Tag: UK

  • Europe After the American Century

    For most of the last eighty years, Europe has lived inside a system it didn’t have to fully carry.Security came from the United States. Growth came from globalisation. Stability was assumed. The arrangement wasn’t perfect, but it worked well enough that Europe could prioritise prosperity over power. That arrangement is now breaking down. What’s happening…

  • 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.…

  • NATO, Burden-Sharing, and the End of a Post-War Security Bargain

    Debate over NATO burden-sharing has intensified as the United States demands greater defence contributions from its allies. While contemporary data clearly show that the US contributes a disproportionate share of NATO’s military capability, this imbalance cannot be understood in isolation from the post-Second World War international order deliberately constructed by the United States itself. This…

  • 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 Mansion Tax Debate

    A Government Making Policy by Vibes, Not Strategy Let’s start with the only honest statement available right now: there is no mansion tax. Not in the Budget. Not in draft legislation. Not in published modelling. The government hasn’t set thresholds, valuation rules, revenue assumptions, enforcement plans or regional impact analysis. Nothing. What we do have…

  • 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…

  • Stop the Boats? Sure. Just Tell Me What Happens Next.

    We hear it on repeat: “Stop the boats.” And on the surface, it makes sense. Who wouldn’t want borders under control? Who wouldn’t question a system that sees tens of thousands entering illegally while taxpayers fund the consequences? But here’s the part no one wants to talk about: What exactly do you expect to happen…

  • 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