Writing about people, systems and the realities that shape our lives
Category: Wealth Inequality
Discussing the wealth divide, wealth inequality, the cost of living, the cost of living crisis, poverty, hunger, disadvantage, social exclusion, social mobility issues, being underpaid, unemployment,
Poverty is often described as a lack of money. Governments measure it through income thresholds, commentators discuss it in terms of affordability, and public debate frequently focuses on individual expenses such as housing, food, or energy. While these measures and discussions capture important aspects of economic hardship, they often fail to identify the underlying condition that poverty represents.
The fundamental issue is not simply a shortage of income. It is the loss of independence.
In a modern economy, poverty begins when a person can no longer meet their essential needs through their own resources and must rely on external support to maintain a basic standard of living.
The inability to sustain oneself independently marks the boundary between economic security and economic vulnerability. This point may be described as the Independence Threshold.
Understanding poverty through independence shifts attention away from arbitrary income figures and towards a more meaningful question: can an individual meet the essential requirements of life without falling into debt, relying on welfare, or depending on charity?
If the answer is no, poverty has already begun.
Poverty as the Loss of Independence
Independence is often taken for granted. It is expressed through ordinary activities: paying rent, buying food, travelling to work, heating a home, replacing worn clothing, maintaining communication, and managing unexpected expenses.
These activities appear routine because they are routine for those whose incomes allow them to participate fully in economic life. Yet all depend upon a continuing ability to convert income into essential goods and services.
When that ability is lost, independence begins to erode.
A person who cannot afford housing without assistance is not fully independent. A person who must regularly choose between heating and eating is not fully independent. A person who requires continual borrowing to meet ordinary living costs is not fully independent.
The common feature in each case is not low income itself, but an inability to sustain essential needs through one’s own means.
Poverty is therefore better understood as a condition of dependency rather than simply a condition of low earnings.
Independence Exists Within an Economic Context
No individual becomes independent in isolation. Independence is shaped by the economy in which a person lives.
The resources required to maintain a basic life differ between countries, regions, and periods of history. Modern life carries obligations that did not exist for previous generations and costs that vary considerably between locations.
Housing, transport, energy, communication, healthcare, taxation, childcare, and access to employment all influence the resources required for independent living.
As these costs rise, the income necessary to maintain independence rises with them.
This has important implications for how poverty is understood.
A level of income that provides security in one economy may produce hardship in another. Likewise, an income that supported independence ten years ago may no longer be sufficient today if essential costs have increased.
Poverty cannot therefore be understood solely through absolute measures. It must be understood relative to the economic conditions in which people actually live.
The question is not simply how much money a person has.
The question is whether that money is sufficient to maintain independence within the economic environment that surrounds them.
The Consequences of Falling Below the Threshold
The loss of independence has consequences that extend far beyond finances.
When people cannot reliably meet their essential needs, uncertainty becomes a constant feature of daily life. Long-term planning becomes difficult. Financial shocks become crises. Opportunities are declined because the risks are too great. Immediate necessities take precedence over future ambitions.
Over time, this creates a pattern of exclusion.
Participation in social activities may decline because they can no longer be afforded. Educational opportunities may be deferred. Career progression may be limited by transport costs, childcare costs, or insecure housing. Physical and mental wellbeing may deteriorate as financial pressures intensify.
Poverty therefore affects more than material possessions. It constrains choices, limits participation, and reduces personal agency.
The defining characteristic of poverty is not merely what people lack. It is what they are no longer free to do.
The Limits of Traditional Poverty Measures
Most poverty measures focus primarily on income.
While income remains important, income alone does not determine whether a person is independent.
Two households with identical earnings may experience very different levels of security depending upon their circumstances. Housing costs, debt obligations, family responsibilities, regional price differences, disability-related expenses, transport requirements, and many other factors influence whether income is sufficient to meet essential needs.
As a result, many people who sit above official poverty lines still struggle to maintain independence. They may appear financially secure according to statistical measures while relying on borrowing, family support, charitable assistance, or the continual postponement of essential spending.
Such individuals may not be recognised by conventional poverty measures, yet their independence remains fragile.
A more meaningful understanding of poverty requires identifying the point at which independence becomes unsustainable, rather than merely measuring income against a predetermined percentage or average.
Defining the Requirements of Independence
If poverty begins when independence ends, a practical question emerges.
What is required to remain independent?
The answer cannot be limited to survival alone.
Independence in a modern society requires more than the bare minimum needed to stay alive. It requires access to the goods and services necessary for participation in ordinary economic and social life.
This includes adequate food, secure housing, utilities, transport, healthcare, clothing, communication, and the ability to absorb unexpected expenses. It also requires a modest capacity to participate in society and contribute to the wider community through taxation and civic engagement.
Together, these elements form the basis of a Basic Living Standard.
The Basic Living Standard represents the minimum set of resources required for a person to live independently within a modern economy. It is not a measure of comfort, luxury, or affluence. Nor is it a subsistence model concerned only with physical survival.
Instead, it identifies the economic foundation necessary for stability, dignity, and participation.
The Relationship Between the Independence Threshold and the Basic Living Standard
The Independence Threshold and the Basic Living Standard represent two parts of the same framework.
The Independence Threshold defines the condition of poverty. It identifies the point at which an individual loses the ability to meet essential needs without external support.
The Basic Living Standard defines the resources required to avoid that condition. It establishes the minimum economic foundation necessary to sustain independence.
One identifies the boundary.
The other identifies where that boundary lies.
Together, they provide both a definition and a measurement.
If an individual’s earned income is sufficient to achieve the Basic Living Standard, independence is maintained. If it is insufficient, independence becomes compromised, and poverty emerges.
This relationship transforms poverty from an abstract social concern into a measurable economic reality.
A New Foundation for Economic Policy
Viewing poverty through the lens of independence creates a different basis for public policy.
The central question becomes whether the structures of the economy allow people to maintain independent lives through their own efforts.
Wages, housing policy, taxation, transport infrastructure, energy markets, healthcare provision, and social support systems can all be assessed according to their effect on independence.
A minimum wage, for example, cannot be considered adequate simply because it exists. Its adequacy depends upon whether it enables a worker to achieve the Basic Living Standard without requiring continual supplementation from debt, welfare, or charity.
Similarly, economic growth cannot be evaluated solely through national statistics if increasing living costs simultaneously undermine the independence of large sections of the population.
An economy succeeds not merely when it generates wealth, but when it allows ordinary people to sustain independent lives within it.
Conclusion
Poverty is often treated as a problem of insufficient income. In reality, it is more accurately understood as a loss of independence.
The ability to meet essential needs through one’s own resources represents the foundation of economic security, personal agency, and meaningful participation in society. When that ability is lost, poverty begins, regardless of how it is measured statistically.
The Independence Threshold identifies this critical boundary. The Basic Living Standard identifies the resources required to remain above it.
Together, they provide a framework for understanding poverty that is rooted not in abstract financial measures, but in the practical realities of everyday life. They shift the focus from income alone to the broader question of whether people possess the means to sustain themselves with dignity, stability, and autonomy.
In doing so, they offer a foundation for a more coherent understanding of poverty and a clearer means of addressing it.
Further Reading
The ideas presented in this essay are explored in greater depth across a series of related works. Together, these pieces trace the development of the Basic Living Standard and the Independence Threshold, from the practical question of what people need to live independently, through to a broader philosophy of freedom, autonomy, and economic participation.
This is the foundational statement of the Basic Living Standard. It sets out the principle that anyone working full time at the lowest legal wage should be able to meet all essential living costs without debt, welfare dependency, or charity.
The article defines the components of a basic but dignified life and establishes the standard as a practical benchmark for wages, public policy, and economic justice.
This accessible introduction explains the purpose and mechanics of the Basic Living Standard. It explores why traditional measures such as minimum wage and poverty thresholds often fail to reflect lived reality and demonstrates how a living standard based on genuine economic independence can provide a clearer and more meaningful benchmark.
3. The Basic Living Standard: Freedom to Think, Freedom to Do, Freedom to Be
Moving beyond economics, this essay explores the deeper human implications of financial security. It argues that economic independence creates the conditions for genuine freedom: the freedom to think without constant anxiety, to act with agency and purpose, and to develop one’s identity without the constraints imposed by persistent insecurity.
The piece examines the relationship between personal sovereignty, dignity, wellbeing, and social stability.
4. The Independence Threshold: A New Definition of Poverty for a Modern Economy
This work develops a new definition of poverty based on the concept of independence rather than income alone. It argues that poverty begins at the point where a person can no longer meet their essential needs without external support.
The article introduces the Independence Threshold as a framework for understanding poverty within modern economies and explains its relationship to exclusion, participation, and economic resilience.
As the 28 October Budget approaches, traders are openly betting against the pound. This essay argues that the real story is not the bet itself, but the growing gap between the people who make decisions and the people who live with the results. I call that gap moral distance – and once you see it, a great deal of modern British life starts to make sense.
There are moments when a country sees itself clearly. Not because someone reveals a secret, but because something that has always been happening suddenly becomes impossible to ignore. The run‑up to the 28 October Budget is one of those moments.
Currency traders are openly betting on the pound falling. Commentators treat it as technical. Politicians treat it as background noise. Markets treat it as opportunity. But the reality is far more consequential: people with the ability to move vast sums of money are playing a game whose results land on everyone else – and the extraordinary thing is that the game is happening in full view, without moral scrutiny, and without anyone connecting the dots.
This is not a story about markets alone. It is a story about a political system that has become market‑facing, an economic system built on promises rather than real value, and a society that has been quietly hollowed out by decades of decisions designed to push consequences onto tomorrow.
Tomorrow has now shown up.
The dots can be connected. Running through the currency markets, the political system, the economy and our wider culture is a single thread: the separation of action from consequence. The people who make the decisions are, more and more often, not the people who live with what those decisions bring. That separation is what this essay is about.
I. Moral Distance: The Thread That Connects Everything
Moral distance is the gap between the person who makes a decision and the person who lives with its consequences. When that gap is small – a builder who lives in the street he builds, a business owner who employs her neighbours – responsibility is felt directly. You see the people affected. You meet them. You have to look them in the eye.
When the gap grows large, something changes. The people affected become abstract. Their lives turn into numbers, positions, risks and forecasts. Decisions stop feeling like choices with victims and start feeling like technical moves in a game. Nobody needs to be cruel for harm to be done. Distance does the work.
This essay follows four forms of moral distance that now shape British economic life:
Traders are distant from the consequences of the bets they place.
Politicians are distant from the future costs of the choices they make.
Institutions are distant from the communities affected by their decisions.
Markets are distant from the people whose lives become the outcome.
None of these distances is new. What is new is that they now reinforce one another, until markets, money and politics behave as a single system – and a culture that judges actions by whether they pay, rather than by who pays for them, makes the whole arrangement feel normal. The sections that follow take each distance in turn, then ask what it would take to close it.
II. The Game Is Visible – But Its Meaning Isn’t
Currency markets behave like one giant betting arena. Traders wager on the future value of the pound based on expectations of growth, borrowing, political stability and fiscal credibility. When they bet on a weaker pound, they are not expressing an opinion. They are shaping the conditions in which government must operate.
This is not metaphor. It is literal.
For readers less familiar with how this works: a trader who expects the pound to fall can sell pounds today, hoping to buy them back more cheaply later, or use financial contracts that pay out if the pound weakens. One trader makes little difference. But when large funds take the same view at the same time, their selling can help bring about the very fall they are betting on. The forecast becomes part of the cause.
A fall in the pound means:
higher import costs
higher energy prices
higher inflation
pressure on interest rates
constraints on government action
rising costs for households and businesses
The chain is simple. Britain buys much of its energy, food and materials from abroad, priced in other currencies. When the pound buys less, those things cost more. Rising prices push up inflation, which puts pressure on the Bank of England to keep interest rates high – and that, in turn, raises the cost of mortgages, business loans and government borrowing alike.
The people who place the bets are rarely the people who bear the full consequences of those bets. The costs are spread across millions of households and businesses that never entered the game in the first place.
This is the moral inversion at the centre of the system.
It is moral distance in its purest form. The decision and its consequences are separated so completely that the person placing the bet need never see, meet or think about the people who will pay for it.
As Budget day approaches, the familiar ritual is already under way. Journalists speculate about winners and losers. Ministers brief against expectations. Economists debate forecasts. Traders position themselves for gains or losses. Yet beneath the noise sits a quieter question: what kind of economy has become so sensitive to expectations that anticipation itself can help shape outcomes?
The Extraordinary Thing: The Game Is Happening in Full View
This is the part nobody talks about.
Currency speculation is not hidden. It is not subtle. It is not coded.
It is public. It is visible. It is normalised.
Every time the pound moves, the scoreboard updates. Every time traders place bets, the scoreboard reacts. Every time government signals uncertainty, the scoreboard flashes red.
And yet the public conversation treats this as technical rather than moral.
The game is happening in plain sight. The consequences are happening in private. And nobody is connecting the dots.
III. Government and the Governed: The Political System Has Become Market‑Facing
Britain’s political and economic machinery has become increasingly brittle. When a system is fragile, even small market signals can become national events. Governments now govern with markets in mind because markets have become the arbiters of credibility.
Bond yields judge borrowing. Currency markets judge stability. Ratings agencies judge risk. Investor sentiment judges political behaviour.
A brief explanation helps here. When the government borrows, it sells bonds – promises to repay with interest. The bond yield is, in effect, the interest rate investors demand to lend to the state. If they lose confidence, they demand more, and the cost of everything government does rises with it. Ratings agencies, meanwhile, publish grades on how risky a country’s debt appears, and those grades influence what lenders are willing to accept.
This is not democratic accountability. It is market accountability.
And it means the game played in financial markets becomes the game government must respond to.
The issue is not that governments should ignore markets. A government that borrows recklessly, wastes resources or loses credibility will eventually discover that reality matters. The deeper question is why modern states have become so dependent on financial market approval that a week of trading can overshadow years of democratic decision-making. Markets are meant to be one source of information. Increasingly, they function as a source of permission.
The issue is not that markets exist. The issue is that governments, institutions and economies have become organised around satisfying them.
Markets have become powerful because politics, borrowing and economic structure have been built around their reactions. And that creates a second form of moral distance. A government answering to markets is rewarded for looking credible today, while the costs of what it postpones – repairs not made, investment not undertaken, problems not faced – fall on people further down the line, many of whom are too young to vote and some of whom are not yet born. Politicians are held to account by the scoreboard in front of them, not by the future they are shaping.
IV. Money and What It Stands For: The Economic System Enables the Game
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.
That is moral distance stretched across time. The person who chooses to wait and the person who pays for the waiting are rarely the same.
For decades, governments, banks and institutions have pushed consequences onto tomorrow. They built a system where money is created as credit, where debt is treated as value, and where promises grow faster than the real things – skills, industries, communities, land, energy – that money is supposed to stand for.
In plain terms: most money today is not printed by the state but created when banks make loans. Every loan is a claim on the future – a promise that value will be produced later to repay it. The modern system increasingly creates those claims on future value faster than it creates the real things that make prosperity possible. Debt grows faster than productive capacity. Asset prices grow faster than wages. Financial wealth grows faster than physical wealth. Each of these is another kind of distance: between money and the things money is meant to represent.
This system works only if everyone keeps believing the promises.
Currency markets are the purest expression of that belief. They trade the future as if it were a commodity. They price political decisions before they happen. They reward instability when instability is profitable.
And because the real economy has been hollowed out – the skills lost, the industries sold, the communities weakened – even small market movements now hit with disproportionate force.
V. Decisions and Places: The Hollowing Out Makes the Consequences Unavoidable
The hollowing out is not abstract. It is visible everywhere:
towns that have forgotten what they were for
trades that disappeared in a generation
public services stretched thin
wages that buy less every year
rivers that are no longer safe
homes priced as assets rather than places to live
This hollowing out rarely makes headlines in one go. It arrives slowly, and then all at once: a long accumulation of choices that only becomes visible when the consequences can no longer be deferred.
When markets bet against the pound, they are not betting against a number. They are betting against a hollowed‑out real economy.
And the consequences land on the people living inside it.
This is the third form of moral distance. The decisions that shaped these places – to close a plant, sell a firm, cut a service, treat housing as an investment – were mostly taken in boardrooms, trading floors and ministries a long way from the streets that live with the results. Institutions rarely see the town that forgot what it was for. They see a line in a report.
VI. The Cultural Reflex That Keeps the Game Alive
Across British economic life, a cultural reflex has taken hold:
If it makes money, it’s justified.
If it’s possible, it’s acceptable.
If it’s legal, it’s moral.
If markets reward it, it must be right.
This reflex is not confined to traders. It runs through politics, business, public institutions and even household financial culture. It is the reflex that allowed the creation of money from promises to become the foundation of the modern economy.
It is the reflex that allowed the hollowing out to happen. It is the reflex that allowed consequences to be pushed onto tomorrow. And it is the reflex that allows currency betting to be treated as neutral.
But legality is not morality. Profitability is not justification. Capability is not legitimacy.
The fact that the game is possible does not mean the game is right.
This reflex is what turns moral distance from an accident into a habit. If the only test of an action is whether it pays, nobody ever needs to ask who pays for it. The question that would close the distance – who lives with the consequences of this? – simply never comes up.
VII. Tomorrow Has Shown Up – And the Bill Is Being Paid
Tomorrow rarely arrives with a bang. It arrives the way a damp patch spreads across a ceiling: slowly, and then all at once.
We are living in the “all at once”.
The bill is arriving as:
a generation that cannot afford a home
wages that fall behind prices
public services that no longer stretch
political systems that cannot act
markets that shape national outcomes
a currency vulnerable to speculation
a future already spent
The bill is not calculated in pounds. It is calculated in lost skills, lost trust, lost places and lost time.
And it cannot be refinanced, rolled over or printed away.
This is what moral distance looks like when it finally closes. Not on the people who made the decisions, but on the people who were furthest from them.
VIII. The Question the Budget Should Confront
The Budget on 28 October will be judged instantly by markets. But the public should judge it on something else:
Does it challenge the cultural assumption that profit is the highest form of value?Or does it reinforce it?
Put another way: does it narrow the distance between those who decide and those who bear the cost – or widen it?
Because until that assumption is confronted:
markets will continue to play the game
government will continue to respond to it
society will continue to absorb the consequences
and tomorrow will continue to arrive faster than anyone expects
Conclusion: Closing the Distance
This essay began with currency traders, but it was never really about them. The trader is distant from the household. The politician is distant from the future. The institution is distant from the town. The market is distant from the people whose lives become its outcome. And a culture that asks only whether something pays has made all of these distances feel ordinary.
Closing the distance does not mean abolishing markets or pretending that borrowing has no price. It means reconnecting decisions with their consequences: asking, every time, who will live with this – and giving those people a voice before the bill arrives, not after. It means remembering the difference between price and value, between profit and legitimacy, between wealth and prosperity, between markets and society.
Because a society that measures everything by its market price eventually forgets how to recognise value that markets cannot price at all.
The game is in plain sight. The consequences are unavoidable. And the only question left is whether we choose to see it.
Key Terms
Moral distance – the gap between the people who make a decision and the people who live with its consequences.
Currency speculation – buying or selling a currency, or contracts linked to it, to profit from changes in its value.
Bond yield – the effective interest rate a government pays to borrow; it rises when lenders become less confident.
Ratings agencies – private firms that grade how risky a government’s or company’s debt appears.
Market‑facing government – a political system that shapes its decisions around how financial markets are expected to react.
Credit money – money created when banks make loans, rather than printed by the state.
Hollowing out – the gradual loss of skills, industries, services and community life that sustain a real economy.
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…
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.
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?
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?
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?
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?
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?
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
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).
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.
Further Reading
This piece draws on a wider body of my work. The essays below follow the same arc as the article: what “the system” is, why growth has drifted away from everyday life, how households and businesses are being squeezed, why Britain has become more fragile, and what leadership means when the model itself is under strain.
I. Understanding the System
The Establishment Is Not What You Think It Is
Why the modern Establishment is a worldview rather than a class, and why even those who oppose it often operate inside it. The foundation for what this piece means by “the system”.
How politicians discover, on entering office, that the system they inherit is already failing – and why that leaves them with so few meaningful levers.
Why money is not a fixed substance but a social and legal system of claims, promises and credit – and how created purchasing power becomes real title over real things, in a system whose rules were never equal.
Why traditional economic levers have worn out, leaving taxation as the mechanism governments can still use – and what that means for households and businesses.
How rising costs, fragile supply chains and systemic pressures are squeezing small firms – and why the model treats them as revenue sources rather than partners.
Taken together, these essays form a map of the moment Britain now occupies: a worldview that still defines what counts as realistic, an economic model built for conditions that have passed, a politics increasingly focused on personalities and performance, fragile supply chains, and a public squeezed by forces far larger than any single policy.
They do not predict what will happen next. They explain why the choices available to any government – including the one delivering the 28 October Budget – are shaped by pressures far larger than any single party or personality.
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.
Further Reading
Exploring the deeper roots of why work doesn’t work for so many – and what a better system could look like.
The ideas in The Two Conditions That Make Work Work don’t exist in isolation. They sit within a wider story about how young people are treated, how our political and economic systems have drifted away from real life, how education has been reshaped around measurement rather than capability, and how meaningful contribution for everyone has been pushed aside by consumption and profit‑centric thinking.
The following pieces expand on those themes. They’re arranged in a way that helps a reader move from understanding why young people feel the way they do, through how the system creates these conditions, and finally toward what a better future could look like for everyone.
I. Understanding Young People’s Experience of the System
The Young People Who Didn’t Fail – And the System That Keeps Pretending They Did
A clear, honest look at how young people are blamed for outcomes created by the system itself. This piece explains why disengagement is not a personal failure but a predictable response to structures that don’t work.
Why Young People and Smartphones Are Not the Problem
A dismantling of the idea that technology is responsible for youth disengagement. It shows how smartphones have become a convenient scapegoat for deeper systemic failures.
This piece explores how political and media narratives about social media distract from the real issues affecting young people – including the erosion of independence, value, and meaningful pathways.
Why these matter: These articles help readers understand that young people aren’t rejecting work, society, or adulthood. They’re responding rationally to a system that has stopped offering the basic conditions required for any of those things to function.
II. Politics, Governance, and Why Young People Disengage
Young People, Politics, and the System That Is Failing All of Us
A deep dive into why young people feel alienated from politics – not because they don’t care, but because governance has become distant, hollow, and disconnected from real life.
Stop Blaming Welfare for Problems This Economic Model Created
This piece explains how welfare is used as a political distraction from the structural failures of the economic model itself – failures that directly shape the work crisis.
A foundational explanation of how local governance and local economies can restore meaning, accountability, and value – themes central to rebuilding work that works.
Why these matter: They show that the crisis in work is inseparable from the crisis in governance. When decision‑making becomes remote and abstract, work becomes remote and abstract too.
III. Education, Capability, and the Myth of Social Mobility
A critique of how social mobility has been reframed around narrative and status rather than real capability – leaving many young people feeling inadequate despite having genuine strengths.
Vocational GCSEs and the Limits of a System Built on Measurement
An exploration of how education has become obsessed with metrics, qualifications, and standardisation – often at the expense of real learning and practical contribution.
A long‑standing argument that equality in education has been misunderstood as sameness, leading to a system that fails to recognise different strengths and pathways.
Equality in Education Has Been Destroyed by the Idea That All Can Make the Best of the Same Opportunities
A clear explanation of how the commercialisation of education created debt, distorted incentives, and pushed young people into pathways that don’t lead to independence or value.
Why these matter: They reveal how the work crisis begins long before a young person enters the labour market. The system shapes expectations, limits capability, and funnels people into roles that fail both conditions.
IV. Contribution, Local Value, and a Better Future
A vision for a future where contribution – not consumption, not credentials, not profit extraction – becomes the foundation of work, business, and governance.
Future Economics Must Be Tied Only to People and Their Contribution
A broader economic argument showing how currency, value, and contribution must be re‑anchored to human needs rather than speculation or global extraction.
A clear, accessible explanation of what a basic living standard is, why it matters, and how it underpins independence – the first condition that makes work work.
Why these matter: These pieces point toward a future where work can once again deliver independence and value – not through abstract policy, but through local contribution, real capability, and systems designed around human needs.
Closing Note
If The Two Conditions That Make Work Work resonates with you, these pieces will help you explore the deeper roots of the problem – and the practical, human‑centred ideas that can guide us toward something better.
They’re not academic papers or political manifestos. They’re reflections on how life actually feels for people navigating a system that has drifted away from what matters.
Taken together, they form a journey: from understanding the crisis, to recognising its causes, to imagining a future where work works again.
