran has imported Chinese-manufactured AI surveillance systems, supplied by at least eight Chinese companies, and deploys them against dissidents, journalists, and foreign intelligence personnel alike. In each of these environments, an intelligence officer moving through public space is, in principle, continuously identified, located, and tracked.

The biometric systems now in use are not defeated by conventional disguise. Systems of the FarSight class — developed under DARPA’s BRIAR programme — achieve over 88 percent identification accuracy by fusing facial, body, and gait biometrics from elevated or long-range platforms, including drones, even when the face is partially obscured. Gait recognition alone achieves 94 percent accuracy in leading commercial deployments. An operative who has worked in a target country before can be identified by the way they walk.

Data aggregation amplifies the biometric threat. An adversary service that acquires a single photograph of a case officer meeting an asset can, using AI systems operating against historical surveillance archives, reconstruct that officer’s global movements over the preceding decade. The Salisbury attack demonstrated this capacity under adversarial conditions: British investigators manually traced the GRU hit team through flight manifests, hotel records, and payment data. A modern AI system would have accomplished the same task in a fraction of the time.

2.2 The Anomaly Paradox

I must address a counterintuitive dimension of the surveillance problem that has significant implications for how the Service operates.

AI anomaly-detection systems function by identifying deviations from expected patterns in large data sets. The natural instinct of an experienced intelligence officer — to minimise digital exposure, restrict communications, leave the smallest possible trace — now risks triggering precisely the detection it is designed to prevent.

A mobile telephone that is active only briefly, for specific communications, is statistically anomalous. An individual with no consistent social media presence, no purchasing patterns, and no digital trail reads, to a machine-learning system, as someone deliberately evading observation — which is, of course, exactly what such a person is. As one former CIA officer observed, the harder one tries to hide, the more one stands out.

The operational response is not straightforward. Officers now actively maintain cover digital lives: social media presences, purchasing patterns, regular communications consistent with their declared identity. This is not a metaphor for tradecraft. It is a literal additional operational task, requiring time, resource, and — in some cases — AI-assisted management of synthetic identity data. We are, in effect, now required to manufacture visible normality as a security measure. The older tradition of silence and invisibility has become, in many environments, a liability rather than an asset.

2.3 The Destruction of the Traditional Legend

A cover identity is, in intelligence parlance, a “legend”: a biographical backstory supported by documentation. For most of the Service’s history, a serviceable legend required a passport, a plausible cover story, and the ability to sustain it under questioning. That is no longer sufficient.

An immigration officer with a smartphone can check a claimed address on a mapping application, query corporate registries, search social media, and compare a face against open-source databases — in the time it takes to process a boarding card. Any hesitation, inconsistency, or absence in the legend’s digital record may be fatal to the operation — and, in some environments, to the officer.

The American community concluded in the early 2010s that improvised front companies and shallow legends had become operationally “untenable under modern scrutiny.” The response has been a shift towards deep non-official cover: operatives embedded, for periods of years, in genuine commercial organisations, academic institutions, or NGOs, with cover employment generating real records — tax filings, email chains, professional networks, publication histories. In some programmes, AI-managed persona maintenance — software that curates the synthetic individual’s online life automatically — is used to sustain a legend without continuous human input.

Russia has invested in this problem for decades. A 2025 investigation into Russian “illegal” operations found that at least nine GRU officers were operating under fabricated Brazilian identities, supported by birth records planted in civil registries as far back as the 1980s, with no detectable forensic signs of tampering. The documents were physically indistinguishable from authentic records. A senior Brazilian investigator confirmed: “The ink is normal. The page is okay. There is no tampering of the books at all.” The implication for the Service is that our own adversaries are operating at a level of identity fabrication that is currently ahead of AI-based verification methods. We cannot assume this advantage will persist.

2.4 Deepfakes and Identity Warfare

The Prime Minister should be briefed separately on the broader national security implications of AI-generated synthetic media. For present purposes, I note the following operational realities.

Real-time face-swapping and voice cloning are achievable today at a level of fidelity that defeats unaided human judgment. These capabilities have already been weaponised in intelligence contexts: to fabricate compromising material against officers and officials, to impersonate senior figures in order to extract information or authorise actions, and to create synthetic identities credible enough to pass employment screening at sensitive organisations.

For the Service, the risk is specific: an adversary could fabricate plausible kompromat against a case officer — footage purporting to show criminality, ideological sympathy with a hostile power, or personal conduct incompatible with continued employment — and use this, not necessarily for blackmail, but to destroy an operational relationship and potentially expose a source. The fabrication does not need to be believed indefinitely. It needs only to create sufficient doubt, for long enough, to cause irreversible operational damage.

This is not theoretical. The capability exists. I am satisfied that our current detection tools are adequate. I am not satisfied that this will remain true as generation and detection continue to develop in an arms race whose trajectory favours the attacker.

2.5 The Threat Environment Has Changed Shape

There are three structural features of the current threat landscape that the Prime Minister should hold in mind.

First, the threat is broad. The National Security Act 2023 was explicit: while only a small number of states display the full range of hostile intelligence capabilities and the willingness to use them comprehensively, a significantly larger number have both the capability and the intent to conduct some form of hostile activity against the United Kingdom. Formally friendly states conduct economic espionage against British institutions. States we regard as neutral are running influence operations in British political discourse. This is the environment, not a departure from it.

Second, the threat is diffuse. The distinction between state intelligence operations and well-resourced criminal tradecraft is eroding at speed. AI systems can now automate between 80 and 90 percent of a cyber intrusion attack lifecycle — reconnaissance, vulnerability mapping, penetration, and exfiltration — autonomously. In 2025, a fully autonomous AI penetration testing agent reached the number-one position on HackerOne, the world’s largest bug-bounty platform, operating as a competitive rather than experimental system. The capability gap that once separated nation-state from criminal tradecraft is closing. Attribution is becoming harder. The attribution problem directly affects our ability to trigger the legal and political responses that disruption requires.

Third, and most importantly for a new government: the most significant operational shift of the past five years has been from classic overseas collection towards influence and interference operations inside the United Kingdom itself. The 2020 Intelligence and Security Committee Russia Report established, with care and credibility, that successive governments had been slow to recognise and respond to this. I note it here not as reproach to predecessors but as a forward commitment: this Service intends to be ahead of this threat, not behind it.

2.6 The Quantum Horizon

Within ten to fifteen years — possibly sooner — cryptographically relevant quantum computers will be capable of breaking the encryption that currently protects classified communications. The Cloud Security Alliance projects this capability by approximately 2030.

Adversary services operating on a “harvest now, decrypt later” doctrine are already intercepting and archiving encrypted intelligence traffic in anticipation of future quantum capability. For intelligence operations whose sensitivity will endure for decades — running agents whose identities must be protected indefinitely — this is not a future risk. It is a present one.

The United States has already mandated a transition to post-quantum cryptographic standards (NIST ML-KEM, ML-DSA, SLH-DSA) across relevant product categories. CISA issued procurement guidance requiring PQC in available categories in January 2026. I am seeking from the Prime Minister his support for an equivalent mandate across the UK intelligence community, and — through the appropriate channels — across the Five Eyes architecture.

PART THREE: THE ALLIANCE ARCHITECTURE AND WHAT A NEW GOVERNMENT NEEDS TO UNDERSTAND

The intelligence relationship with the United States — formalised through UKUSA and the Five Eyes framework — is the most operationally valuable bilateral relationship this Service holds. Our access to American technical collection, AI-enabled analytical systems, and the breadth of the wider intelligence community network is not replicable from British resources alone. It is also a relationship that functions, in practice, partly through personal relationships at senior official level.

The Prime Minister comes to office with limited prior engagement with the American national security establishment, which is largely the natural consequence of his previous role. This is not unusual for an incoming Prime Minister and is readily addressable. I would recommend early personal engagement — at a level below the formal bilateral summit — with CIA Director and, if possible, the Director of National Intelligence. I am happy to facilitate introductions through appropriate channels.

3.2 The European Intelligence Architecture

The United Kingdom’s departure from the European Union created structural gaps in intelligence-sharing arrangements, particularly in counter-terrorism and organised crime. Bilateral liaison relationships with the major European services — BND, DGSE, AIVD, BfV, AISI — have compensated substantially, and in several areas these bilateral channels are operationally more effective than the formal EU structures they supplement.

I note, however, that the Foreign Influence Registration Scheme created by the National Security Act 2023 depends, for its full effectiveness, on close information exchange with European counterparts about known and suspected foreign-directed operatives. The current architecture for this exchange is improvised. A more systematic arrangement would improve operational outcomes. This requires Foreign Secretary engagement and, ultimately, a political decision about the degree of institutional proximity to EU intelligence-sharing mechanisms that the Government wishes to maintain.

3.3 Relationships with Difficult Partners

Some of the most operationally valuable intelligence relationships available to the United Kingdom are with services whose governments pursue policies that a British government committed to human rights values will find uncomfortable. I have raised this with predecessors and I raise it with the present Prime Minister for a simple reason: intelligence liaison does not always align with diplomatic virtue signalling, and the Government should understand in advance where those tensions lie. Decisions on these relationships require the Prime Minister’s personal engagement in some cases. Guidance on the Government’s risk appetite in this area is sought early.

PART FOUR: WHAT IS NEEDED FROM THE PRIME MINISTER

The Service has benefited from investment under previous governments. It requires continued and, in several areas, increased investment to maintain its operational edge. The specific budget submission is held separately. I draw the Prime Minister’s attention to three areas where the gap between current resource and operational requirement is widest.

Deep non-official cover operations require years of preparatory investment per officer. The synthetic identity infrastructure, cover employment arrangements, and AI-assisted legend management that the current surveillance environment demands are significantly more expensive than traditional cover arrangements. Our current programme is not at the scale the threat environment warrants.

Quantum migration — the transition to post-quantum cryptographic standards across communications infrastructure — requires dedicated capital investment. The technical work can proceed in parallel with the political mandate, but it requires both.

AI capability development. My December 2025 speech set out this Service’s commitment to mastery of technology as a core competence. AI is a domain in which we intend to excel. Our officers will become as fluent in Python as in foreign languages. This is not aspiration. It is operational necessity. It requires investment in both technology and the people who understand it.

4.2 Legislative Clarity

The Covert Human Intelligence Sources (Criminal Conduct) Act 2021 provides a framework for authorising criminal conduct by human sources. It does not adequately address AI-assisted recruitment operations, the deployment of synthetic digital personas as sources or cover identities, or data-poisoning operations as counter-intelligence instruments. The law has not kept pace with the operational environment. I am seeking Attorney General engagement and, ultimately, either primary legislation or a significantly revised code of practice.

The National Security Act 2023’s Foreign Influence Registration Scheme is underused. The registration and publication architecture exists. The will to designate specific foreign powers under the Act’s enhanced tier has been cautious. I would welcome an early conversation with the Prime Minister and the Security Minister about how aggressively the Government intends to use this tool, because the decision affects our operational approach as well as our public posture.

4.3 Political Engagement

Intelligence is only as useful as the decisions it enables. I would respectfully make two requests.

The first is that the Prime Minister engages personally and seriously with the intelligence product he receives — not simply as a briefing ritual, but as operational input. Some of what this Service will provide will be uncomfortable. Some will challenge assumptions about states or relationships the Government has invested in publicly. The intelligence is not adjusted to suit policy preferences.

The second is personal. The Prime Minister is a person of strong democratic instincts, rooted in public service and accountability. So am I. This Service operates, as I have said publicly, with accountability and trust as foundations, not constraints. We will be transparent with Parliament through the Intelligence and Security Committee. We will be honest with our oversight structures. We expect, in return, that the political decisions made on the basis of our product are made with integrity and that when operational requirements and political preferences collide — as they will — the Prime Minister tells us, so that we can advise him properly. Silence in those moments creates operational risk.

CLOSING NOTE

The world described in this memorandum is, I am aware, darker than a new administration wishes to contemplate in its first days. I do not write it to discourage or to perform institutional authority. I write it because the Prime Minister deserves an honest account of what this Service faces, and because the choices made in the next eighteen months — on resource, on law, on alliance management, on quantum security, and on how aggressively to use the legal tools already in place — will shape whether this Service can continue to operate effectively in a world where surveillance is ubiquitous and the cost of failure is measured in lives.

Human intelligence will not be replaced by artificial intelligence. The ability to listen to a human being who has decided to trust us — to hear what is really driving events, beyond what algorithms can read from behaviour and metadata — is, I believe, the most distinctive and irreplaceable contribution this Service makes. It is what keeps us a very human agency in a world that is rapidly becoming less so.

I am at the Prime Minister’s disposal.

Chief, Secret Intelligence Service (’C’)
Secret Intelligence Service, 85 Vauxhall Cross, London SE1

ENDS

I must start my debut on this Substack by speaking of my delight in joining FFF and my gratitude to both Steve and Harry for bringing me on board to this important project.

Because this is an important project. Regrettably, there are only very few of us who are actively interested in cultivating the environment that is necessary for freedom to flourish, and there are even fewer of us who are prepared to dedicate their professional careers to the pursuit of it.

There are very few people who will say they do not support freedom. To be explicitly anti-freedom puts you on the echelons of the political spectrum and far outside the Overton Window. Even the most repugnant movements in the world like to style themselves as “freedom fighters”. But if everyone is truly in favour of freedom, how can it be that we are losing?

The answer, of course, is that the word itself and what freedom means in modern society can be, and certainly has been, twisted to advance whatever political agenda the politician exulting the word supports. This is not a particularly new phenomenon. As with an awful lot of political discourse that reaches Britain and Europe, it came from a cold we caught from the other side of the Atlantic. Even when governments promise freedom, they rarely follow through. When Sir Keir Starmer became Prime Minister, he promised a government that would “tread more lightly” on our lives. In other words, a freer society. I do not need to go into the details to say that we have seen nothing of the sort.

There are very few, if any, modern states in which the concept of freedom is more integrated than the US. This has meant that every cause since its foundation has had to unite itself with the concept of freedom. Even the cause of slavery, an inherently anti-freedom cause, had to proclaim itself as a movement concerned with the rights of states. This was followed by Theodore Roosevelt and the progressives defending freedom by intervening in the market to break up monopolies.

For us, though, in 2026 Britain, the biggest corruption of the word freedom that impacts us to this day took place in 1933. Once again in America, the false flag of freedom was waved by Franklin Roosevelt. This time though, he didn’t just steal the word freedom from us, he took the word liberal as well.

FDR masquerading as a liberal was able to implement an incredibly socialist state that the real liberals in America have spent all their time in the 90 years since trying to undo. He was able to create a welfare state, raise extortionate taxation, and plan large swathes of the American economy by completely reversing the claim integral to classical liberalism; he was able to convince people that the state was benevolent and would free people from the oppression of private corporations. Freedom from the state, freedom to live one’s own life in the pursuit of happiness, became freedom from capitalism.

It is this idea of freedom, FDR’s idea of freedom, which remains prevalent in Britain and much of the West today. Greedy corporations are the root of misery and poverty, and it is up to the nanny state to free us from them, and even more scarily, free us from ourselves. The state came to see freedom not as a concept to be defined internally by the individual, but one to be defined by benevolent bureaucrats and philanthropic politicians.

As classical liberals, the real liberals, the heirs to Locke and Mill, we must once and for all put an end to this bastardisation of our values. We must reclaim freedom for its true meaning. We must reclaim the value of liberty. We must reclaim the concept of liberalism. And we have to win - no alternative leaves society standing. That is why I am proud to be fighting for a free future.

Despair is the conclusion of fools.
– Benjamin Disraeli

Once again, it is officially acknowledged that, on current policies, UK public debt is on an unsustainable upward path over the coming decades. In plain language, that will mean a long period of chronic default on important obligations. See the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) Fiscal Risks and Sustainability Report, July 2026.

As ever, a picture tells a thousand words – spending soars, revenue stagnates and debt runs to implausible levels:

Read the Executive Summary or the more helpful CapX article which is not burdened with official niceties, Britain is going bankrupt in slow motion:

The OBR report highlights the challenges an ageing population poses for the UK: sooner or later, taxes rise, spending falls or growth accelerates – duck all three, and we go bankrupt. How painful the correction turns out to be remains a political choice.

As both the OBR and CapX point out, it is not too late to do something about this looming disaster. And the sooner we act, the less painful it will be.

Debt interest is already about £110 billion a year, compared to health (£204 billion), education (£95 billion) and defence (£39 billion): how long can this go on?

How bad is it, really?

The situation and the looming consequences are grave indeed.

The problems we face cannot be solved by cutting working age welfare benefits or reducing immigration, though both must be done. The report is clear about the origin of our problems: age-related spending. As our population ages:

• Health spending is projected to rise from 8% of GDP in 2030-31 to 13% of GDP in 2075-76.

• Adult social care spending is projected to rise from 1.2% of GDP in 2030-31 to 1.8% of GDP by 2075-76

• State pension spending is projected to rise from 5% of GDP to around 9% of GDP.

• Other welfare spending is projected to remain relatively stable.

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Having fewer children reduces education spending, tragically. Net Zero’s impact on fuel duty reduces receipts.

The OBR says, with typical understatement:

“if these paths [of debt] did start to materialise, then it is almost certain that governments would have to take action to tighten fiscal policy to restore sustainability at some point.”

They illustrate the action needed by saying the cut needed by 2030-31 would be the entire education budget.

Of course children cannot go uneducated, that’s why a government will have to cut spending where it hurts: pensions, healthcare, social care. It could mean real harm to people who obviously cannot return to work.

I think avoiding those painful cuts is why 14 years of Conservative government left our national defence and our justice system scandalously underfunded: our Chancellors and Prime Ministers cut what would not be immediately noticed.

The OBR conclude,

unsustainable fiscal outcomes that may not occur for some years are today’s challenge not tomorrow’s

What is to be done?

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Every year, Britain’s public spaces sprout more covered faces, and it is a grim trend to watch. The other day, I watched a mother in a full niqab walking with her young daughter. The girl’s hair blew in the wind, her smile wide and carefree. It was a poignant sight because I knew that one day, she will likely be told to hide that smile forever. Children copy their parents; what they see every day becomes their baseline. But covering your face in public is not normal. Not in Britain. It isn’t even normal in much of the Islamic world, where nations like Tunisia and Turkey have restricted full veils in public spaces.

The social contract is simple: show your face if you want to be a full participant in British society. This rule must apply across the board, to youths prowling the high street in balaclavas just as much as to religious fundamentalists or political performance artists.

The most urgent argument for a ban is basic public safety. Criminals cover their faces because anonymity breeds impunity. Yassin Omar, one of the failed 7/7 bombers, famously attempted to evade capture disguised in a burqa. Today, the problem is more mundane but entirely pervasive. Fare-dodgers openly ride the Tube in balaclavas to trick facial-recognition CCTV. Shoplifters brazenly loot supermarkets while security guards stand by, their identities safely hidden behind Lycra masks. We already accept restrictions on face coverings in specific settings; petrol stations and banks routinely ban motorcycle helmets because concealment makes robbery easy. The underlying principle is clear: once you step into shared public space, you must show who you are.

This is no longer just a hypothetical issue for the high street; it is actively knocking on the doors of our democracy. Consider the bizarre political circus unfolding in Clacton, where Nigel Farage has engineered a sudden by-election. Because the mainstream political parties have chosen to boycott the contest, the highest-profile challenger left on the ballot is Count Binface, an intergalactic space warrior with an upturned dustbin strapped to his head. Social media is already alight with voters half-seriously plotting to do the funniest thing in British political history by electing a comedian in a dustbin to Parliament.

While the British public rightfully loves an eccentric protest candidate to mock the establishment, we must maintain absolute clarity about the serious nature of institutional power. If the voters of Clacton actually deliver this ultimate electoral punchline, the joke must stop at the gates of Westminster. No allowances or special exemptions can be made for satirical performance art in the House of Commons. If Count Binface defeats Nigel Farage, he must be forced to take off the bin.

Democracy requires absolute, unyielding transparency. We cannot have lawmakers debating legislation, voting on national security, or representing the interests of British citizens from behind a literal piece of sheet metal. The rulebook of Parliament exists for a reason, and it dictates that members cannot cover their faces because officials must be able to visually identify them to register a vote. If you want the immense privilege of sitting on the green benches, you must look your colleagues and your constituents in the eye. To allow a politician to hide behind a mask under the guise of theatre would completely undermine the principle of democratic accountability.

After all, human beings talk with their faces. In Britain, our unspoken vocabulary relies on a flash of expression: a widened eye, a smirk, a pursed lip, a warm smile. To hide all of that is to cut yourself off from the community. It naturally invites suspicion.

We already have fresh, painful evidence of the psychological harm caused by masked societies from the Covid-19 pandemic. During that time, our cities felt instantly colder and meaner because the smiles vanished. More troubling still, developmental researchers have since proven that children’s speech and emotional growth suffered significantly. One major study found that young children’s accuracy in recognising basic human emotions fell by almost a third when adults were masked. Research focusing on nursery-age children showed sharp declines in their ability to identify joy, sadness, and anger behind surgical masks, while acoustic studies confirmed that masks muffle the high-frequency sounds essential for speech clarity. If a few years of temporary masking did this to a generation of children, what does a lifetime behind a heavy veil do?

I feel this cultural friction myself. At a political vigil recently, someone turned up wearing an England flag face mask. It felt deeply bizarre and hostile, and I instinctively moved away. Ironically, when I see women in niqabs or burqas, I do not feel threatened; I simply feel sad. I feel sad because I know that if they had been born men, no one would expect them to live out their lives behind a wall of cloth.Of course, there are reasonable exceptions. Festivals, theatre, and cultural celebrations are entirely different. Halloween masks, the Venice Carnival, or a masked ball are moments of collective joy. Crucially, they prove the rule because they are temporary. Step outside the venue and back into everyday life, and you show your face.

It is a matter of profound regret that the unspoken rule of “when in Rome” is no longer enough. Once, it was simply understood that living in Britain meant adhering to British norms of openness and mutual trust. Today, those eroding norms must be codified into law. Covering your face has never been a British habit.

Other confident, liberal nations have already successfully drawn this line. France, Denmark, Austria, and Belgium have all passed public face-covering bans. The sky did not fall. Liberal democracy did not collapse. If anything, those societies look more secure and self-assured for having done so. Allowing masks in public life, whether for crime, fashion, faith, or political theatre, legitimises concealment. It opens the door to a pervasive culture of mistrust. If we cannot even look each other in the eye, we are no longer the Britain we think we are.

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Albie Amankona is a broadcaster, financial analyst and political activist. He is the co-founder of Conservatives Against Racism and a member of the Conservatives LGBT+ National Executive. He regularly appears across broadcast media and can be followed on X through @albieamankona.

Welcome to The Counter‑Insurgency, the Substack‑exclusive companion podcast to The Insurgency with Steve Baker. Every two weeks, Steve, Harry and political consultant Laura Emily Dunn analyse the week’s events through the lens of the principles of a free society.

This week, economic journalist Mani Basharzad joins Steve and Laura to unpack Nigel Farage’s “back‑me‑or‑sack‑me” Clacton by‑election, the future of the BBC licence fee, and the latest OBR report which makes clear that Britain’s finances are on a knife‑edge. Subscribe to Mani on Substack today and follow him on X.

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This article was first published on The Dispatch. It can be accessed on their website here.

Even during a period of unprecedented political events witnessed by the British public, the idea of a regional mayor using a single local election to effectively unseat the prime minister seems shocking. But that’s exactly what happened in the U.K. last week.

On June 22, Keir Starmer announced, after serving less than two years as prime minister, that he would vacate No. 10 Downing Street.

Now Andy Burnham, who until last week was the mayor of Greater Manchester, is suddenly on course to become the country’s next leader.

Starmer’s resignation came after months of intense pressure from fellow Labour Party members of Parliament over his handling of various issues: the appointment of Peter Mandelson to the position of ambassador to the U.S. despite Mandelson’s prior relationship with Jeffrey Epstein; embarrassing U-turns on key welfare and pension reforms; the Labour Party’s languishing favorability among the British public; and the recent resignations of Defence Secretary John Healey and Armed Forces Minister Al Carns—both of whom stepped down to protest Starmer’s agreement to a defense spending plan that offered substantially less funding over the next four years than had been requested.

But as Burnham—the so-called “King of the North” (a nickname that any politician would envy)—takes the reins in Westminster, he will do so during a period of unusual volatility for the office of prime minister. Since Conservative David Cameron’s resignation in 2016 following the U.K.’s vote to leave the European Union, five prime ministers have occupied Downing Street—and each for no more than a few years. Cameron’s successor, Theresa May, served for only three years before being deposed for failing to deliver on Brexit promises. Boris Johnson’s scandal- and sleaze-marred premiership then lasted only slightly longer before giving way to that of Liz Truss, who herself survived for only 50 days before backlash to her “mini Budget”—a 45 billion pound (equivalent to $60 billion) package of largely unfunded tax cuts, alongside a subsidy for each household’s energy costs following a spike in prices during the Ukraine War—sent her packing. Rishi Sunak lasted less than two years before leading the Conservative Party into a general election that produced its worst result in modern history. And when Starmer announced his imminent resignation last week, his brief spell as leader of a Labour government had similarly lasted less than two years.

Most in the U.K. recognize that frequently changing prime ministers between general elections—which must occur within five years of the preceding general election—is not a strong and stable way to run a country. Yet almost no one agrees on how to fix the problem. Some argue that the U.K. is simply ungovernable and that Britain’s parliamentary system is no longer fit for purpose. Some propose that a political party in control of Parliament should commit to calling an election when it seeks to change its leadership, or even that this requirement should be written into law. Others argue that the country’s first-past-the-post electoral system—which elevates candidates to office even if they win only a plurality, but not a majority, of the vote—should be scrapped to achieve a more enduring democratic mandate for prime ministers.

But many of these arguments are focused on addressing the symptoms of the U.K.’s political and economic problems, not the underlying disease itself.

What is that disease? As a result of decades of state overreach and ever-growing state spending commitments, the U.K. is on the brink of fiscal collapse. The cost of the country’s public services and welfare spending has swelled without the necessary economic growth or expanded tax base to support it. Britain is facing a paralyzed planning system, historic tax highs, declining productivity, and a persistent fiscal gap. Meanwhile, the country’s bureaucracy is ballooning, both in central government and the quasi-autonomous nongovernmental organizations—known in the U.K. as “quangos”—that operate at arm’s length from direct political control, but are funded by taxpayers and carry out legislative governmental duties. And despite record funding for public services like the National Health Service (NHS), the quality of many of those services appears to be in terminal decline.

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The issue facing the U.K. is not that it is changing prime ministers too often, or that every one of our prime ministers over the past decade has somehow not been up to the job. The problem is that every one of those prime ministers has refused to confront Britain’s harsh economic reality. And until the country’s leaders are willing to take drastic measures to address that reality, they will continue to try—and fail—in leading the country into greater prosperity.

During Starmer’s time in power, both the U.K.’s public-sector spending and its tax burden reached record highs. Yet public services still don’t seem to work. For example, waiting lists for the NHS are enormous—around 2.5 million patients in England are waiting more than 18 weeks for elective treatments recommended by their doctors. Excessive regulatory burdens are also strangling the British economy. State infrastructure projects take decades to build and, even when they run significantly over budget, often end up being scaled back. And in London, even during a widespread housing availability and affordability crisis, homebuilding has fallen by 84 percent in only a decade, largely due to a failure to reform the planning system, which has acted as a chokehold on new housing developments. The U.K.’s planning system is based on the 1948 Town and Country Planning Act, which was intended to build whole new towns following the bombing destruction of World War II, not to allow urban cities to grow and expand to meet their population needs.

Britain’s National Insurance Fund—the fund used to pay the country’s state welfare—also appears to be in trouble. In a 2020 review of the fund, the Government Actuary’s Department projected that the U.K. would effectively default on its welfare spending commitments, including those related to pensions, in less than 20 years. But the reckoning could come even sooner: The review took place before U.K. welfare spending ballooned even further under Starmer. And overspending isn’t just a Labour Party issue: Tax burdens and public-sector spending also rose under the leadership of Conservative prime ministers. The U.K.’s total tax-to-GDP ratio in 2023, for example—under Sunak’s Conservative government—was 35 percent. By comparison, the United States’ total tax-to-GDP ratio at the same time was only 25 percent.

In fact, public spending as a share of Britain’s GDP hasn’t fallen below 34 percent since before World War II, and only once—under Margaret Thatcher—was there a serious attempt to constrain the state. Even Cameron’s 2010–2015 “austerity” plan only managed to bring down public-sector spending as a share of GDP to the size it was three years before the plan started. By 2025, government spending accounted for more than 44.5 percent of GDP. This is a level that previous generations would have considered necessary only in wartime. Other than a temporary rebound following the lifting of COVID-19 lockdown restrictions, the U.K. economy has not grown by 3 percent or more since 2017. Last year, GDP only grew by 1.3 percent despite government spending increasing by 5 percent during the same period. Since 2021, the U.K.’s annual productivity growth has averaged less than 1 percent.

These financial woes are not unknown to the British public. In a January 2026 survey by the Institute of Economic Affairs, 67 percent of respondents said that Britain was heading in the wrong direction and 87 percent said that the U.K. should focus more on economic growth. But even then, respondents dramatically overestimated the U.K.’s economic position relative to other countries. When asked to compare the U.K.’s per capita GDP with the 50 U.S. states, for example, respondents guessed that the U.K. was wealthier than all but six of them. In reality, however, the U.K.’s per capita GDP is lower than that of every single American state, including states like Alabama, Mississippi, and Arkansas.

Politicians may be making promises that the state cannot deliver, but they often do so because the British public demands it of them. As someone who has worked in the British Parliament and run election campaigns, I can tell you these demands are ever-present. Both politicians and the public are as bad as each other. Politicians need to tell the British public the real truth about our financial situation and the drastic change necessary. And the British public must come to the realization that its constant demands for greater state action and state spending on almost every issue are bringing Britain to ruin.

Starmer ran on a cautious manifesto that promised change but spelled out little of how that change would be implemented. He seemed to genuinely believe that the country was heading in the wrong direction simply because of Conservative Party mismanagement. All that was needed, in his and the Labour Party’s eyes, was for the adults to be back in charge. But Starmer, like his predecessors in Downing Street, failed to understand Britain’s harsh fiscal reality.

The major issue holding Britain down is not Brexit—as many on the left claim. Nor is it immigration—as many on the right do. As economists like Julian Jessop have suggested, economic indicators do not suggest that Brexit has had a measurably negative effect on the U.K.’s economic situation. And while immigration has played a minor role in increasing the costs of the British welfare system and public services, it is not the protagonist. Instead, Britain needs to confront that its decades of unfunded spending commitments have created obligations that cannot be met by any sustainable taxation system or debt burden. This requires fundamental restructuring of the welfare state and government commitments, not tinkering at the margins as successive prime ministers have done. The country’s pension system requires immediate reform that stops inflation-busting increases; the NHS must transition to an insurance-based model like that used in the Netherlands or Switzerland; the welfare system must be significantly reformed with far stricter requirements for welfare recipients; and the vast apparatus of regulations, regulatory bodies, and bureaucrats—those that prevent us from building anything anywhere in Britain—must be drastically cut.

Time and again, the country’s leaders have promised the world to the British people—from Johnson’s “Levelling Up” agenda and Sunak’s five promises to Starmer’s commitment to put growth at the heart of his government. But even with the promises of hardworking politicians, the U.K.’s growth remains sluggish and living standards continue to fall. The British government now spends about as much on interest payments on its debt as it does on the country’s entire education system. Yet successive prime ministers have done little to rein that spending in.

The choice facing the U.K. is either voluntary reform now or involuntary collapse later. We must either implement drastic spending cuts or accept the inevitable collapse of the British economy and the welfare state. That economic reality is why Britain churns through prime ministers—they all enter office making promises that our fiscal situation will not allow them to keep. But dumping one prime minister who is unwilling to address these challenges for another who is equally unwilling to face them will do nothing. It is the equivalent of scrubbing the decks on the Titanic as the ship is already sinking—it might make the ship look better momentarily, but we’re all still going down.

The U.S. should take what is occurring in Britain as a warning of what happens when fiscal reality is ignored. Successive U.K. prime ministers have tried to square an impossible circle: the promise of Scandinavian-style public services to a demanding electorate in the face of weak productivity growth and an overcommitted state. We have seen members of Parliament turn on their leaders in the hope that a new face may somehow be able to wish away the same problems that led to the previous leader’s departure. The root of our prime ministerial carousel is not individual failures; it is a total economic model that cannot and will never deliver what it promises.

America is not yet where Britain is, but it is heading down the same path. Debt is rising and there are growing entitlement pressures. U.S. publicly held debt has exceeded 100 percent of GDP for the first time in 80 years. Yet Congress is dominated by a bipartisan refusal to confront the significant gap between what the politicians promise and what the real economy can sustain. Federal government interest payments have already reached the same level as defense and education spending combined. The same problems that have driven British political instability are quietly taking root in Washington. Britain’s experience has made clear that you can ignore economic realities for a time, but you will never be able to escape them. The U.S. should heed our warning from across the Atlantic. You do not want to join Britain on the edge of economic breakdown.

In less than three weeks’ time, the U.K. will see its seventh prime minister in 10 years. Andy Burnham will be a better communicator than his predecessor, but will do little to address the root problems causing Britain’s decline. Over the next few weeks, Burnham is due to make a series of speeches setting out his policy platform. Those policies may include raising capital gains tax, devolving greater powers to city mayors, and implementing a universal social care system. None of these policies—and little in Burnham’s recent speeches or actions as the mayor of Greater Manchester—suggest that he will implement the broad cuts, reforms, and spending discipline needed to right the fiscal ship. Britain is on the brink of fiscal collapse, and until its prime ministers, Parliament, civil service, and voters reckon with that reality, the carousel of British leaders will continue to spin.

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Harry Richer is the director of Fighting for a Free Future, under Chairman the Rt Hon Steve Baker. He has worked as a senior aide in the British Parliament and has also co-written multiple publications on Austrian School economics, including the 2024 Springer book The Age of Debt Bubbles.

This article was first published on The Dispatch. It can be accessed on their website here.

“We have intentionally blown the biggest government bond bubble in history”
—
Bank of England Executive Director for Financial Stability, then Chief Economist, Andy Haldane, 2013

Being 55 is scary: I realised over the weekend as I read Liam Halligan in the Telegraph that I recall the events of 20 years ago in the run-up to the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) as if they were only recent. Lehman Brothers, where I worked1, boasted record quarter after record quarter. Then it all went pop.

As we grind forward with chronic fiscal and economic challenges, I view our situation with mounting dread. As I set out in a short book, we are in the biggest bubble in history: a bigger bubble, when it bursts, will have worse consequences than the GFC.

Famously, economists as a profession had not seen it coming. HM the late Queen asked the question why when visiting the LSE. Under the auspices of The British Academy, some luminaries attempted to answer the question: hubris, wishful thinking, the “savings glut” myth, “a failure of the collective imagination of many bright people, both in this country and internationally, to understand the risks to the system as a whole”.

The response deserves a read, particularly as it sets out how good the boom felt:

Households benefited from low unemployment, cheap consumer goods and ready credit. Businesses benefited from lower borrowing costs. Bankers were earning bumper bonuses and expanding their business around the world. The government benefited from high tax revenues enabling them to increase public spending on schools and hospitals. This was bound to create a psychology of denial. It was a cycle fuelled, in significant measure, not by virtue but by delusion.

Circumstances today are rather different. The western world is in relative stagnation, not apparently-endless boom. Housing is hopelessly unaffordable, and the job market is daunting. There is war in Europe.

Unfortunately, because a policy of easy money has been sustained and then expanded with QE, then as now, an unwelcome explanation is to be found in the monetary theory of the trade cycle: to understand the pattern of events in the economy, it is not enough to look at movements in the general price level, but instead we ought to consider the deviations of particular prices caused by monetary factors.

It is a refusal to do this which prevented economists as a whole from seeing the GFC coming and which is preventing them from foreseeing the next crisis. Those who did look at the distortions created by new money saw it coming.

This article asks questions which politicians, policy makers and economists might reasonably ask if we are to avoid another GFC and the looming chronic default of the welfare state. If we could solve the puzzle of why productivity growth detached from trend and stagnated after the GFC, as shown in the 2025 Budget Red Book, meeting the welfare state’s obligations would be more plausible.

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Has the biggest bond market bubble in history deflated since 2013?

The then Bank of England Executive Director for Financial Stability and subsequently Chief Economist, Andy Haldane, was being admirably plain-speaking and honest when in 2013 he told us, “We have intentionally blown the biggest government bond bubble in history”. Does anyone think that bubble has since deflated?

My answer is an emphatic no. This analysis presents the data to show we are now in the biggest bubble in history. I wrote it with The Cobden Centre’s Max Rangeley, with support from Harry Richer, now the Director of this project. It has not been refuted.

We recently presented it at the Institute of Economic Affairs. There was no shortage of experts in the room. Our analysis stood.

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In this Substack‑exclusive post‑show, Steve, Harry and Lord Elliott explore how family and faith shape their politics, and what it means to live in a nation that believes it has a God‑given right to prosperity.

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The main episode is available, free of charge, on our YouTube channel, Spotify and Apple Podcasts. Please do like, share, and subscribe!

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Then you come in—the fresh face with big ideas. The supporters give your hiring a massive vote of confidence. Under your guidance, you drag the club back up to the top flight. The sponsors return, the fans are buzzing, and you bring glory and hope back to the stadium.

Suddenly, you’re a massive club with massive financial backing.

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Now it’s time to perform in the top league against the best. But all of a sudden, you start making terrible tactical decisions week after week. Behind the scenes, you implement toxic policies. Instead of supporting your squad, you publicly bash your players to the media day in and day out.

Naturally, your players are miserable. The supporters who once cheered your arrival are now out in force, demanding your resignation and threatening to protest in the streets if you stay. To make matters worse, there’s another coach at another club who is absolutely beloved by your fan base. He openly admits he’s willing to resign from his current gig to come save your team from you—because you’re a terrible manager, and everyone knows that if you stay, the club will slide right back into the second division. That is the ultimate nightmare.

This is exactly what has happened to Keir Starmer.

“Mr. Serious”—by the way he combs his hair, you’d think this man has absolutely zero time to play around; his tailored suits practically scream that he means business. He was elected with a historic parliamentary majority—the kind of leverage where you can pass legislation effortlessly, and if an MP steps out of line, you can whip them into a swift U-turn.

What happened to Starmer isn’t just a string of bad policies (though, no pun intended, he barely has any). His true downfall is a total lack of judgment, an inability to govern, and a complete absence of aura. He has no presence, no charisma.

The man tipped to replace him—or who soon might—is Andy Burnham. They call him the “King of the North,” and after his absolute landslide victory in the Makerfield by-election, he wears the title well. But here is the real shocker: Is Burnham actually the solution for the country, or is he just a tactical shield brought in to save the Labour Party from an absolute beating if a general election were called today?

After his speech earlier this week, what the public saw was a prime minister waiting. Announcing a 10-year economic plan, he promised massive reforms to the British political establishment—and there are even reports of him living in Manchester while in office.

But the problem with Andy Burnham is that we still don’t know his tax policy. Yes, if you watched his economic speech, you might have felt refreshed, but it left behind more questions than answers. We still don’t know how he plans to implement those ideas, or if they will even work.

Every Prime Minister has a love-hate relationship with the media, especially journalists. But with Burnham, we saw a man who isn’t even interested in the press. He doesn’t take questions. Frankly, after his speech yesterday ended with thunderous applause, he walked off as if he had just delivered the speech of the century.

You know, this reminds me of Joe Biden’s presidency. Now, before you scream at me, hold on—I’m not saying Burnham is Biden. But if his playbook is to avoid questions, then his administration will do everything it can to shield him from scrutiny. We can’t have that.

On the flip side, Burnham possesses a level of charisma and personality that Keir Starmer simply lacks. He’s capable of making a crowd laugh instead of sounding like a robot.

Burnham is currently implementing “Manchesterism”—a wave of nationalisation measures mixed with a pro-business approach. Does that sound like the Chinese system? Well, no; I’m not implying Burnham is a communist in waiting, especially since some of his policies are genuinely welcome.

For example, his approach of prioritising government contracts for British high street businesses is great. Supporting small businesses will boost the UK economy, but he needs to be careful that this doesn’t devolve into protectionism, where we blindly reject cheaper international bids.

Burnham seems like a decent man, but he’s going to have to learn to take tough questions. If he doesn’t, Kemi Badenoch, the Leader of the Opposition, will eat him alive every Wednesday during Prime Minister’s Questions.

There is so much for Burnham to answer for, such as his plans to nationalise water, energy, and the railways. He needs to explain exactly how that will impact the economy. Perhaps to get up and running, he first needs to look at amending the Employment Rights Bill. While there are good provisions in there to support workers, the “job tax” on employers is damaging. Business owners are becoming uncomfortable hiring new staff; instead, they would rather give longer hours to existing workers or even use automation to do the job.

Ultimately, that is having a massive, negative impact on the economy.

If Starmer is pushed out, the burning question becomes: how long will Burnham actually last in the Prime Minister’s hot seat before his own cabinet or MPs turn on him?

Labour won their mandate on the promise of “change.” Yet two years down the line, the country is deeply divided, and the public simply isn’t feeling the progress they were promised. Now, the party appears to be preparing to swap leaders, installing someone the wider country never actually voted for. Sure, he’s popular up North, but what about the rest of the country? Did the British public vote for him?

Think back to when Rishi Sunak was Prime Minister. The Labour Party was aggressively demanding an immediate general election when he was first appointed. Their core argument? Nobody voted for Sunak, just like nobody voted for Liz Truss. By that exact same logic, nobody has voted for Andy Burnham.

The only democratic move left for the Labour Party is to call a general election and let the voice of the people be heard. The electorate voted for Starmer, not Burnham. If Starmer goes, the country deserves its say.

Will the right honourable member from Makerfield agree with me that a general election is the only right path forward? Yes or no?

We shall wait and see.

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Glodi Ntoya is a Leader for Liberty Fellow with Fighting for a Free Future, the Institute of Economic Affairs, and the Adam Smith Institute. He regularly writes on geopolitics and can be followed on X through gNtoya76. You can subscribe to his Substack below.

The Strategic Desk

Dive into the unexpected corners of Geopolitics. Where curiosity meets insight, and every article is a journey worth taking.

By Glodi Ntoya

Given the evidence of Scotland and Wales, the question is not whether Burnham’s ideas will fail to meet public expectations. It is how soon people on his own side are disappointed. Will it be before nominations close in what could still be a Labour leadership contest, on 15 July at 18:00?

Two weeks is a long time in politics. Here’s how it could go wrong for Andy Burnham, leading to a contest not a coronation.

Right now, Labour MPs are so far gone in their fervour for Mr Burnham, anything but a coronation seems unlikely. Can he make it over the line? Will the circus continue?

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Argentina hit annual inflation of over 200%, multiple exchange rates and soaring poverty before voters handed Javier Milei a mandate for radical free‑market shock therapy. Rob Marstrand breaks down what his government has actually done so far, from slashing the state and deregulating at chainsaw speed to forcing inflation sharply down and narrowing Argentina’s risk premia, and then compares it to Britain’s cautious drift into higher taxes, heavier regulation and long‑term decline.

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Thumbnail image: “Javier Milei VIVA 24” by Vox España. Original: https://www.flickr.com/photos/voxespana/53732400023/ – via Wikimedia Commons: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Javier_Milei_VIVA_24.jpg
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Welcome to The Counter‑Insurgency, the Substack‑exclusive companion podcast to The Insurgency with Steve Baker. Every two weeks, Steve, Harry and political consultant Laura Emily Dunn analyse the week’s events through the lens of the principles of a free society.

This week, the team discuss what Andy Burnham’s Labour Party might look like, Ed Miliband’s next job, and the rise of the “degrowth” ideology among Labour backbenchers.

A free preview of The Counter-Insurgency is available on our YouTube channel, Spotify and Apple Podcasts:

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This Week on Voices

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According to some of the more sober members of her company, what appeared to animate these people was the fact that Boris Johnson had won his “stonking” majority on only 43.6% of the popular vote, on a turnout of 67.3% of registered voters. This, they felt, did not confer upon him the mandate he needed to form a government and deliver us from the European Union.

As the revolving door of Tory Prime Ministers began to turn, the problem only got worse. Not only did the Tories have the support of a fraction of the electorate, but the leaders they were selecting internally often proposed radically different legislative offerings from those that Boris had originally campaigned on. And, to be fair, they had a point. The public did not vote for Truss or Sunak, and Labour members were keen to point out this constitutional travesty.

In the words of Angela Rayner, “the Tories have crowned Rishi Sunak without him saying a word about what he would do as PM. He has no mandate, no answers and no ideas. Nobody voted for this.”

So, imagine my surprise when, in July 2024, the same protesters were mysteriously absent from the streets of London. Not a peep was raised when the Labour party won their landslide win with a paltry 33.7% off a mere 59.7% turnout from registered voters. If Boris did not have a mandate to govern, Lord knows what the “loveless landslide” conferred upon the hapless Starmer.

And now a fresh leader waits in the wings. Andy Burnham looks to become leader without the say-so of the general public and with very little in the way of a coherent policy agenda. I would hope that Angela Rayner will be tweeting about the injustice of it all.

Andy Burnham does not have the mandate to govern. Not only is the government he intends to take over, one with foundations of sand, but he did not even become an MP in the election which created it! Andy Burnham? Not my Prime Minister.

Except, of course, that he is very likely to be. The response to his impending coronation has been to call for a general election. Some MPs have floated the idea of a law mandating a General Election in the event that the leadership of the party changes.

We elect a parliament, not a Prime Minister. The government must command the confidence of the house. If Burnham can do that, then more power to him. Whatever the apparent shortcomings of our “winner-takes-all” electoral system, it is still our system. Complaining about the results it returns after the fact is a bit like a losing rugby team complaining that they should have won with their beautifully worked try, despite their opponents slotting three penalties past them.

In case you needed further convincing, the current parliamentary Labour Party was individually elected by voters in 2024 and given a mandate to represent them. If those representatives give their support to Burnham, then that is where he derives his mandate from. Given that his politics more closely align with the PLP than Starmer’s ever did, it is arguable that he has more of a right to govern than Sir Kier.

So, Burnham is likely to be Prime Minister. Much good may it do him. He will shortly discover that Britain’s problem was not Starmer, but Labour being unwilling to make the difficult choices. And so the outcome is likely to be the same. Soon enough, we will be searching for a new messiah, or a very naughty boy.

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Eve Lugg is a Voice for Freedom with Fighting for a Free Future. Eve Lugg served as Special Adviser (SpAd) in the Cabinet Office and brings with her experience in policy and comms, as well as knowledge of how Whitehall really operates.

is an investment analyst and previously was an international corporate strategy director for a major global investment bank. He lives in Buenos Aires and writes OfWealth by Rob Marstrand on Substack for private investors who seek a better understanding of the global investment world.

People in rich countries should never assume that things will stay the same forever. Over the past fifty years or more, Argentines have learnt this to their cost.

The United Kingdom remains one of the most affluent countries in the world, for now.

This result was built on centuries of capitalism that steadily raised living standards, as technology advanced and productivity improved. The capitalist system also provided the means to fund public services such as education and healthcare, as well as defence.

At the global scale, the UK is in a privileged position held by a relatively small group of successful countries. The United Nations classifies just 36 nations (18%) as “developed economies”, out of a total nation count of 195. British citizens are among the lucky 17% of the global population that’s fortunate enough to live in high-income countries.

But for decades, the UK has pursued policies that are taking it down a rocky road that will inevitably lead to economic ruination. Just because many other developed countries are making similar mistakes is no excuse. The clock is ticking.

What should be done?

Not least, British people and policymakers can learn from Argentina’s painful economic past. This is a country that converted itself from rich to poor, all of which was self-inflicted.

I’ve lived in Buenos Aires for the past eighteen years, meaning I’ve experienced a lot of the problems and uncertainty first-hand. I see plenty of parallels with the UK’s current direction of travel.

The good news is that it’s not too late to reverse the UK’s course on the path to poverty. The bad news is that time is running out before things get really serious.

A particular problem is that the economic ruin of a nation is usually a slow journey that lasts many decades. This means that it’s easy to miss the accumulating signs of impending doom.

The rot sets in, consolidates, and then takes over. Once the host is sufficiently weakened, it no longer has the strength to deal with major crises. Such crises include severe recessions, financial meltdowns, pandemics, and the impact of wars (even foreign ones).

By my reckoning, the UK is about three decades into the process of fiscal self-destruction, driven by the creeping bloat and waste of big government. Basically, that’s since the Labour Party took power in 1997, shortly followed by rocketing public spending.

The country is now edging towards a fiscal cliff. Once it starts to fall off, the decline will be rapid and brutal.

Argentina provides both the historical warning for how this could happen, and the template to ensure that it doesn’t.

“Long live freedom, dammit!”

After decades of decline, the current Argentine government is taking radical steps to turn things around. That’s under the leadership of President Javier Milei, who came to power in December 2023.

His government is almost certainly the most pro-capitalist government in the world, combined with having the conviction to pare back the state to the minimum size practicable. That said, Argentina still remains a very long way from actually being the most capitalist economy.

Milei’s reforms so far have been fast and radical. But the statist rot runs really deep, and there is still a vast amount to do. Nonetheless, this is Argentina’s big chance to turn things around.

If Milei can win a second four-year term as president in 2027, then there will be a chance for past reforms to really bear fruit, and for even more radical reforms to be enacted.

Milei has been described as many things. What he is not is “far right”, just in case any confused British journalists happen to be reading. I can assure you that there are no “brown shirts” marching through Buenos Aires in jackboots.

He is also not a clone of Donald Trump. Milei is an academic economist of the Austrian school, with many books to his name. He is most definitely against trade protectionism and tariffs and is committed to balancing the budget.

Milei describes himself as “anti-collectivist”, which means he’s against any form of big-state government, be it socialist, communist, fascist, or globalist.

Philosophically, he’s an anarcho-capitalist, which is an ideology of free-wheeling capitalism, and no state government at all. But he’s also a pragmatist who operates in the real world of nation-states and current conditions. Which means that he’s arrived at being a “minarchist” in practice. That means cutting the state back to a bare minimum.

In summary: a small state, maximum freedom for citizens, and pro-business and pro-markets.

In effect, when it comes to economic and fiscal policy, Milei is what I call “Thatcher on steroids”. In fact, he has publicly praised Margaret Thatcher’s past economic policies on several occasions.

Milei’s dreadful inheritance

Milei inherited an Argentine economy that was on the brink of a hyperinflationary meltdown that would have plunged almost all Argentines into deep poverty.

This was caused by large fiscal and financial deficits funded by vast central bank money printing.

Monthly consumer price inflation peaked at 25.5% in December 2023, the month that Milei took office, and was still accelerating. Backwards-looking annual inflation peaked at 289% in April 2024.

The country has no excuse for being relatively poor. It’s the eighth-largest country in the world, one place behind India. Yet it has a modest population of 48 million, similar to the size of Spain.

It’s rich in farmland, fishing grounds, oil & gas, copper and lithium. The vast majority of its people are of European descent - Spanish, Italian, British, German, French, etc. Their ancestors moved there to build a better life. The country should be as wealthy as places like Australia or Canada.

When those immigration waves happened, Argentina was a rich country, relative to most others. The grandeur of the Congress building and much of the historic architecture in Buenos Aires and elsewhere is a testament to that. The capital was once known as “the Paris of the South”.

But decades of absurd economic policies caused a severe decline. The rot really started under President Juan Domingo Peron, who first took office in 1946. This was the start of Peronism, a relentless political movement that adapts to the winds of change and keeps coming back.

Peronism has been variously described as quasi-fascism or populist socialism over the years, but some things have stayed consistent.

These include rank populism to garner votes (e.g. heavily subsidised energy bills and public transport), big government, an authoritarian streak, political patronage (jobs for the boys and girls), economic interventionism (such as trade protectionism and tariffs, heavy capital controls, price controls), heavy regulation, and deep-seated corruption.

The result has been severe dysfunction. To give an example, an astonishing 40% or so of workers are employed on the black market for cash. Most businesses can’t survive without breaking the rules. It’s a truly broken system.

The long economic decline has been defined by periods of relative stability punctuated by severe financial and economic crises, such as debt defaults, sudden currency implosions, and hyperinflations. Each crisis pulled the country a peg or two lower.

The initial decline was relatively slow until about the 1960s, or around two decades after Peron first took power. But the country really started going off a cliff from the 1970s onwards.

Over time, this has gutted the affluent middle class, which used to be large and the envy of neighbouring countries. I’ve met plenty of people who survived only by steadily liquidating the assets that they inherited from their better-off parents.

Poverty rates increased from mid-single digits in the 1960s to more than 50% by the time Milei came along. Around 10% of the population struggled to afford food in a country that produces enough for at least five times its own population. This is an insane situation.

In my 18 years here, I’ve calculated that the Argentine peso has lost 99.8% of its value relative to the US dollar. Just imagine trying to save for your future in such an environment. This is why most ordinary Argentines focus on survival from month to month, with little long-term planning possible.

Investment virtually stopped, vast amounts of capital were sent to offshore havens to escape the hands of the grasping state, and the wealthy emigrated in their droves to places without annual wealth taxes, such as neighbouring Uruguay. (Take note anyone who is pushing the idea of wealth taxes in the UK...)

Thatcher on steroids

Milei famously campaigned with a chainsaw held aloft. This symbolised his intention to slash back the bloated state.

He warned that fixing things would take years, and it would be hard at first for a lot of people. Despite this alarming honesty, or perhaps because of it, fed-up Argentines decided to give him a chance.

After the presidential inauguration ceremony, Milei walked out onto the steps of the grand congress building and declared to the crowd and media, “No hay plata” (There is no money.) In other words, he was refreshingly honest with the Argentine people, which is rare in political leaders anywhere.

Due to Argentina’s electoral system and constitutional limits on presidential power, Milei doesn’t have a free hand to pursue reforms. Despite this, and along with some political horse trading with moderate opposition parties, he has already achieved much through legislation and presidential decrees.

The first and most important step was to balance the budget. Despite a fiscal deficit of around 5% of GDP, Milei achieved this in month one. Initially, this was done by bringing infrastructure spending to a dead halt. An extreme but necessary measure in the circumstances. It was followed by deep cuts to the state monster.

Federal-level public sector staff levels are down around 20%, including cuts of more than 30% to the equivalent of the civil service, and the trimming continues. The initial chainsaw has been replaced with a scalpel.

To achieve this, whole non-essential ministries, departments, and other publicly-funded bodies have been shut down or merged. And guess what? Life goes on.

The country has been running a small budget surplus since January 2024, as it gets to grips with its inflation, maturing debt repayments, and restoring freedoms to an economy full of artificial distortions. Monthly inflation was 2.1% in May and about 30% over the past year, which is still high by international standards. But it’s on a continuing disinflationary trend.

Aside from slashing waste, stopping the money printing, and controlling inflation, Milei’s economic reforms have focused on aggressive deregulation and progressive tax cutting. But the balanced budget remains “non-negotiable”, as Milei frequently reminds everyone. So the tax cuts have to be phased.

The biggest tax cuts have been to the huge tariffs on both imports of goods and on exports of things like crops (yes, really, which destroyed investment). But other taxes are coming down as well. Eventually, swathes of taxes are likely to be abolished completely.

There are also incentives in place to foment large capital investments. As a result, oil & gas production is booming, and the country now has an energy surplus (net exports) after years in energy deficit. There are also large investments going into mining in under-exploited areas such as copper and lithium.

On the deregulation front, Milei’s government passed a jumbo deregulation bill early in its term. It also secured special powers from Congress for one year, allowing it to continue chipping away at the morass of regulations without further congressional votes.

Milei even created a whole new Ministry of Deregulation and State Transformation under Federico Sturzenegger. He created an email address and then a website where anyone could point out destructive and pointless regulations. His team were then set to work investigating and eliminating vast numbers of such petty rules. This would be a good idea to adopt in the UK.

Saving the UK

Milei inherited an Argentine economy that was in a far worse state than the UK has ever experienced, at least so far. Therefore, the UK doesn’t need quite such extreme medicine. But the basic model that’s required is the same, in my opinion.

The UK has a bloated government, too much public debt, an excessive budget deficit above 4% of GDP, a persistent trade deficit, far too many petty regulations, the longest and most complex tax code in the world, and an ageing population that progressively adds to the burdens of healthcare and state pensions over time.

Just to keep the house of cards standing, the country has already resorted to mass money printing (Quantitative Easing, or QE) twice, following the Global Financial Crisis and during the Covid pandemic.

The UK also has twin energy and food deficits, meaning it has to import a lot of both. Meanwhile, it pursues self-destructive policies that seek to reduce domestic production in both cases and increase food and energy insecurity. This is bonkers.

By contrast, Argentina is a resource-rich country that has still managed to self-destruct economically. Put another way, the UK is far weaker than Argentina when it comes to self-sufficiency. Which means its future decline could be far faster than Argentina’s past one.

This is what I believe the UK must do before it’s too late.

• Phase 1 - The Chainsaw (speed: fast): Slash wasteful public spending, focus on the essentials of government, and start mass deregulation. Timing: year 1.

Suggestions include immediately cutting civil service staffing by 5% across the board, trimming foreign “aid”, cutting funding and closing many of the 600+ quangos, restricting disability welfare to the genuinely disabled, merging/closing many foreign embassies. (You should see the size of the British Ambassadors’ residences in both Argentina and Uruguay...)

Deregulation is detailed and complex work. Hence, any government-in-waiting should prepare the legislation in advance to hit the ground running when the time comes. (As Milei’s government did.)

• Phase 2 - The Scalpel (speed: medium): Continued deregulation in finer detail, ongoing trimming of spending. Start radical tax simplification. Timing: years 2 and 3.

The aim should be to achieve a balanced budget or a small fiscal surplus (including interest costs). The debt will stop growing, and gilt yields will start to fall due to the lower risk for investors. In turn, borrowing rates for all types of lending will fall, including residential mortgages. This will start to stimulate the economy, along with the improved productivity from deregulation.

• Phase 3 - The Virtuous Circle of Growth (speed: slow): Maintain a balanced budget at all times, and progressively reduce taxes as the economy grows. The ratio of government debt-to-GDP will fall over time, reducing borrowing costs as confidence builds. Leaving more money in the hands of citizens and businesses by lowering taxes will stimulate private sector spending and investment. Timing: year 4 onwards.

Some of that probably sounds hard, and it would be met by huge resistance from various vested interests. Not least within the public sector itself.

But I’m convinced it’s all achievable. It’s just a question of having strong leadership that acts with conviction to drive through change.

The alternative is steady decline, periodic severe crises, and climbing poverty over time. Believing that “it couldn’t happen to us” is extremely naive.

Adam Smith said that “There is a great deal of ruin in a nation”. By which he meant that it takes a significant amount of mismanagement and a long time to really destroy a country’s prosperity, even with a concerted effort.

But every country can get there in the end. The UK is no different and is already well along the path.

Complacency is rife, but time is running out. The UK’s leaders and voters can learn a lot from Argentina, in terms of both its past road to ruin and Javier Milei’s current policies to reverse the decline and unlock growth.

Does it look likely that a future UK government will make the hard choices in time? I doubt it. People seem to prefer suffering self-destructive crises before being spurred to act.

I visit England around twice a year. The decline is obvious. But I hope that one day I’ll have cause for some renewed optimism about the UK’s future.

There’s still time to fix things, just about. But the clock is ticking.

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Rob Marstrand grew up in Sussex, England. After university, he worked for a global investment bank during the 1990s and early 2000s, based in the City of London and Hong Kong. He has lived in Buenos Aires, Argentina, since 2008. These days, he writes OfWealth by Rob Marstrand on Substack for private investors who seek a better understanding of the global investment world.

In this Substack-exclusive post-show, Steve and Prof Paul Dolan discuss their personal feelings on today’s 10th anniversary of the Brexit vote, when British politics might move on from Brexit, and how we can avoid the pitfalls of short-termism in democratic governance.

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The main episode is available, free of charge, on our YouTube channel. Please do like, share, and subscribe!

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Brexit was largely a macroeconomic non-event.
– Wolgang Munchau (not a Brexiteer)

On this the tenth anniversary of our vote to leave the EU, I find we are refighting the referendum in the same old terms. Surely it is time to move on and build a brighter future?

But should we? Can we without returning to the EU?

I keep engaging with the arguments of those who want to rejoin, making claims of terrible economic harm. I find those claims don’t stand up, as economist Julian Jessop has been proving.

Julian Jessop

Explainer – debunking the dodgy stats used by Project Rejoin

There is now a bewildering range of estimates for the harm that Brexit is supposed to have done to the UK economy, or the benefits of rejoining the EU. Indeed, pro-EU accounts often present several inconsistent figures as if each were established facts – even in the same post…

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3 months ago · 45 likes · 13 comments · Julian Jessop

Now a new paper from economist Dr Gerard Lyons, published by the Centre for Policy Studies shows that Jessop and pro-EU commentator Wolgang Munchau have been right:

In truth, leaving the EU left us performing mid pack with competitor EU economies. Covid was the big shock and Germany is the under-performer. Here is the data:

So if returning to the EU is not the answer to our economic woes, how can people of good faith engage with one another in a way designed to help them move on?

Toleration is a fundamental principle of a free society: we should be willing and able to agree to disagree where people are doing no harm and move on together. Those of us fighting for a free future should care how toleration can be promoted.

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It turns out behavioural scientists, and my friend Prof Paul Dolan in particular, have some great ideas about how to embed tolerance by design and enable “adversarial collaboration”. Paul wrote the book Beliefism: How to stop hating the people we disagree with and together we have founded The Provocation People to offer companies and institutions services to embed a happier and more productive culture of constructive disagreement.

In the final chapter of a new book from Cambridge University Press – The Brexit Effect, 2016–2026 – Paul and I summarise the arguments and set out his EMBRACE framework for better disagreements. I commend our chapter to you.

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Former Liberal Democrat leader Tim Farron MP joined Steve and Harry on The Insurgency to explore what real freedom means in practice. The discussion ranged from the Christian conviction that every person has equal worth, to whether there is a “ceiling” for people of faith in British politics. They dive into social media’s coarsening of debate, the limits of free speech in an age of incitement, and why secure, affordable housing and meaningful work are, in Farron’s view, the true foundations of a free society.

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You can also watch this episode on YouTube, Spotify or Apple Podcasts:

Last Week on Voices

A. J. P. Taylor’s English History, 1914 - 1945, famously opens:

Until August 1914 a sensible, law-abiding Englishman could pass through life and hardly notice the existence of the state, beyond the post office and the policeman. He could live where he liked and as he liked. He had no official number or identity card. He could travel abroad or leave his country for ever without a passport of any sort. He could buy goods from any country in the world on the same terms as he bought goods at home. … Since 1911, it helped to insure certain classes of workers against sickness and unemployment. This tendency towards more state action was increasing. Expenditure on the social services had roughly doubled since the Liberals took office in 1905. Still, broadly speaking, the state acted only to help those who could not help themselves. It left the adult citizen alone.

How far we have fallen! Imagine, for a moment, if a person were to fall asleep in 1914 and wake up today in 2026. What might the man from 1914 say?

There was a time, not so very long ago, when it was the solemn responsibility of a parent to prepare their child for a world of a great many risks.

They would keep them from harm by holding their hand in the street, teaching them the difference between strangers and friends, and trusting that, in time, the child would learn to judge such things for him- or herself.

Inevitably, difficulties and complexities arose. But despite that, the family managed. Many promising children were raised into great men and women, and because of it civilisation advanced at pace.

That arrangement, it seems, is soon to go through another deliberate change.

On 15 June, Keir Starmer announced that children in the United Kingdom will be banned from social media until the age of sixteen, with major platforms required to exclude them or face penalties. The law is to be legislated before Christmas, with enforcement to follow in the spring.

Having already issued stringent instructions to children on what to eat, how to exercise, what to think, and how long to sit in a classroom, the state now proposes to decide which parts of the modern public square they may enter, and at what age.

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The Prime Minister calls this “giving children their childhood back.” If this is giving children their childhood back, one shudders to think what confiscating it might look like. He does not pause to ask whether the childhood he remembers is even available in a world where friendship, culture and politics are now lived as much online as off. For today’s teenagers, social media is not a curious add‑on to everyday life. It is not some novelty that they can cast their minds back just a few short years to remember a world without. It is the essential forum by which they organise their lives: be it arranging a walk in the park, sharing homework, discovering music, or encountering the arguments that will shape their view of the world.

Whether that is a good or bad thing is a worthy question, but it is not the immediate one. It simply is how the world now operates. Every generation faces a horizon its parents did not quite recognise, and it has always been the role of the parent to help their child through it. Whitehall’s response, however, is to try to legislate large parts of the new reality out of existence.

So let us begin with the only proposition that really matters: it is not the business of the state to raise children. Even if that were in dispute, governments do not have a good record of running private life from the centre. Whenever they assume responsibility for shaping how we live - be it schooling, health, morals, or now digital life - planners tend to overpromise, under‑deliver, and generate unintended harms. The further the state pushes aside the family and assumes its role, the more likely it is to damage the very children it claims to protect.

The principle at work here is simple enough. It is the belief that the state knows better than the parent and that bureaucracy can substitute for private judgement. Most problematically, it assumes that children must be rescued from the world rather than prepared for it. It is precisely this instinct that animates the ban.

Ministers do not trust parents to supervise their children’s online lives, so they will try to abolish those online lives by law. They do not trust teenagers to learn to navigate risk, so instead they will attempt to simply erase them.

This is, of course, all said to be in the name of safety. Yet even some of those most anxious about children’s welfare recognise the trap here. Save the Children has warned that sweeping bans risk creating a comforting illusion of safety while doing little to equip young people for the world as it is, and that the hard work of supporting families, tackling poverty and improving mental health cannot be outsourced to an age‑gate on a smartphone.

That isn’t even to mention that efforts by the state to manage childhood from the centre have a habit of failing even on their own terms. That is not just a lesson from history, though we would not be short on examples. It is visible in the present. Australia introduced its own under‑16 social media ban in December 2025, and Britain is plainly borrowing from that example. The Adam Smith Institute, in a piece by Tim Worstall published the day after the announcement, made the obvious point: Australia is already running the experiment, so the sensible course would be to wait and see what it produces before copying it. Instead, the British state has preferred the old political habit of acting first and learning later.

The Institute of Economic Affairs has made a deeper criticism. Matthew Lesh, the IEA’s Public Policy Fellow, described such a ban as “utterly ill‑conceived” and argued that the proper answer is “educating and letting parents decide, rather than restricting access and stunting growth.” The IEA has further argued that bans of this kind create a false sense of security for parents, undermine open family conversations about online safety, and encourage young people to seek workarounds rather than develop critical judgement. That is the central weakness of this policy. It diminishes responsibility while pretending to increase safety.

Nor is the likely result difficult to foresee. Teenagers will not obediently retreat into some imagined pre‑digital innocence. Many, perhaps most, will evade the ban. In Australia, more than sixty per cent of twelve to fifteen year‑olds who had social media accounts before the ban were found to still have access to at least one platform. Others will drift toward smaller, less accountable, and less regulated online spaces. If even the best‑case version of this policy replaces parental judgement with administrative control, the worse version does so while also making children decidedly less safe online.

The government is obviously not proposing to collectivise the whole of childhood. It is doing something milder than that, but no less revealing: inserting itself, yet again, between parent and child, insisting that the risks inherent in growing up can and must be managed from the centre. Where once a parent took a child’s hand and taught him how to cross the road, a bureaucrat now drafts a code of practice to fence off the pavement. Where once a mother or father watched over the first tentative steps into the wider world, a minister now issues a mandate cordoning it off.

If history teaches anything, it is that the state is a clumsy surrogate parent. When it confines itself to upholding the law and defending the realm, it can be a necessary servant. But when it begins to supervise the inner life of the next generation - deciding what friendships they may form, what information they may see, and which conversations they may enter - it intolerably becomes something else entirely.

That is the line this government is now edging across.