When Tomorrow Showed Up

A story about money, integrity, and the bill we keep passing on to people who haven’t arrived yet

‘The process by which banks create money is so simple that the mind is repelled.’
– J. K. Galbraith, Money: Whence It Came, Where It Went (1975)

One: The Problem for Tomorrow

Everyone has at least been tempted to delay, put off or put on hold a problem when it feels like there is actually a choice. We know, deep down, that we aren’t helping ourselves when we do this, especially if there is an unknown or unpredictable outcome involved – which is probably why it feels so appealing, if not easy, to literally put it off for another day.

Think of the letter that sits unopened in the drawer. The damp patch on the ceiling that we tell ourselves we’ll get looked at in the spring. The conversation we rehearse in our heads a hundred times but never quite start. None of these problems go away because we stop looking at them. If anything, they quietly grow.

So, let’s imagine all the things we would like to put off. To not deal with. Those things that will have a price once dealt with or acted upon, which it would just be nice to leave behind and pretend that they, or the need to address them, simply don’t exist. A difficult message to a loved one? A truth about a new partner to a friend? A relationship or friendship that it would feel better not to have to tell someone in particular, or anyone else, about? The list could be endless if we think about it, and what all these things have in common is that they are about things like honesty, integrity, respect, care and consideration for others – or, collectively, what we might call doing the right thing.

My guess is that most people reading this will have experienced a situation like this at least once in their lifetime, if not on a number of occasions. I know I have.

Something these things always seem to share is that the longer they are left alone or remain hidden, the greater and more far-reaching the consequences of waiting become – particularly if the truth comes out without it being our choice to tell it.

Because a problem left for tomorrow doesn’t sit still. A small untruth needs a second one to protect it. A debt left unpaid gathers interest. A crack left unfilled lets in the water that widens it.

The cost of putting something off is almost never the same as the cost of dealing with it. It is almost always bigger – and it is very often paid by someone other than the person who chose to wait.

The funny thing is that when we don’t make that choice – when we know we could keep quiet, hide things or put the consequences off, but we do the right thing at the time anyway – these things have a habit of working out for the best. There is a moral pay-off, even when there isn’t a material one.

Now imagine something much bigger. Imagine finding a way of doing things that brings a massive reward, with the potential to provide many more – and, this is the important part, a way that means, if you are clever and stick to some boundaries and rules, any reckoning can be put off not just for another day, but for so many days that it might never be a day that you, your children or even their children will have to face. The ultimate problem for tomorrow. All you would have to do is make sure everyone keeps playing by the rules – even if they don’t know the game that’s actually being played.

Do that, and you might never have to face it at all. Nor would anyone you appointed, or anyone appointed by those who followed – because most of them wouldn’t even know…

Two: When Nobody Is Watching

What I am really talking about here is doing the right thing, even when nobody is watching. There is a word for that: integrity. Funnily enough, integrity isn’t the main subject of this story. But it sits underneath every part of it, and if there is one thing I would ask you to take away, it may well be this.

Integrity is easy when people are watching. The real test comes when we know we could get away with something – when the consequences won’t land on us, or won’t land for years, or will land on somebody we’ll never meet.

So here is a question to carry with you. If it would be wrong for one person to quietly push the cost of their choices onto someone else, does it become any less wrong when it is done by a bank? Or a government? Or a whole society?

Does something stop being wrong just because it is done on a bigger scale, by more people, over a longer time?

Let me tell you a story that might help us answer it.

Three: The Banker

Imagine, if you will, a man who works in a bank. Not one of the friendly faces behind the counter at your local high street branch, always sounding lovely as they reset passwords and talk new customers through everything they’ll need. He works at a bank with a name you often hear newsreaders mention in the same breath as markets, economics, how public borrowing is going, and jargon like GDP.

He isn’t just someone crunching the figures or talking to the media about monetary policy. He is one of the people with whom the buck really stops – deciding what is done with the bank’s money, who it lends to, what bonuses are paid, how much help is given to others, and of course who those others will actually be.

I’ll simply call him the Banker.

The Banker has everything he wants. But he would like to have more, and to be able to do bigger things – things that have a much bigger pay-off than before.

All his time in banking has taught him how money makes people think and how it makes them behave. He knows all the formulas that sit behind the psychological levers of money – whether someone is rich or poor, a business or a government, and whatever it is they need money for.

Before we go on, pause for a moment. If you were him, and you knew what he knew – what would you do with it?

Four: The Secret

Because he knows everything about money, and how every part of the system that surrounds it works, the Banker has worked out what people will believe about money – or are willing to believe.

And that means he could literally create more of it. So long as the people who weren’t in on the secret still believed that the money in their hands was exactly the same the day after he changed the system as it was the day before.

Most people, then and now, picture money as a thing. Something solid, kept in a vault, once backed by gold sitting in a basement somewhere.

For a long time that picture was at least partly true: a pound or a dollar was a promise that could, in theory, be swapped for something real.

But the Banker knew the picture didn’t need to be true. It only needed to be believed.

The magic of creating money from nothing rests on creating a debt that isn’t really owed to anyone – but which he knows will be repaid, because he is confident that anyone he lets into the secret, or lends this new money to, will always pay it back, in a way and on a timeline where nobody need ever know that this new way of doing things exists.

And it is astonishingly simple. When the Banker approves a loan, he doesn’t go to a safe and count out notes that someone else deposited. He simply types a new number into the borrower’s account.

That money did not exist a moment before. There is no lorry delivering it, no vault opening, no gold changing hands. There is only a promise to pay it back – and that promise becomes money. When the loan is repaid, the money quietly disappears again.

He calls this money creation ‘credit’ for short. And he imagines all the things that could be done with an almost endless supply of it, and all the people who could be helped – as long as it is legal, and as long as one golden rule is kept: never create money that could not have come from a ‘normal’ route, over what would be considered a ‘normal’ period of time.

Which raises a question worth sitting with. If money can be created simply by a promise to pay it back, what is money, really?

And then, what happens if the promises start to grow faster than the real things – the homes, the food, the skills, the work – that the money is supposed to stand for?

Five: Bringing Everyone on Board

Rules won’t be a problem, the Banker reasons. If the people who actually run the country are brought on board, they will benefit from the new system too, because it will make it a lot easier for them to do whatever they want to do – as long as they play by the same rules of money creation, and change whatever rules and laws need changing to make it all legal.

‘We can give money to whoever we decide,’ he tells himself, ‘and nobody will ask where it comes from, because we are the banks. Nobody will see what’s really going on, as long as we play it right.’

So the Banker, and a few other bankers who share his world view and understanding, decide to go ahead. They bring in the people they need, all of whom benefit in some way from being on board – politicians who can suddenly pay for the things that make their lives easier, other bankers who are paid well, and key business people who know their stuff and can be trusted to pay back on time.

‘With the power we have,’ they agree, ‘we will be able to make whatever adaptations we need to do what we want – as long as we keep it real.’

Of course, money has a different effect on different people – especially when power and influence are involved – so, as the scope and dark brilliance of the new system rolls out, frameworks are put in place to make it all look responsible.

‘We will police the system by creating credit agencies,’ the Banker decides, ‘and as time goes by we will be able to judge everyone’s credibility by the records we keep on them.’

It would be easy to make the Banker a villain. But I don’t think that would be fair – and it would let the rest of us off far too lightly. Schemes like his are rarely born out of pure greed. More often they are born out of a problem that seems too big to solve any other way. A war that has to be paid for. A country that has to be rebuilt. A crisis that won’t wait. It is no accident that the Bank of England itself was founded, back in 1694, to lend money to a government that needed to fight a war.

And at first, it works. Roads are built. Homes are bought. Businesses start that would never otherwise have got off the ground. Wars are fought and, in some cases, won.

If you’re honest, you might even be on the Banker’s side by now. What’s the problem? It sounds brilliant.

Which brings us to one of the oldest moral questions there is: can something be wrong if the outcome is right? If the secret bought a victory, a recovery, a generation of prosperity – does the way it was done still matter?

Hold on to your answer. We will need it later.

Six: The Golden Rule

Everything depends on the golden rule: never create more money than could have come about by a ‘normal’ route, over a ‘normal’ period of time.

In other words – never let the promises get too far ahead of the real world.

I think it is quite possible that the Banker kept to that rule. He may have been confident – perhaps over-confident – but he understood what he had made, and why the limits mattered.

For anyone with a strong sense of what is right and what is wrong, it’s difficult to fathom the idea that money can be created literally by saying ‘this money now exists’ – especially if you’ve never had a lot, and have perhaps struggled to make ends meet with what you had.

But for those who have grown used to money, and comfortable with it, the morality looks very different.

And a rule like the Banker’s has a weakness built into it. It relies entirely on the restraint of whoever comes next. And whoever comes after them. And whoever comes after them.

Can you build a system that relies, forever, on the self-control of people you will never meet?

Seven: Passing the Baton

It started out well. The key was to stick to the rules. But the Banker, who designed the system and understood its limits, saw it very differently from those who came after him and had never known anything else.

The secret – or rather the open secret this system always really was, hidden only because so many people still thought all the money flowing around was ‘real’ – was passed like a baton from one generation of beneficiaries to the next. And with each handover, the new hands lost a little more sight of what was needed to keep it all under control.

Think about how a habit forms in any family or organisation. The first generation makes an exception, for a good reason, in a time of need. The second gets used to the exception. The third mistakes the exception for the rule. And the fourth cannot imagine there was ever any other way.

By the time the baton reaches that fourth pair of hands, nobody is asking whether the system is right any more. They are only asking how to get more out of it. And most of them aren’t bad people. They are doing exactly what they were trained to do, in the only system they have ever known.

The Banker’s successors started to believe it would be possible – realistic, even – to pay for whatever they wanted, especially if it gave them greater control over the profits and incomes they could then use to pay the ‘debt’ from the ‘credit’ back.

Around the 1980s, they found a philosophy to match. Economists today often call it neoliberalism, but at its heart was a simple belief: that markets, left free to buy, sell, compete and borrow, would always make better decisions than governments or communities could.

So industries that had been built and owned in common were sold off. The rules on banks and borrowing were loosened. Money was set free to go wherever it could earn the highest return, as fast as it could get there.

Put that belief together with the Banker’s secret, and something powerful happens. Money stops flowing mainly towards the things a community needs, and starts flowing towards whatever makes more money fastest.

And the question nobody inside the system seemed to ask was the simplest one of all: what happens to the places, the jobs and the people that the money flows away from?

Eight: The Hollowing Out

Unfortunately, whether by design or by accident, having control over what so many people see as real wealth also made those at the centre of the system, and those they helped, blind to consequence – blind to what money that is only believed to be real actually does when everyone who believes in it behaves as if it really is.

Over time, everything was hollowed out. People’s lives, communities and the environment were all hollowed out, and the value they once held was replaced by that giant IOU called credit. It took away the real value and left behind an extraordinary form of human debt: the loss of being able to identify with, and relate to, who we all really are.

That hollowing out rarely makes the headlines in one go. It happens a little at a time.

A family firm that has made things in the same town for eighty years is bought with borrowed money – and the debt used to buy it is loaded onto the firm itself. The buildings are sold and rented back. The profitable parts are sold off, the pension fund is squeezed, and what is left is closed when it can no longer carry the weight.

In the City, it is called a successful deal. In the town, a trade that took generations to learn disappears in a couple of years.

Homes stop being places to live and become places to put money. Prices rise faster than wages, year after year, because it is easier to lend against a house than to build a business. The parents who bought a home on one wage watch their children struggle to rent on two.

Water, energy, railways and the other things that were once built and owned in common are sold, borrowed against and run to produce a return. When the pipes leak, the rivers suffer and the bills rise, the debt is still there – and someone still expects to be paid.

The high street empties. The skills leave. The young people leave. And slowly, a place forgets what it was for.

None of this shows up as a debt on anyone’s bank statement. But it is a debt all the same. And from very early on, it was the people at the bottom of the ladder – the workers, the small towns, the communities with the least say – who paid it first, and paid it in full.

The debt was never only financial. The real bill was paid in lives, in places, and in the world around us.

Nine: The Stories We Were Told

At some point, the people doing well out of the system must have noticed. Not all of them, and perhaps not all at once.

But you cannot close that many factories, sell off that many shared assets, or watch that many town centres empty without someone, somewhere, beginning to ask questions.

And this is where the story becomes less about money and more about people. Because when a system that everyone depends on starts to show its cracks, the easiest thing to do is not to fix it. It is to explain it.

So we were given stories. That the jobs went because of technology, or global competition, or because people simply didn’t want to work. That the money had run out because of whoever was easiest to blame that year. That if prices rose, it was always someone else’s fault. That the answer to too much debt was more debt. That growth – measured by a number called GDP – would sooner or later lift everyone.

Some of those stories had grains of truth in them. Many were told by people who honestly believed them. But they all had one thing in common: they kept attention away from the system itself.

When the whole thing nearly fell over in 2008, it wasn’t allowed to. The banks were rescued. Then the central banks – the Bank of England among them – reached for the Banker’s oldest trick on the grandest scale yet. They created hundreds of billions of pounds of new money and called it ‘quantitative easing’.

The new money was used to buy up government debt and other assets, holding interest rates down and propping up prices. It kept the system going. Many have argued that it also made those who already owned property, shares and other assets a great deal richer, while those who owned nothing watched the things they needed slip further out of reach.

By then, some economists had begun to say out loud what the Banker had always known. A school of thought called Modern Monetary Theory argued that a country which creates its own currency can never simply ‘run out’ of money the way a household can – and that the real limit on what it can do isn’t money at all, but real things: people, skills, materials, energy and land. Push beyond those, and prices rise.

Whatever you think of that idea, notice where it lands. Even the theory that says money itself isn’t the problem agrees that real things are the limit. And real things – the skills, the industries, the communities, the land and the environment – are exactly what had been hollowed out.

You can create money from nothing. You can’t create a lost trade, a living river or a community’s sense of itself the same way.

Underneath it all sat one belief, so comfortable that it rarely needed saying out loud: that this is a system where everyone can have whatever they want, and worry about paying the bill later.

Of course, nobody can. Not a person, not a bank, not a country. A system that only survives by bringing in ever more borrowing to pay for the promises it has already made starts to look uncomfortably like a giant Ponzi scheme – and the thing being borrowed against, in the end, is the future itself.

Ten: Where Has All the Money Gone?

Over time, governments became completely beholden to the system too. Their success was measured by GDP – a number that counts how much is bought and sold, not whether life is getting any better. And when they needed more money than they raised in taxes, they borrowed it by selling bonds – in Britain, they are called gilts. A gilt is simply an IOU: lend the government money today, and it promises to pay you interest every year and give your money back on a set date.

Those IOUs are held by banks, pension funds, insurers and investors at home and abroad – and, after all that quantitative easing, by the Bank of England itself. Every year, interest has to be paid on every one of them.

It was only when things had gone so far that a once-rich country like the UK could no longer afford to do the things it used to do that ordinary people began asking the same question: where has all the money gone? And if we are now paying more in interest on what the country owes than we spend each year on educating our children – where do all those interest payments actually go?

The answer is simple, and uncomfortable. A large part of it goes to those who already hold money – paid for by those who do the work, through their taxes, through public services that no longer stretch as far, and through all the things that quietly stop being done.

Which brings us back to where this story began. Who decided this was a problem for tomorrow? And who did they think would be standing there when tomorrow arrived?

Eleven: When Tomorrow Showed Up

You may have realised by now that this is where – exactly where – we are right now.

The Banker’s story was never really about one banker. It is the story of the money in your pocket, the mortgage on your home, the pension you are counting on, and the country you live in. It is the story of the system we were all born into – the only one most of us have ever known.

And tomorrow didn’t arrive with a bang. There was no single day when the bill landed on the doormat. It arrived the way the damp patch on the ceiling does – slowly, and then all at once.

It arrived as a generation that cannot afford a home. As the potholes, the closed libraries and the waiting lists. As towns that have forgotten what they were for. As rivers that are no longer safe to swim in. As wages that buy less every year. As a growing sense, shared by people who agree on almost nothing else, that something has gone badly wrong – and that nobody in charge will say what.

And here is the cruellest part. The bill isn’t calculated in pounds. It is calculated in lost skills, lost trust, lost places and lost time. It can’t simply be refinanced, rolled over or printed away. The problem was never really put off at all. It was only passed on – to whoever happened to be standing there when tomorrow came.

The future has no vote. That is exactly why it was so easy to spend.

Twelve: The Greatest Crime of All Time?

So was this a crime? Perhaps even the greatest one of all time?

It is tempting to say yes, and to go looking for the people to blame. But remember how this story started.

Maybe the Banker had a genuine problem to solve. Maybe he kept to his own rules. Maybe most of those who followed him were decent people doing what they had been taught, in a system they never designed and never saw from the outside.

None of that makes it right. A harm doesn’t become acceptable because nobody meant it, or because it was spread across millions of hands over a hundred years. If anything, that is what makes it so serious.

A crime with a villain can be punished. A crime that everyone took part in, and that almost everyone benefited from in some small way, is far harder to face – because facing it means facing ourselves.

Which leads to the most uncomfortable question in this whole story. If you have ever had a mortgage, a pension, a loan or a credit card – or simply lived in a country that borrowed to keep the lights on – where do you stand in the chain?

And remember the question I asked you to hold on to: can something be wrong if the outcome was right?

What is your answer now?

Thirteen: Doing the Right Thing

We started with the small things – the message we didn’t send, the truth we didn’t tell, the letter we left in the drawer. And we said that the longer they are left, the bigger the consequences become, especially if the truth comes out without us choosing to tell it.

The same is true here. Tomorrow is already knocking at the door. The only real choice left is whether we open it ourselves – honestly, together, and with our eyes open – or wait for it to be kicked in.

Doing the right thing, even when nobody is watching, starts with being willing to look. To ask where money really comes from, who it really serves, and who really pays. To value the things that can’t be printed – skills, communities, places, the natural world and each other – as the real wealth they always were. And to stop handing our problems to people who aren’t here yet to argue back.

That is what integrity looks like when it is scaled up from one person to a whole society.

It isn’t easy. It never was. But as I hope this story has shown, the alternative was never really easier either.

It was only later.

Tomorrow has shown up. The only question left is what we do today.

Afterword: A Note on This Story

The Banker is not a real person. He is a way of telling a story that is far too big, and spread across far too much time, to be told any other way. He stands for the many people – bankers, politicians, officials and business leaders – who built, inherited and ran the monetary system we live with today.

Some of the details are simplified. Some of the steps may have happened in a different order, and some may have happened by accident rather than by design. Many of them were taken – and are still being taken – by people who have never seen or understood the monetary, financial and economic system in any other way. None of that changes the question at the heart of the story.

This was never meant to be an economics lecture. You didn’t need to know what a bond is, what fiat money means, or what anyone means by MMT or neoliberalism to follow it – and if you didn’t before, I hope you have a clearer idea now. What I hope you take away is a single question, and that you keep asking it: is this a problem for today, or a problem for tomorrow – and who decided?

Questions to Carry With You

For your own reflection, or for discussion with others:

Does something stop being wrong just because it is done on a bigger scale, by more people, over a longer time?
Can something be wrong if the outcome is right? Has your answer changed since you first met the question?
If you had been the Banker, what would you have done with the secret?
Where in your own town or community can you see the hollowing out? Who paid the bill – and who was paid?
Which of the stories we were told have you believed? Which do you still believe?
What would doing the right thing look like now – for you, for your community, and for the country?

A Few Words in Plain English

Credit – money lent to someone on the promise that they will pay it back. In today’s system, most new money comes into existence this way.
Debt – the other side of credit: what is owed, usually with interest on top.
Fiat money – money that has value because a government declares it to be money and people accept it, rather than because it can be swapped for gold or anything else.
Interest – the price of borrowing money; what the borrower pays the lender on top of the amount borrowed.
Bonds and gilts – IOUs that governments and companies sell to borrow money. A gilt is a UK government bond.
GDP (Gross Domestic Product) – a measure of the total value of everything bought and sold in a country in a year. It counts activity, not wellbeing.
Credit rating agencies – organisations that judge how likely a person, company or country is to repay what it owes.
Quantitative easing (QE) – when a central bank creates new money to buy government bonds and other assets, usually to keep interest rates low and the financial system running.
Neoliberalism – a set of ideas, dominant since around the 1980s, that markets usually make better decisions than governments, leading to privatisation and looser rules on finance.
MMT (Modern Monetary Theory) – an economic theory that says a country issuing its own currency can’t run out of money, and that the real limits are inflation and real resources.
Asset stripping – buying a business, often with borrowed money, and selling off its valuable parts for a quick profit, frequently leaving the rest to fail.
Ponzi scheme – a scheme that pays existing investors with money from new ones, and so collapses when the new money runs out.

Notes and Sources

The Bank of England was founded in 1694 to lend money to the government of William III, largely to fund war against France.
The end of the gold link: in August 1971 the United States suspended the conversion of dollars into gold, ending the last formal tie between the world’s major currencies and gold.
How banks create money: the Bank of England explains this in ‘Money creation in the modern economy’, Quarterly Bulletin, 2014 Q1.
Quantitative easing: the Bank of England’s asset purchases reached a peak of £895 billion between 2009 and 2021.
Debt interest and education: how UK debt interest compares with education spending depends on the year and on how each is measured. Check the latest figures from the Office for Budget Responsibility and HM Treasury before publication.
Epigraph: J. K. Galbraith, Money: Whence It Came, Where It Went (1975).

When Tomorrow Showed Up PDF_Vers1_21Oct26

A Budget for a System That No Longer Fits the Country

Why the numbers and everyday life keep drifting apart – and why a change of leader, Chancellor or party cannot, on its own, close the gap

On 28 October the Chancellor will deliver a Budget built around growth, stability and fiscal credibility. Many households and small businesses will hear those words and struggle to recognise the country being described. This piece does not try to guess what will be announced. It tries to explain why that gap exists, why it affects any government of any party, and why it matters more than any single measure in the Red Box.

A note on approach: This is not a prediction, and it is not a case for or against any party. It is my own analysis of the conditions in which any Budget is now written. Where I reach conclusions, I have tried to show how I got there – and to set out the strongest objections to them.

In Brief

Every Budget is now judged on two scales: what it means for the markets and the public finances, and what it means for everyday life. Those two scales are drifting further apart.
When I talk about “the system”, I do not mean a party, a conspiracy, an economic theory or a group of people. I mean a shared worldview – unspoken assumptions about what counts as realistic, responsible, affordable and possible – that shapes every government, and many of those who oppose it.
The economic model those assumptions support was built for conditions that no longer hold: cheap energy, expanding globalisation, favourable demographics, falling interest rates and rising asset values.
Governments are not powerless. But the tools they inherit, and the institutions that use them, face the markets first and the public second.
That is why changing the leader, the Chancellor or the party does not, on its own, change the direction of travel.

Two Budgets on the Same Day

When the government delivers its Budget on 28 October, the country will once again hear the language of growth, stability and resilience. Forecasts will be revised. Headroom will be calculated. Commitments to the fiscal rules will be restated. In Westminster, that is how a Budget is judged.

But a second Budget is being written at the same time – at kitchen tables, in small business accounts, and in the monthly calculations millions of people make about food, rent, energy and fuel. For many of them, the numbers celebrated in the Commons will bear little resemblance to the reality they live in.

That feeling is not imagined, and it is not simply disappointment with one government. It is the result of a deeper problem – one that affects any government, of any party, operating inside the current economic model.

To explain why, I first need to be clear about what I mean when I talk about “the system”.

What I Mean by “the System”

Most people already sense it. It is the “they” that appears in so many conversations about politics: “they won’t allow it”, “they’ve already decided”, “they’ll never let that happen”.

When pressed to say who “they” are, people reach for different answers – the government, the Treasury, the civil service, the City, the media, “the elites”. Each answer contains a fragment of truth. None captures the whole.

That is because “they” is not really a group of people. It is a worldview – a shared set of assumptions about what is realistic, responsible, credible and possible.

In The Establishment Is Not What You Think It Is, I described this as the modern Establishment: not a class, a cabal or a secret network, but something closer to an operating system that runs quietly beneath politics, finance, the media and public institutions.

It is important to be clear about what this is not. It is not an economic theory, a party programme or a particular school of thought about money and markets.

People who disagree fiercely about policy can share it completely. It sits beneath those arguments, in the assumptions that decide which arguments are allowed to count as serious.

It shows up in what is treated, usually without discussion, as:

“realistic” – and what is dismissed as naive
“responsible” – and what is labelled reckless
“affordable” – and what is ruled out before it is ever costed
“credible” – and who is listened to, and who is not
“possible” – and what never reaches the table at all

None of this is enforced by conspiracy. It is enforced by incentives. Careers, institutions, budgets and reputations are rewarded for working within these assumptions and quietly penalised for questioning them.

Over time, the assumptions stop feeling like choices and start feeling like common sense. That is what makes them so powerful – and so hard to see from the inside.

It also means that anyone who lives and works within today’s version of normal life, including me, has been shaped by them in some way.

This is why decisions can feel as though they arrive from somewhere without anyone quite making them. The power is real, but it is distributed – spread across policy, finance, professional norms, media narratives and institutional habit. It speaks through many mouths while belonging to no single person. And because it protects the institutions that carry it, and keeps those who make decisions at a distance from the consequences, it is remarkably good at absorbing challenges – including from people who sincerely believe they are fighting it.

Today, that worldview is bound up with a particular economic model, built in Britain over roughly the last forty years.

That model relied on:

cheap energy
cheap labour
expanding globalisation
privatisation and outsourcing
low and falling interest rates
rising asset values, especially property

My argument is simple to state, even if its consequences are not: the assumptions are still in place, but the conditions they were built for are not.

The 2026 Budget is being written by people working with tools designed for a world that has changed beneath them.

Why the Budget Will Feel Detached From Real Life

For most people, the economy is not a set of numbers. It is the cost of food, the rent or mortgage payment, the energy bill, the price of diesel, the viability of a small business and the ability to plan for the future. Yet the Budget will be framed around growth – a measure that has become increasingly detached from lived experience.

That is not to say growth is meaningless. Within the current model it matters a great deal: tax revenues, borrowing capacity, pensions and public services all depend on it, which is precisely why every government pursues it.

The problem is what growth has become. It now functions primarily as a system metric – a number that stabilises borrowing, reassures markets and keeps the machinery turning.

It does not tell you whether your household is secure, whether your business can survive, or whether your community is thriving.

Part of the reason lies in what we take money to be. As I explore in The Money Illusion, money is real in its effects, but it is not a fixed substance. It is a social and legal system of claims, promises and credit – and we do not all enter that system on equal terms.

When new purchasing power is created through lending, it becomes real title over real things: homes, land and businesses. A growing economy, measured in money, can therefore sit alongside households and small firms steadily losing ownership, security and room to manoeuvre, under terms they never chose.

Behind this sits a more fundamental point. The tools of economic government – fiscal rules, growth forecasts, borrowing costs, market confidence – face outward towards the markets first and inward towards the public second.

A Budget built with those tools will naturally speak the language of the markets. That is why so much of what is announced can sound reasonable in Westminster and remote almost everywhere else.

And this year, the gap between the two is being widened by pressures that sit largely outside Westminster’s control.

The Pressures Shaping This Budget

The UK is not facing one crisis. It is facing multiple overlapping pressures, many of which have little to do with the domestic choices of any single government.

They are structural, global and long-term – and together they define the space within which any Chancellor must work.

1. Energy and Fuel: The Hidden Tax on Everything

Diesel prices, oil volatility and gas markets are not just energy issues. They are cost-of-everything issues. Higher fuel and energy costs feed into food distribution, construction, farming, manufacturing, public services and the running costs of small businesses – often long before they show up in the inflation figures.

2. Global Shipping and Chokepoints

The Strait of Hormuz is one example, but the vulnerability is wider: disruption in the Red Sea, drought restrictions on the Panama Canal, rising shipping insurance costs, container shortages and geopolitical tensions along key trade routes. Britain’s supply chains are global. When the world’s arteries narrow, Britain feels it quickly.

3. Fertiliser, Farming and Food Security

Fertiliser costs rise with gas prices. That affects planting decisions, crop yields and livestock feed – and, months later, supermarket prices. As I argued in The Fragile Nation, Britain’s reliance on global food systems leaves it far more exposed to shocks than is often acknowledged. This is not a short-term issue. It is structural.

4. Climate Volatility and Extreme Weather

Floods, droughts, storms and heatwaves are not only environmental stories. They are economic ones. Climate pressures now shape food production, insurance costs, infrastructure resilience, supply chain reliability, water availability and energy demand.

5. Demographics, Health and the Workforce

Britain faces an ageing population, rising demand for health and social care, workforce shortages, weak productivity and long-term sickness at record levels. Together, these increase the demands on public spending while narrowing the base that pays for it.

6. Debt, Interest Rates and Fiscal Constraints

Higher interest rates mean more expensive government borrowing and less fiscal headroom, alongside higher mortgage costs, pressure on renters and squeezed small businesses. But the question is no longer simply how much borrowing costs. It is whether borrowing is possible at all on terms the country can bear. The ability to borrow rests on market confidence, and that confidence is now wafer-thin. When borrowing is expensive, conditional on the markets’ continued patience and growth is weak, the levers left to a Chancellor narrow sharply. That is why, as I have argued before, tax increasingly becomes “the only tool they have left”.

7. Technology, AI and Circular Fragility

Financial markets, supply chains and AI-driven industries are now so interlinked that they are set to rise and fall together. That brings higher volatility, the potential for faster contagion, more systemic risk and less room for error. AI is also widely presented as the route to renewed productivity – a claim I return to below, because it contains a tension that rarely features in Budget debates.

8. The End of the Operating Model

Beneath all of these sits the pressure that connects them. The model built over the last forty years depended on cheap energy, cheap labour, expanding globalisation, low and falling interest rates and rising asset values. None of those conditions can be relied upon today. Each of the pressures above would be difficult on its own. Together, they arrive at a model that no longer has the slack to absorb them.

This is the core constraint behind the Budget.

Why Changing the Leader Does Not Change the Rules

Much of our political debate assumes the answer lies in better people: a more competent Chancellor, a bolder Prime Minister, a different party. That assumption is understandable. It is also, I believe, increasingly misleading.

In The Contemporary Politicians’ Dilemma, I explored what happens when people arrive in office and come face to face with the system they have inherited. Read as a whole, it points to an uncomfortable conclusion: that the system is already failing, and that the job on offer is not to fix it but to manage its decline.

That discovery is not confined to one government. Those now in Downing Street and the Treasury have themselves acknowledged that they did not fully understand the state of the country until they were briefed in post.

It is fair to ask what that says about readiness for office. But the more important point is that they are no different from anyone else who might stand in their place.

The deeper question is about a system in which people can reach the highest offices in the country without a clear view of what they are inheriting.

Once in office, the pattern repeats. Whatever a new government intends, it quickly finds itself managing borrowing costs, market reactions, fiscal rules, service pressures and the next set of headlines.

The machinery of government – the Treasury, the fiscal rules, the forecasting process, the relationship with the bond markets – is itself oriented towards the markets. Its instinct is continuity, because continuity is what the markets reward.

This is why I describe many of today’s political figures as managers rather than leaders. It is not a personal criticism. It is a description of what the system rewards.

Even those who arrive intending to lead are gradually turned into managers by the incentives and institutions around them.

A large parliamentary majority creates real agency on paper. In practice, that agency is overwritten by the cost – economic, political and social – of using it to change direction.

It is also why so much of the gesturing from other parties and leaders should be treated with caution. The promise that a change of leader or party will, by itself, put things right is a powerful one. But many of those presenting themselves as outsiders operate within exactly the same assumptions: success judged by market confidence, growth treated as the unquestioned goal, competition as the organising principle.

Anti-establishment rhetoric is not the same thing as anti-establishment thinking – and in some cases it is a more intense version of the same worldview.

When a change of leadership is no longer the solution, presenting it as one is not just unhelpful. It is dangerous, because it directs public frustration at people rather than at the assumptions they share.

There is a second, quieter version of the same problem. British politics is showing signs of a two-part messiah complex: the belief among some politicians that they are uniquely equipped to lead the country – the self-anointed – and the belief among some supporters that stability will come from choosing the right individual rather than from strengthening the system itself – the self-comforted.

It is not confined to one party, or one wing of a party. It can be heard in the suggestion that the markets would simply “fall in behind” a particular leader, as though systems respond to personalities rather than to signals, and in support for would-be leaders built on tone and managerial polish rather than on defined proposals.

These two instincts look like opposites, but they meet in the same place. Both assume that leadership is primarily about the individual. Both assume the public will accept personality in place of substance. And both assume the system will wait while politics settles its internal contests.

It is not waiting. Local authorities are warning that they cannot meet their statutory duties. Public services are running with little slack. The pressures set out above are already shaping the country’s direction. A politics preoccupied with succession and positioning at such a moment is facing not so much a crisis of ideology as a crisis of focus – and focus is the one thing the country cannot afford to lose.

Testing the Argument: The Strongest Objections

An argument like this should be tested against the strongest case against it. These are the objections I take most seriously – and why I do not think they overturn it.

“Governments are not powerless”

They are not. Governments can still tax, spend, regulate, legislate, invest and reform. Choices on planning, energy, skills and infrastructure make real differences to people’s lives. Anyone who claims otherwise is overstating the case.

But agency is not the same as freedom of direction. The tools available to government are system tools, and the institutions that use them are market-facing.

Governments can choose how to manage the existing model; what they find far harder is choosing a different one.

The model expects them to keep extracting – from households, businesses, public services and public assets – to sustain it, and it offers no natural point at which that extraction stops.

Those who can read the bigger picture are left with an uncomfortable question: can I lead us out of this?

In practice, the honest answer is a choice between managing the model for as long as it can be managed, or deliberately changing direction – something that would demand far more disruption than any Budget statement could contain.

“Britain is not uniquely fragile”

That is true, and it matters. Ageing populations, rising debt, energy constraints, weak productivity and political fragmentation are visible across much of the developed world. Britain is not special.

My argument is not that Britain is on a different path, but that it may be further along the same one.

The shocks and choices of the last decade – including Brexit and the economic response to Covid – have amplified pressures that were already building and brought them into focus sooner here than elsewhere.

Several of our closest neighbours face versions of the same strain, some acutely. That is worth remembering whenever closer alignment with Europe is presented as a straightforward way out: our neighbours are travelling in the same direction, and in some cases are not far behind.

“Growth still pays for everything”

Within the current model, it does. Tax revenues, public services, pensions and borrowing all depend on it, and no responsible government can ignore that.

But that is precisely the point. Growth is essential only for as long as we remain bound by the mechanics of this model.

If managing decline remains the only direction anyone in government is prepared to take, growth will remain the master metric.

The question is not whether growth matters within the system, but whether a system that depends on it can still deliver security to the people living inside it.

“We have been here before”

Every generation believes its problems are uniquely difficult, and systems do adapt. Britain came through the crisis of the 1970s, including the 1976 IMF loan, and through the financial crisis of 2008. Perhaps this is simply another painful period of adjustment.

But the comparison with 1976 is less reassuring than it first appears. Britain then still had a substantial productive base – manufacturing, industrial and energy capacity that recovery could be built around.

Much of that has since been hollowed out, and the economy is now organised around growth, consumption and asset values rather than genuine productive capacity.

Households, too, have far less resilience. Conditions of the kind that come with external rescue would land on a society already dealing with homelessness, food insecurity and stretched public services – and they would not, on their own, address the underlying issue.

“Technology will lift productivity”

It may. AI, automation and energy innovation could raise output significantly, and it would be wrong to dismiss that possibility.

But productivity only becomes prosperity if people still have secure incomes. Much of the current wave of technology is built on the assumption of a large base of paying customers and subscribers – many of whom are the same people whose work it is designed to replace.

That is not an argument against technology. It is an argument that technology alone cannot resolve a problem rooted in how the model distributes its gains.

The Choice Few Are Willing to Name

If this analysis is broadly right, the choices facing this government – and any that follow it – are stark, even if they are rarely stated openly. Neither is easy, and each carries real costs.

Option 1: Manage the model for as long as possible

This is the path most governments take, and it is not hard to see why. It is politically safer. It avoids immediate shocks. It keeps services running, markets calm and the machinery turning. It buys time. Its cost is that the underlying pressures continue to build, each crisis leaves less room for manoeuvre, and the gap between the numbers and lived experience keeps widening.

Option 2: Change direction by choice

This would mean openly acknowledging the limits of the current model and beginning to redesign it: how value is created, how success is measured, how money circulates locally, how public capacity is rebuilt, and how institutions are made answerable to lived reality rather than to the markets alone.

It could offer a path to longer-term stability. Its cost is significant short-term disruption – economic, political and social – and it would mean confronting the very incentives that brought today’s leaders to power.

Describing the second option as blowing up the existing model would not be an overstatement. That is why few politicians focused on re-election are prepared to risk it.

The incentives of the system reward caution over candour, performance over transformation and management over leadership.

There is also a third possibility that nobody chooses: that change eventually arrives on terms set by events rather than by policy. Nothing in this piece predicts whether or when that happens. But it is the quiet consequence of treating the first option as the only responsible one.

What to Look For on 28 October

Rather than guessing what the Chancellor will announce, it may be more useful to ask a few questions of whatever is announced:

Is success being measured by what reassures the markets, or by what changes for households, businesses and communities?
Do the measures address the structural pressures – energy, food, housing, health, local capacity – or manage their symptoms?
Is local government and community capacity treated as a cost to be contained, or as part of the country’s resilience?
Does growth appear as a means to better lives, or as an end in itself?
Does anything in the Budget question the assumptions behind the model, or does it simply restate them?

These are not partisan questions. They can be asked of any Budget, from any government.

Conclusion: The Wrong Tools for the World We Now Live In

The point of this piece is not to predict what the Chancellor will say. It is to explain why so much of what is said may feel disconnected from everyday life.

It is because the Budget is written, first and foremost, for the machinery: the markets, the fiscal rules and the forecasts. It is because the pressures shaping the economy – energy, shipping, food, climate, demographics, debt and technology – are global, structural and long-term. And it is because politics is still operating inside a worldview that defines what counts as realistic, responsible and affordable by the standards of a model built for conditions that have passed – even as that model explains less and less about how people actually live.

None of this is the fault of one Chancellor, one Prime Minister or one party. In their different ways, they are all in the same boat.

The Budget cannot fix these things because it was never designed to fix these things. Not because politicians lack will, but because the tools they have inherited are the wrong tools for the world we now live in.

Whether this Budget is judged a success in Westminster will depend on forecasts, headroom and the reaction of the markets.

Whether it is judged a success by the public will depend on something much simpler: whether everyday life feels any more secure in six months’ time than it does today.

The growing distance between those two measures may be the most important economic story of all.

Real change will not begin with a new leader, a new party or a new slogan. It begins when enough people stop mistaking the existing model for reality itself – and start asking what a system built for the world we now live in might look like.

The Cure for Misinformation | Why falsehood spreads so easily in a society that has already lost its grip on reality

Many people feel that the world is going mad. Facts seem negotiable. Institutions contradict themselves. Public debate hardens into rival realities, each with its own evidence, enemies and explanations. We usually describe this as a crisis of misinformation, as though false claims arrived from outside and contaminated an otherwise healthy society.

But misinformation is not the beginning of the crisis. It is what becomes possible when a culture has already weakened its relationship with reality.

For decades, we have organised more of life around a system that rewards what is profitable, convenient and advantageous, even when it conflicts with what is true, sustainable or right. Most of us participate because participation appears to work. It pays the bills, confers status, offers comfort and promises security. The system therefore feels real because its rewards are real – until the moment they are not.

This creates a strange condition: a shared reality built on arrangements that many people privately recognise as unstable, contradictory or morally compromised. We learn to live with the gap. We call it pragmatism. We adapt. We look away. And in doing so, we become used to a world in which appearance and advantage can matter more than truth.

That is the environment in which misinformation flourishes. It does not need to pull people out of reality. It only needs to enter a culture in which reality has already become fluid.

1. Misinformation lands easily when reality is already negotiable

Misinformation is not new. Rumour, propaganda and deliberate deception are as old as human society. What is new is the ease with which falsehood can now settle into everyday life and feel plausible.

The usual explanation is technological: social media spreads claims quickly, algorithms reward outrage and bad actors exploit attention. All of that matters. But it does not explain why so many claims find an audience ready to receive them.

Falsehood needs something to attach itself to. It lands most easily where people no longer trust the public account of how the world works-and where their distrust is not entirely irrational.

When an institution says one thing and does another, when a company speaks of responsibility while externalising harm, or when political language bears little relation to lived experience, people learn a lesson. They learn that official reality is often a performance. They become accustomed to reading between the lines, assuming hidden motives and treating every claim as strategic.

At that point, misinformation is not entering a world of settled truth. It is competing in a marketplace of narratives. Its advantage is not necessarily that it is convincing. It is that the alternatives have already spent their credibility.

2. The system feels real because participation is rewarded

The system we inhabit is not imaginary. Its wages, prices, debts, deadlines and penalties are concrete. Its benefits are concrete too. People participate because participation can provide income, identity, convenience, recognition and a measure of security.

That is precisely why the deeper unreality is difficult to see.

A system can function and still rest on false assumptions. It can generate wealth while exhausting the people and places on which that wealth depends. It can celebrate choice while narrowing the practical choices available. It can speak the language of human value while measuring almost everything in money, output, growth and attention.

Most of us are bought into this system at some level, not because we endorse every part of it, but because refusing it carries a cost. We make compromises, accept contradictions and tell ourselves that this is simply how the world works. As long as the arrangement appears beneficial, its underlying flaws remain tolerable.

Then comes the moment when the benefit disappears: the job is lost, the institution fails, the promised security proves temporary, the environment deteriorates, or the future offered to the next generation no longer looks credible. What seemed solid is suddenly revealed as conditional.

This is the non-reality reality: a social order that is experienced as unavoidable and treated as normal, even while its values and claims increasingly fail the test of lived experience.

3. “You cannot con an honest man”

The old saying is deliberately uncomfortable: You cannot con an honest man.

It does not mean that only bad people are deceived. Intelligent, decent and careful people can be misled. The saying points to the opening a con requires: the wish for an outcome that reality does not support – a shortcut, an easy return, a flattering explanation, a justification for what we already want to believe.

The same principle applies at the level of a society. A culture becomes easier to deceive when it has already accepted dishonesty in more respectable forms. If we routinely tolerate misleading language, concealed costs, performative virtue and rewards detached from contribution, we cannot be surprised when cruder falsehoods find a market.

The vulnerability is moral before it is informational. We want the system to be legitimate because our lives are organised through it. We want our compromises to be harmless because acknowledging their cost would demand change. We want our advantages to be deserved and our discomforts to have simple causes. Misinformation succeeds by offering stories that protect those desires.

This is why the proverb belongs in the argument. The con does not create the appetite. It recognises it.

4. A fluid society produces fluid truths

Once a society grows accustomed to contradiction, truth begins to feel less like a common standard and more like a position to be managed.

Institutions publish values that their incentives undermine. Politics presents choices without addressing the structures that constrain them. Advertising turns desire into need. Public relations converts failure into messaging. Digital platforms personalise what each person sees until a shared picture of events becomes harder to sustain.

None of this means that every institution lies or that all public knowledge is false. It means that people experience enough distance between language and reality to become suspicious of language itself.

In that atmosphere, an unsupported claim can feel no less credible than an official statement. A conspiracy can seem more coherent than a complicated truth. A confident voice can outperform a careful one because certainty feels like solidity.

Misinformation therefore does not win by proving itself. It wins by arriving in a world where proof has lost status, trust has been depleted and every account is assumed to serve somebody.

5. Why the usual remedies are not enough

Fact-checking, media literacy, responsible platform design and proportionate regulation all have a role. False claims can cause real harm, and practical safeguards matter.

But these measures operate downstream. They treat misinformation as a defect in the flow of information rather than a symptom of a deeper failure in the culture receiving it.

A fact-check can correct a claim. It cannot restore trust to an institution that has behaved without integrity. Media literacy can teach people to examine a source. It cannot make public life coherent when incentives repeatedly reward pretence. Regulation can slow the circulation of a lie. It cannot give people a reality worth trusting.

Worse, control imposed by institutions that have not earned confidence can confirm the very suspicion it is meant to reduce. People do not hear, “We are protecting a shared reality.” They hear, “The same system that misled us now wants greater authority over what may be said.”

The point is not that every remedy is censorship, or that nothing should be done. It is that no informational solution can repair a moral and structural problem on its own.

6. The cure is reality, rebuilt through integrity

If misinformation feeds on the distance between appearance and reality, the durable response is to close that distance.

That begins with values – not as slogans, branding or private sentiment, but as standards that carry a cost. Honesty matters when telling the truth is inconvenient. Responsibility matters when the consequences can no longer be passed to somebody else. Service matters when there is no immediate return. Stewardship matters when restraint limits profit. Community matters when belonging demands more than agreement.

Institutions regain trust by becoming trustworthy. Businesses regain legitimacy by valuing people and places as more than inputs. Leaders regain authority by accepting limits, admitting error and aligning their words with their conduct. Individuals regain their bearings by refusing the small daily bargains through which unreality becomes normal.

This is not a call for a perfect past. Earlier societies were often unjust, exclusionary and dishonest in their own ways. Nor is it a demand for one uniform morality imposed from above. It is a simpler proposition: a society cannot maintain a shared reality if it repeatedly rewards behaviour that denies what is true and evades what is right.

Reality is not restored by insisting more loudly on the official version of events. It is restored when the world people are asked to believe resembles the world they actually experience.

Conclusion: Misinformation is not the madness. It is the symptom.

The spread of misinformation is often described as an assault on reality. But it may be more accurate to see it as evidence that reality had already been weakened.

We built a culture in which participation often requires compromise, in which advantage can outrank truth, and in which institutions ask for trust while behaving in ways that corrode it. Because the system still delivers benefits, most of us continue to cooperate with it. We treat it as reality. Yet the arrangement remains convincing only while its promises appear to hold.

When they fail, people do not simply lose faith in one policy, company or leader. They begin to doubt the whole account. Into that doubt come explanations that are simpler, darker and more emotionally satisfying. Misinformation lands ridiculously easily because it does not have to overturn a stable reality. It enters a reality already made fluid by compromised values and failing legitimacy.

The answer is not to abandon fact-checking, education or sensible safeguards. It is to recognise their limits. A society cannot fact-check its way to integrity. It cannot regulate its way to trust. It cannot censor its way to reality.

The deeper cure is to make our shared world believable again: to say what we mean, to do what we say, to accept the real costs of our choices and to organise life around values that remain valid when they are inconvenient.

When reality is lived rather than merely asserted, misinformation loses the conditions it needs. The bearings return – not because everyone agrees, but because truth is no longer treated as whatever best serves the system in the moment.

The Myth Catcher – A quiet guide to discovering clarity in an age of noise | Full Text

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The AI Middle Ground | Beyond hype and panic: why the real challenge is not whether we use artificial intelligence, but whether we use it honestly, competently and responsibly

AI is neither magic nor a monster. It is a powerful, fallible tool-and the quality of its impact depends on the judgement of the people and institutions using it.

Last week, someone used AI to improve an email and then joined a conversation in which people criticised colleagues for using AI. Neither part of that scene would feel unusual. That is the strange position we have created for ourselves: artificial intelligence has become ordinary, but admitting to using it can still feel risky.

AI is already woven into daily life. It helps people draft, organise, translate, summarise, explore ideas and make sense of information. Students use it to understand difficult concepts. Workers use it to get started, keep up or communicate more clearly. Families encounter it inside products and services without always noticing.

Yet our public conversation remains trapped between two poles. At one extreme, AI is treated as magic: frictionless, authoritative and ready to replace almost anything. At the other, it is treated as a monster: inherently corrupting, socially ruinous or destined to escape human control. Both stories are seductive. Neither is a sound foundation for judgement.

The more useful position lies in the middle. AI is powerful. It is useful. It is fallible. It can extend human capability, but it can also conceal weak thinking, scale bad decisions and encourage people to surrender responsibility. The central question is therefore not simply whether AI is used. It is whether the person using it can understand, evaluate and stand behind the result.

The strange secret everyone shares

If you have used AI recently, the reason may have been modest. Perhaps a paragraph would not come together. Perhaps a blank slide needed a first outline. Perhaps an unfamiliar idea needed explaining in plain English. These uses are now commonplace, but people often describe them in whispers, if they describe them at all.

The result is a peculiar double standard. Workers quietly use AI to polish reports, then question a colleague who does the same. Managers use it to prepare material, then warn their teams not to depend on it. Students use it to structure their thinking, while assuming any classmate who mentions AI must have cheated. Writers use it to break a creative block, yet worry that disclosure will invalidate the work.

Not all of these uses are equivalent, and that is precisely the point. A student who asks for an explanation of a difficult concept is doing something fundamentally different from a student who submits an unexamined generated essay. An employee who uses AI to create a first draft and then checks every claim is not behaving like someone who presents an output they cannot explain. When all AI use is compressed into one moral category, honest use is discouraged and irresponsible use becomes harder to see.

AI is not the taboo. Transparency is. The person who discloses thoughtful use may be judged more harshly than the person who hides careless use. That rewards appearance over competence and secrecy over responsibility.

What we are actually getting wrong

The problem is not that people are using AI. The problem is how they are using it, what they expect from it and whether they remain capable of judging its work.

Imagine two colleagues preparing the same report. One understands the subject, uses AI to organise a rough draft, checks the evidence, challenges weak phrasing and takes responsibility for the final version. The other asks for a finished answer, accepts it because it sounds confident and sends it under their own name. The tool is the same. The intellectual act is not.

The same distinction matters in education. Using AI as a patient tutor can support learning: it can offer another explanation, test understanding or suggest questions to investigate. Using it to bypass the learning process produces the appearance of knowledge without the substance. One strengthens capability; the other hides its absence.

AI becomes dangerous when it replaces human understanding. People who do not understand a domain may use fluent output to fabricate expertise, produce work they cannot evaluate, trust claims they cannot verify or present themselves as competent when they are not. That is not augmentation. It is impersonation.

The deeper incentive is human, not technical. Many workplaces and institutions reward speed, polish and certainty. AI makes it easier to display all three, even when knowledge is shallow. If we reward the appearance of competence at any cost, we should not be surprised when people use new tools to manufacture it.

Technology is rarely dangerous simply because it exists. It becomes dangerous when people stop thinking, checking and accepting responsibility for what they do with it. The risk is not the tool alone. It is the abdication of judgement.

The fear machine

None of this means that AI carries no serious risks. Bias, privacy loss, surveillance, misinformation, concentrated power, insecure deployment and disruption to work all deserve sustained attention. The mistake is to let dramatic speculation crowd out the harms and choices already in front of us.

Two narratives dominate much of the debate. The first imagines AI-driven human extinction. Views on that possibility differ sharply, and uncertainty should invite scrutiny rather than dismissal. But distant scenarios often receive more attention than the immediate questions shaping workplaces, classrooms, public services and democratic trust: Who is accountable? What data was used? Can a decision be challenged? What happens when a confident answer is wrong?

The second narrative is that AI will make human beings redundant. This fear is more immediate, but even here agency matters. Technologies do not restructure organisations by themselves. Leaders choose what to automate, which safeguards to retain, who benefits from productivity gains and whether human expertise is preserved or discarded. AI may enable those choices, but it does not absolve the people making them.

The real threat is not simply replacement. It is devaluation: treating judgement, care, experience and accountability as costs to be removed rather than capabilities to be protected. Institutions can use AI to support people, or they can use it as a convenient explanation for decisions they already wanted to make.

This is why the double standard at the top matters. Some of the loudest warnings about AI coexist with a race to deploy it quickly. Public caution can sit beside private acceleration; calls for safety can sit beside resistance to meaningful scrutiny. That does not make every warning cynical. It does mean we should look beyond rhetoric and ask who holds power, who bears risk and who remains answerable when systems fail.

The real risk

At the individual level, secrecy creates its own damage. Students, workers, managers, writers, recruiters and publishers may all use AI while judging others for doing so. Honest use is punished, hidden use is rewarded, real capability becomes difficult to assess and misuse is pushed further from view.

This is not a coherent ethic. It is a culture that asks people to pretend.

The better boundary is responsibility. Anyone using AI should remain responsible for understanding the domain, evaluating the output, verifying consequential claims, protecting sensitive information, preserving their own capability and communicating honestly about material use. In high-stakes settings, that responsibility should be supported by clear governance, human oversight and a meaningful route to challenge decisions.

Responsibility also means knowing when not to use the tool. Convenience is not the same as appropriateness. A system that is helpful for brainstorming may be unsuitable for a confidential record, a legal conclusion, a medical decision or any task where the user cannot recognise a serious error.

When responsibility collapses, trust and capability follow. People lose confidence in work they cannot trace. Organisations become dependent on systems they cannot question. Knowledge thins out because fewer people practise the craft required to judge the output. AI does not create every one of these weaknesses. It reveals them, and it can scale them.

A workable middle ground

We do not need a ban, a panic or another story in which technology acts and human beings merely watch. We need a cultural reset built on five practical commitments.

Be honest. AI is already part of everyday work and learning. Clear, proportionate disclosure is healthier than ritual denial. The purpose is not to confess to using a tool; it is to make responsibility visible where that use materially affects the work.

Understand before you rely. People should not outsource judgement they do not possess. Domain knowledge, verification and an awareness of limitations are the ethical boundary between assistance and blind dependence.

Keep humans answerable. AI can suggest, organise and generate. It cannot carry moral or professional responsibility. A named person or institution must remain accountable for consequential decisions and outputs.

Distinguish different kinds of use. Augmentation is not automation. Exploration is not impersonation. Professionalising a rough expression is not fabricating expertise. Policies that ignore these differences will be both unfair and ineffective.

Protect capability. A tool should help people think and perform better, not leave them unable to work without it. The test is not only whether AI makes a task faster today, but whether its use strengthens or erodes the judgement needed tomorrow.

These principles do not settle every case. They provide something more useful than a slogan: a way to ask better questions. Did the user understand the subject? Could they detect an error? Was the use appropriate to the risk? Was anything important concealed? Who is accountable for the result? Did the process preserve or weaken human capability?

What happens next is still ours to decide

Every technological era eventually discovers the same truth: tools reveal us. They reveal what we value, what we are willing to overlook and where we prefer convenience to responsibility.

AI is revealing how often we reward appearance over competence, certainty over understanding and speed over care. It is also revealing something more hopeful: used well, it can help people learn, communicate, explore and contribute with greater confidence.

The question is not whether AI will change society. It already has. The question is whether we will use it to strengthen human judgement or gradually replace it with the performance of judgement.

AI did not create our inconsistency, our fragile systems or our temptation to avoid responsibility. It exposed them. The answer is not less thought about AI, but better thought: more honesty, more understanding, clearer accountability and a willingness to distinguish responsible assistance from intellectual surrender.

AI will not decide what happens next. We will-if we remain willing to understand the tools we use, answer for the choices we make and protect the human capabilities that give those tools value.

The Two Conditions That Make Work Work

Why people and especially young people look at the jobs on offer today and quietly think: “This doesn’t make sense.”

1. When Work Stops Working

If you talk honestly with people about work – not the official line, not the political noise, just the lived reality – you eventually reach the same conclusion: work doesn’t feel like it works anymore. Not in the way it used to. Not in the way it’s supposed to. And young people, more than anyone, can see that. They’re not confused, they’re not entitled, and they’re not disengaged because of screens or attitudes. They’re looking at the deal on the table and recognising that it simply doesn’t make sense.

Work is supposed to be the bridge between effort and life. It’s meant to give you the ability to stand on your own feet and the sense that what you’re doing matters.

But the modern system has quietly stripped both of those things away. And when you boil it down, work only really works when it gives you one of two things: independence or value. Ideally both. But at least one.

2. The First Condition: Financial Independence

Financial Independence is the foundation of adulthood. It’s the ability to rent a place without bankrupting yourself, to buy food without doing mental arithmetic in the aisle, to get around, to have a social life, to save a little, to make choices about your own life. It’s not luxury. It’s not excess. It’s the basic ability to live without relying on parents, welfare, or debt.

But minimum wage doesn’t get you there. It doesn’t even come close. It barely covers the basics, and even then you’re juggling, compromising, cutting corners. You’re working, but you’re not independent. You’re employed, but you’re not free. And young people can see this as clearly as anyone else who is struggling.

They can do the maths. They know that the jobs being pushed at them don’t lead to independence. So when they hesitate or disengage, it’s not because they don’t want to work. It’s because the work on offer doesn’t do the one thing work is supposed to do.

3. The Second Condition: Value

The second condition is just as important, and just as absent.

Work has to give you a sense of value – not corporate “values”, not a mission statement, not a poster in the staff room, but real human value.

The feeling that what you’re doing matters to someone, or something, or even just to yourself. That you’re contributing. That you’re learning. That you’re part of something that isn’t pointless.

Value does not mean enjoying every minute of a job. It means being able to see how your effort contributes to something beyond simply generating revenue.

But look at the jobs the modern economy produces. So many of them exist because the system is built around global supply chains, centralised decision‑making, and profit extraction.

Work becomes a cost to be minimised, not a human activity to be dignified.

You end up with roles that are repetitive, hollow, disconnected from anything real. Jobs that don’t build capability. Jobs that don’t meet human needs. Jobs that don’t connect you to your community. By contrast, the work people most often describe as meaningful lets them see who benefits from their effort: colleagues, customers, patients, neighbours or the wider community.

Older and past generations often had work that produced something tangible. Young people and older lower-paid workers today inherit work that produces output, but not meaning. And they feel that hollowness immediately.

The obvious question is how an economy that depends on work ended up producing so many jobs that deliver neither independence nor value. The answer lies in what the economy has been organised to prioritise.

4. The System That Produces Jobs That Fail Both Conditions

None of this is an accident. It reflects an economy increasingly organised around stimulating wants while making many basic needs harder to secure.

Streaming services, fast fashion, takeaways, processed food, endless digital consumption – these things aren’t needs, but the economy treats them like essentials.

Meanwhile, the actual essentials – housing, healthcare, nutritious food, transport, education – have become luxuries. Hard to access. Hard to afford. Hard to rely on.

The problem is not that services built around wants have no value, or that the people doing those jobs contribute less. It is that the system often rewards the creation and consumption of wants more reliably than the meeting of needs. The result is too many roles that provide neither a secure livelihood nor a visible connection between effort and social value. They fail both conditions.

The lower paid have already been hurt and pushed aside by this. And young people aren’t confused by this either. They’re simply the first generation to see the system clearly at the start.

5. Young People Didn’t Fail – The System Did

For years, society has misdiagnosed youth disengagement. It has blamed smartphones, social media, entitlement, lack of resilience, poor attitudes, apathy, welfare dependency.

But none of that explains what’s actually happening. Young people aren’t disengaged because they’re shallow or distracted. They’re disengaged because the system offers education built on sameness and measurement, social mobility built on narrative rather than capability, governance that is distant and hollow, welfare scapegoating that hides economic failure, and work that doesn’t deliver independence or value.

They’re not rejecting adulthood. They’re rejecting a version of adulthood that doesn’t work.

6. Why People Increasingly Reject Jobs That Fail Both Conditions

When work fails both conditions, rejecting it is not laziness. It’s discernment.

People are not refusing responsibility. They’re refusing exploitation.

They’re not rejecting work. They’re rejecting employment that offers neither independence nor value.

And when you look at the reality of what’s on offer, it’s hard to argue with them.

7. The Path Forward: Locality, Contribution, and Real Value

The way forward isn’t about tearing the whole thing down. It’s about recognising where work actually works – and it’s always the same place: locally.

When decisions are made close to the people they affect, work becomes meaningful again. When value is created and recognised within communities, work becomes human again. When contribution is rewarded instead of consumption, work becomes purposeful again. And when basic living standards are guaranteed – not as luxuries, but as the foundation of life – work becomes a bridge again, not a trap.

This isn’t a utopian idea. It’s simply the conditions under which work has always worked, for everyone.

8. Work Has to Work

Work only works when it gives independence, value or both.

Right now, too many jobs give neither.

Young people aren’t the problem and the low paid and vulnerable in older generations have been struggling too. Young people are just the first to recognise the problem, right ‘out of school’. And they’re right.

Work has to work. It has to mean something. It has to lead somewhere. It has to connect you to life, not drain you from it.

Until the system can offer that again, people of all ages will keep rejecting work that doesn’t work. And honestly, who can blame them.