Tag: politics

  • Margaret Thatcher and the Comfort of Relief

    Part I: – What Changed – and Why It Felt Right Britain did not arrive at the end of the 1970s on the brink of collapse. It arrived tired, frustrated, and increasingly doubtful of itself. Inflation had become part of everyday life, eroding wages in ways that were visible week by week rather than year…

  • The next 20–50 years: what the post-American-assumption world probably looks like

    If you zoom out far enough, the argument about whether this is “just Trump” stops being the central question. The deeper issue is that the post-1945 settlement depended on one condition: a US political class willing to pay to run the system (security, sea lanes, alliances, monetary architecture) because it judged the returns worth it.…

  • The Long Clock and the Short Clock: Why Power Is Quietly Shifting

    There is a divide shaping the modern world that most voters sense but rarely see explained clearly. It is not left versus right, democracy versus dictatorship, or even East versus West. It is far more basic than that. Some political systems are allowed to think in decades. Others are trapped thinking in election cycles. Once…

  • An Open Letter to the Government of the United Kingdom

    To those elected to lead this country, You should be ashamed of yourselves. You have let us down. And before any of you try to twist this into a partisan argument — don’t. The decline we are living through did not start a year ago, or five years ago, or under one party. It has…

  • Britain: A Multi-Trillion-Pound Business Run by Amateurs

    How a once-serious nation became a masterclass in short-termism and mismanagement Introduction — Systemic, Cross-Party Failure The UK’s political crisis isn’t ideological — it’s operational. Every major party has taken turns running the country, and every one of them has left the same underlying problems untouched. The system isn’t failing because the “wrong team” won;…

  • Europe Is Sleepwalking Into the Qing Trap — And the World Won’t Wait for Us

    When people draw parallels between today’s Europe and 19th-century Qing China, it sounds dramatic. It shouldn’t. The comparison is uncomfortably close, and the more you study the history, the more you see the same strategic pattern unfolding in slow motion. In the early 1800s, the Qing empire genuinely believed it was still the centre of…

  • The UK Ltd Accounts: Why Politics Barely Matters in the Balance Sheet

    Imagine if the UK were a private company. Each March it would publish its annual accounts, just like Tesco or BP. Analysts would pore over the numbers, investors (you and me, the taxpayers) would worry about the bottom line, and the board (the government of the day) would try to spin the story of “sustainable…

  • Our elected representatives – do they really represent us?

    I’ve thought for a long time that politicians and government rarely represent the views of those that elected them, an article in today’s Telegraph drives this point home

  • The big banks join the profit bonanza

    In the continuing saga of big companies making excessive profits for doing nothing except increasing prices at a rate far beyond their cost base the the banks now join the party …. This latest interest rate increase comes after the big four UK banks – Lloyds, Barclays, Natwest and HSBC – announced staggering collective profits…