Last month I warned that we should not mistake recent electoral trends in South America for a continental shift to the political right as each government differs significantly in its approach to individual liberty. After all, liberty does not come in a small and tidy package.

In most Latin American countries, the most important divide is increasingly between states in which institutions constrain political power and those in which political power has learned to constrain institutions.

However, this is not the case in Brazil which is currently holding a closely contested presidential election between a far-left and far-right candidate. After the first round of voting on the 4^th of October, Flávio Bolsonaro (not to be confused with his father, the currently imprisoned former president Jair Bolsonaro) is narrowly ahead with a promise of major fiscal reform similar to that seen in Argentina. Despite this, Reuters has reported investor scepticism about either candidate’s ability to reverse Brazil’s rising debt trajectory, offering a useful distinction between ideological policies and practical outcomes.

Throughout recent decades Brazil has been marred by countless corruption and money laundering scandals, with the far-left candidate, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (“Lula”), having served 19 months in prison from 2018-19 on corruption and money laundering charges. All convictions were however, later annulled by the Supreme Federal Court. The far-right candidate, Flávio Bolsonaro is also currently under investigation for corruption, money laundering and tax evasion.

Because of this, corruption is a major concern in this election. It has become no longer about left or right in either the traditional or modern sense. By this, I mean the traditional sense of economic activity being dominated by the state or by the market, and the modern sense of nationalist versus cosmopolitan ideology.

However, corruption has alienated voters. Whilst a 79% turnout in the first round of the presidential election may not seem low to us in Britain, Brazil maintains strong mandatory voting laws where abstainers are fined. This is therefore the lowest first-round turnout since 1998. This has generally been attributed to the corruption surrounding both candidates leading to over 20% of voters preferring to risk being fined instead of giving their vote to any candidate.

But what does that mean? After the first round, Bolsonaro has 47.03% of the vote to Lula’s 45.16%, representing a gap of just 2.2m votes. With 9.32m votes cast for other candidates and 33.47m abstaining, the outcome of the election remains uncertain.

Aside from corruption, education is a major matter for voters. Just this year, the National Education Plan was announced which commits raising government expenditure on education to 7.5% of GDP by 2033, with an increase to 10% in 2036. This is a significantly large increase in spending commitment especially when taken into consideration with UNESCO’s global benchmark of 4-6% of GDP.

This reinforces the idea that unlike other South American countries, Brazil faces an entirely different election. Whatever the result of the Brazilian election, it will tell us little about the transformation of voters’ economic and political beliefs, that have been observed elsewhere in South America. Instead, it will only tell us of their attitude towards corruption, insecurity, and established political elites.

We are therefore unable to answer the question of whether Brazil is turning towards liberty. With voters disillusioned by years of corruption and scandal, a change in leadership does not necessarily represent a change in ideology. Ultimately, Brazil’s election may reveal less about the direction of its political future and more about the growing frustration of voters who have lost faith in those elected to shape it.

Luke Lucas is a Fighting for a Free Future Associate. He runs Voices for a Free Future’s column, What is Happening in Argentina!, and Principles for a Free Society series.

When I lost my seat, a supporter told me, “You should have a think tank.” After a day’s consideration, I replied, “I’m not Tony Blair. I can’t have the Steve Baker Institute. And anyway, we have plenty of great freedom-oriented think tanks. Why don’t I set something up to amplify them all using what I learned in Parliament?”

He provided some help and the Fighting for a Free Future project was born, named after a slogan on a Big Brother Watch t-shirt. Today, we encompass a collaborating community of voices for freedom, educational programmes, events, this Substack and our podcast plus of course our outstanding merch, which you should buy.

We maintain a relatively light presence online because this project is not about us: it is about the voices for the principles of a free society who we support. We are inspired by Leonard Read’s How to Advance Liberty and Hayek’s The Intellectuals and Socialism: we need to make the philosophy of freedom attractive so that it becomes fashionable for those who set the terms of public debate and public policy to advocate for a free society over the managerialism which is now failing.

It is only by changing the terms of debate that we can avoid the fiscal, economic, social and political disaster which looms before us, and which is perhaps unfolding even now as riots over the cost of living sweep France and Europe. Brexit taught us a few lessons: one is that a small band of determined and effective political operators can only force a choice on the governing elite for so long. The elite will work to reassert themselves relentlessly when they are overridden.

A lasting change requires those who set the terms of debate and policy to believe, on the whole, in the new paradigm. That is what this project is about.

We are working in the short, medium and long term to create the conditions for a free society. Because if you think taxes have been too low, that we have not borrowed enough, that money has been too tight and that regulation has been altogether too laissez-faire, I hope you will look at the data…

In other words, we are upstream of and independent from party politics. There’s a reason Conservatives and, yes, for five years, liberals in government did not do enough to rebalance public spending and the rights of the individual after the Global Financial Crisis: the Blairite settlement – “The Third Way” – of endless intervention in the market is the paradigm in which officials, politicians, journalists, academics and lawyers operate.

We need to change their minds. That’s why we are Fighting for a Free Future, and that is why we were at the Battle of Ideas.

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Lord Craig Mackinlay joins Steve Baker to discuss his experience of sepsis, a condition which can develop with frightening speed. Craig reflects on his recovery, rehabilitation and return to Parliament, and on the importance of recognising the signs that something could be seriously wrong.

You can watch the full episode here on Substack, or on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts:

“So, which university are you going to?”

The conversation every 16- and 17-year-old is going to face for the next year or so of their lives. The number of times they will have this conversation, they will stop counting. The pleasantries of someone taking an interest in your future.

But what does this actually mean? The decision has been made. You are already predestined to go to university.

They have done their research, their time, their choice. Choosing their first choice, a lovely university that resonates with them, people they associate with, classes they like and a prospectus that feels like them. Still, this isn’t good enough. “Oh, but you can do so much better.” The remark, filled with good intent and praise, indicates a higher intelligence that they don’t feel they have. Yet it makes the young person’s ambition and happiness sound like a disappointment.

Another young person saw an alternative course, a carpentry apprenticeship. They did woodworking at school and enjoyed it. It wasn’t their best GCSE, but they never really got on with long written assessments and much preferred the practical element. They visited the workshop; they liked the people, and they enjoyed their banter. The idea of bringing an idea and vision into the real world as a product is something that interests them, and they can picture themselves honing their craft.

Once again, “you can do so much better”.

Both phrases are a product of a faulty “degree by default” culture identified by the British Government. But this has been the attitude since 1999, when Tony Blair announced his 50% target of higher education participation. The impact is that the number of undergraduates receiving a degree in 1999 was 265,000, and this has only increased since, with the number of students accepted in 2026 being 518,000.

Blair raises a question that a box-ticking exercise can’t answer: who should decide your future? His target did cover higher education, including vocational qualifications rather than purely academic university degrees. However, it expresses a political idea about the destination towards which all young people should strive. Blair reduced individual ambition and the freedom to choose one’s own future to something a government could count towards fulfilling its ambition, a policy metric.

On paper, this seems like an attractive measure: the United Kingdom becomes more educated, average wages go up, and so does GDP. But this isn’t the reality of what has happened. Unsurprisingly, there have been unintended consequences of central planning of young people’s futures. We’re currently seeing an education bloat and a youth unemployment crisis. Nearly a third of graduates are not in high-skilled work and youth unemployment stands at over 16%. Pushing young people towards university may have good intentions, but these good intentions do not translate into the government knowing which path each individual should take for their future.

And the state does not need to physically assign a person to university when the overarching system operates to finance the conditions attached to support, and they embed a culture that looks down on those who choose other paths. The government constructs the expectations that individuals are then told they have freely chosen to satisfy.

And this concern continues. In 2018, the House of Lords Economic Affairs Committee concluded that post-school education in England was unbalanced towards full-time university degrees. The 2012 financing reforms encouraged universities to recruit undergraduates. It identified incentives for schools to favour academic routes, creating institutional pressures for students to attend university rather than simply ambitious parents offering advice.

Returning to the young person deciding on university. They can picture the satisfaction of turning an idea into something tangible that someone will use for decades. But where does that satisfaction appear in a governmental metric? The official cannot experience their life on their behalf, nor will they bear all the consequences of choosing the wrong life.

Once government sets a preferred destination, institutions have an incentive to achieve that goal. Success becomes easier to demonstrate through the number who enrol than through asking whether those decisions serve the individuals making them. The question gradually shifts from “is this the right decision for you?” to “does this help meet the target?

Although university attendance can indicate opportunity, maximising attendance does not maximise opportunity. The education bloat we have suffered in the United Kingdom illustrates the danger described by Goodhart’s Law: when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.

This has created a culture shift. The only way to be successful is to go to university. And the only way a school is successful is based on how many students are going to university. The education ladder is not freedom; it demands that everyone climb it and removes your ability to choose when to get off.

Individuals need to have the freedom to choose their paths in life. The actual meaning of what is ahead for them. Take the time to consider the years spent studying versus the experience and earnings they could acquire elsewhere. Above all else, they need to ask what they want to become capable of doing with their life.

No one else can answer that.

Equally, a person may choose university knowing that their subject does not offer much financial reward. Just because someone wants to study English Literature doesn’t mean they shouldn’t, just because Economics on average will earn them more in their lifetime. Honest information should be provided to help the person choose what’s right for them. It should leave room for values that cannot be reduced to statistics.

In both cases, the principle of freedom must protect both choices. But the principle of freedom has a distinction between pressure and compulsion. This distinction does not make the surrounding elements irrelevant. Young people should have clear information about costs and outcomes, with universities being accountable for what they provide. Freedom does not require an unlimited public subsidy for every preference.

However, it does require resisting the temptation to organise lives around a single official measure of success. A target cannot tell us whether a young person has found a worthwhile and meaningful purpose in life. Neither can a target for apprenticeships. The individual disappears from view when their decision matters chiefly because it helps complete somebody’s narrative and statistics.

One path leads to lectures, examinations and the study of a subject that may become a lifelong passion. The other may lead to early mornings, practical training and the satisfaction of making something physical.

Both demand effort. Both carry uncertainty. Neither guarantees a fulfilling life. But both allow someone the freedom to carve their own path and find what is fulfilling to them off the back of their own curiosities and not a coercive idea of what’s the correct path.

We can ask better questions than embrace young people’s freedom of choice.

“What do you want to build with your life?”

And we should respect the answer because when future generations are reduced to a statistical box-ticking exercise, they become instruments of somebody else’s ambition. Freedom means recognising that the future they are building belongs to them.

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Luke Lucas is a Fighting for a Free Future Associate and also runs Voices for a Free Future’s monthly column, Liberty Around the World.

Welcome back to the series Profiling Freedom. For the second edition, I will be covering the life of John Lilburne, also known as Freeborn John.

John Lilburne was a parliamentarian and soldier who fought for the Roundheads during the English Civil War. He was arrested and imprisoned several times throughout his life, essentially for his absolute unwillingness to compromise on his principles and beliefs. This attitude meant that he was persecuted not only by the Realm, but also by the Commonwealth after the Civil War, despite fighting for its creation.

Lilburne was born around 1614, most likely in Sunderland. This was the year of the Addled Parliament, when James I recalled Parliament after a seven-year hiatus. It was dissolved the same year due to the parliament’s unwillingness to grant new taxes to the King. This is, of course, the backdrop to the Civil War, which began a few decades later.

Prior to the Civil War, he had already gotten himself in trouble due to unauthorised publication of texts. At the time, all printing press publications required licensing from the Stationers’ Company in order to secure regime control. Upon his return from exile in 1637, he was arrested and brought before the court of Star Chamber in the Palace of Westminster. Crucially, he was asked how he pled despite the fact that he was not charged with any specific offence, and he refused. He also refused to take the ex officio oath that was required by the Star Chamber.

These are vitally important moments in the fight for liberty for reasons that were probably not immediately obvious at the time. John Lilburne refused to comply with the authorities because of the belief in “freeborn rights”. This was a fairly new idea: that rights were not something merely granted by the government, but something that all people were born with. In this case, Lilburne believed that all men were born with the right to know the specific charge they were charged with, as well as the right to not incriminate themselves as necessitated by the ex officio oath. If this sounds familiar, it’s because this belief, and this case, are directly responsible for the creation of the 5th Amendment to the United States Constitution. Lilburne was even cited in the majority opinion of the landmark Supreme Court case Miranda vs Arizona, which created the eponymous Miranda Rights in the US.

We very much take the right to a fair trial for granted. We often think about show trials as something that happens elsewhere. Not many people know of Freeborn John, but it’s to him that we owe a great debt, not just here but around the world as well.

This was far from the only occasion in Lilburne’s life where his refusal to comply resulted in clashes with authority. During the Civil War, he naturally signed up to fight for the Parliamentarians. Despite becoming friends with Oliver Cromwell, he resigned from the army in 1645 over his refusal to sign the Solemn League and Covenant. This was an agreement between Scotland and the Parliamentarians that would guarantee the existence of the Reformed Church in Scotland. Lilburne was not a Presbyterian but a Puritan at this point. He had no qualms with the Presbyterians and defended their right to practise their faith, but he refused to support any plan to ensure that it was the only faith that could be practised in Scotland.

This was a recurring theme for Lilburne after the Civil War. He fought to overthrow the monarchy because of its inability to ensure freeborn rights. He quickly, though, became disgusted with the extent to which the Commonwealth under Cromwell simply replaced the dogma and tyranny of the monarchy with its own form.

The point of this series is not just to go through the biographies of great heroes and just say how courageous they were. The point is to learn how these figures achieved their great feats and what tactics we can take from their struggles and heroics.

In this case, it’s Lilburne’s campaigning and popularity with the general public which is so striking. It might be hard to imagine such popular support for a philosopher advocating for freeborn rights in this day and age, but he achieved this on such a scale. In 1648, he presented a petition to Parliament on a written constitution that was signed by a third of all Londoners. In 1649, he was put on trial for high treason at the Guildhall. When he was acquitted, the public cheered so loudly and for so long that the trial could not be formally ended for half an hour.

This is what we need to recapture. John Lilburne’s ideas were able to reach popularity in a time of crisis because the populace were politically engaged. This was a population which largely was not even able to vote at this time. In order for us to succeed, freedom needs to be popular again, and as Lilburne has shown, we need popular figureheads in order to achieve it.

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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.

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Lord Mackinlay joins Steve and Ted this week to ask whether Britain can reverse Net Zero, and what that would mean for energy prices, industry and economic growth. Craig argues that cheap, reliable power is essential if Britain is to make things, compete internationally and avoid further industrial decline. They discuss the political choices behind Net Zero, the pressure on household bills, and whether Parliament can change course.

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This week, FFF Director Harry Richer is joined by Harry Wilkinson, Anna Ridgway and Ted Granger to ask where the line lies between fraud, harmful falsehoods and free speech, and why answering bad ideas with evidence may be better than policing “truth”.

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In a political debate today on the scale of government, you’ll hear endless arguments from both sides. So how can we evaluate which side has more merit: Should the government be larger or smaller? Should it intervene more or step back?

We need to start with a more fundamental question: What is the state actually for? Before we can argue over how big the government should be, we have to establish what gives it legitimate authority in the first place.

What do most people actually want in their lives?

I believe that what most people want out of life is remarkably simple:

• Food on the table - the peace of mind that comes from knowing where your next meal is coming from

• Secure place to live - a home that offers shelter, stability and a foundation to raise a family

• Good health - physical and mental vitality to enjoy living and care for those around us

• Meaningful relationships - lasting bonds with friends and family

• Strong communities - belonging to networks that add richness to everyday life

• Safety and security - knowing that you, your property and the fruits of your labour are safe and secure

We could say in summary that this is simply prosperity or, as Aristotle called it, “the good life” - a life of dignity and human flourishing.

What is the best way to achieve this good life or human flourishing?

Scan that list again, and one thing stands out: none of this is possible without safety and security.

You can not plan for the future, build a home, raise a family or look after your health if you are constantly living in fear. Security isn’t just a nice item on a long menu. Security is the foundation upon which all aspects of human flourishing rest.

Crucially, however, we must be clear about what genuine security means. Legitimate security is protection from coercion, plunder, violence, and arbitrary control by others. It is not, and cannot be, protection from the natural risks of life, such as illness, misfortune, or the negative consequences of our own bad choices. Falling ill or making a poor decision are natural features of the human condition. When the state attempts to eliminate natural risk, it must control human behaviour, stripping away personal agency in a futile quest to engineer a risk-free world.

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Where does legitimate authority come from?

This is precisely where the concept of government comes in. At its core, government is simply a mutual association. It is an agreement among individuals to pool their inherent, personal right of self-defence into a shared system of law and justice.

Bastiat’s insights reveal both the origin and the strict limits of state power. The state has no magical, special rights or powers of its own. It derives its authority entirely from the individuals who created it.

Because no single person has the moral right to plunder their neighbour, micro-manage their family, or dictate how they live, a group of individuals acting in the capacity of ‘the government’ can’t suddenly grant themselves that right either.

We intuitively understand this when it comes to personal freedoms. A 51% majority vote cannot make it morally right to silence a minority, outlaw a religion, or dictate who someone is allowed to love. If an action is an unjust violation of an individual’s liberty when done by one person, multiplying that action by millions of voters doesn’t transform it into a legitimate authority.

Democracy is a vital tool for choosing who administers the law, but it does not have the power to redefine basic human rights. And so the legitimate function of the law is strictly defensive: to protect person, liberty and property.

Where modern politics strays: protection vs. paternalism

This brings us to the core split in modern politics. The state’s legitimate job is to protect the conditions that make the good life possible by protecting people from physical violence, theft, and coercion, but not attempting to manufacture the good life itself or insulating individuals from reality.

When the government crosses from protection into paternalism, it turns Bastiat’s principle upside down. As we explored in Is a free and prosperous society compatible with welfare entitlements?, the moment a state-managed safety net becomes an institutional entitlement, it ceases to be a static floor. It transforms into an open-ended political prize driven by a one-way ratchet where politicians compete by offering broader benefits.

Paternalism rests on a quiet arrogance; the belief that the politicians and bureaucrats know how to run your life better than you do. It assumes that central planners can manage and guarantee human flourishing better than free individuals can.

So a government cannot legislate meaningful relationships or strong communities - those only grow through voluntary human connection. Nor can it create true prosperity and wealth by decree; it can only redistribute what free individuals have already produced.

Worst of all, when the state takes over the responsibilities of daily life, it quietly strips away personal agency. It replaces voluntary cooperation with legal force, turning self-reliant citizens into permanent dependents and clients of the state.

If we want a society where people truly thrive, we must maintain a clear distinction: the state exists to keep us safe from coercion so that we have the freedom and dignity to build the good life - not to run our lives for us.

Pillars of a legitimate state

If the state’s authority is strictly derived from the individual’s right to self-defence, then it follows that its scope is naturally limited. Government isn’t a Swiss Army knife for every social friction, nor is it society’s moral conscience. It is a specialised tool built for a specific job: protecting individuals from coercion, theft, and violence.

In practice, that narrow mandate rests on three pillars.

Pillar 1: External defence

First, protecting the people from foreign aggression, invasion, or coercion.

Domestic liberty means very little if your society is exposed to conquest or dictation by external powers who don’t respect individual rights. Pooling resources for a military tasked strictly with defending the realm, its borders, and its sovereignty is a clear and direct extension of the individual’s right to self-defence.

The key word here is defence. A legitimate military exists to protect peace and freedom at home, not to engage in foreign social engineering, nation-building, or global military intervention.

Pillar 2: Internal justice and the rule of law

Second, keeping domestic peace through an objective, impartial legal system. This requires a police force to prevent or respond to criminal acts (violence, fraud, theft, and coercion) and an independent judiciary to enforce contracts and settle disputes.

In a free society, the Rule of Law means two specific things:

• Equal protection: The law applies equally to everyone—citizens, politicians, and bureaucrats alike. No individual or group receives special legal privileges or exemptions.

• Negative prohibition: The law exists to prohibit harmful actions against others, not to mandate virtuous behaviour. It tells people what they must not do (e.g., do not steal, do not assault), rather than micro-managing what they must do.

When courts enforce contracts and penalise harm objectively, people can interact, trade, and co-operate with confidence, knowing that disputes will be settled by reason and established law rather than force or political influence.

Pillar 3: Property rights and free exchange

Third, securing property rights, including the freedom to make contracts and trade freely.

Property rights are not an arbitrary social convention or a privilege granted by politicians; they are an extension of personal liberty. To own property is simply to retain the fruits of your own labour, time, and talent. If the state fails to secure property rights, or if it arbitrarily seizes property through over-regulation or excessive taxation, it strips away the incentive for individuals to work, invest, build, and save.

The principle of restraint: Rules of the road vs. the destination

Together, these three pillars define a state that acts like the rules of the road.

Traffic laws, speed limits, and road signs exist to prevent crashes and allow everyone to travel safely. They do not dictate where you are going, what car you must drive, who your passengers should be. The rules apply equally to every driver, ensuring maximum freedom for all.

The moment the government steps beyond these three pillars - moving from protecting rights to directing outcomes - it ceases to be an impartial umpire. It becomes an active player - a driver attempting to steer every car on the road, inevitably bringing traffic to a standstill and causing the very collisions it was meant to prevent.

Would an impartial observer call our modern government structure legitimate?

If we accept that a legitimate state has a strictly defensive role - protecting our life, liberty and property - then we face a sobering reality: much of what the modern state does today sits well outside its authority.

We have gradually traded away personal agency, community self-reliance, and long-term prosperity for the promise of state-guaranteed comfort. But an overextended state inevitably fails at both jobs - it neglects its core duties of protection and justice while micromanaging the details of our everyday lives. We see this in the very pertinent present debate over national defence, where core protection is underfunded while state welfare entitlements continue to expand.

This captures the central challenge of the modern state: when government expands its role into broad social engineering, its foundational duty of national security is forced to compete for priority rather than standing as the essential baseline.

Reclaiming a free society doesn’t start with electing “better leaders” to manage a broken system. It starts with a cultural shift. It requires us to stop looking to government as the primary answer to every human problem, and to rebuild the muscles of personal responsibility, family, and voluntary community.

Before supporting any new law, spending proposal, or government initiative, we ought to ask one fundamental question: Is this a legitimate exercise of collective self-defence to protect people from force or fraud or is it another attempt to use political force to dictate how others live? If it is the latter, it belongs to civil society, not the state.

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Jilan Shah is an insurance and Reinsurance professional in the London Market with a keen interest in individual liberty, free markets and sound money.

The atrocities of 7 Oct 2023 against Israelis were unspeakably evil. Whatever opinions anyone may have about the subsequent conduct of Israel in their war against Hamas, to go out and protest against Israel on such an anniversary is a disgraceful contempt of the victims, their families, friends and Jews everywhere. People should stay at home.

I find we live at a time when Jews in our own country feel it is increasingly unsafe to be here. One friend says he and his family now keep bags packed in case they must leave at no notice. In their own home. In the UK. And they are not alone.

The Met police have responded to calls to ban the protest, setting out their position here: they have urged the student organisers of today’s protest to hold their march on a different day. It is a sensible statement of the police position and I commend it to you. In particular, they do not have the power to stop protests and there is a high bar to asking the Home Secretary to stop one.

In a free society, that is the right policy. Meanwhile in Gosport,

Police have placed a dispersal order on the whole town of Gosport as preparations continue to be made for a possible migrant boat landing.

The police statement says,

Under Section 14 of the Public Order Act 1986, those seeking to gather will be directed to a designated area which is inside Walpole car park outlined in the map labelled ‘Section 14’. This order is in place until 4pm on Monday, 5 October. Failure to comply with these conditions is a criminal offence and may result in arrest.

Face coverings are banned and the dispersal order means people can be required to leave the area under criminal penalty.

As I found on TalkTV this morning, and previously, common sense people are bound to juxtapose the two circumstances: a disgraceful protest in contempt of victims of atrocity on the one hand and on the other, banning people from protesting the arrival of illegal migrants.

It is a toxic situation in an increasingly polarised society: what is going on?

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You can watch the full episode here on Substack, or on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts:

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The fuss surrounding Ed Sheeran and Macklemore’s “Free Palestine” stage antics is absurd. We have reached outrage fatigue. A pop star uttering a slogan from a concert stage is not an international crisis.

I’ve been going to gigs and festivals for years. If I demanded a refund every time a performer said something disparaging about conservatives, I’d be a wealthy man. Being forced to listen to a musician deliver an ill-informed, sanctimonious lecture on current affairs is a rite of passage for music fans. It comes with the territory, right alongside warm Strongbow Dark Fruit spiked with two shots of vodka and unusable portaloos.

That sanctimony peaked at Glastonbury in 2017. Ed Sheeran was headlining the Pyramid Stage, trying to shake off the internet rumour that he was a closet Tory—venting in interviews: “People on Twitter keep calling me a fucking Tory! I don’t know where that came from. Make it clear that I’m a big Corbyn fan.”

There I was, amidst a sea of mud and bucket hats, when Jeremy Corbyn strutted onto the stage. Tens of thousands of revellers broke into a chant of “Oh, Jeremy Corbyn!”. It became inescapable—much like the “Steve! Alan!” meme, echoing down every muddy footpath whether Corbyn was in sight or not. Did I file a formal complaint to Michael and Emily Eavis? No. I did the sensible thing: I heckled back at the top of my lungs with a spirited “Oh, Theresa May!” You mock it, you laugh, and you move on.

Cast your mind back a year earlier to Glastonbury in June 2016. Brexit had just landed, sending shockwaves through Worthy Farm. The morning sun was rising over a sea of glitter and shell-shocked festival-goers. I was, predictably, drunk by noon. Fuelled by a mix of cider, cigarettes, and political adrenaline, I turned to a fellow reveller who was in an EU onesie while we were waiting for Muse to start and declared: “Brexit means Brexit, vote leave, take back control!”

Out of hundreds of thousands in that Somerset field, I was quite possibly the lone voice of celebration, grinning while the surrounding crowd looked as though they were attending a funeral.

Did security march me off the premises? Was I set upon by an angry mob of Remainers in flower crowns? Not in the slightest. What followed wasn’t a wave of public condemnation; it was a series of rambling, passionate exchanges with equally half-cut strangers. We locked horns, gestured, shared a laugh, and carried on enjoying the music together. It was British political discourse at its finest: chaotic, loud, and good-natured.

Later that autumn, I attended a jobs fair for LGBT students and graduates. That evening, in the smoking area outside Heaven, I met a tall, dark, handsome young man who happened to be Israeli. We got chatting and, from opposite sides of the spectrum, we ended up debating Israel and Palestine. Did we throw drinks over each other or call the bouncers? No. We sparred verbally, stood our ground, and ended up snogging.

I dread to think what would happen to an Israeli Zionist expressing his point of view in the smoking area of a London gay club today—or if someone dared to chant a Vote Leave slogan at a festival in 2027.

Somewhere along the line, our culture lost its funny bone and its thick skin. We swapped friendly sparring for moral panic, tribalism, and a demand for censorship. Today, voicing a dissenting opinion doesn’t spark a banter-filled argument over a drink; it triggers a crusade targeting your job, your platform, and your standing in society.

The rule of live music used to be simple: if a musician starts talking rubbish between songs, roll your eyes, shout a retort if the mood strikes, then shut up and enjoy the music.

What is exhausting about our current climate is how debates like Israel–Palestine turn sensible people into lunatics. Cultural events are treated as proxy wars, every artist is expected to issue a declaration of allegiance, and every fan is nudged to purge their playlists of anyone who strays from the line. It’s puritanical and tedious.

This fragility treats adults like glass statues that will shatter at the sound of a disagreeable noise. When did we become so terrified of friction? Robust debate used to be the lifeblood of a pluralistic democracy.

Not every controversial remark requires a boycott. We need to revive the art of holding different views without aiming to destroy someone. If we can’t handle a half-cut reveller shouting a political phrase, a musician virtue-signalling on stage, or two people locking horns over a cigarette outside a nightclub, we’ve lost something vital.

Let Macklemore spout his talking points, let Ed Sheeran be neutral, and let the rest of us get back to enjoying the gig. Life is too short to let pop stars and politics ruin a good night out.

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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.

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This week, Steve is joined by Alexander Baker and Matthew Bowles from the Prosperity Institute for a special discussion about their latest research on crime, policing and the justice system.

Read the reports now: Making Space for Justice: A Plan to Solve the Prison Capacity Crisis by Alexander Baker and Broken Windows Britain: A Plan for Policing Low-Level Crime and Disorder by Matthew Bowles.

They discuss Britain’s prison-capacity crisis and early releases, repeat offending and shoplifting, low-level crime and anti-social behaviour, why policing can feel less visible, and the reforms that could make communities safer.

You can watch the full episode here on Substack, or on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts:

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Party conference season is here. Britain is currently enduring several weeks of politicians competing to tell us what else they intend to do to us and for us - with our money.

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, 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.

At Labour Conference, Jonathan Reynolds argued that Britain’s economic renewal depends on working with businesses and entrepreneurs, with an industrial strategy to turn British ideas into British production, investment and jobs. Few would dispute these ambitions. But they raise the question of what conditions allow an entrepreneur to turn an unlikely business idea into a successful business.

The idea of supporting innovation is a straightforward concept once an idea has proved its worth. But the harder test comes at an earlier point when the potential is unrealised. An economy that welcomes successful companies must also leave room for the people who might eventually challenge them. James Dyson is a perfect illustration of this.

Through dissatisfaction with current dust bags, he set out to build a much better system. He constructed a crude cardboard version and attached it to his vacuum cleaner in place of the bag, but the original prototype failed. Over 5000 prototypes later, he finally found one that worked and the familiar product we all know today was created. Dyson identified a problem, he had an idea, and he dedicated himself to discovering whether his idea could solve the problem.

But this mission was not started with certainty. Public celebrations of technological advancements tend to conceal the journey it took to get there. Success appears inevitable when viewed backwards, but each attempt requires the desire and motivation to succeed. When at the conclusion, each step looks like a chapter in a book, but an entrepreneur must make decisions before the chapter is written, and the possibility of wasting time and money is ever present.

But the successful design wasn’t the end of the story either; the established manufacturers rejected his prototype until he eventually launched it under his own name. If Dyson didn’t have the freedom to start his own business in an economy that allows challenges to the market, then the customer would never have been able to demonstrate the desirability of his innovative design.

This is Free Enterprise in practice, the fourth chapter in Nigel Ashford’s Principles for a Free Society. An established company can refuse an invention, an investor can refuse to fund it, a customer can refuse to buy it. But one action does not give authority over everyone else. The entrepreneur is ultimately in charge of the destiny of the invention.

This is why the ambition from labour deserves scrutiny. Government-backed finance ambitions are understandable: bring resources together, identify promising ideas and accelerate growth. The danger begins when political judgment dictates commercial enterprise.

A minister backing a project - potentially a large unnamed railway project as an example – is spending money collected from other people. A subsidised business can gain an advantage over competitors that must persuade investors to voluntarily part with their money. If the project shortfalls, there are potentially political incentives for further support. Perhaps jobs have been promised, announcements made or even reputation damage mitigation. The public may find itself financing commercially unviable enterprises that, in a sound market, should be wound up to allow for the next idea to be attempted.

But none of this means one entity knows best. Dyson’s story is crucial precisely because no single entity’s judgment superseded another’s. Either the manufacturers or Dyson could have been wrong about the viability of the cyclone technology, but it was the competitive market that allowed the disagreement to be tested through customers having the freedom to accept or reject the product.

The government should therefore be careful about organising economic renewal around selected businesses that they perceive to be what is needed for growth. Fully realised businesses that are unable to grow would be seen to not be a sound investment in a competitive market; the government should therefore be focusing on the future, the emerging challengers helping to shake up the market and catapult Britain’s future.

From a consumer perspective, would you want tomorrow’s products limited to ideas endorsed by today’s leading firms or would you want to test a promising new invention that could revolutionise the way you go about your day? A consumer’s purchasing decision demonstrates when ideas are viable, not how much money a government scheme can prop up ideas of individuals.

Secure property, enforceable contracts, and protection against fraud let people cooperate without political direction dictating ambitions. Proportional and equal rules make investments easier to assess, and barriers that protect incumbents should be challenged even when under the guise of national renewal. Scrutiny must be applied equally to all ideas. Free enterprise remains valuable through ongoing competition. Every business should face the possibility that someone else will find a better answer to the problem it aims to solve. If business cannot keep up with modernity, then ultimately, it should fail rather than be propped up.

Labour wants Britain to invent, invest and produce. But Dyson’s story shows how demanding that ambition is. The next important invention could just begin with someone being frustrated at a household product. However, you can't promise a minister that certainty; what matters is that the creator has the freedom to find out.

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Luke Lucas is a Fighting for a Free Future Associate and also runs Voices for a Free Future’s monthly column, Liberty Around the World.

I welcomed Dr David Starkey onto the Free Future Podcast last week, expecting direct and consequential views, well-founded on historical evidence. We were not disappointed. It was one of his best interviews yet, viewers have told me.

My first question? “Why should the normal person care about the constitution?”

We found David’s arguments captivating, with enough good material for two episodes. As expected, there were areas where I could not have agreed more and some areas where I have differences of emphasis and substance.

Starting with where we agreed: I believe that David’s theory of British decline is pretty much spot-on. For the uninitiated, Dr Starkey is the man most responsible for popularising the theory that so much of where British governments have failed over the last twenty or so years is the direct result of the constitutional changes, or vandalism, of Tony Blair. For Starkey, the quangocracy that Blair created through the adoption of the Human Rights Act, the creation of the Supreme Court and the Climate Change Committee, as well as a host of other radical constitutional innovations, has stripped power away from Parliament, the democratic decision-making body in the country, and from ministers.

I saw this first-hand as a Member of Parliament for fourteen years in the aftermath of the Blair Settlement. When I was first elected in 2010, I was concerned that too much power had been taken from MPs and ministers, but I had not appreciated the scale of it nor the extent to which ministers would be bound and unable to escape their bonds. In this paper for Net Zero Watch, I explore these issues and the threat to liberty and democracy from the institutions of Net Zero. The situation is not pretty.

Over many years, through the growing adoption of secondary legislation and the empowering of “independent” institutions, the House of Commons has been transformed into something resembling a Potemkin parliament. Check my work on this with the Hansard Society. It is a phenomenon railed against by Hayek in The Road to Serfdom: I believe he foresaw it would advance so far.

As we listened, the team and I were left with the impression that if someone seriously wishes to create change in our country today, then they might be better off becoming a judge, not an MP or minister. Vital as good judges are, that can’t be right, and it must change.

I winced a little over the discussion of rights. David accused me of adopting the language of rights, and it is true: I do believe in freedoms from oppression, whether by the state or other people. Those are so-called “negative rights”. I too object to positive rights, or entitlements. The key test is whether a “right” is universal and reciprocal: if it is, then it is probably allowable, but if it implies a cost to someone else, it isn’t.

For example, consider the much maligned European Convention on Human Rights:

• Everyone’s right to life shall be protected by law.

• No one shall be subjected to torture or to inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.

• No one shall be held in slavery or servitude.

• No one shall be required to perform forced or compulsory labour.

• Everyone has the right to liberty and security of person. No one shall be deprived of his liberty save in the following cases and in accordance with a procedure prescribed by law: (a) the lawful detention of a person after conviction by a

  competent court; [etc]

• […] everyone is entitled to a fair and public hearing within a reasonable time by an independent and impartial tribunal established by law.

• No one shall be held guilty of any criminal offence on account of any act or omission which did not constitute a criminal offence under national or international law at the time when it was committed.

• Everyone has the right to respect for his private and family life, his home and his correspondence.

• Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion […].

• Everyone has the right to freedom of expression.

• Everyone has the right to freedom of peaceful assembly and to freedom of association with others, including the right to form and to join trade unions for the protection of his interests.

These are reasonable rights which everyone can enjoy universally and reciprocally without imposing costs on others. I commend the text to you. It is a very great pity that the jurisprudence of the Court – the body of its decisions over time – has established rights and restraints on government policy which we now cannot tolerate.

To put it another way: if you think everyone’s right to life need not be protected by law, or that torture and slavery are fine alongside arbitrary detention and secret justice, or that people’s privacy need not be respected by the state, then the Fighting for a Free Future project is probably not for you…

I think the truth is that rights do matter, in the sense of freedoms from the abuses and oppressions which have blighted even Europe in living memory under the various doctrines of state collectivism and totalitarianism. To reject all rights has historically been extremely dangerous, which is why I tested David on that point, especially in relation to minorities. If people are doing no harm, let them alone.

Maybe the issue is that ultimately David is a conservative, or perhaps paleo-conservative, whereas my views are classical liberal to libertarian. This is the range of debate the country needs: whether merely to avoid too much change or to drive decisively in the direction of freedom consistent with our norms and traditions. That was the Hayekian direction: I commend to you “Individualism: True and False” in his collected essays Individualism and Economic Order.

Dr David Starkey makes a compelling, and I think correct, case that we must have a constitutional restoration which overthrows much of the Blair settlement if there is to be any chance of placing this country on the path to a future which is prosperous, happy and free for the vast majority within it. But let’s not forget that successful democracies and civilisations protect everyone’s rights to be free from oppression and tyranny, including minorities where they are doing no harm.

To learn more, download the short book by Nigel Ashford, Principles for a Free Society, here. Enjoy our interview with Dr David Starkey here.

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If you ask someone on the street what actually matters to them, you won’t hear about GDP targets or government metrics. You’ll hear about prosperity, real achievement, feeling safe, saying what they think without fear, and the simple dignity of building a life on their own terms.

Yet slowly, under the banner of keeping us safe, government intervention, spending, regulation and bureaucracy has been quietly reshaping the way we live with increasing central planning and restrictions on personal freedoms.

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Walk into any political debate today, and it feels like watching two people argue over who gets to drive a car that’s running out of fuel. Both promise a smoother ride, but neither is willing to open the hood to see if the engine is actually running nor accept that freedom is the best and most sustainable fuel.

How we are defining a free society

We are using a classical liberal definition of freedom in the negative sense. An individual is free to make their own choices and is responsible for the consequences. The law exists only to protect those freedoms and restrain other individuals and governments from coercing, stealing from or arbitrarily controlling them. Please see post below on The Principles for a Free Society.

Why is freedom and a free society important

Individuals are unique and thus create very diverse societies which they form through mutual cooperation. An individual can be a member of multiple societies by virtue of their different interests and lifestyles. It is inevitable then that individuals and societies will have very different views about what a “good life” is.

So, liberty in the negative sense allows individuals to coexist in different groups all pursuing happiness in their own way without the need of an official vision of virtue, religion, culture or values enforced on them. A free society treats adults as individuals capable of making their own choices in their individual pursuit of their own “good life” and are held responsible for the consequences of those choices.

The state’s legitimate role in a free society is to protect individual liberty and prevent coercion.

How does welfare fit into the story

We are all blessed with different talents and abilities however there are individuals who are less fortunate to suffer in the longer term from a physical / mental / other disability or in the shorter term a temporary setback such as an illness or loss of employment.

Kindness, fairness and compassion are among the hallmarks of a civilised society which is able to provide support to those in genuine need. Most people are naturally moved by stories of fairness and kindness and reasonably believe that the strong should help the weak and the fortunate should support the less fortunate.

The moral value of any assistance or helping hand to our fellow human beings lies in the voluntary character of the action. Generosity, compassion, personal sacrifice for the benefit of others are virtuous actions only when they are freely chosen. If they are coerced or compelled they cease to be virtuous and it becomes merely extraction.

Furthermore, we have for a long time conflated state with society and hence confused or blended the role of the state. The state has a monopoly on force and coercion while society is voluntary. We are going down a dark road by believing that the state can be a substitute for society and hence should constantly intervene in people’s lives to correct perceived inequities and deliver social justice. Welfare delivered as enforceable entitlements changes society from a free society based on voluntary cooperation to one defined by political allocation which goes beyond the legitimate role of the state.

This isn’t just about personal welfare, it is across the entire political economy. Long before the state offers a hand to a struggling family, it hands out subsidies, tax loopholes, and regulatory benefits to big corporations, financial institutions, and well-connected groups. When government possesses the authority to redistribute trillions, politics inevitably becomes a contest of who can lobby the hardest and inevitably the system serves the powerful and politically well-connected who will always win that game over the general public.

Challenges with the Robin Hood story we’re told and keep reinforcing

When a government starts to intervene and engage in redistribution and social engineering to reshape society, some predictable dynamics tend to kick in:

• Voters learn they can use the ballot box to secure benefits for themselves.

• Politicians learn they can use spending promises and regulation to buy voter support and loyalty.

• Over time, a powerful narrative develops to justify redistribution.

• The costs are diffused across a much broader population – so the full trade-offs are rarely confronted honestly.

• The government is expected to continue to engage in redistribution at an even larger scale

It’s extremely easy and lucrative to support benefits, be they in the form of rights, grants, subsidies, regulations or individual welfare payments, so long as the public doesn’t ask or want to understand some basic questions: Where does the money come from? Who is paying? What incentives does this create? What does it do to the culture over time?

A society can survive a fair bit of political turmoil in the short term, however in the long term it appears to be virtually impossible to survive a system of redistribution which steadily divides the population and society into warring groups competing to determine who gets the benefits and who bears the burden.

How redistribution forms a one-way ratchet which continually erodes individual liberty

The desire to create entitlement for a safety net comes from a genuine desire for human decency. In theory, a strictly limited safety net acts like an insurance policy - a temporary fallback for those hit by sudden misfortune, designed to restore dignity and independence without distorting the broader market.

The fatal flaw, however, is not in the intent of the safety net, but in the inherent mechanics and incentives under a democratic system. A limited safety net requires political restraint, but modern democratic politics contains no mechanism for restraint. The moment a safety net is institutionalized as a state-managed entitlement, it ceases to be a fixed safety net and becomes an open-ended political prize. What begins as a compassionate floor quickly becomes an expanding ceiling as politicians compete to broaden eligibility, increase payouts, and redefine basic human comfort as an enforceable right.

Take the Winter Fuel Payment for example. It was introduced in 1997 as a targeted help for pensioners struggling with heating costs. Within a few years it became universal, regardless of need. The most recent attempt to means-test it became politically toxic and was branded as taking money from pensioners to freeze. What began as compassion has become an untouchable entitlement.

The problem is not that helping the vulnerable is wrong; it is that a state-managed safety net structurally cannot remain small.

So, once a redistributive state is established, it tends towards forming a self-reinforcing coalition. People who depend on government programmes – directly or indirectly – will naturally support any system and politician who is most likely to preserve those programmes. It’s not malice; it’s just human nature.

Few people vote to burn the bridge they’re standing on especially once so many have become used to the government programmes and institutions e.g. The NHS, the State Pension, Free Schools, etc. We have become so accustomed to these institutions that we can’t imagine an alternative without them and hence the sub-optimal outcomes persist e.g. the idea of not having a centrally planned and funded NHS or state schools brings up visions of no healthcare or education provision for the public.

Over time, this produces a one-way political ratchet:

• It’s politically rewarding to keep growing government with more market interventions and social programmes.

• It’s politically suicidal to shrink the state and scale back these social programmes if not remove them completely.

Even when politicians and political parties campaign on measures to reform the system, the incentives within the system have been seen to prevent and even punish meaningful reform and rollback. Rhetoric changes; the basic direction often doesn’t as evidenced by recent history.

As more groups become beneficiaries (e.g. pensioners, public sector workers, businesses receiving subsidies, individuals not in employment) the system becomes constrained by one overriding requirement: keep the coalition of net beneficiaries satisfied. Meanwhile, the productive side of society carries an ever-growing load – taxes, regulation, compliance, inflationary financing – often while being told that questioning any of it is immoral. The question is not whether there should be help, but whether help should take the form of politically competitive entitlements aimed at outcomes.

Why better leaders won’t fix a system where political incentives corrupt good intentions

The prevailing political debate revolves around the core issue being who holds power: the right leaders or the wrong leaders, the right party or the wrong party, the right policies or the wrong policies.

What if our current parliamentary democracy contains incentives that consistently produce outcomes we claim to dislike: living standards that slip over time, basic public services that don’t work as they should, and a political culture that hardens into a bitter “us vs. them” fight?

Why do voters keep supporting policies (whether by nudges or outright bribes) that are fiscally unsustainable and culturally unstable in the long run?

Have we got a system that rewards extraction over value creation, encourages dependence rather than resilience, and makes meaningful reform not just difficult but structurally unlikely?

A free society doesn’t appear to be compatible with state welfare and social engineering

If the argument so far is right, then an uncomfortable conclusion is not that compassion is wrong but that state entitlements delivered through a system with mass democratic policies where benefits can be voted up while costs are dispersed and a government empowered to engage in broad social engineering and redistribution is inherently unstable.

Why? Because the electorate is always incentivised to vote itself benefits financed by others, and politicians are always incentivised to compete to offer even more benefits to gain favour. That combination invites permanent escalation. Over time, this produces a ratchet: expansion is rewarded, restraint is punished, and reform becomes politically near-impossible.

The result is a state that grows in power and a society in which liberty steadily narrows. The more power the state has, the more dangerous it becomes – regardless of who holds office.

So if we agree that the democratic system has flaws and that we want to address the broken incentives without giving up on the benefits of democracy itself then we need to face up to the reality that the current system eventually leads to self-destruction.

Public Choice Theory provides perspective and insights

Public choice theory, developed by James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock, offers a useful framework for understanding the dynamics between voters and politicians. Public choice assumes politicians, bureaucrats and voters are motivated by the same incentives and constraints as other individuals. In this view, the state is not a neutral actor implementing policies for the public good, but an institution whose members respond to incentives - seeking power, career stability and electoral success.

From this perspective any government in power faces enormous pressure from entrenched interests - civil servants, public sector unions, big business, special interest lobby groups, the media and international institutions.

The result is a form of policy convergence. The past 30 years confirm that we have been governed within a narrow range, with politicians and government only tinkering at the edges rather than undertaking fundamental reform.

The topic has been covered in more detail in the following posts:

Fighting for a free society is an imperative but will not be easy

Even if you accept the diagnosis, moving towards a free society is not an easy journey.

A large state won’t shrink quietly. Coalitions, built on benefit recipients, will fight tooth and nail to preserve them. And as pressures rise, politics becomes more bitter, more coercive, and people within become more willing to cross lines to maintain control.

No political party seems to want to shrink the state and move towards a free society. Those that are talking about cuts to welfare are merely proposing slowing the growth of welfare spending.

And given politicians try to deliver what the public want, perhaps the hardest challenge lies with us culturally where the public always looks to the government for solutions to all problems with a ‘something must be done’ attitude to any challenge. It’s far easier for people to believe that the problem is the wrong leaders than to convince themselves that the incentives of the system itself are broken.

The structural conflict of interest in voting on the expansion of government spending will need to be addressed. It’s simply not possible to stop the expansion of government as long as this conflict of interest persists which is evidenced by the growth of the state under both Labour and the Conservatives.

Bread and circuses are politically easy to provide. Taking them away is not.

Attribution

This post is based on ideas and phrasing from Julius Ruechel (https://www.juliusruechel.com/) and Steve Baker, Harry Richer and Liam Shearer from Voices for a Free Future.

They discuss judges, experts, the Equality Act, two-tier policing, public safety and what a future government would need to do to restore democratic accountability.

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You can watch the full episode here on Substack, or on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts:

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In this panel discussion from our latest event, Prospects For Liberty Under This New Government, Rt Hon Steve Baker FRSA was joined by Fred de Fossard, Director of Strategy at the Prosperity Institute; Jasper Ostle, Head of Research and Education at the Adam Smith Institute; Maeve Halligan of the Institute of Economic Affairs; Albie Amankona, Voice for Freedom at Fighting for a Free Future; and William Yarwood, Campaigns Director at the TaxPayers’ Alliance.

After a fascinating opening address from Big Brother Watch’s Silkie Carlo, our panel considered how far Britain could go in restricting what people are allowed to say. They discussed the erosion of free speech, the pressure to treat words as violence, the limits of tolerance, and why open debate remains essential to a free society.

You can also watch the panel discussion on YouTube, Spotify and Apple Podcasts:

Like many Brits, I have travelled to the EU on a variety of occasions since October 2025, and have therefore experienced one of the less advertised consequences of becoming a third-country national: Brussels would now like my fingerprints.

This is not a particularly recent phenomenon. The EU began rolling out its new Entry/Exit System (EES) in October 2025. Since April this year, it has been fully operational, meaning British visitors to the Schengen area are now routinely required to register biometric information at its external borders, including fingerprints and a facial image. The system also records passport details and where and when travellers enter and leave. It brings back uncomfortable memories of Covid passenger locator forms, when international travel suddenly involved informing the authorities where you were staying, for how long and how you could be contacted. Measures introduced as administrative necessities have a habit of making extraordinary intrusions feel remarkably ordinary for most.

We were warned about EES, of course. Big Brother Watch Director Silkie Carlo raised the alarm years ago. This is how erosions of liberty so often happen: announced, implemented and then quietly absorbed into everyday life.

This latest one comes packaged as part of Europe’s “smart borders”.

I find it amusing how the word “smart” has become one of the most effective words governments use to make surveillance sound benign. Smart borders. Smart ID. Smart technology. It all sounds frictionless, modern and most importantly - terribly convenient. Convenient at what price? We marvel at what technology enables before asking whether the state should be doing it in the first place.

This isn’t about Brexit, or whether countries should police their borders. It is about why doing so apparently requires harvesting the fingerprints of millions of law-abiding travellers. I’d love to know how effective this has been at identifying the overstayers, illegal immigrants or identity fraudsters.

This time, when at my destination airport and presented with the screen asking for my “consent”, I tried answering “no”. There is only one correct answer to this question in order to enjoy a trip in the Schengen area, but I thought I’d try anyway. Obviously I was taken back to the beginning.

What sort of choice is that? I had bought my ticket, boarded the plane and arrived at the border. What exactly was I supposed to do if I didn’t want to hand over my biometrics - turn around and fly home? If entry is conditional on providing biometric information, let’s dispense with the fiction that I am freely choosing to provide it.

Of course, technically, there is a choice - don’t travel to the EU. But how meaningful is that in reality?

I asked fellow passengers what they thought of the new system. Everyone mentioned the delays, how tedious it was, how long it took.

Their personal information will be mixed in with eventually billions of pieces of data, spanning photographs, palm prints, DNA records and facial biometrics, to which controversial recognition algorithms can be applied. This may be the biggest biometric data collection operation in European history. Biometric information is fundamentally different from the other data we routinely surrender. If somebody steals my password, I change it. If my bank card is compromised, I cancel it. I cannot reset my fingerprints or order a replacement face. Yet this wasn’t what people seemed concerned about.

The problem is bigger than Brussels, of course. Britain’s enthusiasm for facial recognition, digital identity (and yes - Digital ID will be back - and not to stop the boats) and biometric technology deserves precisely the same scrutiny.

Governments increasingly assume that because technology enables them to collect, store and cross-reference information about us, they should.

“Smart” cannot become shorthand for “don’t ask questions”, and convenience cannot disguise surveillance as progress.

Standing in that airport queue did not make me regret Brexit. I’d wait longer to stay outside a political union I don't believe Britain should belong to. The queue is tedious, slow and unnecessary - but it is temporary. My fingerprints, however, are in that database forever, and will be linked up to who knows what in the future. It is the latter that should bother us most.

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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.

Rishi Sunak recently argued “Britishness must not be turned into a DNA test”, causing a ferocious row. I went on BBC Newsnight and argued for a strong defence, which I regard as peace-keeping: I was denounced as a warmonger… Where was the nuance? The tolerance? The prospect of serious progress on difficult issues?

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I will get into those issues another time. This post is about five lessons I have learned since leaving parliament on how we can have better debate. Resisting excessive Covid restrictions brought me into contact with LSE behavioural science professor Paul Dolan, a leader in his field. We didn’t expect to get along, but we forged not only an alliance against government excess but a friendship and then a business, despite disagreeing across a wide field.

Here are five lessons I wish I had learned before I was first elected. I hope they help you make the case for liberty to ever greater effect.

1. The fundamental attribution error: disagreement does not mean foul motives

When we disagree, we don’t naturally try to see things from the other person’s point of view. We don’t typically ask whether they have information we don’t, or a different perspective on the facts. We don’t reflect on whether a different hierarchy of preferences for compromises and trade-offs might be legitimate. And so on.

Instead, we tend to explain the other person’s opinion through their character.

If we are good and intelligent and right and the other person is wrong, then perhaps they are stupid, wicked or corrupt. Our compromises were forced upon us; theirs were a choice driven by ignorance, cowardice or corruption. We have high motives; theirs are low. I saw this constantly in politics, especially on social media.

For better debate, understand that this is how people’s psychology works by default. Try to forestall their reaction by claiming the moral high ground and giving your evidence. And instead of imputing bad faith to others, ask what they know that you don’t, what pressures and incentives they face and what might lead a decent, honest person to their opinion.

2. Affect: combat the chemistry

We are emotional before we are rational. Our conduct is powerfully shaped by our emotions and how we relate our emotions to circumstances and opinions. Sometimes we need to take a deep breath.

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