Britain’s Most Dangerous Assumption | Why Winning Elections Doesn’t Guarantee Leadership

As another Budget arrives, Britain is once again engaged in a familiar ritual.

Ministers are accused of incompetence. The Chancellor is criticised for decisions already taken and decisions yet to come. Commentators debate taxes, spending and who deserves the blame for the country’s economic position.

Beneath all these arguments sits an assumption so familiar that we rarely notice it.

We assume that being elected and being capable of governing are essentially the same thing.

But what if they aren’t?

What if Britain’s most dangerous assumption is not that our politicians are incompetent, but that electoral success somehow confers expertise?

The moment someone becomes an MP, a Cabinet Minister, a Mayor, a Chancellor or a Prime Minister, something curious happens. We begin to assume that their office tells us something about their ability. We assume they possess insights we lack. We assume they have demonstrated the qualities necessary to deal with the immense responsibilities they now carry.

Yet what has actually been proven?

That they won an election.

That they navigated a political party.

That they persuaded enough people to support them over someone else.

None of those achievements are easy. All require skill. But they are not necessarily evidence of an ability to navigate the increasingly complex economic, financial and institutional challenges that governments now face.

The distinction matters.

If your accountant successfully stood for Parliament tomorrow, would you automatically assume they had the skills required to run the NHS?

If a successful entrepreneur became Chancellor, would that alone qualify them to reform housing, welfare, policing, local government and infrastructure simultaneously?

Of course not.

We instinctively understand that success in one field does not automatically translate into competence in another. Yet politics occupies a unique position in public life. Election itself often becomes a form of qualification.

At least in our minds.

I was reminded of this recently while discussing the political situation today with a friend.

Imagine walking into a busy pub on a Thursday evening. Pick a reasonably intelligent person at random and tell them they need to be outside Number 10 on Friday morning because they are now Prime Minister.

Most people would laugh at the absurdity of the suggestion.

But why?

What exactly is the qualification that separates that person from the one who eventually walks through the black door?

I’m not suggesting they would make a better Prime Minister. Equally, I’m not convinced they would automatically make a worse one.

The point is that we often imagine the gap between ordinary citizens and political leaders to be far larger than it really is.

Strip away the titles, the advisers, the official cars and the ceremony, and we are left with human beings attempting to make sense of situations that would challenge almost anyone.

That is not a criticism. It is simply reality.

In fact, I increasingly find myself feeling a degree of sympathy for many of the people who reach the highest offices in the country.

Not because I agree with them.

Not because they should be excused for poor decisions.

But because many appear to spend years pursuing power only to discover that power is not quite what they imagined it would be.

They arrive in office. The briefings begin. The numbers become clearer. The constraints emerge. The choices narrow.

And many of the assumptions they held while seeking office fail to survive contact with the realities of governing.

Recent weeks have provided examples of senior politicians admitting that the true state of affairs only became clear once they briefed in their roles. Many interpreted those admissions as evidence of incompetence.

I took something different from them.

They suggested a growing disconnect between politics and governing.

If people can reach the highest offices in the country before fully understanding the position they are inheriting, what does that tell us about the system that selected them?

This question matters because the challenges facing Britain today are very different from those faced by governments even a generation ago.

For decades, economic growth offered political room for manoeuvre. It increased tax receipts, supported borrowing and softened difficult choices. Governments could often postpone problems without immediately paying the price.

That space appears increasingly limited.

Today’s governments inherit enormous financial commitments, ageing infrastructure, mounting pressures on public services and an economy that no longer responds as predictably as political models often assume.

Yet our political system still primarily rewards people for becoming good politicians.

It does not necessarily reward them for understanding the deeper structural constraints they may eventually be asked to confront.

More importantly, it does not necessarily reward leadership.

Leadership is often confused with authority, but the two are not the same.

Authority comes with a title. Leadership is earned through judgement, trust and a willingness to confront reality as it is rather than as we might wish it to be.

A person can hold high office without ever truly leading. Equally, some of the finest examples of leadership are found far from the corridors of power.

Representative leadership, at its best, is fundamentally selfless. It is service-oriented. It is not driven by personal advancement, ideological purity or the pursuit of power for its own sake. It is rooted in a willingness to place the long-term interests of the public above personal or political convenience.

Above all, it requires an unwavering commitment to the common good.

That commitment becomes most visible when circumstances are difficult, when trade-offs are unavoidable and when there are no easy answers. Those are the moments when leadership matters most.

That may help explain why successive governments often encounter the same difficulties.

Different parties promise different things.

Different leaders arrive with different personalities.

The rhetoric changes.

The names change.

Yet the same constraints continue to reappear.

At some point we have to ask whether this is simply a story about individual politicians succeeding or failing.

Or whether it is a story about a society that has placed extraordinary faith in a political class whose preparation no longer matches the nature of the challenges before it.

As the Budget reaches Parliament, scrutiny of ministers and their decisions is entirely appropriate.

But perhaps we should spend some time thinking about a deeper question.

Britain’s problem may not simply be that we keep electing the wrong people.

It may be that we continue expecting an electoral process to produce something it was never designed to guarantee: leadership.

Winning power and exercising power are not the same skill.

Campaigning is about persuading people to place their trust in you.

Leadership is about proving that trust was justified.

It demands the courage to confront reality, the humility to recognise constraints and the judgement to place the common good above personal or political interest.

Leadership begins where campaigning ends.

The longer we pretend that electoral success automatically produces those qualities, the more surprised we will be when governments of every colour encounter the same limits, the same constraints and the same disappointments.

That possibility is far more unsettling than the idea that we simply elected the wrong government.

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Burnham’s First Conference Speech as Prime Minister: Performance Politics at the End of a System

Andy Burnham’s first Labour conference speech as Prime Minister was delivered with confidence and clarity. It was well paced, well received, and immediately treated by the media as a set of current, immediate, and actionable policy commitments.

But many of the policies Burnham discussed were explicitly framed for the next Parliament. Yet the media analysed them as if they were decisions the government was preparing to implement now.

This is not optimism. It is not enthusiasm. It is not a sense of renewal.

It is blindness to timelines, and more importantly, blindness to the structural reality of the political class now running the country.

Because Burnham is not operating as a recognisably traditional Prime Minister. He is operating as part of the performance class – the management class that has replaced leadership with messaging, replaced agency with choreography, and replaced decision‑making with the careful maintenance of a system that no longer works.

This blindness is not universal across history. There was a time when Prime Ministers and Chancellors understood the machinery they were responsible for. But today’s political class does not.

Only weeks ago, it was reported that both the Chancellor and the Prime Minister were unaware of the true state of the public finances until they were formally briefed – a stark reminder that the people at the top are not steering the system, but being carried by it.

Burnham’s speech must be understood within this reality.

1. The Management Class Behind the Door

Every incoming Prime Minister now arrives in Downing Street believing they can change everything. They imagine renewal, reform, transformation.

Then the briefings begin.

They discover that:

the previous government was not incompetent – it was constrained
the crisis is not a collection of separate issues – it is one systemic failure
growth is not optional – it is required to justify borrowing
public services are not underfunded by accident – they are structurally underfunded
and the levers of government are not tools – they are obligations

They learn that the system is already failing, and that their job is not to fix it but to manage its decline.

This is the defining feature of the modern political class: they are managers of a failing system, not leaders of a functioning one.

Burnham is now inside that reality. His speech was shaped by it.

2. Why Long‑Term Policies Are Being Treated as Current

Burnham’s speech contained policies framed for the next Parliament. Yet the media treated them as if they were part of the government’s present agenda.

This is not because the media see renewal. It is because they still report politics as if the system is functioning normally.

They treated long‑term commitments as if:

the government had the capacity to act on them now
the system were stable enough to absorb them
timelines were flexible
and the future would resemble the past

This is paradigm blindness – the belief that the same tools that created the crisis can solve it, and that the system still works in the way it once did.

Burnham’s announcements were not real policies. They were signals – narrative devices designed to buy time, reassure the public, and avoid revealing the constraints of the system.

The media missed this almost entirely.

3. The Triple Lock: Abolished – Then Abruptly Pulled Into This Parliament

Burnham is not protecting the triple lock. He is abolishing it.

Originally, he announced that this would happen after the next election – a future‑facing commitment that:

costs nothing today
changes nothing today
risks nothing today
and avoids confronting the structural reality the triple lock was designed to hide

But within days, the position shifted again.

Burnham has now indicated that the triple lock may be dealt with during this Parliament after all.

This rapid adjustment is not a sign of decisiveness. It is a sign of the management class responding to pressures it does not control.

The timing of the abolition – first distant, then immediate – is not the story. The story is that the political class is improvising inside a system that no longer behaves predictably.

The reversal does not change the structural argument; it confirms it.

It shows how performance politics works:

future promises
present narratives
sudden pivots
and commitments that change before the public has even absorbed them

The triple lock was never a generous policy. It was a stabiliser – a mechanism designed to hide the widening gap between what people need and what the economy can deliver.

Its abolition is not reform. It is an admission that the stabiliser can no longer be maintained.

But the way the policy has already shifted – from future to present – reveals the deeper truth:

The political class is not governing. It is reacting. It is improvising. It is performing.

4. Proportional Representation: A Future‑Facing Distraction

Proportional representation was treated the same way.

Commentators discussed PR as if Burnham were preparing to legislate for it now. But PR is not a current policy. It is a distant, abstract reform that only matters in a functioning system.

It is attractive precisely because it is irrelevant to the immediate crisis.

It is safe. It is distant. It is a distraction. It is a promise for a future that may never arrive.

Burnham’s use of PR in his speech was not a commitment. It was a signal – a way of appearing bold without touching the real crisis.

The media treated it as a current policy. It is not.

5. Burnham’s New Statement: Campaigning to Rejoin the EU

Burnham has now said he may campaign to rejoin the EU as part of Labour’s manifesto for the next election.

This is another example of the same pattern:

a future‑facing promise
framed for the next Parliament
treated by the media as if it were a current policy
and used to signal direction without committing to action

It fits perfectly within the suspended state the UK already occupies.

As one analysis of Brexit puts it:

“Instead, the UK occupies a space that feels suspended – as if the decision was made, but the destination never materialised.”

Burnham’s suggestion of rejoining the EU does not resolve this suspended state. It extends it.

It is another performance of direction in a system that cannot move forward or back. It is another promise for a future that may never arrive. It is another example of political actors reaching for familiar structures because they cannot imagine rebuilding capacity at home.

The media treated Burnham’s comment as if it were a real‑time strategic shift. It is not.

It is the same pattern repeated: future promises treated as present commitments, because performance is all the system has left.

6. The Media’s Blindness: Reporting Theatre as Reality

The most alarming part of the reaction to Burnham’s speech was not enthusiasm – it was misinterpretation.

The media treated:

long‑term reforms
distant commitments
structural promises
and future‑facing narratives

as if they were current, immediate, and actionable.

This is not optimism. It is blindness to the timelines and blindness to the structural crisis.

Britain has reached a point where the traditional toolbox of government – borrowing, cuts, privatisation, growth – has worn out. Taxation is now the only lever that still moves.

Everything else is performance.

Yet the media continues to report policy as if the old levers still exist. As if governments still have meaningful choices. As if the system is not already hollowed out.

Their failure to recognise the structural crisis is itself part of the crisis.

7. Leadership at the End of a System

Burnham’s speech was not dishonest. It was not incompetent. It was not unusual.

It was exactly what any Prime Minister from the management class would deliver at this moment in history.

Because performance is all that remains.

Britain’s crisis is not a crisis of personalities or competence. It is a crisis of the model itself.

Leaders are trapped between:

paradigm‑blind managers who understand the machinery but cannot imagine a future beyond it
institutional romantics who believe power is simply a matter of will

Burnham’s speech was shaped by the first group. The media’s reaction was shaped by the second.

Neither group is prepared for what comes next.

8. The Real Travesty

The tragedy is not that politicians cannot lead. It is that they still believe they are operating within a system that can be led.

They have not yet accepted that:

the decisions they make today have real‑time consequences
the crisis is accelerating
the public needs honesty, not performance
and the weeks and months ahead may require seismic decisions

Honesty would be catastrophic for any leader unwilling to govern in real time. But honesty is now the only responsible choice.

People, communities, and businesses need to prepare.

Instead, the political class is playing for time.

9. Burnham’s Speech Was a Mirror, Not a Map

Burnham’s first conference speech did not tell the country what the government will do.

It told the country what the government cannot do.

It revealed:

a system at the end of its life
a political class performing competence
a media still trapped in the old story
and a public being prepared for narratives, not realities

It showed that unless leadership emerges that can see beyond the machinery, the machinery itself will decide what happens next.

Burnham’s speech was not a plan. It was a reflection of a system that can no longer produce one.

The Performance of Politics: Why Power No Longer Serves People

The Adults Never Arrived

We are living through a moment when people are looking for leadership – and finding performance instead.

But in our moment – a moment of economic fragility, social fracture, and institutional decay – the adults never arrived.

What we have instead is a political class that knows how to look like it is governing, but increasingly struggles to govern with courage, honesty, or purpose.

As I wrote in The Way of Awakened Politics for Good Government (2022):

“People do not need perfect leaders. They need leaders who are real.”

Yet what we see today is not real leadership.

It is the performance of its absence.

1. Politics Is No Longer About Governing

Modern politics is no longer a vocation.

It is a career path, a branding exercise, and a survival game.

That does not mean every politician lacks integrity. Many enter public life for decent reasons. But they enter a machine whose incentives steadily pull them away from service and toward survival.

The incentives are brutally simple:

• Win the selection

• Win the seat

• Keep the seat

• Protect the party

• Protect the narrative

• Protect yourself

Everything else – policy, principle, public service – is secondary.

This is why scandal‑mining, character assassination, and narrative warfare dominate the political landscape.

They are not aberrations.

They are the natural output of a system where optics matter more than outcomes.

In How to Get Elected (2018), I wrote:

“If you are more focused on how politics looks than what politics does, you are already part of the problem.”

Today, that problem is the system itself.

2. This Did Not Happen Overnight

The dysfunction we see today did not appear suddenly.

It is the result of decades of structural drift – and it needs to be understood honestly.

By “the system”, I do not simply mean Parliament, parties, elections, advisers, donors, media cycles, and polling operations. Those are the visible mechanics of politics. They matter, but they are only one layer.

The political system is itself a system within a wider system: a money-centric, extractive order that has captured almost every institution it touches. It is a philosophy of life that places money before people, extraction before care, growth before wellbeing, and measurable value before human value.

That wider system now shapes how politics behaves, how the media frames truth, how public services are funded, how work is organised, how communities are treated, and how success itself is defined.

Nothing functions effectively for long when it is built on a broken philosophy.

Politics has not escaped this logic. It has absorbed it.

Politics became:

• Market‑constrained

• Donor‑dependent

• Media‑shaped

• Poll‑driven

• Risk‑averse

• Narrative‑obsessed

Parties became machines for winning, not governing.

Policy became a branding exercise.

Leadership became a performance.

And morality – the quiet compass that once guided public life – was replaced by legality.

As I wrote in Legality Has Replaced Morality (2026):

“We have built a world where the question is no longer ‘Is this right?’ but ‘Can we get away with it?’”

This shift hollowed out the space where leadership once lived.

3. Weak Leaders Create Weaker Successors

One of the most corrosive dynamics in modern politics is the generational weakening of leadership.

Strong leaders can tolerate strong people around them.

Weak leaders cannot.

So they surround themselves with:

• Loyalists

• Message‑disciples

• Careerists

• People who won’t challenge them

• People who won’t outshine them

And because parties reward those who “don’t rock the boat,” the next generation is even weaker.

This is how leadership quality decays over time – not because talent disappears, but because the system filters it out.

We end up with leaders who are managers, and managers who are performers.

4. The System Gives Leaders No Room to Lead – Only Room to Perform

Even the most capable, well‑intentioned politician enters a system that:

• Punishes honesty

• Discourages truth‑telling

• Rewards deflection

• Measures success in headlines

• Treats policy as messaging

• Forces loyalty to the party over loyalty to the public

So they become performers in a theatre they cannot escape.

This is the tragedy:

The system rarely rewards leaders for leading. It rewards them for looking safe, sounding disciplined, and avoiding the truth long enough to survive.

In The Way of Awakened Politics for Good Government (2022), I wrote:

“Real leadership begins where self‑interest ends.”

But in modern politics, self‑interest is the only safe place to stand.

Real leadership would look less like message discipline and more like truth-telling – even when it costs.

5. Scandal Politics Fills the Vacuum Left by the Absence of Real Leadership

When a political system cannot solve real problems, it shifts to the only arena where it can act: narrative warfare.

This is why we see:

• Personal attacks

• Dredging up old stories

• Targeting families

• Manufactured outrage

• Culture‑war distractions

These behaviours are not moral failings.

They are structural inevitabilities.

When the system cannot deliver solutions, it delivers stories.

When it cannot offer leadership, it offers theatre.

When it cannot inspire trust, it manufactures fear.

Scandal becomes the currency of a system that has run out of truth.

When public services strain, housing becomes unaffordable, or communities are left to carry the cost of decisions made elsewhere, the political response is too often not structural reform. It is a change of story, a new slogan, a symbolic fight, or another managed outrage.

6. The Public Sees the Performance – and Withdraws

People are not disengaged.

They are disillusioned.

They see:

• The avoidance of real issues

• The obsession with optics

• The lack of courage

• The absence of vision

• The endless recycling of political theatre

This is why trust collapses.

This is why turnout falls.

This is why populism rises.

This is why “None of the Above” becomes a meaningful political identity.

In Officially None of the Above (2023), I wrote:

“People are not rejecting democracy. They are rejecting the people who have hijacked it.”

The public is not apathetic.

They are waiting for adults who never arrive.

7. We Are Watching a Structural Tragedy

Politics today is not a comedy of errors.

It is a tragedy of constraints.

The actors are not villains.

They are trapped.

The system is not malfunctioning.

It is functioning as the wider extractive order requires it to function: to preserve itself, protect its interests, and keep people arguing about symptoms while the underlying philosophy remains untouched.

And until the system changes, the behaviour cannot.

Closing: The Curtain Will Fall – The Question Is What Comes After

Every political system reaches a moment when the performance can no longer continue.

When the gap between what politics pretends to be and what politics is becomes too wide to ignore.

When the public stops applauding and starts demanding something real.

We are living in that moment now.

The tragedy is not that our leaders are inadequate.

It is that the system has made adequacy impossible.

But systems are not permanent.

They are choices repeated until they feel inevitable.

And as I wrote in The Way of Awakened Politics for Good Government (2022):

“The moment we stop accepting the world as it is, we begin to create the world as it should be.”

The curtain will fall on this performance.

The only question is whether we will demand real leadership – and a system built around people rather than money – or continue rewarding the performance in its place.

The Performance of Politics PDF_Vers1_18Jun26 Download

A Leadership Void in a Moment That Calls for Far More Than Westminster Politics

The most revealing part of Catherine West’s apparent decision to put herself forward as a stalking horse is not the move itself, but the political class’s response to it. The reactions have been immediate, loud, and contradictory, yet almost entirely inward‑looking.

Some MPs have rushed to distance themselves. Others have quietly welcomed the pressure it places on colleagues. A few have called for a slow, carefully managed contest, as though time were the commodity the country most urgently needs.

What unites these responses is the frame in which they are made.

Across Labour, the Conservatives, and even among those who present themselves as alternatives, the argument quickly narrows to personalities.

Who should lead. Who is “ready”. Who has the profile. Who has the right to step forward. Who is available.

It is treated as though leadership were a scarce resource held by a small circle of familiar figures, rather than a responsibility exercised on behalf of the public.

This way of thinking is not merely limiting. It narrows democratic life around internal succession and quietly sidelines the electorate these roles are meant to serve.

The assumption that only a handful of individuals could possibly fill these roles is not a reflection of talent. It is a reflection of a system that has forgotten where authority begins.

This is not about individual bad faith. It is the predictable outcome of a political culture that has spent years producing managers rather than leaders. Managers preserve structures, maintain processes, and protect their positions. Leaders take responsibility, absorb risk, and act in the public interest.

When a system rewards the former and filters out the latter, it is hardly surprising that political debate revolves around succession rather than service.

You can see that dynamic clearly in the way senior figures respond in moments of crisis. Some present themselves as indispensable, as though the system could not function without them. Others speak as if their continued tenure were itself the answer, regardless of public mood.

The Prime Minister’s response to the recent local election results offers a particularly clear example. Rather than acknowledging the scale of public dissatisfaction, he appeared to frame the outcome as a misunderstanding, as though voters had simply failed to grasp the government’s direction.

There was little sign of engagement with the reasons for those losses, little recognition of the pressures people are living under, and no clear signal that anything would change.

What stood out was not the harshness of the response, but its candour. The dismissal of public sentiment was neither softened by language nor obscured by process. The message, in effect, was that the government would continue on its current course, regardless of what the electorate had just said.

This is not merely an issue of tone. It is an issue of orientation.

A leader treats public judgement as the basis of authority. A manager treats it as an obstacle to be explained away.

That might be troubling in any circumstance. It becomes much more consequential when public trust is needed to meet pressures building beyond Westminster.

The situation in the Gulf, and the concern it is already prompting about global supply chains, is not a distant or abstract issue.

If events continue on their present course, there is a growing risk of disruption in the coming months, and the UK could face shortages or delays in essential goods sooner than many people may expect.

In such circumstances, the difference between leadership and management becomes more than theoretical. It becomes the difference between a society that can navigate a crisis and one that cannot.

We have already seen what happens when a government meets a complex emergency with managerial instincts. During the pandemic, the decision to lock down the country was presented as decisive leadership. In practice, it also functioned as a form of control that created the appearance of action while deferring the harder, earlier decisions that genuine leadership would have required.

The long‑term costs, economic, social, and psychological, are still unfolding, and they have contributed to the pressures the country now faces.

If supply chains falter in the months ahead, the challenge will be very different from managing movement or imposing restrictions. It will mean supporting people who may be short of food, fuel, or essential goods, people who will be anxious, uncertain, and looking for reassurance that someone is thinking ahead.

Managing fear by creating more fear will not work. Managing scarcity by imposing rules will not work.

These are conditions that require leadership: calm, clarity, honesty, and the ability to bring people with you rather than push them into compliance.

That is why the question this episode raises matters. It is not about who leads a party. It is about whether the political system still contains the capacity for leadership at all. The pressures building outside Westminster will not wait for internal debates to resolve themselves, and they will not be managed away.

They will require leadership, the kind that has been missing for far too long.

What matters is not the individual involved, but what this moment exposes: a political class so absorbed in its internal dynamics that it struggles to see the country standing outside the room. It reveals a system that has lost the ability to recognise leadership even when circumstances demand it, and it reminds us that the crisis facing the UK is not about personalities at all, but about a democratic culture that has drifted away from the people it is meant to serve.

The public is living through rising costs, collapsing services, insecure work, and a political environment that feels increasingly unresponsive. Yet the debate among those who seek to govern still turns on timing, positioning, and who might gain from a contest.

The country is experiencing a legitimacy crisis. Westminster is experiencing a staffing issue.

The question is not simply who should lead, but whether the political class is still capable of recognising leadership at all. Leadership is not a personality trait. It is a relationship, and it exists only if the public is at its centre.

Right now, the public is nowhere near the centre of the conversation. Until that changes, it will not matter who occupies the office. The vacancy will remain.

The Absence of Leadership in a System Built for Managers and Nothing More

End of the ‘Duopoly’ – or the Slow Death of the Entire UK Political System?

A Leadership Void 10May26 PDF_Vers3_30Aug26 Download

The Borrowed Time Budget: A System Running Out of Road

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.