Shortly after his defection to Reform UK, Danny Kruger MP came on the podcast to explain why he thinks the British right should rally behind Reform, arguing that family, community and country must come before technocratic managerialism. He sets out how Reform could turn from protest party to government‑in‑waiting, take on the Whitehall ‘blob’, and rebuild a broken state around conservative values.

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If you missed it, you can watch the other part of our interview with Danny Kruger MP here:

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

We sit on substantial oil and gas reserves. We possess world-class engineers, scientists and industrial expertise. We remain home to some of the world’s leading universities, financial institutions and technology businesses. Yet despite these advantages, Britain increasingly behaves like a country that has lost confidence in its own ability to generate wealth. While our competitors focus on producing more, building more and competing harder, Britain seems increasingly preoccupied with restricting, regulating and delaying.

The consequences are visible in the economic data. Before the financial crisis, British productivity growth averaged roughly 2 per cent annually. Since 2008, it has largely stalled. Between 2010 and 2024, productivity growth averaged just 0.58 per cent per year. The result has been weaker wage growth, slower economic expansion and mounting pressure on public finances. A country cannot sustainably raise living standards if it fails to become more productive.

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For most of modern history, prosperity rested on a simple principle: societies become richer when they produce more. They extract resources, generate energy, build infrastructure, manufacture goods and reward innovation. Economic growth was not viewed as morally suspect. It was the foundation of higher living standards, stronger public services and greater social mobility.

Somewhere along the way, Britain lost sight of this basic truth.

Today, much of our governing class appears more comfortable managing decline than pursuing abundance. Politicians routinely complain about weak economic performance while presiding over a system that frustrates investment and delays major projects. HS2 has consumed tens of billions while delivering a fraction of its original ambition. Heathrow’s third runway remains trapped in planning disputes. Uncertainty surrounding projects such as Rosebank and Jackdaw has raised questions about whether Britain remains serious about developing its own energy resources.

Few areas illustrate Britain’s confusion more clearly than energy policy. Reliable and affordable energy underpins every modern economy. Yet Britain increasingly approaches energy policy as though production itself were a problem.

Despite years of political rhetoric, oil and gas still account for roughly three-quarters of Britain’s total energy consumption. These fuels remain central to heating homes, moving people and powering industry. The real question is whether Britain should produce more of these resources itself or become increasingly dependent on imports.

Yet Britain increasingly behaves as though domestic production is less virtuous than foreign production. New North Sea developments are frequently portrayed as environmental scandals, while importing liquefied natural gas attracts far less scrutiny. We restrict domestic extraction, outsource production and then congratulate ourselves for reducing emissions at home.

This contradiction lies at the heart of Britain’s economic malaise. We celebrate the closure of domestic industries while remaining dependent on the products those industries once supplied. We have become remarkably skilled at exporting jobs, investment and industrial capacity while convincing ourselves that doing so represents progress.

Britain has achieved genuine success in decarbonising its electricity system. Renewables generated more than half of Britain’s electricity in 2024, while wind became the country’s largest single source of generation. These are real achievements. However, transport, heating and large parts of industry remain heavily dependent on oil and gas, even as indigenous energy production continues to decline.

Meanwhile, many competitors are moving in the opposite direction. Norway continues to develop oil and gas resources while building one of the world’s largest sovereign wealth funds. The United States has embraced a new era of industrial policy centred on energy security and manufacturing. China continues to expand power generation and industrial production on a vast scale. These countries understand that economic strength still depends on production, industrial capability and access to abundant energy.

This reality will become even more important in the decades ahead. Artificial intelligence, advanced manufacturing and data centres all require vast amounts of reliable power. The countries that dominate the twenty-first century will not simply be those with talented software engineers or sophisticated financial sectors. They will be those capable of generating enormous quantities of energy at competitive prices.

Yet Britain’s energy costs are moving in the wrong direction. UK industrial electricity prices are among the highest in the developed world. British manufacturers can pay several times more for electricity than many American competitors. It is difficult to build a globally competitive manufacturing sector when one of the economy’s most important inputs is among the most expensive in the OECD.

Britain should continue investing in renewable energy, grid modernisation and next-generation nuclear power. If Britain is serious about energy abundance, competitiveness and decarbonisation simultaneously, nuclear must be central to the conversation.

The deeper problem, however, is cultural as much as economic. Britain has developed an increasingly unhealthy relationship with growth itself. We have elevated process above outcomes, regulation above production and symbolism above prosperity. Building things has become difficult. Expanding infrastructure has become controversial. Ambition is often treated with suspicion.

A country cannot regulate itself into prosperity. Wealth is ultimately generated by people who build, invent, produce and invest. The societies that succeed are those that make these activities easier, not harder.

Britain’s future prosperity will depend on whether it rediscovers this principle. The challenge is not to abandon environmental goals, but to recover a belief in growth, production and abundance. A successful Britain should be building more homes, constructing more infrastructure, producing more energy, investing more capital and creating more high-productivity jobs.

The countries that succeed in the twenty-first century will not be those best able to moralise about economic activity. They will be those capable of generating abundant energy, building infrastructure, supporting industry and rewarding productive work.

Britain can either rejoin that world or continue congratulating itself on managing decline more elegantly than its competitors. For too long we have mistaken restraint for virtue, scarcity for sustainability and stagnation for responsibility. The real challenge facing Britain is not technological, environmental or even economic. It is psychological. We need to decide whether we still believe this country deserves to be rich.

Decline is a political choice. Prosperity can be one too.

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

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

This week, the team is joined by Voice for Freedom Albie Amankona to discuss Tony Blair’s latest essay on Labour in government, the impact of rising energy prices, and the deepening crisis of the SNP in light of the Peter Murrell case.

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

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

Thumbnail Image: “Presidente Bernardo Arévalo se reúne con Tony Blair, ex primer ministro del Reino Unido” by Presidencia de Guatemala, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Presidente_Bernardo_Ar%C3%A9valo_se_re%C3%BAne_con_Tony_Blair,ex_primer_ministro_del_Reino_Unido-_54168021777.jpg)

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That instinct - to recast powerful politicians as helpless bystanders to their own scandals - has become something of a broader trend. Since the last general election, politicians caught in what appears to be staggering corruption and dishonesty seem able to wriggle free by presenting themselves as victims of process failures, misunderstandings or administrative confusion.

Take Angela Rayner. Questions surrounding her failure to pay thousands of pounds in stamp duty were ultimately framed not as an attempt to avoid tax, but as an unfortunate oversight that she moved quickly to correct. HMRC (with uncharacteristic efficiency and generosity) resolved the matter without further issue. It is difficult to perceive this generosity being afforded to the everyday citizen. And what about Rachel Reeves, who simply had no idea that certain rules had to be followed before you could rent out a property. A terrifying absence of due diligence from the woman in charge of the economy!

Or Sir Keir Starmer, who gladly received mountains of gifts, including two sets of tickets to see Taylor Swift, designer suits and some very fancy specs. His apology cast him as an unknowing victim of a system that badly needed an overhaul. As if horrified that he had been able to receive quite that many gifts in the first place, he said he would reform the process. It was the process that was to blame, not his own greed and opportunism.

But what about the Tories! I hear you cry. Partygate was an example of shocking dishonesty on the part of a Prime Minister who knowingly broke the rules. Very true, and I am not naïve enough to argue that politicians have only started lying since 2024. The difference is the insufferable performance of self-righteousness that we have been forced to endure from holier-than-thou politicians of the left, who go on to behave just as badly, if not worse. That is why the instinct to plead confusion, blame process and cast themselves as victims when scrutiny arrives now reeks of hypocrisy.

The thing is that we know. The public has stopped believing them and is showing their displeasure at the polls.

Because what stings the most is these politicians asking for the benefit of the doubt, when the public receives no such grace. As our finances are squeezed, faces scanned and posts studied for wrongthink, we see brazen requests by politicians of the left that we treat them as victims and move on. The voter knows that they would not be treated so kindly by this government if they made an honest mistake on their tax returns, or failed to follow the correct procedure when letting a property.

In the words of Big Ange, it’s one rule for me, and another rule for thee, and we are fed up.

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

Milei has become a bastion of libertarian ideology. We have seen a shift in the Overton Window. European media now views him much more favourably given his success cannot be denied. He is now viewed as having saved the Argentine economy. I have only been covering Milei’s presidency since just before the midterms in September 2025, but so much happened in the 15 months before that. This article is an overarching catch-up on everything Milei has attempted during his presidency.

Milei’s Massive Deregulation Program

One of Milei’s fundamental beliefs is the abolition of the state. 10 days after officially taking office, Milei passed his Massive Deregulation Program, known as Decree 70/2023. As it contained more than 300 reforms and 366 articles, it could be its own article in and of itself, so I won’t explore it in detail, but it largely contributed to all of the reforms that followed.

Considered one of Milei’s defining actions, it aimed to swiftly reshape the Argentine landscape to promote competitiveness, investment, employment and economic growth. Although critics said Milei was “resorting to a ‘mega decree’ to advance his agenda that will undermine democracy and human rights”, we’ve now seen it was effective Shock Therapy that has turned the Argentine economy around.

Shock Therapy

Milei’s Shock Therapy began with his ordering a 50% devaluation of the Argentine peso shortly after his inauguration. He implemented severe austerity measures to eliminate the fiscal deficit and achieve his “zero-deficit” fiscal target. He achieved Argentina’s first fiscal surplus in years by freezing thousands of public projects, reducing subsidies in energy, transport and utilities, and slashing federal spending across nearly every ministry. Milei believes that inflation is a purely monetary phenomenon, and by focusing his policymaking on devaluing the peso, he managed to reduce MONTHLY inflation from 25% down to 2-3%.

Part of his Shock Therapy was government restructuring. Milei reduced the number of ministries from 18 to 8. He achieved this by either dismantling a ministry that was deemed unnecessary, and which could be achieved by a like ministry or merging ministries into one. An example is the Human Capital ministry, which was the consolidation of education, labour, and social policy functions, such as culture and women/gender etc. On top of reducing the number of ministries, he cut hundreds of state agencies, departments and secretariats whilst also committing to public-sector layoffs.

Reforming the Public Sector and Welfare

Milei’s public-sector reforms began by auditing payrolls, which resulted in firing or declining to renew thousands of public-sector contracts and closing agencies and institutions. Milei weakened anti-discrimination offices, indigenous affairs institutions, cultural programs and gender-related programs. All of this was part of his announced plans to eliminate tens of thousands of government jobs as he claimed Argentina’s bureaucracy was bloated and corrupt.

To help achieve the zero fiscal deficit, Milei has also reformed welfare and social policy. He reduced subsidiaries and social spending, tightened oversight of welfare programs and reduced transfers to provinces and local government. In an attempt to restructure food assistance systems, Milei tried to cut intermediary organisations out of aid distribution. However, he cut spending on public works tied to employment programs, which led to real wages falling before a partial recovery later. Poverty surged sharply during the early adjustment phases but as now readjusted to levels lower than before Milei’s election, from approximately 53% down to 28%.

Liberalising Commerce and Income Tax

Another part of Milei’s Massive Deregulation Program was to liberalise commerce. Milei has strongly promoted foreign investment in Argentina, including various trade deals with the US, Europe and China as examples. He has opposed protectionism and opened sectors that were previously more restrictive to foreign capital. In addition, he has supported the deregulation of international trade through freer Mercosur rules. And he has introduced special incentives for large investors, which include 30 years of stability for foreign investments over $200m through the Incentive Regime for Large Investments (known as RIGI). This also introduced tax, customs and foreign exchange benefits.

Part of Milei’s tax and fiscal reforms includes modifying income taxes as part of his broader simplification of taxes. He has promised major tax cuts in the long run, but it’s more than that he wants to reduce the amount of different taxes people pay (such as federal taxes), and shift fiscal power to provinces. This is part of his fiscal adjustments in pursuit of balanced-budget policies that he pursues aggressively.

Monetary Reform

Milei’s fiscal adjustment promised to shut down Argentina’s Central Bank and dollarize the economy during his campaign to be President. However, what he did was a bit more complicated than that. He did not fully dollarize the economy, nor did he close the central bank. What he did instead was to reduce the monetary issuance aggressively and promote currency competition by allowing a wider use of foreign currencies for contracts and transactions that facilitate foreign investment.

To stop the issuance of money, he tightened central bank policy and reserve management so that they could not interfere with this readjustment to foreign capital. It is worth noting that he has continued to discuss the eventual closure of the central bank or the replacement of it with a more suitable institution.

Omnibus Reform Bill

To help achieve his Massive Deregulation Program, Milei also passed his Omnibus Reform Bill. This bill initially failed in congress but in 2024 Milei secured a modified version. This expanded the presidential emergency powers that he used to push through legislation. Although some of the original proposals were watered down or removed entirely, it also helped to pursue the goals I have stated above: tax changes, investment reforms, administrative reforms, incentives for large foreign investments, reduced bureaucracy and it provided authorisation to privatise selected state firms.

Milei has pursued a massive privatisation agenda that he has repeatedly pushed to achieve the privatisation or partially privatisation of state companies. This has largely targeted infrastructure such as state media, rail, energy and water. It also has also targeted Aerolíneas Argentinas, the dominant domestic flights company that links major cities and tourist hubs.

One reason the Omnibus Reform Bill stalled was efforts to remove certain companies from privatisation packages. An example is Yacimientos Petrolíferos Fiscales which was removed from the packages. It operates across the entire hydrocarbon supply chain, managing everything from oil and gas exploration and production to refining, transport and the commercialisation of petroleum products. It is probably not a bad thing for the state to continue to own this business at this time, considering Milei’s broader attempts to loosen the restrictions on oil and gas mining in Argentina.

Milei vs Judges

However, not all of the reforms have managed to pass; a judge nixed six articles largely related to Milei’s labour reforms. Somewhat uniquely, Labour rights are written into the Argnetine Constitution. Milei has succeeded in moving Argentina’s labour laws to a more employer-friendly deregulated direction; however, he finds himself in an ongoing legal battle with the courts as they consistently constrain his labour reforms.

Similarly, judges blocked reforms on extending probation periods, reducing severance costs, limiting union privileges, easing employer penalties, restricting strike-related protections, and making hiring/firing easier.

In 2024, Milei passed the Ley Bases reforms, which repackaged many of the previously blocked reforms, albeit watered-down. As both the Ley Bases reforms and the 2026 labour reforms passed through Congress, they are legally sounder and harder for the courts to challenge. The courts are now focusing on blocking provisions relating to union power and constitutional worker rights.

Reforming Argentina - Britain Should Learn From The Chainsaw

What we have seen is not a chipping away at institutions but a large-scale reformation. Milei has u-turned decades of economic abuse by exercising fiscal restraint instead of the pay-now tax-later approach so endemic across Europe - and nowhere more so than Britain.

The United Kingdom now carries the highest tax burden since records began. We spend more on debt interest than on schools. Welfare spending continues to climb year after year, yet living standards stagnate, public services creak and the people who depend on them most are no better off. We have poured more money into the state than at any point in our history, and what do we have to show for it? Longer NHS waiting lists, a benefits system that traps people in dependency, and a political class that responds to every failure by demanding more of the same.

Argentina pursued the opposite course - and it worked. Milei is proving that everything the left have told us about free markets and fiscal restraint is wrong. The policies we are constantly told will hurt the most vulnerable have instead lifted them up.

Thatcher was right. The best way to help people is independence, self-reliance and freedom, not state dependency.

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In 2010, I stood up in Parliament’s Westminster Hall and asked whether it could possibly be right to drive a railway viaduct across the Colne Valley and the Chilterns AONB in pursuit of the supposedly overwhelming national benefit of HS2. Sixteen years on, HS2 has given us an answer. The beauty has been blighted, the property rights have been overridden … and we reap hideously expensive failure.

This is not a story about trains. It is a story about institutions: about how a politicised rail system, prestige politics and concentrated interests produced a project that looks, in retrospect, uncannily like a case study from the Institute of Economic Affairs.

From Chilterns viaducts to cancelled phases

When the scheme was first sold, ministers talked in terms of roughly £32–33 billion for a Y‑shaped network from London to Birmingham, Manchester and Leeds. Credible estimates for even the truncated London–Birmingham core now run in the £70–80 billion range at current prices. Phase 2 to Manchester has been cancelled; HS2 Ltd alone has booked more than £2 billion of one‑off losses on sunk assets for the northern leg and related scope changes.

Even the surviving core is delayed beyond the already‑slipped 2033 opening date, with no firm new date and no contracted train fleet. The National Audit Office and the Public Accounts Committee now describe HS2 in language that would have been dismissed as the rhetoric of its early opponents: out‑of‑control scope, fragile business case, serial cost overruns and poor transparency.

This matters for more than the Chilterns. In 2010, I argued that if the economic and environmental case were not overwhelming, the project could not justify “so grotesque an intrusion into property rights and local collective enjoyment of the natural environment”. That condition has not been met. What remains is an over‑extended state project with very visible costs and increasingly hypothetical benefits.

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HS2 as public choice in action

Eamonn Butler’s short IEA book Public Choice – A Primer starts from a simple idea: people do not become angels when they enter public life. They pursue their interests, notably votes, budgets and careers, just as firms pursue profits. Once you apply that lens to HS2, the pattern is depressingly familiar.

First, concentrated versus diffuse interests. HS2 offered intense, focused benefits to a relatively small set of players: large engineering firms, consultants, parts of the rail supply chain, and some city‑region lobbies betting on land values and regeneration. The costs – tax, disruption, environmental damage – were spread thinly over millions of taxpayers and thousands of affected households. Each individual had only a small financial stake and very high organising costs. As Butler puts it, “small groups with sharply focused interests have more influence…than much larger groups with more diffused concerns, such as consumers and taxpayers”.

Second, rent seeking. Gordon Tullock coined the term for the effort spent lobbying the state for monopolies, privileges or transfers, instead of creating value. HS2 was almost designed as a rent‑seeker’s playground: a multi‑decade, politically protected capital programme with huge discretion over routes, tunnelling, station locations, compensation regimes and procurement. It would have been astonishing if affected interests had not spent millions of pounds lobbying to shape those choices in their favour.

Third, logrolling and coalition‑building. To hold the project together politically, successive governments stitched different goals into HS2: long‑distance capacity, regional “rebalancing”, a Heathrow link, a Northern Powerhouse badge, and a national engineering showcase. Each bolt‑on brought in another supportive interest group. Each also added complexity, cost and fragility. Once the fiscal tide turned, the coalition frayed – and the “Y‑network” quietly collapsed into a single, truncated arm to Birmingham.

In other words, the project looks very much like Butler’s world of rational self‑interest in the political sphere: minorities dominating representative democracy, logrolling to expand the state’s budget, and “government failure” at least as severe as any supposed “market failure” in rail.

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They meant well

D. R. Myddelton’s They Meant Well – Government Project Disasters surveys six large twentieth‑century projects: R.101, the groundnut scheme, nuclear power, Concorde, the Channel Tunnel and the Millennium Dome. His conclusion is unambiguous: “each of the six projects aimed to promote the national interest, but each resulted in huge losses”, with any technological or prestige benefits coming “at huge expense”.

Several of his recurring pathologies are starkly visible in HS2:

• Prestige politics. R.101 was an imperial project; Concorde and the first nuclear programme were about national greatness; the Dome was sold as a millennial emblem. In a similar way, HS2 was presented as “the principal infrastructure project of our time”, proof that Britain could still do the big things. Once the scheme became a prestige symbol for prime ministers and Chancellors, mundane questions about opportunity cost were crowded out by the fear of losing face.

• Optimism bias and opaque costs. Myddelton notes that initial estimates are routinely “purposely too low” and that government accounting tends to conceal true costs. HS2’s journey from c.£33 billion to sums more than double that – without an equivalent expansion in capability – is entirely in line with his earlier cases. The NAO has had to work hard to piece together the full fiscal picture, including Phase 2 write‑offs and Euston‑related costs.

• The “too late to stop now” syndrome. In Myddelton’s case studies, projects that should have been cancelled early – the groundnut scheme, Concorde – staggered on because ministers could not bring themselves to admit failure. HS2 has followed that script. Parliament was repeatedly told that billions had already been spent on land, design and early works, so cancelling would “waste” that money. Only when Phase 2’s economics became completely indefensible was it finally dropped, at a cost of more than £2 billion in formally recognised write‑offs.

• Soft budget constraints. In the market, a failing project eventually runs out of investors. In the state sector, it runs into the Treasury. Myddelton observes that, as a result, “governments often choose to continue projects…even after it has become clear they are not commercially viable”. HS2 is a textbook example: every warning – on geology, costs, demand, governance – produced not a reset but another round of cash, scope changes or timetable slips.

The result, again, is not malevolence but misaligned incentives. They meant well; they did not pay.

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Rail without prices

In 2010, I suggested that British Rail was “neither fish nor fowl”: a system of franchises whose contracts descend into specifying “biennial talent management programmes”, ministerially constrained fares, and constant structural tinkering since 1948. That is not a market: it is a hybrid bureaucracy in which “economic calculation is likely to be hampered, if not irrational”.

HS2 magnified that problem. In a genuine market, capacity and alignment decisions would be disciplined by price signals and revealed demand. Here, long‑distance fares are politically constrained, and the business case rested heavily on DfT’s value‑of‑time assumptions – including the quaint view that business travellers cannot work on trains. Remote work, videoconferencing and laptop culture have quietly shredded those premises.

Meanwhile, William Niskanen’s budget‑maximising bureaucrat seems to have found a home in our transport institutions. Officials and delivery bodies had every plausible incentive to favour a large, complex, long‑lived project with a growing budget and correspondingly little incentive to champion incremental upgrades and removing bottlenecks on existing lines. Yet the latter – longer trains, better signalling, targeted four‑tracking – are exactly the kinds of investments that can be evaluated, tested, corrected and, in extremis, stopped.

We have therefore ended up with the worst of both worlds: a politicised pseudo‑market in which neither prices nor profits reliably guide decisions, and in which the coercive powers of the state can be deployed to override local communities without the discipline that a real balance sheet would impose.

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A different way of doing infrastructure

Public choice theory is sometimes accused of cynicism. In fact, Butler and his colleagues are simply asking us to take human nature seriously and then design institutions accordingly. If we do that, HS2 offers some clear lessons.

• First, constitutional restraint matters. Long‑lived, high‑risk capital projects that trample property rights and protected environments should not be authorised by a simple whipped majority on the back of a headline promise. Buchanan and Tullock’s instinct – higher voting thresholds, hard budget limits, explicit time‑limited mandates – should not be reserved for academic seminars.

• Second, we should prefer modularity over grandiosity. Almost every Myddelton case would have been less damaging if government had favoured small, testable increments over single “silver bullets”. Rail is no different. A serious, classical liberal approach to capacity would start with timetabling, signalling, platform extensions, rolling stock utilisation and targeted new links, not with an all‑or‑nothing, multi‑decade bet.

• Third, we should take ownership and incentives seriously. The more the state controls both the customer interface and the investment decision, the more politics – not value – will drive choices. A classical liberal approach would treat rail and road as industries rather than permanent candidates for discretionary capital grants: open access, genuine competition where feasible, real prices, and risk borne by investors who can lose.

None of this means abandoning infrastructure, any more than abandoning Concorde meant abandoning aviation. It means abandoning the notion that national greatness can be ordered up from Whitehall by edict, regardless of prices, incentives or knowledge. And it means being honest that HS2 does not show the dangers of doing too little – it shows the dangers of doing the wrong thing on the wrong terms.

The Chilterns will not recover quickly. Nor will the public finances. But if HS2 finally persuades thoughtful people that a state‑centric, prestige‑driven model of infrastructure is failing, and that we need a more modest, plural and constitutional way of doing these things, it may yet have performed one useful service.

Just not the one advertised.

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Steve and Harry sit down this week to walk through four key policy areas - housing, energy, taxation and the size of the state, and civil liberties - and reveal where Britain’s mainstream political parties really stand.

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

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

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

In 1914, a young man who wished to better himself had two paths before him.

The first was the workshop, the counting house, the apprenticeship. A direct exchange of labour for instruction. He learned by doing, earned while learning, and arrived at competence without detour. The second, reserved for a small and privileged minority, was the university. It was funded by family wealth, scholarship, or charitable endowment.

Let us be honest about this, because honesty is what this argument requires. Only the few went. A system that confined higher learning to those who could shoulder its extraordinary fees was an impassable barrier to most. It kept out many who would have thrived in higher education, and society would have been better off for it. It deserved to be replaced.

And yet.

Coming from 1914, I might have imagined that any evolution of the system would be an improvement on that sorry state of affairs. It is true, plainly, that the intelligent sons of labourers were not, in the main, reading Greats at Oxford. Yet the remedy for a system that excluded too many has become a system that exploits nearly everyone.

Today, roughly half of young people in England are ushered through the gates of a university. At first glance, this looks like an admirable achievement. Look more closely and it becomes something more sinister. Students attend not because half of all young people need a degree, but because the state has made it the default path, and because the institutions that profit have every incentive to wave them through, their best interests be damned. Through fear and coercion, the great achievement of the state has been to turn a Morton’s fork – two bad options – into a Hobson’s choice, no real choice at all.

They arrive at eighteen, often unsure what they want or why they are there. For the most part, they are exploitable optimists, made to feel they are making an intelligent choice that may pay off later in life. Only when they leave at twenty‑one, with a qualification of variable worth and a debt that most will never fully repay, do they realise they have been duped.

If a man in 1914 were told that his grandson would pay a surtax on his ambition well into middle age, he would demand to know what revolution had overturned the rights of free men, and how he had failed to notice.

Such a state of affairs ought to fuel the outrage of several generations of parents and students. Yet it still has to be stated plainly: the majority of graduates will never fully repay their student debt. More than four in five graduates will not clear their loan before it is written off after thirty years. For those enrolled after September 2023, the term is forty. This is not a loan in any meaningful sense your bank manager would recognise. It is a graduate tax with a deferral mechanism and a dishonest label.

The state has decided that the appearance of a market, with its fees, statements and repayment schedules, is preferable to an honest admission. An admission that it has created a three‑decade surcharge on the act of following the path it declared, quite bluntly, that you must follow.

The man of 1914 who entered a skilled trade was, within a few years, earning. At twenty‑five, he was not calculating what percentage of his salary would be taken before he could begin saving for a home he would already struggle to afford. Apprenticeships then were as imperfect as the higher education system. Entry was uneven. Progression often depended on whom you knew. The trades were not equally respected or rewarding. But the principle was sound. You learned a skill. You were paid to learn it. You emerged owning your own labour, without a lien against your future earnings.

Today’s apprenticeships are often better than they are given credit for. Higher and degree routes usually offer something genuinely valuable. Yet they remain treated as the system’s embarrassed stepchild. Careers advisers suggest them only after university has been dismissed as unsuitable. Employers and parents treat them as a consolation prize. Meanwhile, the graduate who studied Marketing Communications at considerable expense is assumed to be the success story. Few pause to compare the state of their respective finances a few years into work.

What, then, is the financial return on this story? In 1999, the average graduate salary was about eighty per cent higher than that of a non‑graduate. Today, that premium has fallen to around forty‑five per cent, and it is falling still as graduates continue to vastly outnumber graduate roles. Once adjusted for inflation, average graduate salaries are now about thirty per cent lower than in 2007. The promise has not merely dimmed. It has been quietly withdrawn, while the fees have continued to rise.

So the honest question is this: for how many of the people now sitting in lecture theatres is a degree the best use of three years, and the best part of thirty thousand pounds of their own future money? It is a question today’s careers advisers do not ask, a question universities have a financial interest in never asking, and a question that government has been too cowardly to answer.

The state did not create mass higher education out of pure malice. There was a genuine aspiration to see future generations better off than their parents. To open doors. To build human capital. To extend opportunity. Those are not contemptible goals. They are valuable correctives to a system born in class‑based discrimination.

But, as with every campaign the state wraps its tentacles around, the road from aspiration to outcome has been paved with perverse incentives. Universities are funded per student, so of course they invent courses and recruit into them. Governments measure participation rates as proxies for equality, so of course they chase higher numbers. Employers, drowning in graduates, use the degree as a crude sifting mechanism for roles that do not require one, so of course they demand it on job listings. Most importantly, the young person, entirely rationally, concludes that not going is a risk they cannot take. In many cases it is not even presented as a choice at all, even if going means mortgaging a significant portion of their financial life for a certificate they needed only because everyone else has one.

This is not a tyranny of old‑fashioned discrimination. It is something arguably more insidious. A tyranny of credentialism that bears down on everyone. An economic tyranny that uses the state to generate demand for the credentials it sells, and extracts payment for both, to the benefit of the very few and the detriment of everyone else.

In 1914, the injustice was that too many were excluded from the summit, and even the paths open to them were imperfect and flawed. In 2026, the injustice is that almost all are coerced into climbing, whether there is a worthy summit up there for them or not.

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In Britain in 2026, it is no longer safe to be visibly Jewish. What a terrible sentence for me to have to write. While I usually write on economic issues, please allow me to use this opportunity and platform to speak about something different. As some of you may know, I am Jewish. I never thought that I would have to write a piece of antisemitism, because I never thought Britain would be such a hotbed for it that I would feel compelled to.

Antisemitism has existed in Britain for as long as there have been Jews in Britain. Being wary of the threat towards myself and my community is simply part of being Jewish. I went to a Jewish secondary school. You had to get through two separate security gates and two sets of security bollards to get in. When we went on school trips, armed security came with us. It was only at university that I came to understand that Jewish schools were the only schools in Britain that required armed security for field trips. During previous large-scale conflicts in Israel, we were sometimes told to remove our school jackets on the journey home so we couldn't be identified as Jewish. My school was found on a Hamas target list during a previous Israel-Gaza conflict. Every synagogue I have ever attended maintains meticulous security, because it simply must given the horrors that would occur otherwise.

For the vast majority of my childhood and adult life, though, it was safe to be Jewish in Britain - and there were few countries in the world where it was safer. There were incidents, sometimes minor, sometimes more serious. But overall, Britain was a remarkable country to live in as a Jew. I use “was” deliberately. That is no longer the case.

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I have felt the need to write this piece partly to vent out the anger and emotion that I have felt over the past few years; partly, so that I can use my platform to explain to my friends, colleagues, and readers what it is like to be Jewish in 2026 Britain; and partly, because I feel like I simply need to. If you are not part of a community and do not experience a threat directly, it is hard to fully understand what that community goes through.

As I was travelling home from the theatre with my partner this past weekend, I received a few messages asking if I was safe. My immediate thought after the recent Golders Green attack, was that another antisemitic attack had occurred in North London and my friends were checking to make sure I was not harmed in it. Thankfully, the messages were about something else entirely, but that reflect speaks to the constant dread running through every Jew in Britain. When will the next attack come? Will I be nearby? Will I be attacked?

For the first time in my entire life, I would 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. When I am on the Tube and find myself near a group of orthodox Jews I do not know, I keep a careful watch - knowing that something could kick off. I know many of my friends do exactly the same.

We are told that “globalise the intifada” is just a slogan. Then the intifada is globalised. Synagogues and Jews are attacked. Then we are told that our sense of unsafety is merely a “perception”. I could fill pages listing the attacks against Jews and the Jewish community in Britain over the past year alone. But that is not the primary purpose of this piece. The primary purpose is to help non-Jews understand what the Jewish community in Britain is actually feeling right now.

What the Jewish community in Britain is feeling right now is scared.

The scale of what has happened since October 7th 2023 is not a matter of perception. The Community Security Trust (CST), which has monitored antisemitic incidents in Britain since 1984, recorded 4,103 antisemitic incidents in 2023 - a rise of 147% - with 66% occurring after October 7th. In 2024, there were 3,556 incidents. In 2025, 3,700 - the second-highest annual total ever recorded - with, for the first time ever, more than 200 antisemitic incidents in every single calendar month of the year. The monthly average in 2025 was exactly double what it was before October 2023.

Behind these numbers are real events. Just to remind you of a few of them. On 2 October 2025 - Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar - a man drove a car into worshippers and then stabbed people outside the Heaton Park Hebrew Congregation synagogue in Manchester. Two Jewish men we killed. On 23 March 2026, four Hatzola ambulances - run by Jewish volunteers who provide emergency medical services to those of all religions in the community - were set on fire in Golders Green in the early hours of the morning, their gas cylinders exploding and blowing out the windows of nearby homes. Then on 29 April 2026, two Jewish men were stabbed in broad daylight on the streets of Golders Green simply because they were Jewish. I do not even mention the multiple arson attacks against synagogues in the last two months.

A pattern of Jew hatred has taken over the UK.

Conversations about moving to Israel used to be half in jest. Now they are serious. I was speaking to a mother recently whose primary school had to cancel their field trip to a nearby park to draw the nature there because it could not be made safe for a large group of visibly Jewish children to be out together. Her and her husband are currently seriously considering if they need to move to Israel. Not 'should' - need to because it is no longer safe to be identified as a Jew in the UK. A survey by the Campaign Against Antisemitism found that 61% of British Jews have considered leaving the UK in the past two years due to antisemitism, and 51% do not feel they have a long-term future here.

The Jewish community is also angry.

We are angry at a Government that has allowed antisemitism to spiral out of control. Angry that our country - a defining part of our identity as British Jews - is turning its back on us. Angry that every time there is an attack - whether the arson attack on the Hatzola ambulances, the firebombing of synagogues, or the multiple violent and sometimes murderous attacks against Jews over the past year - we hear warm words from our leaders and then nothing changes. Nothing is really done.

Consider this: the Metropolitan Police Commissioner requested £35 million to keep London's Jewish community safe - a rounding error in Government finances. The Government would not provide it in full. Instead, £18 million came from the Home Office and a further £4 million from the Jewish Community Protective Security Grant - enough to fund 100 new officers, when the Commissioner had said 300 were needed. The Met's own Commissioner said the Jewish community would not be safe without the full funding. The full funding did not come. So apparently the Jewish Community will have to make do with not being safe.

So how did we get here. How did anti-semitism spiral so out of control that the majority of Britain's Jews are now having to consider if they will have to leave Britain?

It started with the protests. On the same day as the October 7th massacre - while Hamas terrorists were still running wild in southern Israel, killing indiscriminately, raping women, murdering children - the application for the first pro-Palestine protest was submitted to the Metropolitan Police. The first recorded antisemitic incident in Britain following that massacre came at lunchtime on October 7th itself, while Israelis were still being killed. When two Jewish men were murdered on Yom Kippur last year, pro-Palestinian protesters held demonstrations hours after the attack across the UK. Have some basic British decency.

These protests aren't about British values though. Indeed, you would be lucky to see a British flag at any of them that have occurred over the past few years. These protests are about intimidating Jews. These weekly protests meant that Jews like my mother would not travel to central London for fear of her safety. We witnessed Jews wearing kippot - a visible symbol of our faith - being told by police that their mere presence near these protests was an act of provocation. Let that sink in. A Jewish man, doing nothing more than being Jewish on a British street, was told by a police officer to hide for his own safety. The worst thing about the incident is the police officer was probably right. It was not safe for him to be visibly Jewish near one of these hate marches.

I am not petitioning to ban these protests. I am ultimately a great believer in both free speech and the right to protest, but there is clearly a serious problem in Britain when significant numbers of people think it is openly acceptable to call for jihad and the murder of Jews on Britain's streets (and in Britain's classrooms - see the article from Robert Peston below and the recent Times report into antisemitism in our schools to see the daily horrors facing Jewish school children in mainstream schools).

I want to make clear, I have friends who go to some of these protests. They do not have an antisemitic bone in their bodies and I know that they have attended them due to genuine heartfelt concern over the images coming out of Gaza. I hope that the majority of protestors are like my friends. I say hope because if they are not, I fear that Britain will never be safe for Jews again.

Regardless of that hope and fear though, it is clear that at least a significant minority of the protestors including many of the organisers are driven by something much darker. Why else would "globalise the intifada" - a phrase evoking a period of systematic, violent slaughter of Jews - become the defining slogan of an entire political movement? Why else would Gail's bakery - a British business with an Israeli founder but no operational connection to Israel for years - be repeatedly vandalised, with its windows smashed and red paint daubed across its doors, simply because of the perceived ethnicity of its founders?

It started with the protests, intimidating Jews across the UK and creating a climate of fear for Britain's Jews. Then we have seen parts of the UK becoming effectively no go zones for Britain's Jews.

Evidence was manufactured by both the police and "community leaders" in Birmingham to ban foreign Jews from the area citing them as the problem. In actual fact, they sat on intelligence that local armed gangs were preparing to attack the visiting Jewish fans. The chair of the all-party parliamentary group against antisemitism put it directly: many Jews feared "the events in Birmingham are just the first step towards excluding them from British public life."

For those who say I am overreacting when I call these areas effectively no go zones for Britain's Jews, ask yourselves, do you actually believe that a visible orthodox Jew would be genuinely safe walking through parts of Birmingham, Bradford, and Luton? I can tell you that those of all religions are safe walking through Golders Green. This is not to mention the campaigns to hound Jews directly. Lets not forget that the Deputy Leader of the Green Party - a political party polling at 15%-20% - ran a campaign against Rabbi Zecharia Deutsch of Leeds that was so vicious and sustained that the rabbi and his family were forced to flee the country. Ali called the rabbi "an animal" and treated him worse than one.

It started with creating a climate of fear; then it moved to making sure that Jews would and could not feel safe in parts of their own country. Then it came to where we thought we were most safe - our most populous area as a community in Britain, the heart of Jewish London. They firebombed our synagogues, set fire to our charity ambulance services, attacked what they thought were headquarters of Jewish charities, and finally they violently attacked us in our previous safe haven. In one of the few parts of Britain where Jewish people genuinely believed they were safe, it has been made brutally clear that they are not.

In 2026 Britain it is no longer safe to be visibly Jewish. I well up as I write that sentence because I love this country. I believe that Britain for its long and rich history has been the greatest country in the world. I am a British Jew and proud to both. This piece will not end with any call to action or ask of the Government. I simply wanted my non-Jewish friends, colleagues, and readers to know what we as British Jews are feeling right now. We are fearful. We are angry. But we will not give up because we love this country, and we hope that we will be able to stay here.

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

This follows Labour leadership candidate Wes Streeting putting rejoin back on the agenda, just when it was least helpful to Andy Burnham’s by election campaign, creating a row at the top of the Labour party: the Guardian reports here. One senior Labour figure describes this as a “shambles”.

The circus rolls on. It rolls on because people who want power will say whatever is necessary to get it. That phenomenon is destroying our society.

Having been on the inside of successful and unsuccessful leadership campaigns, I will try to unpack what is going on. In short, politicians crave power and their pursuit of it is exposing contradictions on multiple fronts. That can only lead to chaos and decay.

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

This week, the team is joined by Voice for Freedom Eve Lugg to discuss Labour's chaotic leadership crisis and whether Keir Starmer's premiership is finally coming to an end. The panel examines why Britain appears ungovernable, debating whether the problem lies with Labour's incompetence and exposed flanks or with the failing model of the managerial state itself.

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: Thumbnail image contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0. Photo: Lauren Hurley / No 10 Downing Street, used under the Open Government Licence v3.0 (nationalarchives.gov.uk/doc/open-government-licence/version/3). Link: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Prime_Minister_Keir_Starmer_hosts_first_Cabinet.jpg.

This Week on Voices

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To appease his party when he came to power, he tossed 22% pay rises to the doctors and 15% to the train drivers, the political equivalent of a king trying to stop a peasant revolt by handing out his own castle keys, only for the peasants to change the locks and tell him to sleep in the moat. The ASLEF train drivers didn’t just take the gold; they took the gold, thanked him for the tip, and immediately announced more strikes.

As the calls to resign echo through the courtyards, the arrogance of his majority is beginning to creak. He campaigned on ‘ethics’, then accepted enough ‘gifted’ designer clothes and glasses to see the ghost of his own credibility leaving the room. He’s hiked National Insurance on the employers, introduced measures that have crushed the jobs market, and performed more U-turns than a confused pigeon in a hall of mirrors. He had the numbers to build a New Jerusalem; instead, he’s currently tripping over his own sceptre. If this is the ‘adults’ taking charge, someone please bring back the circus; at least they know how to manage the elephants.

Flash forward to today, and the adult in the room is currently trying to keep the room from being repossessed. The local elections weren’t just a loss; they were a high-speed collision with reality that left the Labour Party’s bumper in a hedge and the engine on fire. The public has spoken, and they’ve spent their votes on anyone but the man in the palace, turning to populist parties on the left and right. Starmer is now fighting for his political life with the desperate energy of a man trying to staple a shadow back to a wall.

The palace coup is no longer a whisper in the corridors; it’s a full-blown shouting match. Wes Streeting is currently in the corner, warming up his vocal cords as he resigns from this failing Government. More than 80 Labour MPs, nearly a quarter of his MPs, have officially asked the PM to please take his crown and find the nearest exit. But Keir, ever the defiant prime minister, has responded by clutching his sceptre tighter and using the King’s Speech to announce the European Partnership Bill.

It’s a masterclass in misreading the room. While the people are crying out for a lower cost of living and a fair tax system, Starmer has decided that what the country really needs is a legislative hug for the EU. It’s a bold move to pivot back toward Brussels when the ghost of 2016 is still haunting the corridors, especially considering the 51% who voted to leave in a turnout that made the moon landing look like a quiet night. He’s essentially telling a public that wants change that the best way forward is to hit the rewind button on a six-year-old remote.

For those who believed Brexit was an opportunity to build a laboratory of competition on the edge of Europe, the Dynamic Alignment Trap has officially been set.

At its core, this Bill is an executive power grab disguised as administrative efficiency. By granting ministers the power to fast-track alignment with EU standards through secondary legislation, the infamous Henry VIII powers allow the government to bypass the very parliamentary scrutiny that was supposed to be the hallmark of our sovereignty. This isn’t just about the Safe Pair of Hands adjusting veterinary standards; it is about the erosion of the rule of law. It’s the political equivalent of Mr Bean trying to fix a priceless painting with a felt-tip pen, except the painting is our democracy, and the pen is a permanent ink of ‘made in Brussels.’ When laws are updated by executive powers to match the whims of a foreign trade bloc.

The economic cost of this alignment is a permanent brake on progress. The primary advantage of a sovereign Britain was its potential to diverge from the EU’s Precautionary Principle. A rigid regulatory philosophy that prioritises the status quo over disruptive breakthroughs. By tethering ourselves to EU standards in energy, food, and emissions, we are accepting a regulatory monopoly. We are voluntarily climbing back into a straitjacket, forfeiting our right to be a permissionless economy where startups can test revolutionary technologies that might be non-compliant in Brussels but perfectly safe in London. It’s like being given the keys to a Ferrari and deciding to hitch it to a horse and cart because the neighbours think speed is dangerous.

The Government justifies this reset by citing the billions saved in reduced friction for exporters. But let’s look at who truly benefits from this bill. It is the large, established corporations with entrenched supply chains that crave the comfort of a single, stagnant rulebook. The unseen cost is borne by the domestic entrepreneur and the small business owner, the very people who will never see the light of day because they are crushed by the weight of a regulatory regime designed for a continent-sized bureaucracy they don’t even export to. This is the adults rigging the game for their friends while the innovators are left to starve.

Perhaps most dangerously, dynamic alignment creates a one-way system. Once our institutions are integrated into European systems, the cost of future deregulation becomes prohibitively high. We are entering a state of Shadow Membership, where we follow the rules of a club we aren’t allowed to enter, paying dues to a landlord who doesn’t have our phone number. We are trading our greatest asset, which is freedom, for the static ease of legacy trade.

The arrogance of the majority is not just a political problem; it is a constitutional crisis. Keir Starmer is acting as if a 33% vote share, the lowest mandate in modern history, gives him a divine right to ignore the 52% who voted for sovereignty and the 72% who showed up to demand it. The local elections were a scream for help from a public tired of being ignored, yet the response in the King’s Speech was to double down on a European Partnership that no one asked for.

A large majority is not a license for a four-year dictatorship. The use of Henry VIII powers to fast-track alignment with Brussels is a direct insult to the concept of Parliamentary sovereignty. Laws that govern British citizens should be debated in the House of Commons, not whispered into existence by a minister behind a closed door. If the government is so confident that dynamic alignment is the right path, they should be brave enough to defend it in a full Parliamentary vote for every single regulation they plan to adopt.

You cannot reset a relationship by erasing the democratic decision of the largest turnout in UK history. To pivot back to Brussels through the service entrance, without a seat at the table and without a vote from the public, is a betrayal of trust that will only fuel the fires of populism. The voters didn’t choose Shadow Membership; they chose independence.

Starmer is trying to rewrite the ending of a story the public has already finished reading.

Every element of the European Partnership Bill must be subject to rigorous, line-by-line scrutiny. We need a Sovereignty Lock that prevents any minister from aligning with a foreign trade bloc without a primary legislative vote. If Wes Streeting and the 80 defiant MPs truly want to save the Labour Party, they should start by saving the democratic process from their own leader’s arrogance.

If the UK is to thrive, it must be a competitor, not a client state. Today’s King’s Speech suggests the government has chosen the latter. By walking into the Dynamic Alignment Trap, we aren’t just easing trade; we are putting invisible handcuffs on the British economy. We are ensuring that our regulatory future is written in a language we no longer speak, in a city where we no longer have a seat at the table.

The adults have decided that independence is too much like hard work. They’d rather be the well-behaved junior partners in someone else’s empire than the masters of their own destiny.

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

Global Trade Geopolitics

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

By Glodi Ntoya

The word gets thrown around so carelessly that it has all but lost its meaning. So what happens when someone uses it accurately? People lose their minds, apparently.

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That much was made clear this week. It turns out many people don’t actually know what propaganda is. Either that, or people are conveniently unwilling to accept that their own side can do it too.

The Crime of Calling It What It Is

It would have been easy to miss the minor controversy that brought this into focus. Sam Coates of Sky News made the apparently terrible mistake of articulating political spin when he saw it. On Tuesday, he called the smiling photographs from the Prime Minister’s visit to the London South Bank Technical College “propaganda”. More pointedly, he described them as “as close to fake news as you can get,” urging viewers to take them “with a huge health label on them” and to “trust pictures from PA” instead. His conclusion: the audience should “distrust the implied story” from Number 10.

Coates was quickly forced to clarify that the images were, in fact, from the PA. He wasn’t willing to back down, though. Good. As a libertarian, doubting the narrative from powerful institutions is just common sense. Governments are permanently mired in political incentives. They have every reason to curate the truth, and no incentive not to.

And frankly, aside from his use of the loaded phrase “fake news” which was bound to wind everyone up, Coates’ comments were entirely unobjectionable. The point he ultimately made was that viewers should not “take these as concrete proof that [the Prime Minister] is happy.” That much seems obvious. It is simply absurd to think that on that Tuesday of all days - with ministers resigning, journalists camped outside Number 10, and difficult questions being howled at anyone unfortunate enough to wander through that famous black door - Sir Keir Starmer could have been anything other than thoroughly miserable. I certainly would have been.

Yet there he was, beaming in conversation with an apprentice. It was helpful to the Prime Minister and his administration for us to see them, and to accept the story that those photographs implied.

The outrage from the Prime Minister’s supporters was immediate and total. Accusations of bias, Ofcom complaints, the usual mob mobilising to defend the Government against any and all criticism. Of course, most of that happened on social media, so who knows how many complaints Ofcom actually received. Still, Sam Coates was branded a rogue. A bad actor. A man in urgent need of a disciplinary procedure.

All for the capital crime of accurately using the word “propaganda.”

What Propaganda Actually Is

Start with what it isn’t. Propaganda is not an exclusively sinister tool reserved for totalitarian regimes and wartime disinformation campaigns.

The Cambridge Dictionary defines it plainly as “information, ideas, opinions, or images, often only giving one part of an argument, spread with the intention of influencing people’s opinions.” Merriam-Webster is blunter still: “ideas, facts, or allegations spread deliberately to further one’s cause.” The Oxford Learner’s Dictionary adds that it may involve statements that “present only one side of an argument” to “gain support for a political leader,” stating that propaganda may be false but need not be.

Notice what every one of these definitions omits: any requirement that the information be false, that the government be authoritarian, or that the intent be malevolent. Propaganda simply means curated messaging designed to shape perception. By that entirely mainstream definition, a flattering photograph of the Prime Minister at a Technical College, released via the PA from a visit conducted as an official engagement of his own administration, must be propaganda. It would be dishonest to classify it as anything else. That the photographs were distributed by the PA rather than directly by Number 10 is beside the point - propaganda is defined by its intent and effect, not by who presses send.

The Discomfort Is the Point

The issue was never whether the word was accurate. It’s the implication that makes people flinch. That discomfort is both important and entirely by design. We have been culturally conditioned to associate propaganda with the tactics of the enemy: Soviet posters, Nazi rallies, North Korean pageantry. To apply the word to an oddly deployed photograph of Keir Starmer at a routine visit is to puncture a very convenient myth.

Deploying that word about something as mundane as a nice picture on a bad news day was, in that sense, a genuine public service. The connotations were uncomfortable precisely because they were apt. Democratic governments across the world manage information daily, and in doing so they quietly shape our understanding of reality. Calling it out isn’t bias, it is just what journalists are supposed to do.

We extend enormous latitude to governments we like. Simultaneously, we scrutinise the messaging of those we distrust with forensic intensity while passively absorbing the same techniques from our preferred side. The shock at accusing this Government of propaganda is itself evidence of how successfully that management of perception operates.

The lesson from this event is not that we shouldn't accuse democratic governments of spreading propaganda. It's that we should be actively prepared to take a sceptical view of any information powerful institutions give us.

A Word of Thanks

So yes: even nice, democratic governments curate information to sway audiences. In the social media age, it is part of the essential infrastructure of governance. Every government has a comms operation. Every image is released for a reason. The question is never whether this is happening. The question is whether the public is willing enough to notice.

Cheers, Sam Coates, for making more people notice.

I am only sorry so many responded by claiming they had filed Ofcom complaints. The irony is almost too much to bear - yet another attempt at information control, deployed in fury at someone for simply naming information control for what it is.

Liam Noble Shearer is an ex-Parliamentary aide and the Operations Manager for Fighting for a Free Future.

Not just the usual Corbynite suspects, but a growing list of MPs and council leaders are saying, with varying degrees of ill temper, that Keir Starmer has fought his last election as leader and should now set out a timetable for his departure. Downing Street is scrambling to rally the Cabinet; senior figures offer performative support or studied silence.

This is not year nine of a clapped‑out government, limping to an overdue defeat. It is the aftermath of a local test of a young administration. If this is what government with a big majority looks like in 2026, it is worth asking whether something much deeper has gone wrong with the way Britain is governed.

Is the UK becoming ungovernable?

Since Brexit, our centre of government, politicians and journalists seem to have had an addiction to chaos with six Prime Ministers since the referendum. Candidates to be the seventh are now limbering up for the job. It took over forty years to run through that many leaders before 2016. What is happening?

We are not suffering simply from bad luck with leaders, or only lingering division over the decision to leave the EU, or the peculiar viciousness of modern social media. Those things matter, but they are symptoms. The deeper causes are structural, and they were set in train long before the referendum. Until we confront them honestly, the chaos will continue – whoever is in Downing Street.

Politics is war minus the shooting

Theorist of war Carl von Clausewitz observed that war is a continuation of politics by other means. Turn it around: politics is war, minus the shooting.

This is not to be gloomy. I write it because naive ideas about how we “come together to decide what to do” make us blind to what is actually happening: conflict.

Politics involves seizing people’s property through taxation and redistributing it according to the judgements of those who hold power. It involves coercion and control, and a battle for those levers over other people. It will always attract intense disagreement. That conflict is managed, usually imperfectly, by democratic norms, accountability and the mutual understanding that the loser of today’s battle may win tomorrow’s. When those norms erode, management of political conflict breaks down.

One corollary is obvious yet frequently ignored: in any conflict, an exposed flank will be attacked. Boris Johnson locked down the nation with radical consequences for millions of families and was then seen not to have taken his own rules terribly seriously. Later, over Pincher, once trust in Number 10’s basic consistency was gone, ministers could not safely go out and defend him. They avalanched out.

Starmer has exposed his own flanks over appointments, over welfare and winter fuel payment cuts, through U‑turns, and now over the gap between expectations and delivery. His enemies are making the most of them.

These are not accidents of character, though character matters. They are the predictable consequences of a political environment operating at Gatling‑gun speed: mistakes that might have been survived in 1992 are lethal within hours today.

The acceleration problem

Social media did not create the human tendencies it exaggerates. Intra‑party factions are as old as the Corn Laws at least. WhatsApp groups replaced the smoke‑filled room: what changed is speed.

When MPs are under pressure from constituents expressing outrage in real time, they post a public position before they have heard the argument. Once they have posted, they are locked in. Daniel Kahneman’s fast brain has spoken before the slow brain engages; the amygdala has done its work. The fundamental attribution error does the rest: the other side must be wicked or corrupt, not merely mistaken.

I exploited this pattern ruthlessly in the Brexit years: if you could get someone to say “this deal sucks, I’m never voting for it” on X, you had their vote, because they now could not back down. The consequences would be too great.

The result is democratic deliberation systematically disadvantaged relative to performative commitment. Whips and ministers arrive too late to a conversation that social media concluded an hour ago. Today, the same mechanisms are being deployed inside Labour: mini‑power centres built around WhatsApp lists, organising against their own leader in days rather than months. And it seems to happen whether or however badly it is organised.

The deeper cause nobody wants to discuss

There is, however, a still more fundamental cause, one I have not ceased to articulate: our managerial system of government is breaking down under the weight of a welfare state we cannot afford and which fails to meet expectations.

Promises made to successive generations cannot be met from our productive output. The gap has been filled by debt and by the systematic debasement of the currency since Nixon closed the gold window in 1971. In the nineteenth century, a pound in 1900 bought roughly as much as a pound in 1800. Since 1971, the purchasing power of money has collapsed. That is not a coincidence. That is policy.

I put this thesis to Rishi Sunak in a private meeting. He readily agreed I was right. The room of some thirty MPs looked crestfallen, until someone said, “But we can’t do anything about it before the election” whereupon everyone relaxed and reverted to type. That moment encapsulates our problem precisely.

Liz Truss understood the fiscal reality and tried to act on it. She was also, simultaneously, spending enormous sums on an energy bailout. The bond markets noted the contradiction and drew their own conclusions. She was unlucky with undiagnosed structural problems in bond markets while caught between two incompatible imperatives. Her underlying diagnosis was not wrong.

It turns out reality is not optional. You can ignore it, but you cannot ignore the consequences of ignoring it. Rachel Reeves and the whole nation are discovering this now, after the Chancellor brought welfare cuts to MPs who told their constituents for years that austerity is a choice and said, “No thank you!”

Starmer’s current crisis sits at this junction: a government elected on the promise that “change” would be painless, running head‑first into the arithmetic they declined to discuss.

What this means

We are not in a crisis of personalities. We are in a crisis of governing model. The social‑democratic settlement of ever‑rising state promises, financed by debt and easy money, managed by a technocratic faith in state omnipotence, is today breaking down under the weight of its own contradictions. Absent a coherent reckoning, the public are voting for multiple, increasingly-radical parties in despair, and yet they are parties still failing to confront the fundamental issue: the failure of the managerial state.

Until a political party and a government are prepared to be honest about the trade‑offs and to seek a mandate for spending less, taxing less and devolving more to families, communities, individuals and markets, the pattern will repeat. The flanks will keep being exposed. The political Gatling guns will keep firing. Leaders of every stripe will discover that their majorities are as if made of sand.

The UK is not yet ungovernable. But it is being governed badly, by people operating in an environment their institutions were not designed for, making promises the numbers will not support.

That is a problem we can solve. Alas that solving it will not be easy.

Steve sits down with Times Radio’s Kate McCann to ask whether politicians have left Britain broke and defenceless. The discussion ranges from Trump, Iran and the Strait of Hormuz to age‑related spending, the triple lock and why no one in Westminster wants to tell voters the truth.

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This Week on Voices

A viral Elector quiz ranked Reform closest to my views on 27.8 per cent, with Advance UK on 22.0 per cent, Restore Britain on 21.7 per cent, and the Conservatives way back on 14.2 per cent. Labour was down on 2.2 per cent and the Greens on 0.4 per cent. If Reform cannot close the deal with a voter like me, then the problem is not a lack of political space on the right. It is what the party is becoming.

That is what makes this so frustrating. I remain furious about the Conservative record on immigration, public spending, taxation, defence, planning reform, NHS reform and the wider collapse of any serious centre-right ambition. After years of drift, cowardice and excuses, Reform looked like the one party on the right willing to say the obvious: Britain’s problems were not caused by bad messaging, but by bad decisions and weak leaders.

That was the appeal. Reform did not pretend the people who made the mess were also the people to fix it. When Zia Yusuf went after Priti Patel, Boris Johnson, Suella Braverman, Robert Jenrick and Rishi Sunak, especially on immigration, it felt like a rare outbreak of honesty on the British right. At last, someone was naming the culprits rather than recycling them.

A genuine realignment is happening on the British right, and it can no longer be dismissed. That’s why I have repeatedly called for the London Conservatives and Reform UK London to unite behind Laila Cunningham as a centre-right mayoral candidate, and for accommodations between Reform and the Conservatives where that makes electoral sense.

However, I can’t help but feel Reform was better when Richard Tice, Nigel Farage, David Bull and Zia Yusuf were running the show without the latest batch of failed Tories barging in. Back then, it felt insurgent. Now it increasingly looks like a witness-protection scheme for politicians trying to escape the smell of their own record.

Reform deserves real credit for what it has built. It is set to do very well in the local elections today. Going from basically nowhere in early 2024 to a position where it could win the most council seats in England, while also emerging as the largest party of the right in both the Scottish and Welsh parliaments, is no easy feat. That is a serious political achievement, and they should be commended for it.

Local-election success, however, is not the same thing as winning a working majority at a general election. To do that, Reform needs more than protest votes and anti-establishment energy. They need to convince right-wing voters like me that they will not repeat the Boris era 2019-2024 mistakes, and that is where the defectors become a problem.

What exactly is the voter now meant to be excited about with Reform UK? Suella Braverman now poses as some embattled truth-teller, but her real record is one of failure in office, not dissent. She was Attorney General during Covid, when the government legalised the most sweeping restrictions on civil liberties seen in modern times, and then Home Secretary during the period that produced record net migration. She was not a rebel. Robert Jenrick, meanwhile, spent his time as immigration minister boasting in public about how many migrant hotels he had managed to open, only to reinvent himself later as though he had stumbled across the disaster by accident. Jenrick had the chance to reinvent himself as Reform’s economic spokesman but has instead offered the political equivalent of duty-free aftershave: a couple of retail duty tweaks, whilst sticking to the failed economic consensus of recent decades.

Braverman and Jenrick are not alone. Nadine Dorries, Nadhim Zahawi, Andrea Jenkyns, Jake Berry, Liz Truss and the rest of this travelling troupe of Tory has-beens seem to think that joining or cheerleading Reform wipes the slate clean. It does not. Their problem is not that they were misunderstood. Their problem is that they failed. They backed failure, enabled failure, defended failure and now want a rebrand.

The danger for Reform is obvious. The more it fills up with yesterday’s Conservatives, the more it inherits the habits that made 2019 to 2024 Toryism so useless in the first place: vanity, gimmicks, moral cowardice and a total inability to accept responsibility for anything.

Worse still is the culture growing up around Reform. Some of the people joining it, and some of the people cheering it on, no longer behave like serious political actors at all. They have become groupies, the political equivalent of a 16 year old girl obsessed with One Direction or a single gay man in his thirties who is a Lady Gaga stan. No scepticism, no judgement, no standards, just clapping like seals every time Nigel Farage breathes.

This is how parties rot, not just through bad ideas, but through fandom. The moment a political movement stops tolerating criticism and starts treating flattery as loyalty, it is already halfway to failure. We have seen where that ends. Boris Johnson built a court, not a government, and his courtiers were happy to debase themselves in his service. Loyalty to the man mattered more than competence, standards or the country. The result was talking right while governing left: taxes went up, immigration went up, regulation went up, welfare spending went up, and Brexit opportunities were squandered. Now the same people want to rerun the performance under a different banner and expect applause for it.

This is where Kemi Badenoch benefits. Every Boris-era defector Farage welcomes is one less ghost she has to carry herself. Every washed-up minister who wanders over to Reform makes it easier for her to say: that was them, this is me. Farage may think he is building momentum. In reality, he may be helping Badenoch shed the human baggage of the Johnson years.

A week is a long time in politics. Three years is a lifetime. Reform will have a triumphant local election, and fair enough, it has earned that moment. Council seats won on protest energy are not the same as a Commons majority, though, and to get that Farage has to win over voters like me. The more Boris-era wreckage he drags aboard, the harder that becomes.

On my own politics, I should probably already be with Reform. If Nigel Farage still cannot close the sale with voters like me, after all that Tory failure, all that Labour mediocrity and all that political space sitting open in front of him, then the problem is not the electorate. It is the company he is keeping.

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

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

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

Tickets are available now: luma.com/oponegbx

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Event Schedule:

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

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

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

​​Location: Curzon Soho

If there is one thing on which serious analysts across the spectrum now quietly agree, it is that the British state at all levels is being asked to do more than it can competently or affordably deliver. We have layered promises upon promises, financed with debt and wishful thinking, in the hope that the machinery of government would somehow catch up.

The leading stories about tomorrow’s local votes will focus on party leaders but the reality is about a national reckoning.

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

This week, the team is joined by Voice for Freedom Albie Amankona to discuss the recent terrorist attack in Golders Green and what it reveals about the growing threat of anti‑Semitism in Britain, the Mandelson-Starmer saga, and Nigel Farage’s undeclared £5 million gift.

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

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

This Week on Voices

Header image: “Finchley Road close to Golders Green tube station in the Golders Green neighbourhood of the London Borough of Barnet” (20 November 2025) by Sjenghai, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

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Yesterday in North London, two Jewish men were stabbed.

No doubt Zack Polanski will soon be on hand to reassure them that while they might feel as though they have been stabbed, and while stabbing is generally to be frowned upon, there is a discussion to be had about whether they only had the perception of being stabbed. I’m sure that will reassure the Jewish community of Golders Green no end.

One attack like this, on any other minority group in the UK would meet nothing like this level of breezy equivocation. For once, can we stop pretending that this is anything other than pure antisemitism? Or are we to believe that it would be acceptable for the leader of a major political party to gaslight any other minority community about its own experiences?

It isn’t as though Polanski was unlucky either. It would certainly be a cruel twist of fate if this was an isolated incident that took place only days after his crass observation. But this is not isolated, it is the latest in a string of violent attacks on British Jews. There have been multiple attempted firebombings at numerous synagogues over only a matter of weeks. Hatzola, a volunteer-led ambulance service operating in the Golders Green area, was set on fire last month. And only last week, a Jewish man was attacked in Slough and accused of ‘killing babies’.

And yet there remains a persistent instinct in parts of political discourse to soften, contextualise or deflect. The left is already trying to mitigate the severity of yesterday’s attack by muttering darkly about Israel, Iran and Gaza. As if a British Jew waiting for the bus has anything on earth to do with the state of Israel’s domestic or foreign policy. No matter what your position on Israel and Gaza, it is a squalid and dishonourable excuse to trot out that somehow Jews in Britain deserve this treatment because of what’s happening in the Middle East.

What makes this more troubling is not just the violence itself, but the response to it. Too often, it is muted, conditional, or hedged with caveats. Statements are recycled and issued, concern is expressed, and then the moment passes.

If this had happened to anybody else, people would already have taken to the streets. Shops would have been looted, cars set aflame, flags waved and sombre speeches given to baying crowds. And I am not suggesting that this should be the response - but the contrast is impossible to ignore.

The government will point to its recent announcement of funding replacement ambulances after the arson attack. Forgive me, but this fundamentally reactive measure does nothing to address the underlying hostility that has made such attacks possible in the first place. Once again, the Jewish community is offered recycled statements, sympathy, and then no doubt silence. An expectation to absorb what has happened and carry on.

It is absurd that it takes people being stabbed in broad daylight before we listen, and even then, the left barely takes notice. What is it going to take?

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

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Header image: “Finchley Road close to Golders Green tube station in the Golders Green neighbourhood of the London Borough of Barnet” (20 November 2025) by Sjenghai, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International. Source: Wikimedia Commons.