The November budget, with its push toward higher taxation, is not simply a matter of fiscal policy. It is a warning sign, a flare in the night sky that tells us the system we live under is running out of road.
Few people recognise what this shift truly signals, and fewer still are willing to confront it. That blindness is not accidental. Our economy has been carefully designed to mislead, to disguise its fragility, and to keep even the sharpest minds chasing illusions.
For decades, governments have expanded the flow of money, not by creating genuine value, but by inflating the system.
They bailed out the banks that caused the crash of 2007- 08, rewarding failure with public funds. Later, they unleashed torrents of money during the Covid pandemic, not to rebuild resilience, but to keep the machine ticking over.
These interventions did not repair the foundations; they merely propped up a broken structure. The result is a distorted reality in which the government can no longer borrow what it needs to sustain public services. Instead, it faces crises that today’s politicians are neither prepared nor equipped to lead us through.
To keep the illusion alive – to make it appear that everything is functioning as normal – the government must find money somewhere.
If banks cannot provide it (and in truth, they never had it to lend in the first place), then the state will take it from us. Taxation becomes not a tool of governance but a desperate grab for survival, a way to scrape together whatever can be found to keep the plates spinning.
This is the trap of the political class. They value their positions and the power they believe they hold more than the consequences of their choices.
Whether they admit the truth now or continue draining the public first, the end is the same: collapse.
The system is already hurting millions, and it cannot endure indefinitely. The only uncertainty is whether we lose what remains of our wealth before the collapse, or when it finally arrives.
The bitter irony is that our money is tied to nothing of real value. That emptiness is what has allowed politicians and elites to manipulate the system for so long. Could anyone become an overnight billionaire if wealth were grounded in tangible worth? Of course not. Their fortunes exist because people buy into offerings with money that, in essence, does not even exist.
This government – and likely the next one too – is living on borrowed time. Real change will only come when leaders emerge who understand the true nature of the crisis and are willing to act decisively to rebuild on solid ground.
Until then, the charade continues – as does the damage that it causes.
Few will welcome the upheaval that is coming, but it is inevitable: the world will soon operate very differently than it does today.
That shift need not be catastrophic. We still have choices, and we still have the chance to take a better path.
But this requires honesty. It requires accepting that the obsession with money at the centre of everything must end.
Unlike the politicians driving the UK bus towards the cliff, we must recognise that we have already reached a place called stop.
From here, the only way forward is to put people first.
Adam Tugwell 