Join Fighting for a Free Future and the Adam Smith Institute for an exclusive cinema screening of Part 1 of their landmark two-part television documentary - The Real History of Communism - a profound exploration of 20th-century history that traces the harrowing descent from idealistic hope to systemic oppression. Following the screening, the Rt Hon Steve Baker will host a Q&A.

Narrated by the acclaimed Hugh Bonneville, this film brings together esteemed historians and the courageous voices of survivors to examine how ideologies born of optimism ultimately paved the way for deprivation and slaughter under the era’s most notorious dictatorships.

Tickets are available now: luma.com/oponegbx

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Event Schedule:

• ​​Screening: Part 1 of the documentary (narrated by Hugh Bonneville).

• ​​Discussion: A 30-minute Q&A session will immediately follow the film.

​​Leading the Q&A is Chairman of Fighting For a Free Future, Steve Baker. Driven by a profound instinct for protecting the rights of the individual, Steve will navigate the complex themes of the film, bringing his signature passion for freedom to this critical conversation on historical tyranny.

​​Location: Central London Cinema (TBD). All attendees will be updated once the screening venue is confirmed.

In 1797, under the pressures of war and financial panic, the government suspended the convertibility of paper money into gold, launching a decades-long experiment that reshaped economic thinking and policy.

Britain was facing a costly war with France and feared an invasion. In response to this, a run on gold depleted the Bank of England’s reserves, threatening monetary stability. In return, William Pitt the Younger ordered the Bank to suspend specie payments, which was later ratified by Parliament through the Bank Restriction Act 1797.

The act meant notes ceased to be exchangeable for gold, moving Britain onto a paper-based currency. The Bank Restriction Act is regarded as a turning point in British financial history. It represented an early form of government-managed monetary policy and introduced debates about the relationship between fiat currency, gold and price stability. It demonstrated the flexibility of monetary institutions in wartime and laid the foundations for future monetary exercises. The experiences of the fiat currency meant Britain eventually returned to the gold standard.

Without the constraint imposed by gold convertibility, the Bank of England rapidly expanded the supply of paper money in an effort to finance the war with France. The most noticeable consequence of this policy was inflation. The result was that the market price of gold rose above its official mint price.

The Bullionists identified that the depreciation of paper money was due to the excessive issuance by the Bank of England, arguing that a return to gold convertibility was necessary to restore price stability and confidence. The Anti-Bullionists disagreed, arguing that external factors such as trade imbalances and wartime conditions were responsible for the rising prices rather than fiscal insecurity.

Now the learnéd reader will see a very familiar situation between then and now.

The debate between the bullionist and anti-bullionist reached a critical juncture with the publication of the Bullion Report in 1810. Produced by a parliamentary committee, the report concluded that the over-issuance of paper money was the primary cause of inflation and currency depreciation. Despite this, the restriction period continued until the conclusion of the war in 1815.

With the end of the war, attention shifted back to the Bullion Report, with a consensus growing around a return to the gold standard being both desirable and necessary for fiscal stability. The gold standard was seen as a symbol of fiscal discipline and sound governance.

In 1819, Parliament passed the Resumption Act. This Act laid out a clear plan for the gradual resumption of gold convertibility. It created a credible commitment by the government to resume convertibility at a fixed rate. The process was carefully managed to avoid economic disruption as the Bank of England began building its gold reserves and reducing the issuance of paper money. By adopting these policies, it was able to bring the market price of gold back in line with the official mint price.

The resumption of the gold standard was widely considered a success and impacted economic thought. It demonstrated how monetary stability requires a firm anchor and a rules-based monetary policy. The short Bank Restriction Act emphasises the dangers of discretionary control over the money supply. Somehow, despite this, the Bank of England managed to leave the period with enhanced credibility and enhanced authority over the monetary policy.

The experiences of the United States

This is not dissimilar to the experiences of the United States. At the end of the American Civil War in 1865, the States faced enormous costs of war, so the federal government departed from its traditional reliance on gold and silver coin and instead issued paper money, known as “Greenbacks”. In addition, nationally chartered banks issued their own notes backed by government bonds, creating a monetary regime that functioned as an early fiat currency system.

For the United States, this system was understood to be temporary, but the challenge stood with how to make the transition back to sound money without provoking severe economic disruption. The process was long, roughly 14 years, and contentious, but ultimately successful, offering a perfect example of how a country can move from unsound monetary policy to sound monetary policy.

To start, the government initially began removing Greenbacks from circulation; however, political resistance soon limited how far this policy could go. The process triggered deflation, and the consequences of this were felt fast and abruptly; many Americans swiftly began opposing policies that favoured creditors at the expense of the ordinary citizen.

The strategy, therefore, had to change; instead of removing paper money from circulation, the government opted to focus on stabilising its value to gold. This approach would require careful fiscal management, economic growth and most importantly, the restoration of public confidence in the dollar.

The start of this process began with the Specie Payment Resumption Act. It did not mandate an immediate return to gold but instead represented a compromise between the competing sides. It set a clear and credible timeline that on January 1^st, 1879, the US Treasury would redeem greenbacks for gold on demand.

The firm resumption date signalled to markets that the government was committed to restoring gold payments, but with the economic breathing room to adjust. Over the next several years, the treasury quietly built up the gold reserves, and confidence in the dollar gradually improved. As trust in dollars improved, the discount on greenbacks relative to gold gradually decreased. On the redemption date, the gap was almost non-existent and very few people chose to exchange their money.

Unlike the United Kingdom, which managed the return to a gold standard in 2 years, the United States took much longer. The time from the end of the Civil War to the resumption of specie payments in 1879 was 14 years, but this timeline does not signify indecision; it reflects the complexities of balancing the economy. A rapid return to gold would likely have imposed severe economic costs, while indefinite delay would undermine confidence in the currency. Either of these routes would have led to the failure of the proposal. The chosen path of a gradual adjustment with a credible long-term commitment struck a successful balance between these risks.

The results highlight that the success of the transition depended less on the mechanical act of redemption than on the credibility of the commitment to redeem. By convincing the public that paper currency would be honoured in gold, the government reduced the incentive to demand gold in the first place.

We must learn from history

But knowing the success stories, why did Stanley Baldwin fail when he tried to return the UK to the Gold Standard in 1925?

Prior to World War 1, the gold standard functioned as a stable monetary system, but it relied on key assumptions: free movement of capital, flexible domestic economies, limited government intervention and a political priority for external balances over domestic concerns. Trade imbalances were corrected through gold flows, which in turn influenced domestic money supplies and prices. The crux is that governments were willing to tolerate deflation or unemployment to maintain the gold standard, or in short, to maintain a non-interventionist stance in markets.

As with the previous examples, Britain suspended gold convertibility during the war, but the war required unprecedented levels of government spending. Inflation soared, and the value of the sterling declined. Britain’s economic dominance of the 19^th century was undermined by huge debts to the United States, which became the world’s leading creditor. Combined with domestic policies changing, particularly the expansion of organised labour, the willingness to accept unpopular policies, such as exchange rate stability, was diminished.

In 1925, driven by economic ideology and institutional conservatism, Stanley Baldwin announced the return to the gold standard in an attempt to restore Britain’s international prestige. However, the terms of the return, unlike previously, were deeply problematic. The pound was restored to its pre-war parity, with an effective impact of overvaluing sterling relative to its post-war economic value. Prices and wages had significantly risen with the war, and returning to the old exchange rate required substantial deflation.

As seen with the US, the decision imposed a heavy burden on the domestic economy, but Britain did not react well.

While the US stabilised the value of the dollar in terms of gold, the UK attempted to pursue deflationary monetary policies by keeping interest rates high to attract gold inflows. This resulted in reduced economic growth, hitting the struggling industries like coal and textiles the hardest. With the change in political environment to be more focused on organised labour, the government faced mounting pressure to prioritise employment over sound fiscal policy.

Post-war, the global economy was fragile. The system relied on short-term capital flows and international lending, but mounting tensions between countries led to confidence faltering, destabilising currencies and financial systems as a whole. In a volatile system, the gold standard was seen less as a stabilisation mechanism but instead as a source of rigidity.

The impact of this volatility was seen with the Great Depression. Britain, still trying to deflate, had exacerbated debt burdens. As the global demand collapsed, international trade contracted, and unemployment rose. In the new social order, this was untenable to continue. After a significant capital outflow due to a lack of confidence in Britain, sterling was allowed to float, signifying the end of the gold standard in the UK.

Why did this fail?

The conditions that made the gold standard viable had eroded: limited government intervention, political tolerance for hardship and economic dominance.

First, instead of allowing time for the markets to adjust to a return to the gold standard as seen historically, Britain attempted to deflate their economy instantly to return to gold convertibility, shocking the markets and causing an economic downturn in an already struggling economy. As seen in the US, without market confidence, a return to a gold standard does not work.

Second, the political landscape had changed; the 20^th century saw the increase in social democracy, no longer dominated by a laissez-faire political elite but by an interventionist state and a populist opposition.

Finally, post 1914, Britain’s economic dominance had declined, and the world was less dependent on Britain’s policies.

The interwar failure of Britain’s return to gold was not an indictment of the gold standard but of the conditions under which it was attempted: sound money is not a matter of institutional symbolism, but a matter of credible constraints on discretionary power. Convertibility cannot be credibly reintroduced through decree alone, but only as part of a broader restoration of monetary credibility.

A modern return to gold coverability in Britain would only be viable under the conditions which allowed it to flourish in the first place:

1. A binding commitment to fiscal discipline, limiting chronic deficit financing through monetary expansion.

2. A rules-based monetary framework, reducing discretionary intervention by the Bank of England and making policy predictive instead of reactive.

3. A credible mechanism of gradual adjustment to allow markets to realign expectations over time rather than forcing abrupt deflationary shocks.

4. And most importantly, the restoration of public confidence in the convertibility promise itself.

Under these conditions, the gold standard is not an archaic constraint but a way for the state to commit to monetary restraint in the same way it binds itself in other areas of governance. The historical record shows that the key variable is not the metal itself, but the belief that the rules will be followed even when inconvenient for policymakers. The lesson is therefore not that Britain should not have returned to gold, but that it attempted to do so after already abandoning the institutional preconditions that made it viable.

The gold standard was never just a monetary system but a constitutional commitment to sound money, and like all constitutions, it only succeeds when those bound by it choose to be bound.

Luke Lucas is a Fighting for a Free Future Associate and runs Voices for a Free Future’s monthly series: What is happening in Argentina!

It has become so prominent and dire that one of Keir Starmer’s main manifesto promises in 2024 was to build 1.5 million new homes over the next 5 years.

Deservedly so. England has a housing affordability ratio of 7.63 in 2025, and London has a ratio of 10.5, which has trended upwards since 1997, peaking in 2021. For reference, 5 is considered the affordability threshold, with anything above that meaning less affordable housing. Housing services make up 22% of total consumption spending, higher than the 17% OECD average, behind only Finland.

The UK has manufactured its own housing crisis. Since the introduction of the Town and Country Planning Act 1947, the UK has moved to a discretionary planning system in which development rights have effectively been nationalised. It means that planning permission is uncertain, expensive and lengthy. Furthermore, it has given small NIMBY lobbies a more influential voice in whether a development is blocked or not. It is central to the crisis because when you restrict supply, demand increases, and prices inevitably rise.

The Ultimate Resource at Risk

Simultaneously, the UK faces a population crisis created by a plummeting fertility rate. The current fertility rate in the UK is 1.44, while the replacement rate is approximately 2.1. The population will begin to fall in 2029 if we exclude migration. Fertility rates in the UK have decreased by 25% since 2010, more than any G7 nation.

A declining population creates challenges for general productivity as well as issues for funding our welfare state. Some models conclude that population decline signifies the end of economic growth and, therefore, a rapidly declining standard of living. Julian Simon famously referred to human beings as the ‘ultimate resource’. In his titular book, he writes, “population growth has long-term benefits, though added people are a burden in the short run.” In the long run, however, “our species is better off in just about every measurable material way.”

The population crisis is happening for a number of reasons, and it would be difficult to pin it down to just one cause. However, I would argue that a major factor is the unaffordable and stagnant housing market. People are more likely to stay living with their parents and less likely to move out, marry, and have kids. If they do, they are usually notably older than previous generations: the median age for an opposite-sex first marriage in England and Wales is now around 35 for men and 33 for women, roughly five years higher than in the mid-1990s.

The housing crisis also makes it harder to move to more productive parts of the country, where there are higher-quality, better-paying jobs. Even if they can move to one of these areas, London being the obvious example, rent can easily eat up 50% or more of your income, which makes it a lot harder to move to a family home and raise children.

These seemingly obvious conclusions are borne out by the data. A recent study concluded that a major cause of declining fertility is rising housing costs. Other studies show that less affordable housing means that people start families when they are older and also have fewer children.

Humans are the ‘ultimate resource’: we innovate, solve problems, and, generation after generation, tend to leave the world better than we found it for our descendants. Unless we build a housing system that is explicitly pro-natalist, we will choose a future of decline, irrelevance, and avoidable poverty.

So, tackling the fertility problem starts with housing. In general, couples will only start a family when they have enough space and the security that only a home of their own can give them. Would-be parents are less likely to start a family when the more available housing is like “rabbit hutches on postage stamps” with poor architectural design and little to no garden space.

We should look to America here and reap the rewards. An American study suggests that the first thing we should be trying to do is build more family-sized housing units in the short term. It hints that it will likely lead to 4.7 million more children born over three decades. It is a cheap way of increasing the fertility rate and increasing economic efficiency. In other words, to achieve the same results with a subsidy would require up to a staggering $160,000 per birth. A recent IEA study comes to similar conclusions, demonstrating that cash incentives and baby bonus subsidies have little to no effect on fertility. There is no reason to pay the subsidy when you can just allow people to build family-sized units. The study goes on to show how intended fertility, what women and couples want, is greater than actual fertility. Increasing the supply of family units helps ease the heavy burden of housing costs on current families and soon-to-be parents. Both of these studies agree that housing liberalisation could be key in closing the ‘fertility gap’.

In the long term, we need to build more micro units to get young people on the housing ladder earlier. Scholars like Emily Hamilton have highlighted that in the US, the number of 1-person households far exceeds the number of studio apartments. This goes a long way to explaining why the rate of 25-to-45 year olds still living with their parents has doubled since 1960. The best way to rectify this is to deregulate land use so that a variety of houses can be built, particularly smaller and cheaper units. As young people’s incomes rise as they get older, they can slowly scale the housing ladder until they can afford a single-family house. This plan is far more realistic than expecting young people’s first house to be a single-family unit. Furthermore, if they are still living at home, they probably aren’t moving to places where there are more job opportunities and higher wages. So, the high cost of housing is causing young people to forgo better jobs and a family, two key components of a fulfilled life.

We should encourage and allow for more micro units and Accessory Dwelling Units (commonly known as ‘granny flats’) to be built. By doing so, we can decrease rents and housing costs across the board, making it much more affordable for people in their 20s to buy their first home or leave their parents’. If 20-somethings stay living with their parents, it is tantamount to choosing not to have children. By making small units affordable, we reduce the costs of fertility in the long term, because adult children can move out.

From NIMBYism to Proprietary Governance

In order to get more housing and a greater variety of it, land-use deregulation is the single most effective policy. It would allow the building of more houses that people actually want, replacing a system where planners build an inadequate number of houses which they don’t.

Liberating land-use laws will also lead to more of this desirable housing in places that people want to live, with more opportunities and higher wages. These places also tend to be more desirable for raising children because of easier access to schools and work. One way to achieve this, according to Mark Pennington’s Liberating the Land, is to denationalise development rights by giving local communities property rights. Communities with strong amenity interests (e.g. privacy, sunlight, and green space), which give them the right to prevent development, often provide the strongest objections to new projects. If these property rights were tradable, communities could sell them and negotiate development, reducing the potential for objection.

Our planning system may have been spawned with good intentions, but now it simply serves to make homes unaffordable. In late 2025, a new build property costs £377,675 versus existing properties with an average price of £266,805. On average, detached houses are the most expensive at around £440,000, followed by semi-detached. Both are more expensive than terraced housing, and detached homes are almost double the price of flats. All the while, rents in cities like Reading and Oxford outstrip those in many major European cities, and London is the only city to rival New York.

Fast-tracking approval for large apartment buildings with lots of small units, as well as approving more granny flats and micro units, are vital policy tools for increasing the supply of housing affordable for people on the first rungs of the housing ladder: helping both the ‘banished bottom’ and reduce the strain on the supply for the ‘missing middle’.

Another important proposal is for proprietary governance. It means that the state would give up its development rights, and private property rights would be held collectively by all property owners in a given community in the form of a private landowner association or company. Property owners would receive profits from new developments based on the proportion of shares they own in the association.

The current system is plagued by a complex hierarchy of nationalised development rights and plans by local authorities. Hayek would say that the system suffers from a “pretence of knowledge”. Planners lack the necessary local and dispersed knowledge to correctly determine the right number, size, and location of new housing. They also lack any feedback mechanism that could hint at whether the plan was any good.

Proprietary governance and private development rights could ease the implementation of many such development strategies. It could see more plot splitting that will increase both small and large units. Furthermore, it may relax parking and fire-exit rules, freeing up more space that families truly value. Both reforms will open the door to a spontaneous order in which tacit knowledge of what consumers want and are willing to sacrifice and prioritise can be used to meet demand, improve quality and create the flexibility in the housing market which is sorely missing. A market that offers more of what families want at a lower price means you’re likely to get more families.

Developers also prefer more liberal development rules. They get more profit by building and selling lots of townhomes rather than a small number of luxury homes. Townhomes are far more land-efficient than detached homes, and they are also cheaper because they use less land. Land-use and planning laws dictate housing shape and formation, like with the fire exits. These laws also directly dictate the size of homes. When developers are free to build smaller homes on smaller lots, they can make it much more affordable for the average family, which is also more profitable for them.

Proprietary governance and denationalised development rights offer a practical path to liberalising land use. It can create a flexible institutional arrangement in which the housing market is flexible and able to respond to demand. It could allow for more affordable and land-efficient family units in the short term to boost fertility rates now, and more micro units in the long term, so young people can move for job opportunities, get on the housing ladder and start a family.

If we had done this 30 years ago, the fertility decline might only be half as bad… literally.

Oscar Gill-Lewis is a political commentator with Young Voices and Correspondent Program Manager at Speak Freely Magazine. He writes for Speak Freely and on Substack, and his articles have appeared in Conservative Home, The Daily Express, and Comment Central. You can find Oscar on X here.

You can purchase Prof. Koppl’s books, including Expert Failure and Big Players and the Economic Theory of Expectations, here.

In this bonus episode of The Insurgency, Steve sits down with Professor Roger Koppl to ask why experts have so often missed crisis after crisis in our lifetimes.

They discuss why so many governments relied on ad‑hoc COVID committees, like SAGE, designed to preserve ministerial discretion rather than discover the truth, and why Sweden’s very different institutional path led to a better outcome. Roger explains why he believes the COVID response may prove to be “the West’s Chernobyl moment”, and how Net Zero policy repeats the same errors by treating the complex “technosphere” that feeds billions as if it were a simple machine that can be re‑engineered from on high.

Paid supporters of Voices for a Free Future have access to the entire discussion. Subscribe to watch or listen today!

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Highlight clips of the interview will be released on our YouTube channel over the next few days.

Thumbnail background image credit: “Billingshurst Weald School Covid‑19 Coronavirus posters in C Block toilets on the boys’ side at the entrance” by N Chadwick, licensed under CC BY‑SA 4.0. Source: Wikimedia Commons. Thumbnail modified for this episode.

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Ambassadors would usually be career diplomats, likely with longstanding developed vetting (DV). I imagine the system recoiled when it was proposed to appoint a controversial former Secretary of State to a plum role and then insisted on DV, a check it seems to me he was not likely to pass easily given his business interests in Russia and China, previous questions about his finances and his links to Epstein.

It was a terrible misjudgement by this Prime Minister but no doubt it was insisted upon. His resolve placed officials – particularly the Permanent Secretary at the Foreign Office, Sir Olly Robbins – in an impossible position: how could they refuse a resolute Prime Minister?

Having sacked Sir Olly Robbins, Sir Keir Starmer has now picked a fight with senior officials and a system which goes to immense lengths to avoid these risks crystallising and uphold propriety. It means even if he survives this week, he will now be a turkey waddling on to Christmas.

What are the factors at work?

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Festus Akinbusoye sets out why London needs a zero‑tolerance approach to crime, how weak leadership in City Hall and the Met has demoralised officers and allowed repeat offenders to thrive, and why he’d be prepared to run for London Mayor to change it.

In this Substack-exclusive post-show, the three discuss defending the right to a trial by jury, the state of British defence, and the sustainability of the triple lock.

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

This Week on Voices

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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?

The United Kingdom is a magnificent country. From the chalk downs of Sussex to the rolling hills of the Scottish Highlands, the good Lord blessed the British people with a glorious canvas with which to make their mark on the world.

And for centuries, we did exactly that. We built cathedrals and coaching inns, market towns and mill terraces, garden squares and harbour villages. Generations of Britons laid their ambition gently on the landscape, and the landscape rewarded them for it.

Now, imagine how different our national monuments would have looked had a board of stuffy bureaucrats been given the opportunity to appraise their keeping with the character of the area, or whether the foxes and hares might raise a procedural objection.

It is as inconceivable for someone today freely to build a new castle as to add a permanent office in their garden. At a stroke in 1947, with the passing of the Town and Country Planning Act, the right to build upon your own land was nationalised. Not your house - the state was gracious enough to leave that in your possession. Just the permission to do anything with it. In other words, the key component of ownership.

The Great Britain I knew in 1914 was built before the Act. Before committees, viability assessments, fourteen rounds of planning conditions and a heritage officer with a clipboard invariably declaring that your proposed dormer window represents a material harm to the character of the conservation area. The great testament to the system which allowed the British people to be the custodians of this land is the towns and villages that people cross continents to photograph. The great testament to our state land-use planning system is the car park.

We have been blindly led into what can only fairly be described as a housing crisis. Consider a young couple (a family that is yet to be, because they cannot afford to form one) facing the seemingly hopeless process of trying to purchase their first home.

Despite being victims of an artificial shortage dating back to 1947, they are told by the abbots in Whitehall and the town hall, dispensing their indulgences, that the sensible answer to this crisis is more government: more targets, more affordable housing quotas, more section 106 obligations, more officials and more nutrient-neutrality assessments. A state-created shortage, worsened by the state, now to be cured by the state.

It is worth pausing to appreciate the sheer audacity.

The human cost deserves to be stated plainly. Britain’s homeownership rate among under-35s has roughly halved since the 1980s. Young people are not enduring the grinding uncertainty known as renting because they prefer it. They are renting because the ladder has been almost fully pulled up.

The planning system inflates land prices by rationing supply. Help to Buy spent billions of taxpayers’ pounds to inflate the very prices it was meant to bring within reach. Stamp Duty compounds this effect, taxing the very act of moving. And leasehold, that feudal relic the government has been reforming for thirty years without meaningful progress, means that even those who do manage to buy a home find they have purchased not a property to do with as they please, but a very long tenancy from a freeholder who can charge ground rent for the privilege of existing on land that is nominally theirs.

The system moves into outright absurdity in the commercial realm. Consider, for a moment, the landlord of a pub who wishes to rename his establishment. Perhaps the old name is tired, perhaps his customers are different now, or perhaps he simply wants a fresh start. This private decision about a private business ought to be trivially simple.

Not so fast. If that pub sits in a conservation area - and in England, there are around ten thousand of them - changing the name on the hanging sign may require advertisement consent from the local planning authority. The application must be made in the correct form, to the correct department, assessed against the correct policies and potentially referred for comment to Historic England, the parish council, or anyone else who happened to wander past the consultation notice on the lamp post.

The process can take months. It frequently costs more in professional fees than the rebrand itself. Crucially, it can be refused. As if whether a tavern was the Dog and Duck or the Mallard and Mongrel is of any consequence worthy of a petty tyranny.

This is not an edge case, nor some temporary overreach that can be amended. The system is working exactly as intended, extended now into every corner of commercial and residential life. You often cannot build an extension without permission. You cannot paint your shopfront a different colour without permission. You cannot, in some cases, cut down a tree in your own garden without permission. The foundational, liberal presumption that what is yours is yours to use as you please has been quietly, legislatively inverted. We are left asking permission like a child wanting to decorate their bedroom when we wish to exercise basic property rights.

You are now presumed to require justification for any change. The state is presumed to require none for any restriction.

Once again, I am left with the troubling conclusion that the people of Great Britain have been boiled like frogs, led into a piecemeal tyranny that quietly swallows the most basic freedoms of human life. The only difference seems to be that a boiled frog will scarcely struggle to find a place to rest when it’s finished.

Anthropic-Pentagon fallout

The most critical casualty is Anthropic, the AI company behind the LLM Claude. A few months ago, most outside of the tech sphere had never heard of it, but it had created AI so effective that the Pentagon had chosen Claude as their LLM of choice. What seemed a workable contract has morphed into a damning exposé of the ailing future of liberty in the US. One would not expect to see, as Dean Ball aptly labelled it, “corporate murder” committed under the star-spangled banner. But in February, the US Department of War attempted to kill Anthropic. Secretary for War Pete Hegseth declared the company a “supply chain risk” in February - this amounts to branding it a threat to national security, which is an unhinged label for a service that has enabled the US offensive in Iran. And despite aiding the US in its military endeavours, Anthropic became the first ever American company to receive the designation. Its purpose was to blacklist foreign adversaries - not those who help combat them. Anthropic is currently challenging its lawfulness in court.

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As if the private company were a deadly disease, Hegseth put it in quarantine, declaring that Anthropic may not conduct any commercial activity with any contractor, supplier, or partner doing business with the United States military. This left $180 million worth of private deals out in the cold. The treason the company committed was refusing a contract that stated Claude could be involved in “any lawful use” – a phrase which flirted with the potentiality for mass domestic surveillance and autonomous drone strikes. How this is deeply unsettling for American business and American life needs no explanation.

The US administration was determined not to let Anthropic walk away unharmed, by any means necessary. A paradox of approach, typical of a state desperate for control, emerged when it became clear that Anthropic’s compliance could not be secured through negotiation. Days before the “supply chain risk” designation, the administration threatened the Defence Production Act - a Korean War era emergency statute - to compel Anthropic’s cooperation. Emergency statutes are seldom repealed, but instead expanded to fit the bespoke needs of the administration in power; this is a lesson we have learnt from Higgs. The US administration was prepared to brandish all the knives of the state - and the bells may be tolling for freedom of association where we thought it most secure.

The market, however, came back with vengeance, to prove that it cannot be beaten by the executive. The day after the designation, Claude soared to number one in the App Store. The app also unseated ChatGPT, proving that OpenAI’s quick seizure of the contracts Anthropic vacated was equally condemned. All the efforts of the state cannot beat the invisible hand, which may well wave on the exodus of tech from its long-time home.

The eagle is tagged, and its wings clipped

Indeed, despite parading with the same elephant as Reagan, the Trump administration never was, or even postured as, economically liberal. But it wouldn’t be sensationalist to deem these actions as anti-American, at least in our understanding of what has fostered the nation’s success throughout its lifetime.

This administration has remarkably succeeded in violating the very principles inherent to what America is - or so we have been led to believe - trust in the free market, the ability to exit without the state bending the law against you, and the preservation of a civil society independent of the executive. Their statist behaviour leaves the “land of the free” hobbling in apathy, exiled by the dirigisme that has taken hold of the American right.

America’s difficulty may be Britain’s opportunity

Beyond ideology, there is pragmatic significance in the Anthropic case. An executive fiat to sever a company’s commercial relationships and designate it a national security risk sends a clear message to every tech enterprise in America; any of them may find themselves in the crosshairs of political interference. As we can also take from Higgs - amidst an unnerving period of regime uncertainty, perhaps the US can no longer be innovation’s refuge.

Britain has a great AI opportunity. The rule of law, after all, is still intact across the Atlantic, and there is no Defence Production Act to be threatened. That could be attraction enough for AI to move. In a rare occasion of lucidity from Sadiq Khan, the London mayor wrote to Anthropic, offering to facilitate the expansion of the company’s presence in London. Google’s Gemini was spearheaded in London by Google DeepMind, which remains in King’s Cross, and the city is considered Europe’s AI capital, boasting hundreds of high-momentum AI startups. And in 2025, AI startups captured a third of all British venture capital.

Europe is also vying for Anthropic’s attention. On paper, it seems like Anthropic’s focus on responsible AI, which led to the Pentagon’s blacklisting, aligns with the EU’s strong-arming approach to AI regulation. But this is ignorant of the difference between “regulation” and “responsibility”. Often, regulation is actually inimical to responsibility; This is especially true for a fast-moving technology like AI, where trapping it in outdated regulation removes the very possibility of responsible frontier research.

Britain understands this and offers real possibilities for cutting-edge research. The AI Growth Lab encases AI in a regulatory sandbox, allowing AI to grow without pre-emptive regulation blocking its way. The Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA) avoids the dangers of petty ministerial interference, which it is independent of, and therefore offers perhaps the most promising recent institutional development in British science policy. It mandates the freedom to conduct speculative research, exactly the kind that attracts the best researchers. And the proof of Britain’s research prowess is in the pudding; OpenAI has committed to building its largest research presence outside of the US in London.

But Britain has built a ceiling

The dynamism of Britain’s AI scene and sandboxed innovation will eventually face the tomes of regulation hot off the Whitehall press. Although it is not as forceful as the US’s - more pathetic, perhaps - the British government has ushered in its own clandestine creep of statism that will turn away those looking for the freedom to build their innovation beyond the ceiling imposed by the state. AI research has cut through, but the heuristic that you can regulate yourself out of anything still looms over Britain, and must be broken down before it sprawls too far.

AI founders are forced to navigate an expansive and unpredictable obstacle course of regulation for Whitehall jobsworths to deem them compliant. Before their product can touch the market, their funding has to be stretched to cover sprawling legality - the Online Safety Act, the Investigatory Powers (Amendment) Act, data protection obligations, and roughshod sector-specific guidance. Britain needs to realise that AI is not just a subject to be researched, but has unprecedented commercial potential that deserves better than Whitehall’s regulatory ire.

Two other hurdles remain: tax and energy. Ireland emerges as the usual competitor in attractive tax policy, vindicated by OpenAI’s placement of their European HQ in Dublin. Ireland gives the simplest of offerings; it has a 12.5% corporation tax, which allows companies to keep significantly more of what they earn than Britain’s 25% (admittedly, OECD Pillar Two dictates that Ireland’s rate rises to 15% for companies with annual revenues of over €750 million). Ireland chose a low-tax policy and reaped the benefits. Britain didn’t, and has suffered its losses. On energy, it is well-known that Britain bears the highest industrial electricity prices in the IEA. This is a real curb on data centres, which are instead beginning to pop up in France, where a nuclear doctrine has best prepared them for the future.

The solution to tax couldn’t be simpler: cut the corporation tax rate. The solution to the energy bottleneck requires a long-term strategy, which seems almost unthinkable for a British government. But to begin, we must sever unconditional devotion to Net Zero and allow nuclear to compete on its merits

A holistic AI strategy, moving beyond research, necessitates a political patience to which a government chasing cheap headlines will never commit. It is tempting for politicians to treat electoral insecurity by demonstrating activity; to constantly prove themselves by accumulating fragments of regulation and tax policy. It will require confidence in the ability of a competitive, lightly-governed economy for politicians to avoid chasing this validation, and let Britain build its AI base while we wait - and hope - for the eagle to be set free.

Jennifer Holly is a student at Magdalen College, University of Oxford. She volunteers with Fighting for a Free Future and is committed to the fight for free markets and civil liberties. She can be followed on X through @jenniferaholly.

The value of money has collapsed in my near 55-year lifetime, as a paper from the Office for National Statistics and Commons Library showed. I believe the debasement of money was a fundamental cause of the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) and has caused unjust social processes leading to a wealth distribution which lacks common consent, deindustrialisation, massive waste of resources, and the lack of productivity and therefore stagnant wage growth which has created misery since the GFC.

I have long yearned to be wrong. After I made strong claims when launching our Leaders for Liberty programme, I found myself challenged to ask again if my Austrian School thesis could be wrong. Might we muddle through?

What I have argued

My position, set out in my paper for Axiom and in the monograph on the biggest bubble in history which Max Rangeley and I wrote for the Cobden Centre, is not merely that the public finances are in poor shape. It is ultimately something more alarming: the advanced social democracies might destroy our currencies trying to fund the welfare state beyond the limits of taxation.

The welfare state – pensions, healthcare, social care, working-age transfers and education – has never been honestly funded. Since the years after WWII and with particular acceleration since Nixon closed the gold window in August 1971, governments have met the gap between what they promised and what they could raise in tax through borrowing and keeping borrowing going with an ancient mechanism: debasing the currency.

The chart above tells the story plainly. Consumer price inflation since 1750, tracked by the ONS and House of Commons Library, is on a linear scale flat until the mid-twentieth century. It then bends upward sharply after the war and shoots upward again after 1971. That inflection point marks the moment at which the last external constraint on money creation was abandoned: the obligation of the United States to redeem dollars for gold at a fixed rate. Since then, for the first time in history, the entire world has operated on a complete paper or “fiat” money standard with no commodity anchor at all.

The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) surveyed the situation in their 2010 paper The Future of Public Debt: Prospects and Implications. They concluded even then that “the path pursued by fiscal authorities in a number of industrial countries is unsustainable”. And in their conclusion, they warned of something beyond merely slow growth: “looming long-term fiscal imbalances pose significant risk to the prospects for future monetary stability”, describing two channels through which unstable debt dynamics could lead to higher inflation – direct debt monetisation, and the temptation to reduce the real value of government debt through inflation.

That was written in 2010. Since then, we have had a decade and a half of Quantitative Easing, near-zero and negative interest rates, pandemic money creation on a scale that dwarfs anything in peacetime history, and the OBR projecting that UK public debt could reach 270% of GDP by the early 2070s. The Government Actuary’s Department forecasts that the National Insurance Fund will be exhausted by 2043-44. The triple lock on the state pension is already projected to cost £15.5 billion annually above an earnings-link baseline by 2030. These are not contested figures; they are the official numbers.

Detlev Schlichter’s Paper Money Collapse, argues a system of elastic, constantly expanding paper money is not merely imprudent, it is structurally incompatible with a market economy, because it systematically distorts the interest rate, generates malinvestment, requires ever-larger monetary injections to sustain the resulting imbalances, and must eventually either be stopped voluntarily – which political incentives make vanishingly unlikely – or collapse under the weight of its own distortions.

My longstanding fear is this: that we are entering an era of chronic default on the promises of the welfare state, promises which have long been possible only by the debasement of the currency, and that this era will lead to either a grinding erosion of living standards so severe as to risk social breakdown, or in a more acute monetary catastrophe of the kind Schlichter describes.

Andy Haldane, then Chief Economist of the Bank of England, told the Treasury Select Committee in 2013:

That is what kept spending going. It has only been made worse since. See my paper for Axiom.

The challenge: might we muddle through?

I may be wrong in three principal ways.

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If you missed it, you can watch the other part of our interview with Sir Jacob here:

This Week on Voices

All the articles published on Voices for a Free Future this week:

We are meant to see this as a moral stand. In fact, it exposes the absence of a consistent standard. Take the John Davidson row at the BAFTAs. Davidson, a Tourette’s campaigner whose life inspired I Swear, uttered a racial slur during the ceremony while Michael B. Jordan and Delroy Lindo were on stage and, according to reports from the night, also directed slurs at black attendees, including production designer Hannah Beachler. It was ugly, it caused real distress, and he later apologised.

However what followed matters just as much as what was said. The reaction did not stop at condemnation. It moved quickly into a discussion about Tourette’s, involuntary speech, disability, intent and mitigation. The BBC apologised for broadcasting the moment, and the broader argument became one about how responsibility should be understood when neurological conditions are involved. You could accept that framing or reject it, but the principle was clear enough.

Now compare that to Kanye West. Kanye has said things that are plainly indefensible, his antisemitism has included praise for Hitler and conspiracies about Jewish control. He has also made anti-black remarks, from claiming slavery “sounds like a choice” to parading around in “White Lives Matter” clothing. This is not a lapse, it is a record, and a well-documented one.

At the same time, he has apologised publicly and has, at times, linked his behaviour to his bipolar disorder. You may think that explanation carries no weight at all, fine. However, if the Davidson case taught us anything, it is that mitigation is apparently not irrelevant simply because the words are offensive. If context is allowed into the room for one man, it cannot be barred at the door for another simply because he is harder to defend.

Yet that is exactly where Britain has landed, the Home Office has blocked Kanye West from entering the UK, shutting down the prospect of him performing at Wireless and helping to bring about the festival’s cancellation.

From a libertarian perspective, that should ring alarm bells; the state is not supposed to decide who is too offensive to be heard. Once you give government the power to exclude people on the basis of speech, unless it involves incitement of violence, you are no longer policing harm so much as policing opinion. And once that happens, the question is not whether that power will be used selectively, but how selectively.

Which brings us to Valentina Gomez. Gomez is a far-right American political figure who has built her profile through calculated provocation. She has staged anti-LGBT stunts, burned the Quran on camera, and declared that she wants to “end Islam”.

Her language is not subtle, she has used dehumanising language about Muslims, including calling for them to be expelled from Texas. She has posted: “I’m coming back to the UK whether you rapists muslims like it or not”. She has also leaned into ethno-nationalist messaging, writing “ENGLAND BELONGS TO THE ENGLISH” and “See you all in London on May 16th” for a Tommy Robinson-led protest, part of what has been dubbed the “Global Fight to Unite the West”, the latest iteration of Robinson’s “Unite the Kingdom” movement. When the rhetoric edges towards violence, one social media user even suggested she should “take your AR-15”, a lightweight semi-automatic rifle. Gomez showed no sign of restraint, replying: “Hahaha I’ll bring my flamethrower.”

Roshan M Salih, editor of the British Muslim news site 5Pillars, described Gomez as a “hate-filled Islamophobic Quran burner who called Muslims rapists”. When she appeared on Piers Morgan Uncensored, even Piers Morgan, not exactly a shrinking violet on these matters, pushed back after she claimed that “England is better off without Muslims”, telling her bluntly: “there’s something wrong with you.” So this is not a muddled or borderline case, it is explicit, repeated hostility towards a religious group.

Which brings us back to the supposed principle. If the government is justified in excluding Kanye West on the basis of offensive speech, then the case for excluding Gomez is at least as strong. If anything, her rhetoric is more directly targeted and less entangled with arguments about mental illness or disability mitigation. If, on the other hand, you take the libertarian view that the state should not be acting as a moral arbiter in the first place, then neither of them should be barred. That position may be uncomfortable, but at least it has the virtue of consistency.

What Britain currently has is the worst of both worlds. A state willing to intervene, but unwilling to apply its own logic evenly. That asymmetry is not hard to spot. Antisemitism, rightly, has become politically radioactive. It is treated as uniquely disqualifying, especially on parts of the right. Careers end over it, platforms disappear and access is revoked. Islamophobia is more often repackaged as cultural criticism, national security concern or blunt-speaking realism. Anti-black rhetoric, meanwhile, is sometimes dismissed in the same circles as “woke gone mad”, less a serious problem than another excuse for eye-rolling about hypersensitivity. The result may not be an official hierarchy, but in practice it looks very much like one. Some forms of hatred trigger immediate exclusion, others are debated, contextualised or quietly waved through.

Once you accept that the state can exclude people on the basis of their views, that distinction becomes very difficult to defend. Because the question you are left with is a simple one: which views, and who decides? If the answer is that it depends on the speaker, the target or the political mood, then what you have is not a principle at all. It is a discretionary power, dressed up as moral clarity and discretionary powers are rarely exercised evenly.

So there are only two serious positions left. Either the government should not be in the business of banning people like Kanye West or Valentina Gomez for their speech, however offensive it may be. Or it should be prepared to apply that standard consistently, regardless of whether the target is Jewish, Muslim, black or anyone else. Once the state starts picking and choosing whose speech is beyond the pale, the principle is already gone. What remains is judgement, shaped by politics, pressure and fashion.

Libertarians have long argued that equality under the law is the only real safeguard against that slide. Not because it guarantees perfect outcomes, but because it prevents power from being exercised arbitrarily. The alternative is a two-tier system, in which different groups are treated differently and different kinds of prejudice are weighed on different scales. That does not resolve tensions. It deepens them. It encourages people to see not a shared standard, but a system tilted for or against them depending on the moment.

If Britain wants a stable, cohesive society, it cannot afford that. It needs rules that apply to everyone, or rules that apply to no one.

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Albie Amankona is a Voice for Freedom with Fighting for a Free Future. He 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.

What the article did not answer is how Labour plans to pay for these and all of its other handouts, including other areas of increased benefit spending. Tax rises are the answer. They are not popular, and therefore, the Prime Minister did not mention them in his article, but tax rises have been an ever-present feature of this Government and will continue to be so; the Labour Government and its MPs are addicted to handouts. Remember when the number one priority of this Government was growth: Pepperidge Farm remembers.

Given all of the tax rises that Sir Keir Starmer has implemented so far during his premiership and the inevitability of him and his Chancellor coming back for me, I wanted to shine a light on an often overlooked part of tax rises: Treasury forecasts.

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Every time the Government raises a tax to pay for a handout, they point to Treasury forecasts of how much that tax will raise to pay for the handout as evidence of their fiscal credibility: it is a costed plan. Yet, if the last 20 years of Budget history tell us anything, it is that Treasury forecasts are anything but an example of fiscal credibility. Time and time again, they have completely overestimated the amount of money a tax rise would raise. There are a multitude of reasons for this: a key one being that the centre-left economic orthodoxy that dominates the Treasury ignores all that free market economics teaches about the unintended consequences of tax rises and tax base behaviour.

The consequences of this failed modelling should not be ignored - the only reason why successive Governments can keep coming back for tax rises for handouts is because Treasury forecasts allow them to make the math work on paper.

The Pattern in the Data

The data below covers major tax rises since 2006, drawing on HM Treasury, OBR, HMRC, ONS data, among other sources.

2009: 50p additional rate of income tax (earnings above £150,000)
Forecast: £2.7bn/year (static costing of £6.8bn)1
Outturn: ~£1bn/year, or potentially negative in net terms2
Verdict: Far below forecast

2010: Bank levy on bank balance sheet liabilities
Forecast: £2.5bn/year3
Outturn: Rate raised multiple times to compensate; by 2025 raises ~£1.3–1.4bn/year - roughly half the original target4
Verdict: Persistent shortfall

2010: VAT rise from 17.5% to 20% (implemented January 2011)
Forecast: “At least £12 billion from 2011–12 onwards”5
Outturn: Receipts broadly met headline target, but the rise demonstrably constrained economic activity and suppressed the broader tax base6
Verdict: Headline met; macroeconomic cost underestimated

2016: Soft Drinks Industry Levy (Sugar Tax), implemented April 2018
Forecast: ~£520m/year7
Outturn: £154m in first 7 months; never exceeded £338m in any subsequent year8
Verdict: Far below forecast

2021: Corporation tax rise from 19% to 25% (from April 2023)
Forecast: £11–17bn/year additional yield9
Outturn: First year broadly as expected; 2024–25 receipts revised down £7.5bn below the OBR’s own October 2024 forecast10
Verdict: Below forecast in medium term

2021/2022: Personal income tax threshold freeze
Forecast: ~£29.3bn/year by 2027–2811
Outturn: Exceeded forecast; total boost ~£41bn by 2025 due to higher-than-expected inflation12
Verdict: Above forecast (due to unexpected inflation levels)

2022: Energy Profits Levy (windfall tax; rate ultimately 38%)
Forecast: £41.6bn total over 2022–23 to 2027–2813
Outturn: Revised down to £17.4bn for the same period, less than half the original forecast14
Verdict: Far below forecast

2024: Abolition of non-domicile tax status (from April 2025)
Forecast: ~£3.2bn/year; £34bn over five years15
Outturn: Capital gains tax receipts fell £2bn year-on-year in Q1 2025; Treasury had internally warned the measure might raise nothing at all16
Verdict: Below forecast; potentially loss-making

2024: Employers’ NI rise from 13.8% to 15%; secondary threshold cut from £9,100 to £5,000
Forecast: £25bn/year by end of forecast period17
Outturn: OBR modelled 60% passes through to workers in lower wages18; broader tax shortfall of £7.5bn in 2024–2519
Verdict: Outcome uncertain; behavioural effects emerging

Why the Forecasts Are Wrong

The Pretence of Fiscal Knowledge

There is a deeper intellectual problem at work here that Friedrich Hayek identified in his seminal essay, The Use of Knowledge in Society.

Hayek’s central argument was that the failure of central planning was not merely a practical failure of bureaucracy, but an epistemological one. The knowledge required to manage a complex economy is not concentrated in any single place. It is dispersed across millions of individuals, with each acting on local, particular, and often tacit information that cannot be aggregated, modelled, or possessed by any central planner: what is known by a single agent is only a small fraction of the total knowledge held by all members of society.

This principle applies with full force to tax forecasting. When the Treasury publishes a revenue estimate, it is not reporting a fact - as all Governments suggest - it is producing a model output conditioned on assumptions about how millions of individuals, businesses, and financial advisers will respond to a change in the rules. Those individuals possess knowledge the Treasury does not: knowledge of their own circumstances, their own legal options, their own tolerance for risk and inconvenience. They act on that knowledge. Their aggregate behaviour determines how much the tax actually raises.

Hayek would have predicted, with no great difficulty, what the 50p tax rate would do. He would have predicted what the Energy Profits Levy would do to North Sea investment. He would certainly have predicted that abolishing non-dom status - a tax specifically targeting internationally mobile, high‑net‑worth individuals who, by definition, have the means and the options to leave - would produce a behavioural response far larger than the model assumed. What the Treasury persistently treats as a parameter to be modelled, Hayek recognised as a dynamic and unknowable process: human beings adjusting their behaviour in ways that defeat the planner’s intentions, not out of perversity, but out of rational self‑interest.

This is not a counsel of despair about taxation as such - that is best saved for another article. It is a counsel of humility about the precision with which its effects can be predicted.

People with Money Change Their Behaviour

The clearest case is the 50p income tax rate. The Treasury forecast that the new top rate would raise £2.7bn a year. In the end, the evidence suggested it raised around £1bn, and quite possibly less. The reason was straightforward: roughly £16–18bn of income was shifted forward into 2009–10 - the year before the new rate came into force - by those with the means and the financial advisers to do so.

This is the Hayekian dynamic in its purest form. The individuals best placed to respond to the new rate possessed precisely the knowledge of their own financial structures, their own timing flexibility, their own alternatives that the Treasury model did not and could not capture. The model treated the tax base as a given. The taxpayers knew better.

The non‑dom abolition is the most recent and potentially most damaging example. Official models assumed only a small number of non‑doms would leave the UK in response to the new rules. Early evidence suggests the departure rate is far higher. The five‑year £34bn forecast now looks like something between wishful thinking and fantasy.

The Tax Base Erodes

The Bank Levy tells a different version of the same story. Introduced in 2011 at a rate designed to raise £2.5bn a year, it was set against a balance sheet the Treasury assumed would remain broadly stable. It did not. Banks were already shrinking their balance sheets after the financial crisis, and they continued to do so at a rate faster than the Treasury’s models assumed. The levy rate was raised repeatedly between 2011 and 2015, not to increase revenue, but simply to try to maintain the original target as the tax base contracted beneath it. Today, it raises roughly half of what was originally promised.

The Energy Profits Levy is perhaps the most spectacular example in recent history. When first announced, the forecast was that it would raise £41.6bn over six years. Within three years, that projection had been cut to less than half of that at £17.4bn. Falling energy prices played a part, but the deeper problem was that a punitive, effective tax rate of 78% on North Sea profits caused investment to collapse. The tax base, the stock of profitable production, shrank far faster than the models assumed. The Treasury taxed the North Sea so aggressively that it permanently impaired the North Sea’s future taxable capacity in the process.

The Sugar Levy: “Success” Funded by Failure

The Soft Drinks Industry Levy offers a special kind of irony. Announced in the 2016 Budget and implemented in April 2018, it was designed both to raise revenue and to reduce sugar consumption. The forecast said it would raise around £520m a year. In its first seven months, it raised £154m. It has never exceeded £338m in a full year since.

Supporters of the levy say this is not a failure: manufacturers reformulated their products so aggressively, reducing sugar content below the taxable threshold, that most soft drinks now avoid the levy entirely. The health objective was, by that measure, substantially achieved. But this only illustrates the Hayekian point in microcosm. The behavioural response that defeats the revenue forecast is the same behavioural response that determines whether the policy is first implemented at all. Firms possessed knowledge about what was technically and commercially feasible that the Treasury did not. They used it. You cannot simultaneously claim the levy was a triumph for public health and pretend the revenue forecast was a reasonable estimate.

The Deeper Problem

None of this means the Treasury or OBR are technically incompetent. In most cases, they are doing the best that can be done with the tools available to them, but we must recognise the great limits of these tools. The deeper problem is that those models are then presented to Parliament and the public with a false precision and a confident number attached to every policy that implies far greater certainty than is warranted.

Hayek described this as the “pretence of knowledge”: the tendency of those who manage economic affairs to mistake the output of a model for real knowledge about how a complex system will behave. The price of that pretence in fiscal policy is that spending commitments are built on revenue forecasts that prove illusory. When the forecast fails - as with the Energy Profits Levy’s £41.6bn that became £17.4bn, or as the non‑dom abolition’s £34bn may prove to be nothing at all - the resulting shortfall has to be filled by further tax rises, cuts to public services, or additional borrowing.

This is the cycle that Starmer’s Guardian article did not address. The spending is real. The revenue funding is not.

The Treasury invents a number. The Chancellor reads it out. The taxpayer pays when it turns out to be fiction.

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Harry Richer is the Director of Fighting for a Free Future, working for Chairman the Rt Hon Steve Baker. He worked as the senior aide to Mr Baker for four years and was intimately involved in all of Mr Baker's national campaigns, including his work on the monetary system, Net Zero, and the Covid Recovery Group, acting as its Head of Research. He has also co-written multiple publications on Austrian School economics, including the 2024 Springer book, The Age of Debt Bubbles.

When Nigel Farage’s Reform UK joined the Conservatives, Labour and the Liberal Democrats in pledging to maintain the pension triple lock, something important happened in British politics: the possibility of a government promoting prosperity in the next parliament died. Alas for the young, who already face a nightmare.

Every major national party has now signed up to a policy the Office for Budget Responsibility has repeatedly described as a major long‑term fiscal risk – one that will dramatically increase over the coming decades, worsening an unsustainable debt path.

We know who will pay: people in their twenties and thirties who are already locked out of home ownership, loaded with student debt, squeezed by stagnant wages and facing some of the highest childcare costs in the developed world.

It is a disaster for them and our whole society.

Politicians and journalists know the truth

Shamefully, politicians and journalists know the truth that the welfare state cannot be afforded and yet do nothing about it: nothing to change policy and nothing to hold politicians to account for their failure. The terrain of debate is the easy one: for higher spending and lower taxes. That spells ruin.

It’s true that many politicians – perhaps a majority – are thoroughly ignorant of the mess we are in, which I spelt out here. But Chancellors are not.

I vividly recall a private meeting of Conservative MPs while Rishi was Chancellor. About 30 colleagues were gathered in one of the larger committee rooms in the Palace of Westminster to lobby him. When my turn came, I briefly sketched that argument: that the welfare state is unaffordable and headed to default. MPs looked downcast as Rishi, to his credit, confirmed I was right. Then one said, “But we can’t do anything about it at the next election,” and the bubble burst: the impossible demands of the voters again drove politicians to make promises they know cannot be kept.

And recently, on our podcast, the excellent journalist Kevin Schofield readily agreed we are headed for default and that journalists do know. He told us every party admits in private that the welfare state is unsustainable. We discussed why this is not news.

It is an extraordinary failure of democracy that this looming implosion and the implications of coping with it are not shaping the news.

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After some fantastic addresses from Lord Jon Moynihan and Lord David Frost, Rt Hon Steve Baker FRSA sat down with Dr Emmanuel Igwe (Prosperity Institute), Eve Lugg, and William Yarwood (TaxPayers’ Alliance).

You can watch the speeches from Lord Frost and Lord Moynihan below:

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

This week, Steve, Harry and Laura are joined by Albie Amankona to discuss the ongoing war in Iran, the Labour government’s continuing attempts to reverse Brexit, and NASA’s first expedition to the Moon in more than 50 years.

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

Subscribe today to watch the full episode!

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If you haven’t seen it yet, don’t miss the latest episode of The Insurgency:

This week on Voices

All the articles published on Voices for a Free Future over the last week, in case you missed any.

Video thumbnail image courtesy of the Executive Office of the President of the United States (public domain US federal government work): https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Donald_Trump_2018-07-23.png

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In a brilliant speech, Lord Moynihan argues that sustained economic growth is essential for human progress and can only be achieved through small government, low taxes, and minimal regulation, which unleash free inquiry, entrepreneurship, and capital formation rather than relying on redistribution or the state.

Buy Jon’s excellent books here and find my review here.

You can watch Lord David Frost’s speech below:

We are pleased to continue our new series: What is Happening in Argentina! Each month, Fighting for a Free Future Associate, Luke Lucas, will report for Voices for a Free Future on what has been happening under the world’s only libertarian presidency.

It has been just over a month since Argentina appeared to be consolidating its transition from stabilisation to early recovery. Since then, March has marked a clear shift: the reform programme is no longer defined primarily by macroeconomic gains, but by political conflict, institutional pushback and emerging social strain.

After securing congressional approval in February, the courts suspended large parts of the reform due to potential constitutional violations relating to labour rights and union protections. The court’s objections are primarily concerned with Article 14 bis of the Argentine Constitution, which guarantees protection against arbitrary dismissal, union freedom and the right to strike. Judges have argued that Milei’s reforms conflict with the freedom of association (specifically with unions). As well as Article 14, under Article 75, Section 22 of the Argentine Constitution, Argentina gives constitutional status to international agreements such as the International Labour Organisation Convention 87 + 98, as well as the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.

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The escalation and partial judicial halt of President Milei’s labour reform agenda mark an important turning point: what had been a legislative battle has now become a judicial one. If the courts are successful at blocking the reform, it will introduce significant uncertainty over the government’s ability to implement structural reform.

Despite the judicial resistance, Milei has doubled down on his reform programme. On March 1^st, he opened Congress with plans for tax cuts, electoral reform, judicial restructuring and further deregulation, all components of his much wider institutional overhaul. The president has, however, adopted a more aggressive stance toward opposition figures and institutions, signalling the early stages of a deepening political divide.

Alongside institutional reforms, Milei has accelerated ideological positioning in both security and foreign policy. The government is taking a more hardline stance by closely aligning with U.S. policy by designating major transnational criminal groups as terrorist organisations. Argentina has also announced its withdrawal from the World Health Organisation, but has undertaken an active schedule of international trips. By strengthening ties with ideologically aligned leaders and promoting a pro-market agenda, the government is increasingly signalling a realignment away from multilateral institutions and toward bilateral or ideological partnerships

Continuing his trend of lowering inflation and reducing poverty rates, macroeconomic indicators remain stable, but March has highlighted a growing social strain. Public confidence in Milei has slipped over the past month, as shown by declining approval ratings. This appears to be driven by a combination of factors: the social impact of austerity, disruption from strikes, and growing controversy from his reform agenda. Confidence has shifted from cautious optimism to conditional support, with much of the electorate weighing the costs of structural reform and economic improvement against immediate social costs.

However, falling approval ratings cannot be taken in isolation as dissatisfaction with Milei’s reform agenda. March carries significant symbolic weight for Argentina, marking the 50^th anniversary of the 1976 military coup that prompted mass demonstrations across the country. These commemorations are not merely historical observances but deeply embedded political and cultural events that mobilise large segments of society around social and human rights issues. As a result, heightened public activity may exaggerate the appearance of declining confidence when viewed through a purely political lens. At the same time, Milei’s administration is more revisionist in tone towards aspects of the dictatorship, and Milei himself is a controversial figure for questioning elements of the commonly accepted historical narrative. Taken together, falling approval ratings cannot be perceived as a simple referendum on the economic programme alone.

While earlier expectations pointed toward a transition into early recovery, it seems March represents a transition from economic stabilisation to institutional confrontation. Despite facing judicial resistance, political backlash and social pressure, Milei remains committed to deep structural change. The central question has shifted from whether reforms can pass to whether they can be sustained. After months of economic stability, macroeconomic stabilisation is no longer the main challenge; political durability is now the main challenge.

In the UK, similar reforms would not avoid confrontation, from the streets to the courts and from political conflict to procedural constraint. Margaret Thatcher illustrates this dynamic clearly: her programme of rapid liberalisation and workers’ reforms in the 1980s did not bypass institutional and social resistance, but instead transformed it into prolonged industrial conflict and political confrontation. Argentina’s current trajectory reflects a similar principle: the faster and more comprehensive the reforms, the more likely they are to provoke friction.

The real test is no longer whether Milei can reform Argentina, but whether Argentina’s institutions will let him.

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It was a pleasure to welcome Lord David Frost to our latest briefing event, Britain Unleashed: Returning to Growth, presented in association with Glint.

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In his powerful speech, Lord Frost argues that Britain has descended into a stagnant, high‑tax, collectivist system and must now undertake the difficult, deliberate work of shrinking the state, restoring free markets, reclaiming national sovereignty from foreign institutions, and rebuilding a cohesive, nation‑based democracy in order to create a freer, happier, and more prosperous country.

You can read Rt Hon Steve Baker’s reflections on Lord Frost’s speech here:

You can read the full text of Lord Frost’s speech below.

In Book VI of Vergil’s Aeneid, the great epic of Rome’s early foundation, the hero Aeneas meets the Cumaean Sybil, a prophetess, and asks her if he may descend to Hades to see his dead father.

Famously she replies:

“Facilis descensus averno

The way down to Hell is easy.

Night and day the gate to gloomy Hades stands open

But to retrace your steps, to pass out once again to the upper air

Hoc opus, hoc labor est

That’s the real task. That’s the difficult part.”

So it is in Britain today. The gate to gloomy collectivism has stood open and we have willingly walked through it. Now we are a zero growth economy, with the highest ever levels of taxation and spending. We have over the last 20 years been all too open to easy decisions and short-run palliatives, to borrowing rather than earning, to taxing and distributing rather than encouraging self reliance. We have lost faith in the market economy as the route to prosperity. Now we have to retrace our steps and return to the upper air, and, as the Sybil says, that is the hard work. That is the labour that lies before us.

It won’t get any easier by delay. Parties on the Right, non-socialist commentators and intellectuals, all need to face up to the reality of what now has to be done and work to create an effective political movement to do it. There is still time. But the work of education and persuasion will be accomplished only slowly. We need to start now.

That political movement needs to be honest about the challenges but also honest about what can be accomplished. It needs to show that, with effort, we can create a freer, happier and more prosperous society, one that is attractive and fulfils human potential, one which people want to be a part of.

We know very well how to make such a society. We have plenty of experience from our own history and from looking around the world. It is about freedom; it is about an effective state not a big state; and it is about fostering a sense of nationhood and belonging.

Freedom and free markets are the only way to create prosperity. Those on the left, and some on the Right, who claim there is some other way are fooling themselves. Look around the world and you will see that the successful countries are those with low taxation and high levels of economic freedom. That’s what supports enterprise, prosperity, and growth.

Unfortunately Britain has got on the wrong path. In the 2026 edition of the Heritage Index of World Economic Freedom, you can see there has been a collapse in the UK ranking over the last 2-3 years of the last Tory govt, from which we have not recovered. Not because of covid, but after it. We are now well below not just the usual leaders, Singapore, Switzerland, Nordics, but countries like Germany, S Korea, Portugal, Cape Verde, Cyprus. 10 years ago we ranked 10th in the world. Now we are 29th globally, 17th within Europe. We know why. High tax, high spend, high borrowing, a big but weak state,and a squeezing out of markets from many areas of activity has done the damage.

What needs to be done is in my view obvious. We need a ten year programme to shrink the state by 1pp or more a year to get it back to early Blair era levels, to cut public spending, taxation, and regulation. We need welfare reform. We need serious planning reform. We need to get tariffs down. We need a Royal Commission to tell us how to move away from the productivity-destroying and, to a greater extent than elsewhere in Europe, the patient-killing NHS, and how to move to a European-style insurance system over time. We need to invest in gas and nuclear energy, stop the rollout of renewable, and end the net zero programme, the National Suicide Pact. And overall we need to remove the dead hand of the state from markets, free up prices, stop capping, fixing, and controlling. If we don’t do this, we aren’t going to recover.

But a successful country is about more than just markets. A successful country also has a sense of nation. That has massively eroded in recent years. That isn’t just a cultural but also an economic problem.

As I have said before, I believe that on a historical perspective Europe’s and the West’s economic success is fundamentally related to the emergence of the modern nation state. It is no accident that the great drive to industrialisation in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries happened first in the traditional existing nation states, and spread with nationalism across the continent. In short, nation-state formation and industrialisation proceeded to a significant extent in parallel.

That was not coincidence. Free markets require more than contracts and prices. They require a willingness to experiment, to change, to disrupt traditional ways of doing things. They require people to accept churn, uncertainty and unequal outcomes. That will not happen unless people feel they are part of a broadly cohesive community; unless they believe that that community can provide collective protection against the worst risks; and unless they think that community is well governed, so that entrepreneurialism pays off rather than being arbitrarily punished. It also requires them to know that they can adjust course and solve problems as they emerge - that the democratic process genuinely means something and that elections can change things.

What does that mean in our context? It means state reform so that the civil service ceases to operate as an independent power in the land and is properly under ministerial control. It means reform of devolution so that the devolved governments concentrate on their actual job, fulfilling the duties of local government, not endlessly talking about independence and not trying to compete with the government on the international scene. It means controlling the borders, targeting net negative immigration, reversing as far as possible the Boriswave, and getting serious about integration policy. It means proper spending on foreign affairs and above all defence and national resilience here at home. It means abolishing the Equality Act and scrapping the system of group rights, of psychological Bantustans based on protected characteristics, in favour of individual rights. It means ending the clampdown on free speech.

To be able to do any of these things we need to be properly in control of our country. We are not. We don’t set all the laws in Northern Ireland. We have no say on the terms on which nearly 6 million EU citizens live here, policed as they are by the European Commission not national institutions. The ECHR court in Strasbourg sets the terms of who can come to Britain and how long they can stay. And now we are faced with the government’s EU reset which is taking us further away from self-govt, thanks to an establishment which has never really accepted the logic of national independence and treats self-government as a regrettable inconvenience. So we need to undo the EU reset, leave the ECHR, and abrogate the Windsor Framework and the rest of the Withdrawal Agreement so we govern our country ourselves again.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I voted to Leave the EU, and I worked hard to make Brexit happen and to deliver the biggest and broadest ever free trade agreement, because I believe that all things we want to do are best accomplished outside the EU. I am a little concerned that we don’t hear enough about this from the leadership of the parties on the Right. I get that no one wants another round of the Brexit wars. I don’t either. But I do want our leadership to stand up for national independence, for reversing the subordination to foreign institutions where this govt is taking us, for standing up for the principles of a free society and free institutions within a national democracy. We don’t have that at the moment and we aren’t going to get it without another supreme effort.

So what we need to do is clear. It’s almost everything. I don’t believe many on the Right would disagree with me on most of it. The task is how and that is where the political effort needs to go. What is the order of priority? What reforms have to come first to unlock others? Which are going to show the political payoff most quickly? Over the last 20 years we have built a rickety but all encompassing structure of scaffolding around the crumbling structure of the British state. We can’t just take bits out at random first or the whole thing will collapse on us. In short we need a plan. I know Kemi says “we have a plan and the others don’t”. Sadly I don’t believe her. I am not sure either party on the Right has a plan yet. Once these local elections are out of the way, one needs developing, and as a matter of urgency.

For the prize is great. To return to the Aeneid. Aeneas ignores the warnings of the Sybil and goes down to Hades and is shown the mighty destiny of the Rome that he will found, the famous injunction, “Roman be sure to rule the world, to crown peace with justice, to spare the vanquished and crush the proud”, but also that he must return and struggle to found the city and make this happen. That struggle faces us too if we are to recover. To refound our nation without external control, and to make it as I said at the start, “a freer, happier and more prosperous society”, one which attracts admiration not pity and disdain from those looking at us.

It will not be easy. But there is no other way. The task now for politicians is to make what is necessary possible. We must not despair. We can do it. This country has declined and recovered before. Writing in the depths of the last great crisis, in 1940, George Orwell wrote in his great essay the Lion and Unicorn, “We must add to our heritage or lose it. We must grow greater or grow less, we must go forward or backward. I believe in England, and I believe that we shall go forward.”

I do too. Thank you very much.

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We will publish his speech in full very soon, but it reminded me of two things. One was Reagan’s brilliant 1964 speech, A Time for Choosing, which transformed his career at a time when people still knew what they were losing. The other was that when Reagan was President and Margaret Thatcher was Prime Minister, we seemed to know what was worth fighting for in a way we seem now to have forgotten.

The Berlin Wall fell1, Communism ended, and the Cold War drew to a close. And yet somehow the socialists seem to have won: I read today Labour draws up equality law revamp that ‘will impose socialism’ on Britain.

Under the plans, public sector bodies will have a new “socio-economic duty” imposed on them, meaning that all decisions they make must strive to reduce inequality in society.

This is injustice exemplified. In a free society, we ought to be treated equally before the law, not discriminated against to meet a conception of just outcomes held by someone in authority, trampling over human choice, agency and action.

This debate was recently the study of our Book Club when we read Nozick’s critique of Rawls theory of justice, which defines the contemporary Left. Unfortunately, the Conservatives were as guilty, introducing the Public Services (Social Value) Act 2012, which I stridently opposed. So why is treating people unequally the consensus?

When I joined the Royal Air Force in the 1980s, we thought we were defending a civilisation built on individual liberty, equal treatment under the law and national democratic self‑government. Today, the governing establishment scarcely believes in those foundations.

Once again, we can choose freedom, prosperity and happiness, or we shall have tyranny, poverty and misery. This could not matter more.

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Join Fighting for a Free Future and the Adam Smith Institute for an exclusive cinema screening of Part 1 of their landmark two-part television documentary - The Real History of Communism - a profound exploration of 20th-century history that traces the harrowing descent from idealistic hope to systemic oppression. Following the screening, the Rt Hon Steve Baker will host a Q&A.

Narrated by the acclaimed Hugh Bonneville, this film brings together esteemed historians and the courageous voices of survivors to examine how ideologies born of optimism ultimately paved the way for deprivation and slaughter under the era’s most notorious dictatorships.

Tickets are available now: luma.com/oponegbx

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Event Schedule:

• ​​Screening: Part 1 of the documentary (narrated by Hugh Bonneville).

• ​​Discussion: A 30-minute Q&A session will immediately follow the film.

​​Leading the Q&A is Chairman of Fighting For a Free Future, Steve Baker. Driven by a profound instinct for protecting the rights of the individual, Steve will navigate the complex themes of the film, bringing his signature passion for freedom to this critical conversation on historical tyranny.

​​Location: Central London Cinema (TBD). All attendees will be updated once the screening venue is confirmed.