The Local Economy & Governance System (LEGS) presents a comprehensive framework for restructuring society, economy, and governance to address persistent challenges such as inequality, environmental degradation, and social fragmentation.
LEGS prioritises People, Community, and The Environment as the foundation for all policy decisions.
1. Principles for Policy Design
People: Policies must protect individual dignity, personal sovereignty, and wellbeing.
Community: Emphasize collective responsibility, local decision-making, and mutual support.
The Environment: Ensure stewardship of natural resources and embed sustainability in all sectors.
2. Governance Reform
Transition from hierarchical, distant leadership to local, democratic, and transparent governance.
Leadership is earned through service and accountability, not status or authority.
Decision-making structures (e.g., the Circumpunct model) ensure open, participatory processes.
3. Economic Restructuring
Implement a local circular economy: value circulates within communities, minimising external dependencies.
Money is treated strictly as a medium of exchange, not as a source of power or speculation.
Essential needs (food, housing, healthcare, transport, clothing, communication, social participation) are guaranteed for all through the Basic Living Standard.
4. Public Good & Social Provision
Redefine public services as Community Provision, locally accountable and ethically grounded.
Every working member contributes 10% of their working week to public services and charity, replacing traditional public sector staffing with a community-led workforce.
Health: Prohibit public smoking/vaping; deliver social care through relational, community-based models.
Housing: Limit ownership to one dwelling per person; treat housing as a right, not a commodity.
6. Education & Skills
Focus education on developing key life skills, self-awareness, and personal sovereignty.
Balance academic, experiential, and social learning to support independence and ethical awareness.
7. Business & Enterprise
Businesses must serve the public good, not profit. Social Businesses are non-profit, collectively owned, and fill gaps where private enterprise does not meet essential needs.
Ownership and wealth are distributed equitably among contributors.
8. Technology & AI
Strictly regulate AI and technology to ensure they serve humanity and do not replace human agency.
All essential services must have human-led, non-digital alternatives.
9. Freedom, Sovereignty, and Ethics
Protect personal sovereignty, freedom of thought, and belief.
Foster morality and ethics through freedom, security, and shared humanity—not through rules or oppression.
10. Decentralisation & Locality
Structure society around decentralised, self-contained Universal Parishes, ensuring governance, economy, and community life remain local, ethical, and responsive.
Strategic Takeaway for Policymakers:
LEGS offers a blueprint for policy innovation that centres on local empowerment, ethical governance, and universal access to essential needs.
Policymakers are encouraged to adopt and adapt these principles to create resilient, fair, and sustainable communities – where the public good is always the primary objective, and every individual’s dignity and wellbeing are protected.
Are you searching for a fresh vision of society—one that puts people, community, and the environment first? The new book, The Local Economy & Governance System offers a transformative framework for reimagining how we live, work, and govern together.
Why Read This Book?
A Timely Critique and Practical Blueprint: LEGS doesn’t just highlight what’s broken in today’s world—it lays out actionable steps for building a society where everyone’s essential needs are guaranteed, and collective wellbeing is the top priority.
People, Community, Environment: These three principles guide every aspect of the LEGS framework, from local governance and economic models to daily life and public policy.
Personal Sovereignty: LEGS places strong emphasis on empowering every individual to live freely, responsibly, and authentically. Personal Sovereignty is recognized as the foundation for dignity, ethical living, and genuine freedom within the community.
Authentic Governance: Say goodbye to distant, hierarchical leadership. LEGS champions local, democratic decision-making, where leadership is earned through service and accountability—not status.
Basic Living Standard for All: Imagine a world where full-time work at the lowest wage covers all core living costs—no more poverty, reliance on charity, or skipped essentials.
Community Contributions: Every working member gives back 10% of their week to support local services and charity, replacing traditional public sector staffing with a community-led workforce.
Ethical Business & Economy: Businesses exist to serve the public good, not profit. Social enterprises fill gaps where private business doesn’t meet essential needs, and wealth is distributed equitably among contributors.
Responsible Technology & AI: LEGS strictly regulates technology to ensure it serves humanity and never replaces human agency. All essential services have human-led, non-digital alternatives.
Who Should Read LEGS?
Community leaders, policymakers, and activists seeking practical models for local empowerment.
Anyone concerned about inequality, environmental sustainability, or the future of governance.
Readers interested in social innovation, ethical business, and resilient communities.
Get Involved
LEGS is more than a book—it’s an invitation to participate in shaping a fairer, more compassionate world. Start conversations, challenge old systems, and take practical steps in your own community. The journey to a better future begins with the choices we make and the values we uphold.
This morning, Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves delivered her pre-budget statement ahead of the Autumn Budget, scheduled for 26th November.
Despite mounting welfare costs, Reeves offered no meaningful solutions — only strong hints that taxes will rise, paired with blame deflected onto everything and everyone except the government itself.
It’s no surprise, then, that Nigel Farage rushed out a bold announcement promising welfare cuts if Reform wins the next general election yesterday, while Tory leader Kemi Badenoch quickly followed Reeves with an online broadcast that, in substance, amounted to much the same.
As the government flounders, it seems poised to announce little of substance of savings on benefits or public services — yet millions already trapped in a financial vice not of their own making will see the cost of living rise again, working harder for ever-diminishing returns.
The Tories — who helped engineer the current crisis over their 14-year tenure up to summer 2024 — and Reform — now visibly undergoing their own establishmentisation makeover — aren’t offering help to people either. They’re offering help to the economy.
And that’s precisely where the problems began for those whose lives revolve around the benefits system today.
There are hard truths here. Truths that many untouched by poverty still find just a little too uncomfortable to believe.
There will always be people who are:
• Out of work for valid reasons
• Unable to work due to illness, disability, or caring responsibilities
But there are also many people who want to work and are able to work — yet still can’t. Why? Because:
• They can’t find jobs that match their experience
• They can’t find roles that fit their qualifications
• They simply don’t “fit” the mould employers are looking for
It’s easy to assume that anyone who wants a job can get one — any job, at any time. And it’s just as easy to judge those who don’t take “any job” as lazy, entitled, or abusing the benefits system.
But those who make these judgments often haven’t experienced what it’s like to be unemployed and dependent on state support.
The Reality of Benefits
Let’s be clear: basic benefits are not enough to live on.
We’re surrounded by comforting myths — stories we rarely question unless we’re forced to confront the truth. One of the most dangerous myths is that the National Minimum Wage is enough to live on independently.
• Minimum Wage: £12.21/hour. For a 40-hour week, that’s about £2,116.40/month
• Actual cost of living: To live independently, a single person likely needs £16–£17/hour — around £2,773.33/month
That’s a shortfall of over £600/month, even for someone working full-time on minimum wage.
The Impossible Choice
Now imagine you’re unemployed, with no savings or support, and your only option is to claim £628.10/month. What do you do?
• Take a job that still doesn’t cover your basic needs?
• Or claim every benefit you can, just to survive?
For many, working full-time in a low-paid job — often under poor conditions and public judgment — while still needing benefits just doesn’t make sense.
The Myth of the “Benefits Culture”
The idea that claiming benefits is an easy ride is a myth. Genuine claimants are treated the same as those gaming the system. The rules are rigid, often making it harder — not easier — to find meaningful work.
Pushing people into low-paid jobs that still leave them reliant on benefits, food banks, or debt might reduce one type of welfare cost. But it could as easily increase the others — through the problems that an ill-considered attempt to push everyone into ‘work’ will create, like mental health issues, workplace burnout, and long-term poverty.
The AI Displacement Problem
A growing wave of joblessness is being driven not by lack of talent, but by the unnecessary and unchecked takeover of roles by artificial intelligence.
Skilled, experienced professionals — once vital to their industries — are being sidelined by automation that prioritizes cost-cutting over human value.
As more capable workers are pushed into the job queue, many will find themselves forced to claim benefits, not because they lack ability, but because the system no longer has space for them.
The Bigger Problem
Most people on benefits aren’t lazy — they’re surviving.
When life becomes a daily struggle, the benefits system can feel like the only option.
But simply cutting benefits without creating real alternatives — like jobs that pay enough to live on — risks pushing thousands into homelessness and crisis.
The Psychology of Work and Pay
Most people don’t need prestige — they need security.
If lower-paid or less challenging jobs guaranteed that workers could meet all their financial obligations and live with dignity, many would take them without hesitation.
The problem isn’t the work itself — it’s that the pay doesn’t match the cost of living.
When people know they can cover rent, bills, food, and essentials every month, they’re far more willing to contribute, even in roles that society undervalues.
What Needs to Change
We can’t fix the benefits system without fixing the economic system that creates the need for it.
If we want fewer people on benefits, we must:
• Build an economy where full-time work pays enough to live on — without top-ups
• Stop supporting a system that enriches a few by impoverishing the many.
Until the government legislates for a fairer system — one where the lowest-paid can live independently on a full day’s work — poverty will persist.
Each of us sees the problems this country is facing from different points of view.
Whilst conversations about the crisis now unfolding with a range of different people would almost certainly deliver a range of common themes, the emphasis, value or meaning of each of those conversations will almost certainly be different.
However, the one commonality, which isn’t about anything that we all have in common, would be the solutions that almost all of us will have based on our own world view, that in the bigger scheme of things, may be in no way similar at all.
Ironically, because so many of us have so many interpretations of the whys, hows and whats that have got us all here, and share them with what will be a relative few, we spend next to no time – if indeed any time at all, thinking about the common problems that we all really do share.
We certainly don’t think about the ways we can work together to create a better way of life for everyone and then how we get the leaders and mechanisms in place that will actually get us there.
The devil is in the detail
It really is no accident that the UK is in the kind of mess that it is. Because life has become so very complicated – and deliberately so.
The more detail, the more distracting and the more impossible a solution to just about anything might seem. Even to those amongst us who really can see that the status quo cannot continue and that no matter how bought into the things we like about the way we live – which we want to keep but don’t recognise that they are actually the part of the problem that’s making everything so impossible to fix – we really do need to snap out of the fixation with noise that’s doing none of us any good.
We must recognise that the things that work well for everyone and will work even better for everyone are much simpler than what we have been convinced we need.
It is inevitable that we will keep tripping ourselves up each and every time we think of the next step as being only about putting our own self-interest first.
Unfair, Unjust and Unworkable living, demonstrated best by Tax
Perhaps the best example of how we get lost and misdirected by the detail of what needs to change for us, rather than focusing on what needs to change so that it works for everyone, relates to the question of tax, taxation and everything else that means people like you and I are stumping up cash that we could often do with being able to spend, just so we can live without debt or in some cases rely on handouts or even food banks.
Yes, even framing the ‘tax issue’ this way will make some prickly – and that really is the point.
The UK Tax code is today thought to be over 21,000 pages and 10 million words long, giving everyone the distinct impression that the subject of how the bill for government action and delivery gets paid for (ostensibly on our behalf), needs to be tailored specially to everyone as if bespoke governance is the only kind of governance that’s really fair to everyone.
This is ‘The day when Britons stop paying tax and start putting their earnings into their own pocket’. Or alternatively, the final day of the year when every penny we’ve earned goes to the government – if we start counting on January 1st, which was this year (2025) calculated as being June 11th by the Adam Smith Institute.
The reason I’m using this figure isn’t to upset anyone by drawing attention to the fact that as an average, we arguably all work for no other reason than to keep the wheels of government turning every year for at least 5 months.
I’m doing so because it may be the only way to look at the relationship all taxpayers have with the government in the same way. Given how easy it is to get sidetracked by the question of what everyone earns!
June 11th 2025 was the 162nd day of the year (as 2025 is not a leap year), and with 365 days in 2025, this means that in comparative terms, people are giving over 44% of their earnings (162 divided by 365 days), before they can even begin to think about what they need to spend money on, in turn before anything that they might actually want.
For a moment, let’s forget the amount anyone is actually earning for themselves, as we know that some have considerably more than others, whilst many just don’t have anywhere near what it takes to live without struggling to make ends meet, and then take it as read that everyone is giving up 44 Pence in every Pound they earn (£0.44).
After realising just how much of everything we do have taken from wages and then what we pay for that includes some form of tax, it doesn’t take much to realise that government or rather the model of government that we have is simply unaffordable, unsustainable and that we must do everything we can to find a different and much better way to pay for the things that we share.
Regrettably, the complexity of rules and regulations supposedly there to benefit and protect us don’t stop at taxation.
One of the reasons that every part of life, that doesn’t already relate to the question of financial affordability in some way, seems so difficult or restricted, is because our freedoms and therefore our independence from the system and government are already being actively controlled in many different silent rules that have deliberately been put there using the excuses like health and safety, and protecting us or someone in some way.
Even if we aren’t actively being followed around by a police officer all the time the fact that we are aware of and abiding by these rules usually adds up to being the same.
Government isn’t what it should or was ever supposed to be
Whilst many would actually like to see the wealthiest in our society directly paying at least 44% of their income to the government to help run everything outside of our front doors, we still need to keep some perspective when it comes to the obvious question we will come back to in a moment about who pays and begin with the question, ‘Does government actually work?’
Government certainly functions. Even the deepest or most vocally critical of what government in the UK does will find it difficult to argue otherwise.
Because no matter the organisation or service that comes under the rather large umbrella of government, they all continue to do something. Even if they are not delivering what we might agree to be the correct results. And that’s the only reason it can be argued that it all works.
However, functioning and succeeding are not the same thing.
The time is long overdue that we all took a very hard and questioning look at every part of government and decided what, if anything, public services should or could be; just exactly where the scope and reach of government should end, and then and only then, what many believe to be the most important question of all, ‘How whatever government and the public sector does is paid for and by whom’.
Whilst it remains the case that there are services, infrastructure and even public facing roles that every modern society needs to be provided by the community, so that everyone can have universal experiences and opportunities which will always be the same, no matter who, where or what you are, the practical approach to not-for-profit service delivery – which this really should in almost all cases be, is not the same as the public sector and system of governance that we have today.
Every part of government and the public sector that we have today is focused on delivering (political) and therefore biased agendas which will inevitably advantage some people more than others in some way. Or is all about the jobs, terms and conditions for whoever the incumbent employees are who currently have the jobs.
There have always been politicians, officers and suppliers who for many reasons have chosen to advantage themselves in some way, if and where they failed to have the integrity to exercise their roles properly. And regrettably, it’s the position of trust we gave them all that enabled them to behave in such questionable ways.
Yet even more shocking reality that we all face today is that the whole public sector and everything that runs within it is now dysfunctional in terms of delivery in some of the most critical ways.
It has only been able to become this way because decisions have either been made (or not made) at the very top by people who really should have known better, and whose actions have allowed or facilitated everything that serves the public unwinding in this way.
Money before People
Regrettably, like so many areas of life today, the role of money – which stretches far beyond the scope of the tax question that we’ve already considered – is also the key element within the dysfunctionality of government and public services across the UK. Because the poor leaders that we have are obsessed with the idea that the only way any problem can and will be fixed is by having enough money to spend – no matter where it comes from, which is itself is these days even better for some politicians who dare not do anything which could restrict what they are already committed to spend.
Idealism and agendas cost a lot of money. Because their implementation requires the creation of systems, rules and infrastructure somebody wants but nobody needs.
The very perverse outcome from decades of government and the public sector serving itself, its people and whoever or whatever influences them, is that the changes that have been made in every way imaginable to support this are now costing too much for either the Taxpayer or government itself to sustain.
We have a VERY BIG problem. Because nobody in government or who wishes to form one either can or will be honest about the true depth and breadth of the mess that the UK is now in.
With Tax rises thought to be well on their way this coming Autumn, the reality that too many of us face is the 44% (or probably much more) that we are already contributing to this public sector black hole through so many of the things that we buy, pay for or earn, are set to keep going up.
All to cover the exploding costs of incompetence, waste and the furtherance of playing up to what are very dangerous egos. Because somewhere in amongst all of this the point has been lost that government does not and never did have the right to exist over the people that it was created to represent.
For any kind of government to be unrepresentative of the people it represents, would by its very nature and intended purpose mean that it represents someone or something else.
Money: The drug wrecking everything to enrich and empower the few
The way that money actually works, how it is controlled and worst but not least, how it is actually created at will, is the truth that sits behind everything bad, that few of us will willingly believe.
It’s much easier to believe that it is all good rather than even having the potential to be bad – even when almost everyone can see the destruction that money or the lack of it is causing to everyone in some way or form.
At the heart of the money tree and its root and branch system sits the mechanisms that supposedly fund government, but actually do so by doing everything to help grow the volume of money that is in circulation, so that the public spending – and the only way that politicians know how to get themselves out of trouble, can leverage ‘growth’ so that the depth and scope of the real problem can be hidden from public view.
Unfortunately for all of us, the exponential growth of the ‘money’ that has entered circulation, particularly since the responses of government to the Global Financial Crisis of 2008 and the Covid Pandemic of 2020, has wildly contributed to the inflationary spiral that accompanies such an expansion of available cash.
The creation of money that doesn’t relate to anything else like productivity or output devalues the money and incomes that normal people already have, as well as what they have the ability to earn.
It does so at breakneck speed whilst the real value of everything is funnelled towards those who control and benefit from what is a fully legal, legitimised but nevertheless completely corrupt system that appears real, because they have typically become millionaires and billionaires in the process.
Put simply, the lowest paid and most vulnerable now have zero chance of ever being able to earn enough to live independently of benefits, charity, debt or worse.
For as long as the money madness continues, the bubble containing all of those who are branded as being a drain on the system will rapidly continue to expand.
The leadership void or black hole
When a country has such questionable leadership, and has done for the period of time that the UK has, it wouldn’t be unfair for any of us to be asking, ‘How did we get them?’ and ‘How did they get to where they are?’.
However, as we all need to realise, very few of us do ask these questions or indeed any questions that are like them. And because we don’t, each time an election takes place locally or nationally, we are, as a majority, making the same mistakes over and over again.
We are chewing at the very same dogs dinner with the bits just wrapped differently with words, rosettes and faces – all hiding the same miserable self-interested and dangerously incompetent content that always delivers outcomes that are the same.
Because we have a very bad, self-destructive habit of going along with the idea that the political fairies come along and give us all a genuine choice at election time – as all good democracies surely would, we have not only accepted that government after government and council after council has worked on all of our behalf. We have also jumped into an elephant trap of our own making that tells us these same fairies will deliver the politicians to choose from at the next election, who will sort out and solve the very same mess that they and their own kind created (with a little help from their friends) in the first place.
Sadly, there are no exceptions to the reality that we must face that there are no real leaders in politics today.
The so-called leadership we see, and what the people we identify as leaders say, is much more likely to be aligned with us hearing and seeing whatever we need to fuel our own confirmation biases than it either is or ever will be about the solutions and outcomes that we might not be ready to hear about, but nonetheless actually need.
Victim or Victimiser: There is no longer an in-between
As a society and culture, we are collectively suffering what might be the worst type of addiction of all. Simply because it is majority of us are addicted rather than the few.
Meaning that that same majority is completely out of touch with the realities of what that addiction does and will remain so, until the supply runs out – which is where all those who cannot afford to live independently within the current system have or are beginning to find out.
Money, or rather the way that money is used by those who control the system – and that means government and politicians, who are very much under their control too, has become the key factor in every equation and consideration in our lives.
The role of money and its reach has dehumanised everything to the point where money and the power, influence and control it is perceived to give at every level of life has become more important than the value of life and community itself.
Few realise just how their lives are completely at the mercy of the ability to spend, borrow and achieve the momentary of transitory hit that this money centric, Moneyocracy we inhabit demands of everyone and which is enforced by the barrage of non stop marketing and remote, typical digital pressure which comes at us constantly and demands that we all conform.
Money; what it does, what it can do and what it says about you is the qualification and gatekeeper that runs through every part of functional life and if you are in, you are in and if you are out, you really are all the way out and fully at the mercy of those who continue to be ‘in’.
The tragedy of the system is the ruthless and methodical way that human behaviour has been used against the masses by the few and the experts they pay who understand it.
The sweeties and trinkets that have been flowing towards for decades have only been bettered by what has appeared to be the endless ability to secure more and more credit to buy it with, all the time becoming more and more essential to secure as real earnings and wealth have been stripped by the printing of all this extra ‘pretend’ or non existent money that even relatively wealthy people have no chance of keeping up with.
The irony is that those of us who continue to believe we benefit from what the establishment is doing and therefore acquiesce or go along with it are – through our actions – making those who cannot the victims.
All for no better reason than this whole situation could not exist without the elites treating the masses as a resource that is not real. But is instead just like oil, coal, precious metals, forests, farms, land and even animals – and just something else for those who ‘own them’ to exploit.
We all need to contribute to what we share in life. But real life cannot continue if we are required to contribute everything we have
Whilst we must all accept it is correct for everyone to contribute to the upkeep and maintenance of the systems and infrastructure that serve us all, from the moment we step onto the pavement or road outside of our homes, what we share is not and never should become more important than the right to have a fully independent, functioning and self supported life experience.
The system that we have discussed is at breaking point and cannot continue as it has, or as it is today.
Those in charge don’t know how to do anything other than borrow or tax us. And as the system can no longer sustain the borrowing that idealism and agendas have made necessary, the current government are now looking at everything they can tax beyond everything they already do.
One way or another, the system is going to collapse. Because we are all living unsustainably in a system that itself is unsustainable and at the centre of which is a plague which is the absence of real leadership, replaced with what is instead no better than incompetent management that makes it the most unsustainable part of it all.
Real life and a money-centric economy are mutually exclusive outcomes
Government already costs us way too much – even at 44%.
That’s before we even begin to consider the work and additional value to public service that charities and other nonprofit organisations bring, that we are all in one way or another contributing to too.
The whole model of economics needs to be restructured and redeveloped so that it supports life, rather than feeding off it like the giant parasite that the financial system and the role that government plays in it now is.
A realistic level for everyone to contribute to ‘the community’ would be around 10% – without any form of exception for anyone.
We should also be considering the added requirement that everyone able to work also contributes the equivalent of 10% of their working time and the skills and experience they offer, to help make our communities, their governance and infrastructure work.
Thereby creating real buy-in and ownership for what we all share, whilst drastically cutting the scope and influence of an out-of-control sector, and the ballooning costs that are actually paying for lots of agendas and idealistic ideas, but very little that is actually about people and certainly nothing that’s doing everyone equally any good.
The identity, qualification and process of finding good leaders
Good public leaders, public representatives and public servants, would not facilitate or contribute to the creation, implementation and furtherance of agendas, ideologies and idealism that doesn’t serve the genuine best interests of those who they have been elected, appointed or recruited to serve.
Yet we have been experiencing decades of exactly that. And we have no hope that this will change if we continue to rely on a system that needs to change giving us the leaders who will then do the right thing when it comes to the delivery of that change.
Contrary to accepted thought, we do not need money to play the role across society that it has been deliberately engineered to do.
Power and control are certainly not a gift that should be secured within the hands of a distant, faceless, unanswerable few who we will never meet and whether intended or not, are treating humanity as a resource and no better than a numbers game that they can do with as they like. All as if they are now, as the result of decades of manipulating the system and bending it to their will, the new gods of everything with everyone else’s destiny theirs and only theirs to decide.
The truth that few see is that the centralisation and push for remote control of everything that globalisation and everything that walks alongside it has been, has been the active and complete restructuring of our society and culture, so that nothing can or will work without the say so and direction of those who make all the decisions.
None of this was accidental. Locality, local relationships, local businesses, local supply chains, local decision making and everything that goes with it promotes sovereignty and independence. It encourages and grows a living environment and cultural model that is good for everyone other than those who want to advantage themselves and be in power or control.
Meanwhile, the downsides of centralisation and everything that goes with it are the for every one of us to see.
However, despite the various attempts, compelling rhetoric and highly credible narratives that work so well when playing up to the addiction for material living that we currently have, there is an alternative and much better alternative to running life and everything that we and our communities need. And the real upside of this real alternative is that it centres completely around putting normal people and our local communities back in control.
The fact that generations of political leaders and those they favour or are influenced by have misused and abused their position to create a system with faux legitimacy – simply by legalising immorality to make it appear moral and therefore unquestionable, doesn’t make it right. And it certainly doesn’t become right, just because those in power today continue to insist and behave as if it is so.
We have a legitimate right to hold power and control over our own destiny.
The power of collective decision making should sit as part of a new structure of governance within our communities, amongst people and representatives who we ourselves select and know we can trust.
A moral obligation arguably also exists to reset the entire system and the various devices such as money and the tools of governance the existing system uses, so that we once again bring the focus of everything in life back to people, to humanity and to creating the best kind of environment that we can to ensure that every person has the life experience that everyone – and not just a selective few should have.
However, nobody else will step up or step in to do this for us – no matter how compelling or necessary this might seem.
Whether addicted or not, the choice and the steps necessary to return power to people and to our communities, and with it the creation of a genuine democracy we can all trust and believe in, are ours and only ours to take.
Nobody in the public sphere today can or will do this. None of them will give us back the influence that is rightly ours. Because they all imagine themselves as leaders who can only lead by having absolute control over everyone and everything else.
We don’t have a roadmap agreed for the future.
But there are plenty of ideas we can share about the outcomes that will serve all of us equally well and in a balanced, fair and just way.
This is where the conversation must start.
The one thing we can be sure of is that real leaders do actually lead. But also know that it is real equality, balance, fairness and justice that applies equally to everyone where the pathway to everything good for everyone really starts.
Watching the continuing bewilderment, frustration, fear and anger from so many across the UK farming community is not easy.
But the real difficulty for someone like me is not only the avoidable hardship that is now being felt. It is the sense that this policy sits within a much wider and deeply troubling direction of travel.
It is the reality that we cannot properly address what is happening, or why it is happening, until many more of us, and not least of all people from within farming and its related industries, begin to accept that what we are seeing, experiencing and increasingly becoming victims to, does not sit comfortably with our reasoned expectations of government and governance. It appears instead to reflect a much deeper worldview about food, markets, land, value and centralised control that many understandably find difficult to recognise, let alone accept.
Whilst many within the farming industry may feel that you can only understand and relate to the turmoil that this one change in public policy has caused if you are a farmer and have obvious skin in the game yourself, the action taken by the government and its failure to respond to months of concern in any way which makes practical sense is far from isolated. Not least of all because the tax that could be raised by the policy is, in public spending terms, trivial. That makes it very difficult to believe that tax revenue alone explains what this change is really about.
Indeed, what appears at first to be a harsh attack on ‘rich farmers’ is better understood as part of a much wider argument about food, food security, and the independence that locally controlled food production gives us. It is this that should concern us all more than anything.
It is vitally important for anyone who wants to address the real issues that UK food production faces to stop and look beyond the question of Farmers IHT itself.
To begin understanding how the bigger and deliberately complicated picture works, we all need to see how the IHT policy did not arrive in isolation. It appears to be the latest step in a long chain of policy changes and their implementation, which have been reforming, remodelling and steadily weakening, if not killing off, significant parts of UK food production for a period that now exceeds 50 years.
We should be under no illusion that the Farm Inheritance Tax policy belongs within a much bigger policy environment. Whether by intention, inertia, neglect or the worldview that now dominates public policy, that environment is placing the future of independent farming and food production of all kinds across the UK under severe pressure.
If food is power, we should not be surprised that influence over food production, processing and distribution has become increasingly important to the systems that shape modern life. Food is not simply another commodity. It is an essential requirement of daily living and, as such, influence over its supply carries consequences far beyond agriculture alone. The more concentrated decision-making becomes within the food chain, the less independence remains for producers, communities and consumers alike. That reality deserves far greater attention than it currently receives.
The last thing any centralised system of political or commercial power naturally encourages is a network of people and businesses capable of giving individuals and communities genuine independence. Yet that is precisely what independent food production can do.
Whilst this broader drift towards centralisation and dependency can be seen across many areas of life today, including the growth of rules intended to create safety and the shift towards digital and online alternatives to ‘real life’, few areas have the same level of potential impact on all of us as food and the supply of it.
Many of those farming smaller, ‘family sized farms’ or rather farm businesses that lie outside of corporate control, understandably perceive a specialised business landscape that cannot exist without subsidies, commercial contracts and the revival of the golden egg – which is a fair income from whatever they produce.
However, contrary to the accepted narrative that tells us ‘This is just how things work’ or this is where ‘progress’ has taken food production in the 21st century, the truth that we all have to wrestle with a very serious paradox indeed, namely:
The only business sector that can genuinely provide UK Food Security, and with it the freshest, most nutritious, healthiest, most cost-effective food supply, that every person’s body across the UK needs at least twice daily is currently unable to provide the producers with a viable, unsupported or independent income.
Truly, the idea that growing the food we genuinely need cannot provide those who produce it with a viable living only begins to make sense when we recognise how the market and policy environment has been shaped. The practical result has been that scale, consolidation, dependency and financialisation are repeatedly rewarded, while farmers and consumers are left carrying the consequences.
Far from being the anachronism that many of today’s politicians would like voters to believe, small independent family farms are the future of food as part of a better future for us and for our communities.
The relatively easy to solve problem for farmers and consumers, and the deeply uncomfortable question for those invested in centralised power structures and business models, is whether we might rediscover the legitimacy of food independence and realise that communities can thrive without depending so completely on systems that no longer serve them well.
That possibility should be taken seriously, because it challenges assumptions that have shaped policy and business for decades.
All the rules that have slowly choked small farmers out of business, following policy change after policy change, heralded by major frameworks such as the Common Agricultural Policy, and by bureaucratic initiatives that have cascaded down into practical business operations in ways that have made support industries like abattoirs unviable, through health, environmental and quality rules, have all had long-term outcomes that now need to be viewed with clear eyes.
Policy after policy has been created, changed and implemented that has, at best, redirected and, at worst, damaged or destroyed businesses that could have adapted to the needs that people genuinely have for food. Needs that could otherwise be met more fully by functioning and supported UK food producers, rather than by leaving what remains of UK food producing industries trapped within circumstances that tell everyone they are unnecessary and therefore done.
Some will argue that these changes are simply the result of economics, modernisation, efficiency, regulation or changing consumer preferences. There is truth in parts of that argument. But it is increasingly difficult to accept it as the whole explanation when viewed alongside the cumulative loss of farms, processing infrastructure, local food capacity and practical independence across the sector.
Whilst even now, many reading this essay may well disagree with what I am sharing, the evidence of this direction of travel is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore as it emerges into public view at speed.
To be fair, it certainly defies the logic and expectations of so many of us, who have always believed that we could trust public representatives to actually do what’s best for us.
Dealing with this problem should be as simple as getting politicians to change their minds. Perhaps do a U-turn. Or even waiting until the next government comes in behind just the latest in a long line who everyone believes to be solely responsible for wrecking everything today.
But it’s not as simple as that in any kind of way.
Government and politics no longer appear to work in the way many of us expect them to. Or in the way they should.
With many of the politicians we can publicly identify seeming unable or unwilling to lead as they should, and with government increasingly reliant upon advice and direction from advisers, institutions, lobbyists and other influencers who are presented as ‘experts’, we have to begin to understand that politicians may be acting within a worldview they have inherited, absorbed and been rewarded for accepting, rather than simply making isolated choices that can be reversed at will.
Even then, if we knew what politicians honestly believe, the full purpose or consequence of what they are being advised or directed to do may not be something that they themselves fully understand.
Regrettably and rather worryingly, the establishment understood as a worldview, and any political party, group or movement that remains aligned with that worldview, rather than with the people and what remains of all independent businesses themselves, is unlikely to change this direction of travel without sustained public, producer and community pressure.
This means that to reshape and redirect UK food production, farmers, growers and fishers must themselves voluntarily step away from the reliance and expectation historically placed upon centralised political and institutional systems, as well as upon those who wish to become part of them.
Food producers must take all steps necessary to develop a new, direct relationship with the public and therefore go it alone.
Regrettably, the alternative is to keep shouting whilst continuing to accept the status quo, and in effect sitting back and watching as UK food production and everything that still remains able to provide us with genuine freedom is weakened further, right up to the point that traditional, ‘natural’ farming and food growing practices may no longer exist in any meaningful form, and people may find it increasingly difficult to function independently and away from centralised systems of dependency ever again.
This blog and accompanying PDF were edited and updated on 22 August 2026 to improve clarity, flow and readability. No substantive changes have been made to the core arguments or conclusions.
