I say this as someone on the right who spends most of my time arguing against Labour’s prescriptions: the reaction over the last 24 hours has been embarrassing. Rather than demonstrating a confident, forward-looking conservatism that measures people purely on drive, talent, and capability, the right has jumped straight into a reflex culture-war script.

Let’s strip away the bad-faith noise. Listening to commentators, you would think Harriet Harman claimed Claire Coutinho was handed a promotion solely because she was pregnant, as if her appointment were some tokenistic tick-box exercise.

She said nothing of the sort.

Appearing on Sky News’ Electoral Dysfunction podcast, Harman directly praised Kemi Badenoch for elevating capable women:

“Woke is as woke does. You’ve done it, Kemi. Claire Coutinho took Andrew Griffith’s job as shadow business secretary. And actually, she was one of a number of women who was promoted by Kemi Badenoch and also is on maternity leave. I’m giving Kemi Badenoch a woke badge for that. That is a very progressive thing to do to give her a promotion. Honestly, I never thought I’d see the day.”

Harman’s point was plain, analytical fact: in modern Britain, a woman can be judged as the best person for the job, awarded the post on merit, and take that role on, while seven months pregnant and preparing for maternity leave.

Why on earth is anyone on the right picking a fight over that?

It is disappointing to see Kemi Badenoch’s team allow this moment to be used for political point-scoring. This is, after all, the same Kemi Badenoch who faced backlash during the leadership contest for suggesting statutory maternity pay was “excessive” and had “gone too far.” When a Labour veteran publicly points out that Badenoch turned around and promoted a heavily pregnant colleague to a frontline role, that isn’t an attack. It is pointing out that the shadow cabinet put talent ahead of physical circumstances. Turning that observation into a cheap political row does a disservice to everyone involved.

Harriet Harman is nearly 80 years old. For almost the entirety of her adult life, a woman in line for a major promotion who announced a pregnancy would have been quietly sidelined, passed over, or frozen out entirely. That wasn’t a myth; it was standard corporate and political reality.

In fact, there were no statutory maternity leave provisions for Cabinet ministers in the UK until Suella Braverman went on maternity leave as Attorney General in 2021. Up until five years ago, a female Cabinet minister who wanted to start a family had to rely on informal, discretionary arrangements or step down.

Even today in 2026, organisations like Pregnant Then Screwed exist because thousands of women every year still face real workplace penalties, demotions, and subtle career sabotage the second they announce a pregnancy. The law protects rights on paper, but cultural attitudes dictate workplace reality. Pushing top talent out of the workforce simply because of biological timing is bad for business, bad for the economy, and bad for society.

Lately, a bizarre argument has gained traction on the right: the idea that if an action aligns with equality protections, calling it “progressive” is somehow an insult, or that doing the right thing is merely “following the law.”

That is total nonsense. When I marry a man, that will still represent a progressive milestone for individual freedom, regardless of the fact that same-sex marriage has been statutory law for over a decade. Protecting pregnant women from workplace prejudice is progressive. Equal treatment under the law is progressive. True meritocracy—where an individual is judged purely on their ability, free from arbitrary barriers—is a fundamentally sensible, right-leaning principle.

The word “progressive” is not automatically a dirty word. Many of us benefit directly from equality laws. The entire purpose of maternity discrimination law is to ensure the best person for the job actually gets the job, even if they happen to be taking leave in a few weeks. Without those protections, risk-averse bosses simply default to promoting whoever is most convenient at that exact moment.

Instead of jumping straight into a culture-war, people should state the reality: Claire Coutinho was the best person for the job, and we live in a country where pregnancy is no longer an automatic barrier to high office.

Harriet Harman spent decades fighting the legal and political battles that made that environment possible. Attacking her for contextualising it isn’t strong, principled, or “anti-woke.” It is foolish, historically illiterate, and ungrateful.

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Fighting for a Free Future is pleased to introduce a new series for Voices for a Free Future: Profiling Freedom. Each month, FFF Network Manager Ted Grainger will profile individuals who have bravely fought for freedom and represent the values that FFF espouses. This series will replace our previous Tyranny of the Month series.

Welcome to the first instalment of my new series for the Voices for a Free Future Substack, Profiling Freedom. I thought I would start this new series by giving a brief explainer on what it's about and why we at FFF decided to start it.

In each instalment of Profiling Freedom, I will be exploring a different figure from history, either recent or older, and their personal struggle for freedom. The aim being to focus on what lessons we can learn from these brave and righteous individuals who often sacrificed everything in pursuit of freedom. Quite frankly, storytelling is one of the most powerful devices at our disposal. We love stories as they make us feel alive, and make us, well, human. And yet I feel those in the liberty movement underutilise storytelling. There is no reason for this to be the case, not least because the story of liberty is one of the most powerful stories man has to tell. I can be certain that I will not run out of stories for this series.

This week we will be profiling the story of Sophie Scholl. Sophie was a member of the White Rose, a non-violent Nazi-resistance group that existed in Germany from 1942-1943. Sophie was raised in an ordinary household. She was the fourth of six children born to Magdalena and Robert Scholl, who was the mayor of their town in the Weimar state of Württemberg. The Scholls were a devout Lutheran family, and faith became central to Sophie’s beliefs.

Whilst Sophie’s politician father was always an anti-Nazi, the same was not always true of his children, including Sophie. At age 12, she joined the female branch of the Hitler Youth against the wishes of her father. As she grew up, she became disillusioned with Nazism as she began to witness the persecution of her Jewish friends. In 1937, her brothers, including Hans, who had also originally been members of the Hitler Youth, were arrested by the Gestapo for being members of the German Youth Movement, which led to her further disillusionment with Nazism.

Upon graduating from secondary school, Sophie initially became a kindergarten teacher. Only a year later, though, she was forced to leave this job to become a nursery school teacher in Blumberg as part of her National Labour Service requirements for entering university. After her six-month service had concluded, she enrolled at the University of Munich studying biology and philosophy. It was here in Munich where she would make the friendships that would later form the White Rose.

However, what I find most intriguing is that this friendship did not begin as a political resistance operation. It was far more ordinary than that. They bonded over their shared love of music, of theatre, of art. I am a big believer in the beauty of the ordinary and how greatness can, and often does, come out of it.

Rather quickly, this group of ordinary friends became the White Rose. It was started by Sophie’s brother Hans and Alexander Schmorell, who wrote and published their first four leaflets in the summer of 1942. Around this time, Sophie also joined by helping to distribute their leaflets. This was the way in which they operated. The White Rose was committed to passive resistance by publishing pamphlets aimed at the German intelligentsia, whom they saw as those able to be influenced by alternative ideas. They spoke through the ideas of Goethe, Schiller, the Bible, and Aristotle to influence change.

They recognised that tyranny cannot survive through terror alone. It also needs the educated to fall silent, to rationalise, to avert their eyes, and to carry on without dissent. Therefore, they had to reach these people and make it so that ignorance was no longer an option. Friedrich Hayek later made a parallel argument for free societies. Political change, he said, begins not only in parliaments or polling booths, but among the people who decide which ideas are worth taking seriously.

In February 1943, Sophie and her brother Hans were arrested by the Gestapo whilst disseminating leaflets at the University of Munich. Hans confessed first and sought to protect the culpability of other White Rose members. However, seeking to do the same, Sophie admitted her own guilt, despite initial beliefs among the Gestapo that she was innocent. In court, she is recorded as saying,

Somebody, after all, had to make a start. What we wrote and said is also believed by many others. They just don’t dare express themselves as we did.

I trust that as the reader, the poignancy of this comment is not lost on you. Her reported last words to her cellmate were somehow even more poignant:

How can we expect righteousness to prevail when there is hardly anyone willing to give himself up individually to a righteous cause. ... It is such a splendid sunny day, and I have to go. But how many have to die on the battlefield in these days, how many young, promising lives. What does my death matter if by our acts thousands are warned and alerted.

This is the lesson that we must learn from Sophie Scholl and the White Rose. We must make sure that within ourselves, the defence of liberty is not optional. To be ignorant, consciously or otherwise, is to be culpable. Sophie Scholl was prepared to sacrifice her life, as she did on the 22^nd February 1943, when she was executed by guillotine, in the name of liberty.

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Ted Grainger is the Network Manager for Fighting for a Free Future. He has previously worked as a parliamentary aide, as the red tape researcher for a Shadow Minister, and for Popular Conservatism.

“The NWF is not a conventional sovereign wealth fund that invests wealth generated from natural resources to benefit future generations. Therefore its name, the National Wealth Fund, could be misleading.”
Commons Treasury Select Committee report on the National Wealth Fund

I have long admired Mark Carney, now Prime Minister of Canada, although not for his libertarianism. He is a brilliant communicator - perhaps better even than David Cameron - presenting as what he is: a statesman of extraordinary skill and talent.

I watched and scrutinised Mark close up over years when he was Governor of the Bank of England and I was on the Treasury Select Committee. He is a brilliant man and exceptionally difficult to argue with.

Unfortunately, many of the things he holds to be true are quite wrong. See for example the following two accounts of a wealth fund proposed for Canada in the context of the UK’s failing one which he helped inspire:

Via Carney’s ‘Canada Strong Fund’ likely to follow path of failing U.K. fund he helped create, think tank says:

The study reports that the National Wealth Fund’s losses have nearly doubled since the 2024 rebranding, reaching £152.2 million (C$288 million) last year. It has delivered a cumulative return of minus 24.9 per cent in two years of operation. It has also fallen short of the three-to-one private-to-public funding ratio it promised Britons.

And via Borrowed Wealth: How the Canada Strong Fund Repeats Other Countries’ Mistakes (IEDM):

A sovereign wealth fund saves a surplus. Norway banks excess oil revenue, invests it abroad at arm’s length, and caps by law what any government may withdraw. The Canada Strong Fund, in contrast, has no surplus to save. Its capital will be borrowed and its deployment directed toward sectors chosen in Ottawa.

In encouraging these schemes, doubtless Mark Carney means well. Given that such a talented man remains willing to back such inevitable and egregious failure, the institutional factors at work deserve a close look: he is no fool.

More of the same?

The Canada Strong Fund is described as a sovereign wealth fund but it is built on borrowed money, not surplus funds from national resources. It is the opposite of Norway’s often-cited model.

The critique from IEDM makes the point that it is a state lending bank branded as a wealth fund. Real capital will not be allocated by entrepreneurs and investors motivated by profit and loss: taxpayer-backed debt will be allocated by politicians and officials at the centre of government.

That National Post article points out the link to the UK’s National Wealth Fund (NWF). As the Treasury Select Committee found, the NWF is financed by government debt, not revenues from resources. Neither the Fund’s performance metrics nor risk appetite are clear. How and by whom the NWF will be evaluated is not known. A risk of crowding out private investment is understood…

Prime Minister Carney’s fingerprints are on both. And there’s a common story: Net Zero investment, bromides about mobilising private capital, “crowding in” and so on. What is going on?

The central insight: two ways to operate

In Bureaucracy, Mises argued that there are two categories of organisation of human cooperation: either prices, profit and loss or bureaucratic management apart from those disciplines, governed by rules from a higher authority. Instead of allowing those who purchase or refrain from purchasing to decide ultimately how capital is allocated, decisions are made through official and political preferences.

This is at the heart of the issue: state enterprises like the National Wealth Fund and Canada Strong Fund want the cloak of profit-seeking investment but they are institutionally rule bound and bureaucratic. They simply do not operate under the incentives of the market economy, even as they operate within it.

This is not a problem of the good faith or intelligence of politicians and officials: it is a structural issue. Without economic calculation resting on freely-chosen market prices, it is impossible to know how well resources are being used. That is what profit and loss are for: without them, institutions are bound to revert to rule-following, misallocation and expansion in the face of failure.

The evidence of history

This is not a matter merely of theory. David Myddelton’s book They Meant Well reviews six large state-directed projects: the R.101 airship, the groundnut scheme, nuclear power, Concorde, the Channel Tunnel and the Millennium Dome. Every project began with confident expectations of national benefit and ended in vast cost overruns: they were not value for money.

And now we can add another notorious failure to the list: HS2. The failure of that project was easy to foresee given the above theory and history. Alas the old pattern repeated: political consensus around lofty ambition without a serious look at incentives. Once again, when politicians and officials direct projects through rule following, they inevitably lack the discipline of profit and loss and failure is not self-correcting. Political prestige, taxpayer funding and sunk-cost thinking keep failing projects going long after private investors would have closed them down.

And of course, for the poor taxpayer, groaning under the overall weight of taxation, the cost to them of an individual government project is not so large as to secure their attention. These “dispersed costs” enable failure to drag on beyond reason: it is when costs are concentrated on individuals and firms that they pay attention and take action.

Conclusion

These so-called wealth funds are not new: they are state direction of scarce resources using structures of incentives which are bound to produce failure. Cloaking them with the language of markets – or indeed wealth funds provided for out of real resources – cannot make them work.

Mark Carney – like so many on the liberal left – is right that the UK and Canada have investment gaps and he is right to believe in markets, in so far as he does. Where he and every other believer in these schemes goes wrong is the ancient conceit that an elite can plan our lives better than we ourselves.

What is needed is not bureaucratic direction of scarce resources and effort, however well intentioned. What is needed is humility about the capacity of individuals and institutions to know how best to serve others and so choose prices, profit and loss, competition on the merits and the sovereignty of the consumer over direction by authority.

Perhaps private capital is cautious. We ought to ask why. I would begin by citing regulatory risk, high and uncertain taxes and intolerable constraints on private property applied through land use planning. The brilliance of an undoubted statesman is not sufficient to conquer those: a change of direction is urgently required.

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Party conference season is almost upon us. Britain is about to endure several weeks of politicians competing to tell us what else they intend to do to us and for us - with our money.

The government will announce new funds, new programmes, new initiatives and perhaps even some new “missions”. Problems will be identified and, almost invariably, the proposed solution will involve the government doing more.

We are much less likely to hear the one promise a country burdened by an ever-expanding state badly needs: what are you going to stop doing?

For too long, British politics has operated according to the peculiar assumption that government action is always the answer. If there is a problem, ministers must intervene. If an intervention fails, they must intervene again. If a regulator fails, it receives more powers. If a public service deteriorates, it receives more money.

Government failure rarely results in less government. Take affordable housing. The government has been the biggest driver of our housing crisis through our broken planning system. It is government failure that has made it extremely difficult to build homes. And it is government intervention that keeps putting more and more costs on the private developers who, once they have got past the NIMBYs, actually build the vast majority of our homes.

Conference speeches embody this instinct perfectly. Success is measured by the length of the shopping list. A new scheme for families. Another fund for businesses. More protection for consumers. Another strategy, task force, or regulator. Each announcement generates applause in the conference hall and another small expansion of the state outside it. Well, we’re running out of people, and we have most definitely run out of money.

There are promising signs that the Right are beginning to ask this question. Kemi Badenoch’s Conservatives and Reform have started challenging the assumption that government must always do more. Badenoch’s decision to abandon the Conservatives’ commitment to the 2050 Net Zero target, alongside promises to cut subsidies and regulation, suggests a willingness to revisit policies that previous Conservative governments treated as effectively irreversible. Reform, meanwhile, has promised significant cuts to the size and cost of the state, tighter welfare eligibility and the abolition or restructuring of parts of the quango and regulatory system.

Meanwhile, the current government consumes an ever-greater share of our money while assuming an ever-greater role in our lives.

So how about this. Rather than making another set of promises that we cannot as a country afford, tell us where you are willing to make spending cuts. Tell us which regulations you will repeal. Which quangos you will close. Which responsibilities currently hoarded in Whitehall will return to individuals, families, communities and businesses.

This requires a different understanding of political leadership. Ministers have become accustomed to demonstrating their seriousness by announcing action. There is a deeper principle here. A free society should begin with the presumption that individuals are capable of making decisions for themselves.

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Government undoubtedly has essential functions: protecting borders, maintaining order and providing public goods which will be chronically underprovided by individuals without government intervention. But outside those functions, intervention should require justification. Instead, we increasingly demand that individuals justify why they should be left alone.

Every unnecessary regulation imposes costs. Every additional tax changes incentives. Every extra bureaucratic requirement consumes time that could otherwise be spent producing, hiring or innovating. Small businesses feel these burdens particularly acutely because they cannot employ armies of accountants, lawyers and compliance officers to absorb them.

And of course, for many of us, the argument is bigger than economics. It is about freedom.

A state that continually expands inevitably diminishes the space in which individuals can exercise responsibility. We cannot simultaneously lament declining self-reliance while constructing a government that increasingly makes decisions on people’s behalf.

The most radical speech this autumn would not contain fifty new pledges. It would contain ten things the government intends never to do again.

So, as politicians take to conference stages over the coming weeks, listen carefully to what they promise. By all means, ask what they intend to create. But there is a much more important question for anyone interested in a freer and more prosperous Britain.

What are you prepared to stop doing?

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Eve Lugg is a Voice for Freedom with Fighting for a Free Future - our group of young advocates fighting for liberty, freedom, and free markets. Eve 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.

Samiksha Bhattacharjee runs Ladies of Liberty Alliance UK - if you are interested in getting involved, follow them on Instagram and drop them a DM or email Samiksha at stateofthedebate@gmail.com.

Let’s be honest: for decades, the liberty movement has suffered from a severe lack of imagination.

Too often, it looks like guys in ill-fitting suits arguing over GDP growth charts in stuffy lecture halls, reciting 19th-century economic textbooks that nobody outside of a hyper-niche seminar will ever read. It is academic and dry, and completely disconnected from how “normies” view the world.

If we genuinely care about freedom and pushing back against the state, we have to do something new.

The battle for the future isn’t being won on parliamentary committees or inside think tanks (though the research being done in them, especially the latter, is very important).

It’s unfolding on TikTok feeds, X, YouTube, cinema screens, and bookshelves. Politics is downstream from culture, and right now, liberty is losing simply because it refuses to speak the language of culture.

Look at popular culture today. Almost every film, TV series, or bestselling novel views the world through a single lens: corporations are evil, markets are exploitative, and only a central authority can save everyone!

Freedom is being sold solely through dense theory that only nerds like you and me read. We are surrendering one of the most powerful tools of persuasion: culture.

Storytelling is what actually changes minds. Whether it’s films that illustrate the dystopian reality of state overreach and what socialism actually does to everyday lives (check out an example here), seeing or reading about it in a setting the audience actually cares about makes the stakes real.

I wrote my first novel at 13, and it taught me that people do indeed absorb ideas subconsciously through literature. So, my next book, a dystopian fantasy, was intentionally built after I had this realisation. Spreading the message of limited government through fiction rather than academia has proven successful (e.g., Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged). We just need to make it mainstream.

We desperately need more pro-liberty books, films, and media.

Winning the fight also means confronting a growing confusion on the right, a trap that many of my friends have fallen into. The biggest threat to individual liberty today doesn’t just come from the traditional progressive left. It’s also rising on the right, where many modern nationalists who I debate daily claim that “saving the nation” requires massive state intervention, economic protectionism, and social control.

They fail to understand that socialism is actually the downfall of a nation.

Replacing left-wing state control with right-wing state control is still authoritarianism, and both end in a disaster.

If we want Gen Z to see that, we have to meet them where they are. We need high-retention video hooks, witty commentary, and short-form videos that expose government overreach wherever it comes from.

That is why I do what I do.

And I’ve come to realise that people don’t connect with… sterile policy wonks. They connect with authentic people, which means presenting your true self online (which I try my best to do on my social media).

And that is why women are the absolute best messengers for this movement.

​When women speak about liberty, the conversation moves away from assumptions and into real life. Women bring authenticity and empathy that instantly break the “boys’ club” stereotype the movement has carried for too long.

As the new Head of the Ladies of Liberty Alliance (LOLA) in the UK, changing that dynamic is the entire mission. I’m turning LOLA into a group designed to get more women onto broadcasts, into print, and at the front of the debate. We host meetups, run media training, and help female creators turn pro-liberty ideas into compelling content.

You don’t persuade a generation by lecturing them. You persuade them by telling stories, mastering the algorithm, and proving that freedom directly enhances their everyday lives.

If you are a woman who wants to speak up, write, broadcast, create content, or simply find a community of people who refuse to accept top-down control, we want you in this fight.

Join LOLA UK today. Follow us on Instagram and drop us a DM or email me at stateofthedebate@gmail.com. Let’s build this movement together!

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Samiksha Bhattacharjee runs Ladies of Liberty Alliance UK, and is a social commentator. You can find more of her work at Samiksha’s State of the Debate.

They are wrong. Nationalisation restricts economic liberty more than it strengthens accountability. If an employer mistreats its workers, workers can call on the state to act as an independent referee by mediating disputes between the two sides. However, this separation is weakened when the state is the employer; workers must appeal to the same institution they are bargaining with for protection. Where competition exists, dissatisfied consumers can take their business elsewhere. Where nationalisation creates an exclusive state provider, that exit power disappears.

A genuinely free market requires competition and limits on concentrated power, whether that power belongs to a corporation, union, or government.

Nationalisation changes ownership, not power

While nationalisation changes an industry’s ownership, it does not necessarily reduce a single provider’s power. Neither a private monopoly nor a state monopoly provides consumers with meaningful choice. Where nationalisation establishes an exclusive public provider, it replaces private economic control with political control. This makes little difference; it doesn’t matter whether an industry is publicly or privately owned if there is no competition in the market. The important question is not who owns a company, but what mechanisms hold an owner accountable and ensure services run efficiently.

While nationalisation is arguably more accountable, as the Prime Minister can sack an underperforming minister, consumers do not take part in daily decisions or operations; they simply want a reliable service. Elections concern more than the workings of a single industry; voters’ issues range from healthcare and immigration to defence and taxation, to name a few. So voters cannot express a separate judgement about one provider. Otherwise, a consumer may rely on their elected representative to take it up in Parliament. However, a free market where genuine competition exists can discipline a poorly performing business through lost customers and the consequent loss of revenue; arguably the strongest message a dissatisfied consumer can send.

A nationalised business may not be held accountable if ministers see it as an industry too politically important to fail. Accountability becomes blurred: managers and ministers blame each other, while inefficiencies continue, costs surge, and the taxpayer pays. Nationalisation does not effectively improve service quality unless competition and clear financial discipline reinforce it.

Engulfed by severe financial difficulty, the government took over British Leyland in 1975. Politically, the company was viewed as too big to fail. This made it more than a company; it became a political object, prompting the government to pump more financial support into it. By December 1980, ministers reported that approximately £1.075 billion in public funding had been made available since the rescue. Consequently, this spending raised questions about the government’s financial decisions, particularly whether they were driven by commercial or electoral interests.

Nationalisation leads to weaker financial discipline and blurred accountability, as ministers’ decision-making is influenced more by political interests and objectives than by a responsibility to balance the books and protect the value of the acquisition for taxpayers.

The state cannot be both employer and referee

In a free, competitive economy, employers and unions negotiate wages and working conditions directly, with the state serving as a referee to maintain dialogue between employers and workers. The state uses its power to enable either side to enforce contracts through courts or tribunals when necessary. This separation is important because it prevents the state from becoming the decision-maker in disputes in which it has no direct interest. Nationalisation compromises this separation by giving government a financial and political interest in the settlement.

Under nationalisation, the state’s relationship with workers becomes paradoxical. The government becomes the sole authority, determining the legality of contracts, salaries, and the settlement. This leaves unions without an independent referee to ensure that neither side oversteps its authority, while the state now determines where power lies in negotiations. Ministers become less independent in negotiating settlements as they have greater power to shape negotiations in favour of the government’s political and financial objectives.

The 2022 rail dispute demonstrated this tension before Britain’s operators were fully brought into public ownership. The Department for Transport already controlled substantial funding and rail policy, giving it the power to refuse to fund a settlement unless accompanied by workforce reforms. As the operators led the negotiations, the ministers controlled funding and rail policy, effectively rendering the operators powerless; they could only agree to a settlement the state would allow them to offer. This matters because it clarifies that a mutually agreeable settlement between workers and employers cannot be achieved where the state has any financial or political interest in the dispute.

Competition where possible, regulation where necessary

Not every industry can be competitive. Water pipes, electricity grids and railway tracks are geographic monopolies; consumers have no choice over which set of pipes or tracks reaches their home or town. Therefore, an unregulated private monopoly would offer little consumer freedom.

Hayek recognised this, arguing that the state, as an institution separate from the utility company, can regulate a private monopoly because the state’s political interest aligns with consumer interest, whereas a nationalised industry puts the regulator and the regulated under the state’s umbrella. This means the government may then become reluctant to expose mismanagement or inefficiencies, as doing so admits failure in its own decisions and appointees. Along this reasoning, Hayek’s objection was “not state enterprise as such but state monopoly”, as he believed the government could use legal and financial advantages to shelter its provider against competition.

The essential safeguard against monopoly power is independent regulation, not nationalisation. Household consumers of Scottish Water cannot switch providers, so public ownership gives them no direct way of demonstrating dissatisfaction. Instead, they must rely on regulators to scrutinise their prices, investment and performance.

This separation matters because government cannot credibly own a provider and act as its sole regulator. Nationalisation changes who can appoint the board and who bears the financial risk, but it does not restore consumers’ power to take their business elsewhere. Where public ownership is considered necessary, the provider should operate at an arm’s length from ministers and face genuine independent scrutiny. This prevents the same institution from owning, directing, and judging the monopoly.

Unavoidable monopolies do not have to be state monopolies

Nationalisation is attractive because it promises to place essential industries under democratic control. However, empowering the state does not equal democratic control; it places consumers further from the decisions being made. By becoming owner, funder, employer, and regulator, the government can influence appointments, funding, objectives, and the legal framework governing scrutiny. This shows that changing a company’s owner does not solve the underlying problem of unaccountable power.

One of the greatest concerns of nationalisation is the paradoxical relationship it creates between the state and workers: shifting the state from referee to employer means workers must bargain with the institution that sets the rules and controls the finances.

Public ownership may sometimes be justified where monopoly is unavoidable, and independent regulation cannot adequately protect consumer interests. But even then, Hayek’s warning remains relevant: state enterprise must not automatically become a state monopoly.

The alternative to nationalisation is not an unregulated private monopoly. Competition should be allowed where it is possible in industries like train operators and energy providers, as consumer choice means that companies base their commercial decisions around the consumer’s interests, rather than a state’s political objectives. Unavoidable monopolies do not have to be state monopolies; ministers should decentralise financial and political power away from their departments so they can act and make decisions without direct political or financial interests. Within a free society, the state must protect economic liberty by enforcing the rules, rather than owning the businesses subject to them.

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Harry Curtis is a student at the University of Warwick, reading politics and international relations. He has worked and run campaigns for the Conservative Party, including during the 2024 General Election.

Of the many factors that affect house prices, the one most often cited is a huge supply-and-demand imbalance, with demand far outstripping supply and driving prices ever higher. On that view, the solution is to build more homes, correct the imbalance and therefore prices will fall. Whatever the merits of building more homes, this story misses a crucial point: the real story is one of credit expansion. For decades, banks and regulators have allowed ever-larger mortgages to be created as new money. This new money has broken the link between people’s earnings and the cost of buying a home. In modern Britain, the availability of mortgage credit is the main factor that drives house prices.

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Most houses are bought with a mortgage and the amount a buyer can offer is limited by:

Personal / family savings + mortgage credit available from a lender + any credit available from Government schemes

i.e. credit availability strongly affects how much buyers can offer and therefore, the final price paid.

In the mid-1990s, average house prices were around three to four times average income, with mortgage lenders typically offering around three times the main income and one times the second income. These limits were set by each lender’s own appetite for risk. A couple both earning £30,000 could therefore borrow about £120,000 as the basis of an offer. Using a lower multiple for the second income reduced reliance on that income and left more flexibility for life events, such as starting a family.

Between the mid-1990s and the run on Northern Rock in September 2007, competition in the mortgage market became intense. To grow their balance sheets, lenders had an incentive to lend at ever higher income multiples. As a result, the full second income was included, and loan-to-income multiples rose sharply. The same couple mentioned above could now borrow around six times their joint income, giving them about £360,000 of available credit. Interest rates were coming down (helped by the Bank of England inflation target moving from RPI to the lower CPI in 2003), and this counter-balancing impact on monthly payments was used to justify the higher debt.

The higher lending multiples created several serious problems, notably:

• When lenders grant loans, the money for the loan is created with the tap of a key, with the lender only required to hold a level of capital against the loan. Each uptick in loan-to-income therefore creates more money. The Cantillon effect allows the first borrowers at each change to use the extra funds to buy a bigger property, but very quickly all prices rise, and the same people end up chasing the same properties at higher prices, with have-nots left further behind.

• The cumulative effect was that house prices trebled in 10 years, with average prices of eight to nine times average incomes. This put home ownership out of reach for many people and reinforced the belief that property prices could only rise, which further encouraged borrowers, including increasing the popularity of buy-to-let loans, pushing prices higher again.

• Borrowers taking high income multiples are vulnerable to increases in interest rates and unexpected life events. Most borrowers take two- or five- year fixed rates, which are variable in all but name. For example, borrowing £360,000 at 3% over 25 years with a two-year fix requires an initial monthly payment of around £1,707. If rates are 6% two years later when the fix ends, the payment will increase by more than £500 per month.

Following the financial crisis of 2007-09, interest rates were cut to near zero, and new regulations were introduced. These rules generally limited new lending to 4.5 times joint income, while allowing 15% of new lending above that level. This was still much higher than was common in the mid-1990s. These higher limits were again defended on the basis that interest rates were very low and this was the “new normal”.

Then during Covid, interest rates rose sharply, and this return towards historical averages should have led to lower loan-to-income multiples for new lending. It did not. Higher interest rates mean higher monthly payments, so affordability should have become a constraint. Instead, lenders responded by extending maximum mortgage terms, often up to 40 years, so that higher loan amounts could still appear affordable.

In recent years, the rule limiting new lending above 4.5 times loan-to-income to 15% has been relaxed for individual lenders and stress rates used to test mortgage affordability have also been eased. Both changes allow people to borrow more and were welcomed by some as an enabler to home ownership; the reality is yet another dose of the insidious poison which has made the patient so ill already.

Lenders often point to low arrears figures as evidence that their lending is responsible and affordable, but this misses many dangerous facts. Borrowers with large loans over long terms are highly exposed to interest-rate rises. Some of the usual tools to help them in the event of rises, such as extending the mortgage term to reduce monthly payments, have already been blunted by using a long term at the outset. Falling birth rates, inadequate pension saving and falling living standards are not visible in arrears figures. Still, they are all symptoms of the problem and very real in day-to-day living, as mortgages drain lifetime incomes.

Lenders, regulators and government have all responded to the incentives placed in front of them, which is why the incentives must change. The housing market will not be fixed by adding more credit to a system already distorted by too much credit; it requires sound money. With sound money, lenders could not keep creating ever larger amounts of credit and directing it towards a single asset class. House and land prices would be lower as a result, capital could be directed to productive activity, and people could save in a store of value they could trust. It is a change only likely to be facilitated by crisis.

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This article was written by an experienced insider in mortgage lending. It is being published anonymously.

However, if we agree that the frontiers of the state must be rolled back in the interests of liberty, then civil society must be empowered to fill the gaps left by the state. Voluntary, democratic unions give workers a real ability to bargain directly with their employers. By creating a channel for negotiation, unions can encourage a more constructive relationship between employers and employees without transferring decisions over pay and conditions to the state.

Voluntary association, not central control

Hayek in The Constitution of Liberty and many other writings warned that unions with coercive privileges risk becoming labour-market monopolies that override individual choice and weaken competition by restricting the supply of labour to raise wages. He argued that unions with these privileges could pressure workers into joining them and intimidate them into following union directives.

A voluntary union is not the same as advocacy for state-set wages or nationalisation. Instead, a voluntary association gives workers a means of negotiating with their employer over wages and conditions under which they sell their labour. By empowering civil society, voluntary collective bargaining balances power between workers and employers without transferring the outcome to the state.

Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations identified a different danger; he claimed that in his day, the law prohibited workers from combining to raise wages, whilst employers tacitly agreed not to raise wages. This meant that bargaining power was heavily shifted to employers. In disputes, Smith argued that employers could hold out in negotiations with individual workers as they could survive on their accumulated stock, whilst many workers could not subsist for a week without a wage.

Smith and Hayek each identify a real danger. Hayek illustrates how unchecked union power can weaken market competition and individual liberty. By contrast, Smith argues that unchecked employer power can weaken workers’ bargaining position. The balance must be found: workers must be free to join a union, refuse to join one, and choose whether to participate in industrial action. That is why the case must also be made for limits on union power– a principle that shaped Thatcher’s union reforms.

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Thatcher’s reforms: freedom needs limits

Unions can help workers but, as Hayek argued, they must not override workers’ individual liberty. Thatcher’s reforms targeted the coercive privileges of unions that Hayek warned could turn them into labour-market monopolies; she curbed closed-shop arrangements, restricted secondary action, and required secret ballots before official industrial action. These changes protected a worker’s right not to join a union, prevented unrelated firms and workers from being drawn into disputes, and ensured that industrial action required a clear mandate from the members affected. This strengthened individual liberty by making unions accountable to their members and democratic in their strike decisions.

Most workers genuinely want to work, earn money and support their families. Industrial action can be legitimate, but it should be a last resort authorised through a properly conducted ballot of the members being asked to take part. A ballot gives a union a mandate to strike, but it does not mean that every individual will choose to take part. This is where Thatcher’s reforms were successful and genuinely beneficial to workers: they shifted authority from union leadership to ordinary members. But they also increased the legitimacy and credibility of strikes because the new conditions communicated a clear message to employers that the action had genuine member support.

Thatcher’s principles should still apply today. However, the Employment Rights Act 2025 has diluted them. The standard ballot mandate now lasts for 12 months, replacing a 6-month period that could previously be extended to 9 months by agreement. This arguably shifts power from workers back to union leaders because it allows them to rely on a mandate whose current support has not been retested.

In any free society, unions must be tolerated and recognised as an integral part of civil society. Still, it is equally important that those unions remain accountable to their members and truly representative of their wishes.

A free market needs competition for workers

A free-market economic model assumes that competition works in both directions. Employers aim to attract and hire the best candidates, while workers compete for better jobs. In a dynamic economy, individuals are free to leave their jobs if they feel they are underpaid or face poor conditions.

However, this is not always what happens in practice. In many areas, workers have only a few realistic employers to choose from. Those with children, mortgages or limited access to transport may be especially constrained because they cannot afford to lose the wage on which they depend. If alternative employment is available, conditions and pay may be worse, and relocation may be necessary.

The CMA found an association between employer concentration and lower pay: comparable workers in the most concentrated tenth of UK labour markets earned, on average, around 10% less than those in the least concentrated tenth. The CMA’s research also suggests that collective bargaining can counter downward pressure on pay within concentrated private-sector labour markets.

Unions do not create additional employers, but in these circumstances, they can pool workers’ bargaining power to support a selection of individuals who would otherwise be bargaining alone. This is important because freedom of contract means little when bargaining power is concentrated on only one side.

The state as referee, not a player

The state must act as a defender of rights and a referee in disputes. This means protecting workers from employer retaliation, unlawful dismissal and breaches of contract, while also protecting employers from union intimidation and unlawful industrial action. This ensures that collective bargaining remains a means of balancing the power of workers and employers rather than an instrument of coercion.

Once the state moves beyond enforcing the rules to determining pay or funding, it ceases to be wholly neutral and acquires a stake in the outcome. The planned Adult Social Care Fair Pay Agreement process in England shows how quickly this can happen. An arm’s-length body will conduct the negotiations between worker and employer, but the Secretary of State will set the remit and maximum funding available, while any agreement will be reviewed before ratification in Parliament. These responsibilities give the government a material interest in the result and distort accountability; employers remain formally responsible for pay, but the state sets the funding limit and retains the power to ratify the settlement.

Within a genuine free market, the state should protect the process of negotiation rather than determine its outcome.

Conclusion

Free-market advocates are justified in their scepticism of unions; unchecked unions can overpower employers in negotiations and exert significant influence over sectors of the economy. However, they are a necessary counterweight within a genuinely free-market society; within such a society, both employers and workers need meaningful bargaining power to ensure that contracts are not dictated by either side.

Hence, the state should enforce the rules fairly, rather than determine wages or settlements. Unions can create a direct channel for negotiation between workers and employers. When the state determines pay and conditions itself, it displaces that negotiation and acquires a material interest in its outcome.

Liberty also requires limits on union power. Closed-shop tactics must remain prohibited, secret ballots must remain mandatory, and ballot mandates should be restored to a six-month default. Under these conditions, industrial action is more likely to represent workers’ contemporary wishes rather than serve as a strategic tool for union leaders.

When properly limited, unions are not an enemy of the free market; they are a cornerstone of civil society that makes the free market possible.

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Harry Curtis is a student at the University of Warwick, reading politics and international relations. He has worked and run campaigns for the Conservative Party, including during the 2024 General Election.

This Substack began as a solo effort when I lost my seat in July 2024. A supporter told me I should have a think tank. After reflecting for a day, I replied that we have plenty of quality think tanks, but there is a need to support them in having greater impact. That is the project we embarked upon: not a think tank, but a means of amplifying think tanks and other voices for freedom.

We think this project is important. We would like you to be a part of it.

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Ours is not a crisis only of incompetent politicians. It is a crisis of ideas.

For decades, we have had government spending consistently greater than revenue, yet with taxes at excruciating levels. The national debt is so large, servicing it is dwarfing a number of key functions of government. Regulations are extensive and minute, clogging the life out of the economy.

No one can look at the facts and seriously claim this is a crisis of laissez-faire.

No - this is a crisis of interventionism: the managerial state which was established after the world wars is now failing. It cannot afford the promises which have been made, promises rarely met at the quality anyone demands. Decades of easy money kept the show on the road, but that approach created the global financial crisis, a crisis whose response has now put us in the biggest bubble in history.

People find they do the right things, but still can’t secure a great job, afford a decent home and start a family. That is a recipe for despair and upheaval.

Simply electing better politicians is no answer. Until the terrain of debate has shifted so that it is politically profitable to adopt the policies of a free society, even good people will do the wrong thing in office: that is how the incentives of elections work.

That is why we are not involved in electoral politics. It is why we do not promote candidates or parties. It is time to move upstream: great ideas precede sound action. We don’t care who is elected, so long as they advance the principles of a free society.

We don’t do research

This project does no original research. As Stephen Fry memorably said:

Indeed it is. And not just the libraries, but the archives of the UK’s great freedom-oriented think tanks too.

That’s why our strategy is not to produce original research. It is to identify great ideas wherever they may be found, and promote them

We are inspired by Leonard Read’s famous lecture, “How to advance liberty” and Hayek’s essay “The Intellectuals and Socialism”. We draw on ideas as diverse as tech marketing (“Crossing the Chasm”) and behavioural science (MINDSPACE). We recognise that until the elite who determine the territory of mainstream debate change their minds about what ought to be fashionable to think, our civilisation is headed for immense trouble.

And you might be part of that elite. We don’t mean only politicians, though politicians count. We include civil servants, lawyers, judges, scientists and engineers, teachers and doctors, commentators and everyone to whom someone else turns, however absent-mindedly, for opinion.

Our work is patient, personal and relentlessly committed to making the ideas and actions of a free society attractive, not only correct. We are about amplifying great quality ideas and great quality voices for freedom.

The method: shoaling, not shouting

One lone backbench MP bellowing into the void changes nothing. Goodness knows I tried that. A network of people insisting on a message or idea exerts much more power. Ideas rise and wane: today we must remorselessly insist it is the managerial state which is failing and that our society long since abandoned the principles of a free society to the notion that a far-off elite are better able to run our lives than we ourselves.

We are trying to catalyse a kind of shoaling or flocking. We can’t command anyone to do anything, and we would not want to. We can show people where like-minded people are headed today and invite them to join us. Just as we invite you.

Our community connects partner think tanks to amplify one another, often by sharing reinforcing ideas and research. Our podcast, Substack, and events provide a platform for voices for freedom. Our educational programmes such as our Book Club and Leaders for Liberty Fellowship equip young professionals with the skills and connections they need to advance liberty in their work. And you are welcome to enjoy our merch.

We don’t measure success by election results - we are not involved in elections - but by the shifting terrain of debate. We asked who would be the UK’s Milei. Accepting the UK needs the kind of dramatic shift towards liberty that Argentina is having, Kemi Badenoch rose to the challenge, declaring that she wants to be Britain’s Milei. We are happy if every politician rises to the invitation to promote freedom resolutely.

Our test is not whether we have been proven right in a barely-read article. It is whether we have helped make the case for freedom interesting, credible and socially acceptable amongst the governing elite.

Our fight for a free future is succeeding

We achieved three days of national media coverage for our hard launch last autumn - almost unheard of without riding on breaking news. We have packed meeting rooms with think tankers, parliamentarians and journalists to hear about the ideas of a free society. And we have engaged with freedom-oriented organisations and institutions in the UK and USA. Our network is expanding as we seek to serve.

Our donors have made possible our events, podcast, panel of authors, educational programmes and network. We could not do it without you nor without those who subscribe to our Substack Voices for a Free Future, watch on YouTube and who like, share and subscribe on all our channels.

Thank you!

What you can do

The scale of our task is astronomical and urgent. Debt is overrunning the public finances, yet public services are too often not good enough. The consequences of generations of chronic inflation are only barely becoming understood. Appealing for more active state remains the default among policymakers, journalists and the commentariat. Freedom under law with virtue, tolerance of irreconcilable difference and faith in spontaneous order, the realistic hope of a better future by our own efforts, and a state which at least punishes crime and defends the nation - these are the ideas which have gone by the board and which must urgently be recovered.

Advocates of greater state power will never concede that it is in fact expansive state power which is failing us all. The argument will be won by new voices creating a new weather in which those willing to adopt a new perspective will be drawn our way. The dial will turn.

You can help us and be part of this movement for better ideas informing practical action. Please support our educational programmes by becoming a paid subscriber, directly donating a small amount, or by buying some of our merchandise. Larger donors are more than welcome to get in touch directly with us.

Come to an event, or even just like, subscribe, and share our content. Our ideas will spread with your help.

Together we can and must win the fight for a free future before the next crisis of state power overwhelms us. Please join us in that battle.

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The Jason Arday scandal at Cambridge must be the final, decisive blow to this experiment.

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It is a genuine tragedy that things have reached this point. Jason Arday’s story—a neurodiverse, working-class black man who overcame immense childhood adversity to reach the heights of academia—was deeply compelling. His journey inspired thousands, and it is heartbreaking that his career has ended in such public ruin. But Arday was also an individual placed inside a system that prized a good narrative over rigorous verification, setting him up for an inevitable fall.

The tragedy of this affair isn’t just the personal undoing of Arday, or the institutional embarrassment for Cambridge, or even the feeding frenzy of an August media machine. The deeper tragedy is the profound insult it inflicts on every black scholar, lawyer, doctor, and professional in this country who earned their seat at the table purely on merit.

When institutions shift the goalposts from equality of opportunity to equality of outcome, they do not elevate talent; they undermine it. They create a culture rooted in the soft bigotry of low expectations, where proper due diligence is bypassed. The message sent to young black kids growing up is toxic: that our success isn't expected to rely on the same uncompromising standards as everyone else, but on institutional indulgence.

Arday’s biography read like a film script, making it tailor-made for an era obsessed with optics. It gave elite institutions a convenient shortcut. By elevating him so rapidly, Cambridge could pat itself on the back for hitting its diversity targets without doing the unglamorous, heavy lifting required to cultivate genuine intellectual rigour and support. In doing so, they failed the public, and ultimately, they failed Arday too.

True progress was never about engineering statistical symmetry at the top to satisfy corporate benchmarks or university committees. True progress, the kind championed by the civil-rights tradition, was about levelling the playing field at the starting line, not rigging the finish.

The truth is, there is only so much any institution can do to deliver equal outcomes. There are far too many variables beyond anyone’s control: geography, family stability, socioeconomic background, health, and individual capability. But we can do so much more to equalise opportunity. We can fix underperforming state schools, expand access to world-class training, break down social barriers, and give a child from a council estate in Brixton or Bradford the preparation and objective evaluation needed to compete with someone from Eton or Harrow.

The Arday scandal has laid bare the hollow bargain of outcome-focused equity policies. It proved that when you prioritise outcome over process, you inevitably compromise integrity, fuel cynicism, and hand bad-faith critics a weapon to paint genuine achievement as patronage.

We must use this moment to reset the compass. It is time to dismantle the apparatus of outcome-focused diversity schemes and return to the ironclad principle of merit-based equal opportunity. Elite institutions need to rediscover their nerve, restore uncompromising standards, and treat black professionals with the dignity of genuine accountability, not the condescension of special treatment.

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Albie Amankona is a broadcaster, financial analyst and political activist. He is an FFF Voice for Freedom - our group of young advocates fighting for liberty, freedom, and free markets. He is the co-founder of Conservatives Against Racism and a member of the General Council for LGBT+ Conservatives. He can be followed on X through @albieamankona.

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

Britain in 2026 faces a real and growing problem: the collapse of tolerance. This isn’t about us being ‘nicer’ to each other. It is far more serious than that. We are seeing the rise of political Islam as a significant force in our public life, and we have seen the emergence of genuine no-go areas for Jewish people in our own country.

Is an orthodox Jew safe in 2026 walking through parts of Birmingham, Luton or Bradford? Horrifically, the answer is no. The solution is not a more muscular and militant Christianity in British politics. This is a mistake that is dressed up as a remedy – and it is merely the same mistake in reverse. We do not need to adopt a new settlement to see the results of politics and religion colliding; our history tells us the consequences. Our history also tells us what is necessary to begin tackling this problem.

Recently, the Fighting for a Free Future Book Club read John Locke’s A Letter Concerning Toleration. It is a fascinating piece. Locke, one of the great fathers of British classical liberalism, writing in exile in 1685, was clear that the state has no business policing souls, but he was also clear about where toleration stops. His piece must be read in its historical context, and so several of the exclusions Locke made would not be appropriate in modern society. However, Locke’s general framework should be used and updated for modern Britain. Locke argues that the state and its courts exist to protect civil peace, life, liberty, and property; the church exists to protect the soul.

Coercion belongs to the first, but it has no business in the second. As Locke writes, “Neither Pagan, nor Mahumetan (sic), nor Jew, ought to be excluded from the Civil Rights of the Commonwealth, because of his Religion“. Here we read the founding sentence of British liberal toleration, and it is a Protestant Englishman writing it, three centuries before anyone had invented the phrase ‘diversity and inclusion.’ Tolerance is not a twenty-first-century innovation, and it long predates those on the British left who now try to claim ownership of it. It is and has been an essential component of civil society, but today we have seen the Left use political grievances to toxify it.

We have also recently seen, in some sections of the right, the rise of an identitarian Christianity that seeks to place itself in a privileged position at the heart of British politics. This is both wrong in principle, and it will not solve the problems 2026 Britain faces today.

Locke wrote that sentence within living memory of the last Englishman burned at the stake for heresy, and the inclusion of followers of Islam was deliberate. He insisted that the Commonwealth is not, in its nature, Christian.

This matters because it is, I think, the strongest available argument for the equal civil rights of all Britons, including religious minorities, and it is a classical liberal one rather than a communitarian one.

It is an argument that all of us can support. If we were to apply this to high-density British Muslim communities, it does not try to claim that Muslims constitute a structurally oppressed group who require special accommodation; it does not try to push the idea that criticism of Islam or Islamism is prejudice. It makes its case for liberalism of the old kind and equal rights for all on the view that the law has no business policing speculative religious opinion, however unorthodox it may seem to the majority, as long as it does no civil injury to thy neighbour.

We often confuse toleration with approval; they are not the same thing. You do not need to approve of someone’s practices to tolerate them. Indeed, this distinction formed the basis of much of the political establishment’s eventual willingness in the 1960s to accept the demands of the gay civil rights movement. Like it or not, nobody’s civil rights are impeded by a British Muslim who prays five times a day, fasts during Ramadan, or wears a hijab.

This view of tolerance is a British constitutional principle, one that emerged from our proud history of British classical liberalism. It has no time for causes like blasphemy laws, but it passes no judgement on the unorthodox practices of religious communities and individuals, provided they do not impinge on the civil rights of others.

Unfortunately, much of the current defence of Muslim civil rights in Britain tends not to use Locke’s argument at all. We now face a struggle where some believe that tolerance means that criticism of Islam or Islamist movements is in fact prejudice, that Muslim community institutions should not be subject to scrutiny due to their status as an oppressed group, and that tolerance falls entirely on the shoulders of the non-Muslim majority.

Framing toleration as something granted to Muslims because they are an ‘oppressed minority’ turns this principle of equality into a revocable privilege. Suggestions that ‘extra tolerance’ is necessary for oppressed groups turn the general principle of equal tolerance into one of levels of tolerance – where some groups are treated with more scrutiny and some with less. Tolerance is not an issue to which equity can apply; this undermines tolerance itself, and this is the kind of conditional arrangement of tolerance that Locke was writing against.

Conflating criticism of political Islamism with anti-Muslim prejudice makes it harder, not easier, to name real prejudice when it happens: a woman who is refused a job for wearing a hijab to the interview, a mosque that is vandalised, or a community collectively blamed for an attack by one of its own are clear violations of civil rights. This is the same for those who blamed the Sikh Community for the recent horrific murder of Henry Nowak or those who have blamed the Jewish Community for the situation in Gaza.

A true British classical liberal theory of tolerance would not accommodate political Islamism nor any form of anti-Muslim prejudice, whether casual or from the state. It would not accommodate identitarian Christianity driven by the state or political leaders, nor would it accommodate the persecution of Christians in any realm of British life. It would not accommodate the persecution of critical free speech, nor the shutting down of open debate. It would allow all religious communities to live their lives as they see fit, knowing that the state will only intervene if they begin to impinge on the civil rights of others.

The examples before are clear and easy violations of civil rights; we need no theory of structural oppression to identify them. All we need is the basic Lockean rule that religion in and of itself is not a lawful ground for civil discrimination.

I want to place alongside all of this my own recent piece on what it is like to be Jewish in 2026 Britain: I am British, I am Jewish, I am Fearful, and I am Angry. As I write in my piece, “for the first time in my entire life, I would now not answer honestly if asked by a stranger if I was Jewish. I am not obviously identifiable as Jewish, so I have a choice. Many of my friends do not have that luxury, and I fear for their safety every day.”

In the one country that did arguably more than any other to build this liberal framework of tolerance, how can it be that there are effectively no-go zones for visibly Jewish people in parts of Britain? How can it be that there are now areas where it is simply not safe to be a Jew in orthodox clothing? For those who say this is an overreaction, are you really telling me that an orthodox Jew would currently be safe walking through parts of Birmingham or Bradford?

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Locke’s argument for civil tolerance was never unconditional. He draws a sharp distinction between “speculative opinion”, that which should always be tolerated, and “antinomianism”, which is the claim that religious truth overrides ordinary moral law and the equal civil rights of others. Writing at times of intense religious debate within the Christian tradition, Locke applied that distinction to his own time. He argued that contemporaneous Catholic claims that the Pope could depose heretic princes and Calvinist claims that the elect should rule were both antinomian. They both forfeited tolerance’s protection, but this was because of their political consequences, not the result of their theology.

We should apply this to political Islamism as a political project today. This is not a conclusion that should concern British Muslims – the majority of British Muslims reject political Islamism and understand the damage political Islamist movements have done. The Fighting for a Free Future podcast had an excellent conversation on this very issue with Muslim Conservative MP Saqib Bhatti.

However, there is clearly a significant minority who push political and sometimes even radical Islamism. Whether it has been the aggressive and sometimes violent antisemitism that has emerged after the October 7th massacre, the Birmingham protests against the teaching of LGBT identities in schools, or the efforts to undermine our democratic system that we have seen in areas such as Tower Hamlets, and to a lesser extent Wycombe. Tolerate the intolerant for long enough, and you end up tolerating nothing at all.

We must combine a Lockean view of tolerance with Karl Popper’s paradox that unlimited tolerance extended to the intolerant eventually gives them the means to end tolerance. While there is clearly a significant problem with community cohesion in certain parts of the UK, this must be applied equally to all – Islamist antinomianism, Christian nationalist antinomianism, and secular identitarian antinomianism.

It is not about whose banner is flying. It is about applying a classical liberal view of toleration to all communities in the UK. Does a doctrine claim a right to override the equal civil rights of others? If it does, then we cannot tolerate it. If it does not, then however unorthodox or different it may be to us, we should and must tolerate it. True tolerance rests on these principles.

We have seen a debate about what “British values” are and how we can reassert them in modern society. British values are the practical output of our rich history of classical liberalism: free speech, equality before the rule of law, the protection of private property, and tolerance as the means by which people who profoundly disagree still share a street without either side reaching for the state or violence to settle it. Tolerance is a foundation of British values.

To attack free expression as violence or prejudice as some on the British left enjoy doing is not tolerance but an attack on true tolerance itself. Many will say that free speech and equality before the law have collapsed in Britain. An assessment of the extent of this is not what this article is about, but the collapse of true tolerance is part of the reason these values are under threat.

I am not going to end this piece with a policy plan to redefine and reinstitute tolerance in Britain: we have not yet had the honest conversation that would make any plan legitimate. What is needed first is a national conversation about community cohesion: about what Locke’s antinomian test actually rules out, applied equally rather than selectively; about why the Lockean argument for equal civil rights is stronger than a group-oppression narrative; and about how full toleration of belief while at the same time zero tolerance for any doctrine claiming a right to override the equal civil rights of others can still be sustained in a country as diverse as ours. We should be under no doubt that this national conversation will be uncomfortable; it should be.

Comfortable conversations rarely fix anything, and Britain has been avoiding this uncomfortable conversation for twenty-plus years while some who have benefitted from our current version of tolerance have started to decide that it no longer applies to them. It is time for that conversation. We should no longer tolerate the intolerant, whatever banner they may carry. Locke gave us these principles three centuries ago. All that is left is for us to have the courage as a nation to apply them.

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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. He can be followed on X through @HarryRicher96.

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

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?

Back in the halcyon days of 1914, 86p was a fortune. It was a sum our sensible, law-abiding Englishman would have thought twice about leaving unattended on a table.

Seventeen shillings and two pence, as it was then known, would have bought six full grocery baskets, each with a large loaf, a pint of milk, a pound of sirloin beef, a quarter-pound of tea, six eggs, and a pound of sugar. Thirstier readers could have stretched the same coin to more than 40 pints of beer, at two-and-a-half pence apiece.

How times have changed. From 1 October, the government proposes to save us 86p a week off our energy bills by removing VAT from domestic electricity. Somewhere, one imagines, a civil servant is still hard at work drawing up the commemorative plaque.

In 2026, far from a week’s shopping, 86p might just stretch to a pint of milk. In London it barely counts as spending money. Enough, perhaps, for something from the reduced shelf at Tesco. Yet the government presents this as a triumph: the classic reflex of a state that watches the billions pile up on its own balance sheet and pats itself on the back for managing to give back as it does so.

It’s worth asking where this modest largesse actually comes from. The £45 a year isn’t funded by growth, or by any newfound thrift, but by cancelling the previous Prime Minister’s £1.8 billion hair-brained Digital ID scheme - a scheme this column once had cause to lampoon.

One tyranny, it seems, has been quietly sacrificed on the altar of another. Sadly, the loose change handed back barely covers the collection plate.

The real bill is elsewhere. Those sums are a drop in the bucket next to what’s been thrown at Net Zero. The grid operator’s own figures put the cost of building a Net Zero electricity system at some £1,300 per household per year. Net Zero Watch warns the true bill, once operating costs are factored in, could run 20 per cent higher still.

No minister will announce this figure with nearly as much fanfare. It’s a permanent annual charge, quietly folded into every bill in the land, for a policy nobody ever voted on directly and few could explain if pressed.

Industrial electricity tells the same story from the other direction. Back in 1914, industry expected cheap, abundant energy, and got it. Today, British manufacturers pay the highest industrial electricity prices in the developed world: some 75 per cent above the average of our peers, and over four times what an American factory pays for the same power. We are, by some distance, the least affordable place in the world to keep the lights on in a factory. The government congratulates itself for handing back 86p while quietly pricing industry out of the country that invented the industrial revolution.

And what is all this sacrifice actually for? This spring, the climate scientists behind the world’s most-cited warming scenarios retired the very model, RCP8.5, that has underpinned the most alarming predictions of the last fifteen years, on the grounds that its assumption of a fivefold rise in global coal use was, in their own words, “implausible.”

The ghost of Christmas Future, it turns out, was reciting from a draft its own writers have since revised. That the policy machine built around the old script grinds on regardless - extracting £1,300 a year from every household, pricing industry out of the country, and handing back 86p a week as though it were relief - would have struck our man from 1914 as a curious sort of governance: one that updates its warnings but never its bills.

For further reading: Roger Pielke Jr.’s excellent breakdown of how RCP8.5 met its end. It was a development significant enough to make headlines everywhere except, it seems, in the corridors of Westminster. For further viewing: any episode of Yes, Minister will do, though even Sir Humphrey never dreamed of a government proud enough of 86p to make such a fuss about it.

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Constitutional rights are one thing. Public responsibility is another.

Someone who exercised such extraordinary influence over the lives of millions surely owes the public more than silence. Fauci arguably became one of the most influential unelected public officials in shaping the response to Covid. His advice shaped policies that closed businesses, destroyed livelihoods, kept children out of schools and placed some of the most damaging restrictions on everyday life that we have ever seen.

Accountability is not the same as criminal liability. It is the democratic expectation that those who exercise exceptional power should be prepared to explain and defend how and why they exercised it.

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Fauci’s refusal to do so exposes a troubling double standard. Throughout Covid, ordinary Americans, and indeed us in the UK and around the world, had the ability to make decisions for ourselves, our families and our lives, removed. Decisions from whether you could keep your business open, visit your elderly relatives or send your own children to school. Yet when the public finally has the opportunity to question one of the architects of that extraordinary period, the answers, and consequences, simply stop.

Five years ago, every statement from Fauci led the evening news. Journalists carried his briefings live. Newspapers treated his pronouncements as front-page news. Governments reordered society around ‘expert’ advice, while dissenting voices were often dismissed as reckless or irresponsible ‘granny killers’. Yet when the man who largely came to symbolise that period finally appears before the Senate and declines to answer questions about it, much of the mainstream media barely pauses to notice.

People say we must move on. Perhaps the reluctance of the public, on a global scale, to engage in this is understandable. The whole period was traumatic, and sometimes it is easier to forget rather than acknowledge that perhaps, we were had. Families were separated. Businesses collapsed. Public finances were transformed. Children lost months, years of normal education. Some children never returned. Public finances were transformed. I understand that many would rather leave those years behind. It is often easier than asking uncomfortable questions.

The Covid years represented one of the greatest peacetime expansions of state power in modern history. Citizens were told where they could go, whom they could meet, whether they could work and whether they could participate fully in society based on whether they complied with public health advice masked as law. Whatever one’s view of those policies, they deserve serious scrutiny.

For those of us who care about freedom, this is not ultimately about Anthony Fauci. Nor is it about relitigating every Covid decision with the benefit of hindsight. It is about a principle that should unite us regardless of politics - extraordinary power demands extraordinary accountability.

Eve Lugg is a Voice for Freedom with Fighting for a Free Future. Eve 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.

Parliament could take 68 years and cost up to £40bn to repair, and officials are calling that "on time." Dr Lawrence Newport, co-founder and CEO of Looking for Growth, joins Steve and Harry to explain why Britain's flagship building has become a symbol of national dysfunction.

To learn more about Dr Lawrence Newport and support Looking for Growth, please visit lookingforgrowth.uk/kickstartbritain

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

If democracy is the self-governance of equals, then the next principle of a free society is logically equality. Yet the existence of equality does not guarantee freedom. As Alexis de Tocqueville observed, the democratic age is defined not primarily by liberty but by the social condition of equality. Citizens must recognise one another as fundamentally equal if they are to govern themselves without tyranny. This disappearance of permanent hierarchies allows citizens to regard one another as equals rather than subjects. Yet equality also carries a danger: without the freedom to associate with one another, individuals will become isolated rather than associated and rely on the security of administration rather than the burdens of self-governance.

To prevent the acquiescence of tyranny, Friedrich Hayek argued that equality was not a matter of equal outcomes but of equal treatment under general rules. Drawing on Edmund Burke, who wrote that “all men have equal rights, but not to equal things”, Hayek maintained that freedom requires that the law applies to individuals equally to individuals rather than serving the interests of particular groups. When the state attempts to enforce substantive or corrective equality, it will increasingly intervene in social and economic life, eroding the very existence of freedom it wishes to protect.

John Rawls developed this idea further by rooting equality in the moral status of citizens themselves. In A Theory of Justice, Rawls argued that citizens are moral equals whose political institutions must be arranged so that inequalities can be justified to those subject to them. In this sense, equality is not uniform fairness: social and economic differences are acceptable only when they arise within institutions that all citizens could reasonably accept.

A similar intuition appears in the political language of Margaret Thatcher; she defended what she described as the “right to be unequal”. A free society must allow unequal outcomes because individuals are different in talent, ambition and effort. Respecting freedom therefore requires allowing these differences to produce different results. Therefore, equality does not concern uniformity but rather status; citizens must be equals before the law and political life, even if their lives diverge in countless ways.

Equality in a free society therefore takes several forms. Social equality prevents the emergence of permanent hierarchies; legal equality ensures the power operates through general rules rather than privilege; and moral equality requires that institutions justify the inequalities they permit. Together these principles ensure that democratic authority remains the shared possession of citizens rather than instruments of the state.

Therefore, equality is not a mere democratic aspiration; it is the very condition that makes democratic freedom possible. Citizens can only govern themselves when they recognise one another as equals; where this recognition weakens, power begins to accumulate in institutions. A free society must preserve equality in a form that sustains independence, not dependency: equality before the law, in political standing and the capacity to associate freely with one another. Only under these conditions can democracy remain an expression of self-rule and not a mechanism of administration

Equality in a free society does not eliminate difference; it ensures that difference does not become domination.

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Luke Lucas is a Fighting for a Free Future Associate and runs Voices for a Free Future’s monthly column, What is Happening in Argentina!

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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, Harry, Laura and Ted are joined by Voice for Freedom Albie Amankona to discuss Andy Burnham's new cabinet and debate whether the Iran War was worth it.

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:

Thumbnail image: "Operation Roaring Lion, 2026" by IDF Spokesperson's Unit, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/). Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Operation-Roaring-Lion-0013.jpg. This image has been modified for use in this video's thumbnail.

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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.

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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.