Another Rise in the Minimum Wage may be the right direction, but the step itself is a leap into sinking sand

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the realities of the minimum wage and what this benchmark actually represents.

The biggest misconception surrounding the National Minimum Wage is the widespread assumption that it bears some meaningful relationship to the cost of living. It doesn’t.

Somewhere along the way, we began treating the minimum wage as though it were a measure of what it costs to live independently, build financial security, and participate fully in society. It was never designed to be any of those things.

Yet each increase is inevitably presented as evidence of progress, a sign that government understands the pressures facing ordinary people, whilst employers often use it as a benchmark to justify the legitimacy of their own pay structures.

The reality is that the minimum wage remains far below the level that many people require to live independently without relying on debt, family support, benefits and welfare, or a combination of all three.

That matters because independence is the issue at the heart of the wider debate.

In recent months I have written about what poverty really is and why small businesses are struggling. Whilst those may appear to be separate conversations, they are in fact different manifestations of the same underlying problem.

The minimum wage debate provides perhaps the clearest example of how disconnected our understanding of that problem has become.

Poverty Begins Where Independence Ends

The way poverty is commonly discussed tends to focus on income alone.

We talk about poverty lines, earnings thresholds, and household statistics. We compare one figure against another and decide whether someone falls above or below a particular measure.

But poverty is not fundamentally about numbers.

Poverty begins where independence ends.

A person enters poverty when they can no longer meet their essential needs without external support. Whether that support comes from the state, from family members, from charities, or from borrowing money that will eventually need to be repaid, the outcome is essentially the same. Independence has been lost.

This is why so much of the debate surrounding wages misses the point.

If someone receives a higher hourly wage but still cannot afford housing, energy, transport, food, insurance, and the basic costs of modern life without additional support, have we actually solved anything?

Or have we simply moved the numbers whilst leaving the underlying condition untouched?

The uncomfortable reality is that increasing numbers of people are discovering just how fragile their own independence has become. A redundancy, an illness, a rent increase, a mortgage rate adjustment, or an unexpected expense can rapidly expose how little resilience exists beneath the surface.

The minimum wage may rise.

The insecurity remains.

The Problem Facing Small Businesses is the Same Problem Facing Workers

The political framing of minimum wage debates often creates the impression that there are two opposing sides.

On one side are workers who quite understandably need higher wages.

On the other are businesses that supposedly do not want to pay them.

The reality is rarely that simple.

Most people earning the minimum wage need more money.

Most small businesses are already struggling to survive.

Both statements can be true at the same time.

The reason is that workers and small businesses are often facing different symptoms of the same underlying pressures.

Workers need higher wages because the cost of living has become increasingly unaffordable.

Small businesses struggle to pay higher wages because they are operating on margins that become thinner every year.

Neither side created the conditions that produced this situation.

For decades, economic value has become increasingly concentrated amongst larger organisations with greater market power, easier access to capital, and the ability to operate at scales that smaller competitors simply cannot match.

At the same time, communities have become less economically resilient. Housing costs have risen. Living costs have risen. Debt has grown. Disposable income has shrunk.

Consumers buy differently because they have to.

Small businesses operate differently because they have to.

The local shop owner trying to meet payroll and the employee struggling to pay rent are frequently experiencing different consequences of the same economic architecture.

Yet public debate encourages them to see one another as the problem.

Why Minimum Wage Rises are Politically Attractive

The argument here is not that minimum wages should not increase.

They should.

The lowest-paid members of society deserve better compensation for their work and contribution.

The problem is that minimum wage policy is increasingly being presented as a solution to issues that are far bigger than wages alone.

For governments, minimum wage increases possess obvious political advantages.

They are visible.

They are measurable.

They create clear headlines.

They allow politicians to demonstrate action.

What they do not do is address the deeper causes of economic dependency.

Raising the minimum wage does nothing to reduce the cost of housing.

It does nothing to tackle the underlying drivers of energy prices.

It does nothing to confront the growing concentration of market power.

It does nothing to resolve the increasing cost of raising families.

It does nothing to address the structural conditions that leave both workers and businesses struggling for survival.

Instead, it attempts to compensate for those pressures after they have already been created.

And in doing so it risks becoming another temporary intervention in a system that continues to generate the same outcomes.

The Ground Beneath Us is Still Sinking

On paper, a significant increase in the minimum wage can look generous, particularly at a time when governments are themselves struggling to balance competing financial pressures.

But appearances can be deceptive.

Large corporations may absorb increased wage costs for a period before finding ways to pass them on through higher prices, improved efficiencies, reduced staffing levels, or increased productivity demands.

Small businesses often have far fewer options.

Many will absorb the costs and accept lower profits.

Others will attempt to raise prices in markets that are already stretched beyond comfort.

Some will simply close.

Meanwhile, those receiving the wage increase may discover that rising rents, rising bills, rising insurance costs, and rising prices steadily erode much of the benefit that was intended.

Everyone moves.

Very few move forward.

This is why the minimum wage debate often feels strangely circular. Every year we now find ourselves having the same conversation once again.

The minimum wage must rise because people cannot afford to live.

Yet people increasingly cannot afford to live despite repeated rises in the minimum wage.

At what point do we stop discussing the symptom and start discussing the cause?

The Real Question

The question is not whether the minimum wage should rise.

The question is why it has to keep rising simply to prevent more people from falling behind.

If full-time work cannot reliably provide economic independence, the problem is not the minimum wage itself.

If small businesses are becoming less viable whilst workers remain financially insecure, the problem is not either side of the employment relationship.

If governments repeatedly return to minimum wage increases as one of their primary responses to economic hardship, the problem is not necessarily the intention.

The problem may lie in the architecture itself.

Modern poverty, struggling small businesses, and constant debates about wages are not separate crises.

They are different warnings emerging from the same system.

And until we start questioning the structure that produces those warnings, every increase in the minimum wage, however well-intentioned, risks becoming another step forward on ground that is still sinking beneath us.

The Game in Plain Sight | How Markets, Money and Politics Became One System – And Why the Consequences Land on Everyone Else

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.

The Game in Plain Sight PDF_Vers2_22Oct26 Download

When Protectionism Makes Genuine Sense – Even if it Stops Some from Making Money

The debate over tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles has been bubbling across social media, and what’s striking is not the policy detail but the discomfort it creates among the market‑orientated commentariat.

These are people who have spent decades insisting that globalisation is the only sensible economic model, that markets should always set the rules, and that any interference – especially by governments – is a step backwards.

Now, faced with the reality that the UK may need to work with EU partners to protect domestic manufacturers, they are being forced into intellectual contortions that reveal just how brittle their worldview has become.

The friction here is not really about cars. It is about the deeper assumption that the economic model we have – a model built on global supply chains, financial expansion, and the relentless pursuit of growth – is the only one that makes sense.

That assumption rests on a one‑directional pull toward opening trade as far as conceivably possible, because that’s supposedly where growth will be found. And growth, in this worldview, is not about people becoming better off. It is about the creation of yet more money, usually through debt, which pushes up GDP and keeps the financial system ticking over.

This obsession with growth hides a fundamental truth: the growth that markets obsess over is not the same growth that most people experience.

GDP can rise while living standards fall. Productivity can increase while wages stagnate. Asset values can soar while home ownership collapses.

Many people still cling to the myth that political growth will make things better – or at least return life to how it used to be – but the numbers have been going up for years while the lived reality has been going down.

To understand why protectionism now makes sense, we have to understand the money system that made globalisation seem inevitable.

The Money System Behind the Illusion

Modern economies run on fiat money – money created not from physical value but from government authority and, crucially, from debt. When banks issue loans, they create new money. When governments borrow, they expand the money supply. Growth, in the political sense, is simply the expansion of this created money.

For decades, this system worked because the newly created money was tied to expanding production. Factories were built. Goods were made. Jobs were created. Communities thrived. The money had something real behind it.

But once production was moved overseas, the link between money creation and real economic activity broke. We kept creating money – but we no longer created the goods, jobs, or value that once justified it. Instead, the West became dependent on consumption funded by debt, while production was concentrated in China and a handful of other countries.

This is where extraction enters the story.

Extraction: The Hidden Cost of Globalisation

Globalisation didn’t just move factories abroad. It extracted value from every part of Western society:

Extraction of jobs – manufacturing, engineering, logistics, and skilled trades hollowed out.
Extraction of wages – pay stagnated while costs rose.
Extraction of communities – towns built around industry lost their purpose.
Extraction of environmental stability – long supply chains increased emissions and resource depletion.
Extraction of political agency – decisions moved from local hands to global markets.
Extraction of national wealth – profits and production flowed outward, not inward.

Above all, globalisation extracted economic power from people and transferred it to corporations, financial markets, and foreign production hubs.

This wasn’t accidental. It was the design. Globalisation was sold as efficiency, but it functioned as a massive wealth transfer mechanism.

Wealth Transfer: The Real Story

The wealth transfer happened in several layers:

1. From wages to profits

When production moved abroad, labour costs collapsed. The savings didn’t go to consumers – they went to corporations and financial markets.

2. From communities to global supply chains

Local businesses couldn’t compete with imported goods. Wealth drained outward.

3. From national economies to China

The West consumed; China produced. The money followed the production.

4. From real economy to financial economy

As production declined, financial speculation replaced industry as the main driver of “growth.”

5. From future generations to the present

Debt expanded to maintain consumption levels that wages could no longer support.

This is why the system feels hollow: because it is.

The Illusion of Efficiency

Globalisation was sold as efficient. But efficiency is fragile.

Efficiency removes redundancy. Redundancy is what makes systems resilient.

Here, redundancy doesn’t mean job losses. It means resilience. In systems terms, redundancy is the spare capacity, backup options, and local alternatives that keep things functioning when something goes wrong. A resilient economy has multiple sources of essential goods, local production alongside imports, and enough slack in its supply chains to absorb shocks. Globalisation removed this kind of redundancy – not by cutting jobs, but by stripping away the buffers that once protected communities, industries, and national security.

Local supply chains, local production, and local skills were once buffers against shocks. Globalisation removed those buffers. It replaced resilience with fragility, and called it progress.

When shocks hit – a pandemic, a war, an energy crisis – the system broke exactly where it had been hollowed out.

The Curious Love Affair With China

This is where the love affair that politicians, industry aficionados and financial players have with China becomes so curious. They praise China’s industrial might, its manufacturing efficiency, and its ability to produce goods at scale and at speed. But they are blind to the realities underpinning the Chinese powerhouse – just as they are blind to how things really work economically here at home.

China’s industrial strength is real, but its economic model is fragile. It is heavily dependent on exports, deeply entangled in debt, and centrally managed in ways that hide structural weaknesses. The property sector has been in crisis for years. Domestic consumption is too weak to sustain growth. And the country’s manufacturing dominance relies on a global system that assumes stability, cheap energy, and constant demand – none of which can be taken for granted.

Yet Western economies outsourced their industrial base to China under the assumption that globalisation was permanent, stable, and mutually beneficial. They believed that moving production overseas would always be cheaper, always be efficient, and always be safe. But globalisation was never a natural law. It was a confidence game – a system that works only as long as everyone believes it will continue working.

Calling globalisation a Ponzi scheme might be too simple, but calling it a worldwide confidence trick is not far off. It requires constant expansion. It depends on trust rather than resilience. It shifts production far from consumption. And it leaves countries vulnerable if supply chains break, energy prices spike, or geopolitical tensions rise.

The truth that must be reckoned with is this: transferring every conceivable part of industrial production to the other side of the world leaves a serious question hanging in the air. What happens here – and what happens there – when the money system that is the lifeblood of this one-directional process comes to a grinding halt?

AI: The Final Blow to the Globalised Model

If globalisation hollowed out production, AI is now hollowing out what is left of the wage‑earning capacity that once kept the system going.

For decades, the global model relied on a simple loop:

The West consumed goods made abroad.
People earned wages to buy those goods.
Governments and banks created money to keep consumption rising.
China produced the goods that consumption demanded.

But AI breaks this loop. It displaces jobs across sectors – not just manufacturing, which was already offshored, but services, administration, logistics, design, media, and even parts of professional work. The very wage base that kept the consumption‑debt cycle alive is eroding.

We now face a situation where:

We no longer produce the goods.
We no longer earn the wages.
We still create the money – but it has nothing real to attach to.

This is the point where the global system begins to fail. You cannot sustain a consumption‑driven economy when the capacity to earn wages is collapsing. You cannot sustain a debt‑driven money system when the underlying productive base has been hollowed out. And you cannot sustain globalisation when the domestic economy no longer has the means to participate in it.

AI is not the cause of the crisis – it is the accelerant that exposes how fragile the system already was.

The Collapse of Demand

The global system requires:

constant production
constant consumption
constant money creation
constant debt expansion

But:

production moved abroad
wages stagnated
AI reduces earning power
debt has reached saturation
demand is collapsing

Once demand collapses, the entire global system fails – and protectionism becomes not ideological, but practical.

EVs: A Redirection, Not a Solution

EVs are being sold as a technological fix, but they are built on the same flawed logic: extract resources, extract labour, extract wealth, and hope the system holds.

The deeper issue is not the fuel that vehicles use. It is the assumption that we need so many vehicles in the first place – an assumption created by an economic system built around long‑distance commuting, centralised employment, fragmented supply chains, and consumer lifestyles that depend on mobility rather than locality.

EVs change the technology but not the underlying logic.

The System Is Failing – And Protectionism Is Becoming Necessary

We cannot continue like this. Soon we will not be able to.

The system that pointed everything toward China, foreign production, and EVs is falling to its knees. The question is whether we wake up in time to address the real issues while we still have a choice – or whether events will push everything we know straight to the floor.

In this context, protectionism not only makes sense – it becomes essential. Not just for cars, but for everything people genuinely need each and every day.

Media discussions about “upsetting China” are irrelevant compared to the question of more pressing matters such as whether everyone can continue to eat during a prolonged crisis.

Like so many other forms of essential production and supply we have hollowed out the UK’s ability to feed itself. Politicians may say we produce around 60% of our own food, but that figure is misleading. Much of that production depends on imported inputs: fertiliser, feed, energy, machinery, labour. If borders fully closed, the real amount of food ready to go directly to the table is closer to 11%.

That means in a real, ongoing crisis, we could feed roughly one in ten people. And this would potentially be the baseline for as long as it would take to change, develop and reestablish UK systems to produce enough food to meet everyone’s basic and essential needs.

To call this situation stupid would be an understatement. It is a growing structural vulnerability that has been ignored for decades because it was easier to believe that global supply chains were permanent and that crises only ever happened somewhere else.

The Only Viable Path Forward

Locality, localism, and an entirely different system – one that puts people first rather than money first – is now the only answer. And it’s the same for everyone else too.

Protectionism, in this context, is not about nationalism or nostalgia. It is about resilience. It is about ensuring that essential goods are produced close to where they are consumed. It is about rebuilding the capacity to feed, clothe, transport, and sustain ourselves without relying on fragile global systems.

This does not mean closing borders or rejecting trade. It means recognising that trade should complement domestic capability, not replace it. It means building systems that can withstand shocks rather than collapse under them. It means prioritising the basics – food, energy, manufacturing, infrastructure – over abstract financial growth.

The globalised model didn’t fail because of ideology. It failed because it extracted too much, transferred too much, hollowed out too much, and left too little behind.

Protectionism isn’t a political choice. It’s a survival strategy.

Why Britain feels like we are being priced out of everyday life – and why the real explanation is nothing like the one you were taught

The Great Untold Story of Money

For most of modern history, people have lived inside a simple, reassuring story about how the economy works. It’s the story you hear in school, in politics, and in everyday conversation.

You earn money. You save some of it. Banks lend those savings to others. Governments collect taxes and spend them. If governments need more money, they borrow from savers. Inflation is just prices rising. Markets reflect real value. Wages follow the cost of living. Benefits are for people who don’t work.

It’s a tidy picture. It feels moral. It feels stable. And it is almost entirely wrong.

The real system is stranger, more fragile, and far more extractive than people realise.

Once you see how it actually works, the cost of living crisis stops being mysterious. It becomes inevitable.

This is the story of how money really works – and why Britain has become a place where even full‑time workers can’t afford everyday life.

1. The first truth: most money is created by private banks

The biggest misconception in the public mind is also the simplest: banks do not lend out your savings.

When you take out a loan, the bank does not move money from someone else’s account. It does not use savers’ money. It does not “find” the money. It simply creates new money by typing numbers into your account.

That’s it. A few keystrokes, and the money exists.

This is not a metaphor. It is the actual accounting. More than 90% of the money in the economy is created this way – by private banks issuing private debt.

It is the first thing people need to understand, and the first thing that makes them say: “That can’t be right.”

But it is.

2. Public debt vs private debt – the difference that changes everything

Understanding the economy requires understanding two very different kinds of debt.

Private debt is created by banks. Every loan creates new money. Every repayment destroys money. Interest payments transfer wealth upward. Households and businesses carry the burden.

Private debt is the engine of money creation.

Public debt is created when the government spends more than it taxes. It is structured through gilts – government bonds.

Public debt does not create money by itself. It is not repaid the way private debt is. It is held by pension funds, banks, insurance companies, and foreign investors.

Public debt is the engine of financial stability.

The key insight is simple: private debt creates money; public debt organises money.

Most people have never been told this distinction. Once they see it, everything else starts to click.

3. How government money creation actually works

People imagine government finances as a household budget: taxes come in, spending goes out, and if there’s a shortfall, the government borrows from savers.

But that is not how it works.

Government spends first

When the government pays salaries, pensions, or contractors, the Bank of England credits bank accounts. New deposits appear. New reserves appear. Government spending adds money to the economy.

Gilts come after spending

Gilts are IOUs the government sells to investors. When investors buy gilts, they use money that already exists – money created earlier by private banks or by government spending itself.

The government’s account at the Bank of England is credited. No new money is created. Investors simply swap cash for government IOUs.

Gilts do not fund spending. They record the deficit and provide safe assets to the financial system.

QE is where money creation and gilts intersect

When the Bank of England buys gilts, it creates new reserves. Investors receive new deposits. This does create new money. And that money often flows into assets – property, shares – pushing up prices.

This is why QE inflates asset prices.

The missing piece: private bank money flows into gilts

The money investors use to buy gilts is the same money that banks created earlier through lending. Private banks create the water; the government builds the pipes. Gilts are how the state absorbs, stores, and stabilises the money created in the private sector.

This is the part most explanations leave out – and without it, the system doesn’t make sense.

4. Inflation: not “prices rising,” but money losing value

People feel inflation is wrong because the official numbers don’t match reality. But inflation is not simply “things getting more expensive.”

It is your money being diluted.

Inflation happens when banks create more money through lending, when government spending adds money, when QE adds money, and when production is hollowed out. Supply chains are fragile. Asset prices rise faster than wages.

Inflation feels like theft because it is a transfer of value from people who hold money to people who create money.

5. Globalisation: the hollowing‑out engine

Globalisation wasn’t just trade. It was a restructuring of where value is created.

Manufacturing moved abroad. Supply chains centralised. Local businesses couldn’t compete. Profits flowed to multinational corporations. Towns lost their economic purpose. Communities weakened. Wages stagnated. Dependence on imports rose.

Britain didn’t just lose jobs. It lost the ability to generate real value.

Once that happened, the country had to rely on finance, property, consumption, and debt.

This is the hollowing out.

6. Markets: not value systems, but expectation systems

People think shares represent real company value, dividends are slices of profit, and markets reward good businesses.

In reality, shares represent claims on future expectations. Prices move based on liquidity, interest rates, and fund flows. Dividends are capital distribution decisions.

Companies can lose money and have rising share prices. Companies can be profitable and have falling share prices.

Markets are giant betting systems, not value systems.

7. The rise of extraction economics

When a country stops producing real value, it must extract value.

Britain chose to extract from housing, wages, public services, small businesses, and future generations.

Homes became financial assets. Prices were pushed up deliberately. Rent became a wealth transfer mechanism.

Wages stagnated because companies could outsource labour abroad. Workers lost bargaining power.

Public services were cut, forcing people to pay privately – another extraction channel.

Small businesses were crushed by global supply chains, supermarket monopolies, online giants, rising rents, and rising energy costs.

The local economy died.

8. The minimum wage trap: the part almost nobody talks about

Here is the piece that makes the whole system morally and economically unsustainable.

A full‑time worker on minimum wage cannot afford rent in most of the country. They cannot build savings. They cannot cover unexpected costs. They cannot support a family without external help.

This is not an opinion. It is a structural fact.

The minimum wage is not a living wage. It is a political number.

In‑work poverty is now normal. Most benefits claimants are working. They work full time or multiple jobs and still cannot afford rent, food, transport, childcare, or energy.

This is not a personal failure. It is a system failure.

Benefits have become a subsidy for low‑pay employers.

When wages are too low to live on, the government steps in with Universal Credit, housing benefit, tax credits, and childcare support.

Taxpayers cover the gap between what employers pay and what life costs.

This is not a welfare system. It is a corporate subsidy system.

Debt and foodbanks fill the remaining gap. Debt becomes a survival tool. Foodbanks become part of the infrastructure.

This is not normal. It is a financial death spiral.

And the psychological trick is simple: people are told that if they fall behind, it’s their fault – they should work harder, budget better, make better choices.

This narrative protects the system. It keeps people blaming themselves instead of the structure that is failing them.

9. Why Britain feels “priced out of everyday life”

Because the system has hit its limit.

The model relied on rising house prices, rising private debt, cheap imports, low wages, shrinking public services, foreign investment, and government subsidies for low‑pay employers.

All of these are breaking down.

Prices rise because money is constantly created. Wages don’t rise because global labour is cheaper. Housing is unaffordable because it’s an investment product. Public services collapse because they’ve been strip‑mined. Small businesses die because they can’t compete with global giants. Communities weaken because their economic base vanished. Workers cannot live on their wages. Benefits subsidise employers instead of protecting citizens. Debt fills the gap until it can’t.

This isn’t a temporary crisis. It’s the end of a model.

10. The credibility constraint: governments cannot go bankrupt – but they can lose trust

Here is the final piece of the puzzle.

A government that issues its own currency cannot run out of money. It cannot go bankrupt. It cannot involuntarily default. It creates the currency. It settles payments through the Bank of England. It cannot run out of the thing it creates.

But it can lose credibility.

And credibility is the oxygen of a fiat system.

Investors buy gilts not because the government needs their money, but because gilts are supposed to be safe. They anchor interest rates. They stabilise pension funds. They act as the plumbing of the financial system.

If investors lose confidence in the government’s ability to manage the economy – even though the money they use was created by banks – they can refuse to buy gilts. Not because the government is insolvent, but because they no longer trust the system’s stability.

This is exactly what happened in 2022 when Liz Truss was Prime Minister. Markets briefly refused long‑dated gilts. The government wasn’t bankrupt. But trust evaporated. The Bank of England had to intervene to stop pension funds from collapsing.

This is the real constraint on government: not solvency, but credibility.

And credibility becomes harder to maintain when the real economy weakens, public services decline, politics becomes unstable, and the financial system grows more fragile.

11. The simplest possible explanation

Britain built an economy where money is created easily, but real value is not.

The country stopped producing and started extracting.

Now there’s nothing left to extract, so everyday life has become unaffordable – even for people who work full time.

Why Britain feels like we are being priced out of everyday life PDF_Vers1_1Oct26 Download

Why Politicians Obsess Over Growth – And Why it Has Nothing to Do with You

If you listen to politicians for long enough, you’ll notice that one word appears more than any other: growth. It’s repeated so often, and with such certainty, that most people simply accept it as a kind of universal good.

Growth is presented as the answer to every problem, the justification for every policy, and the measure of every government’s success.

It has become a mantra – a belief system – and like most belief systems, it survives because very few people ever stop to question it.

But what if we did?

What if, just for a moment, you paused and asked yourself what politicians actually mean when they talk about growth?

What if you asked why it matters so much to them, and why it seems to matter so little to the quality of life you experience every day?

Because the truth is this: the growth politicians talk about is not the growth you think it is.

What We Think Growth Means

When ordinary people hear the word “growth”, we think of improvement. We imagine better jobs, rising living standards, stronger communities, investment in public services, and a general sense that life is moving in a positive direction.

Growth, in the everyday sense, feels human. It feels like progress. It feels like something that should make life more secure, more hopeful, and more stable.

That’s the growth most people assume politicians are talking about.

But they’re not.

What Political Growth Actually Is

Political growth has almost nothing to do with people, communities, wellbeing, or the environment. In political and economic circles, growth is a very specific thing: GDP.

GDP doesn’t measure prosperity. It doesn’t measure wellbeing. It doesn’t measure fairness, stability, or the health of society. It measures economic activity – any economic activity – without asking whether that economic activity improves life or destroys it.

If money moves, GDP goes up. If money moves faster, GDP goes up faster. It doesn’t matter what the money is doing or who it is benefitting.

This is why GDP can rise while your life gets worse. It can rise while public services collapse. It can rise while inequality deepens. It can rise while the environment is pushed beyond repair. It can rise while the majority become poorer in real terms – something we’ve seen in Britain as GDP per head has increased while median wages and household disposable incomes have flatlined or fallen .

Yet politicians continue to insist that growth is essential, as if the number itself were more important than the lives it is supposed to represent.

GDP: A Tool That Dehumanises Everything It Touches

In an earlier piece, I described GDP as one of the most dehumanising tools ever created. And I stand by that.

GDP reduces an entire society to a single number. It strips out meaning, humanity, and context. It rewards activity even when that activity destroys communities, erodes stability, or undermines the very foundations of everyday life.

GDP treats human beings as units of economic throughput. It treats communities as marketplaces. It treats the environment as a resource to be consumed. And it’s important to remember that GDP was never designed to measure human wellbeing at all – it was created in the 1930s as a wartime production metric, intended to track industrial output, not the health of society.

Because GDP can be measured, it can be manipulated. If you can measure it, you can control it. If you can control it, you can justify anything – austerity, privatisation, deregulation, asset inflation, debt expansion – as long as the number goes up.

GDP has become the perfect political tool: simple, manipulable, and detached from reality.

How Britain Became Dependent on Growth

Over decades, Britain’s economic model has been hollowed out. Financialisation replaced real productivity. Asset inflation replaced genuine prosperity. Debt-driven expansion replaced sustainable development. Outsourcing and privatisation replaced public responsibility. Austerity stripped out resilience and capacity.

This is the story behind the fiscal armageddon we now find ourselves in. It’s how Britain ended up borrowing into oblivion, hollowing out the institutions that once held society together, and becoming dependent on a model that can only function if the illusion of growth is maintained.

Growth is no longer a sign of strength. It is a sign of dependency – the only thing keeping a failing system upright.

A Place Called Stop

In another piece, I described Britain as having reached a place called Stop – the point where a system built on efficiency, extraction, and dependency simply cannot continue.

Everything that could be cut has been cut.

Everything that could be sold has been sold.

Everything that could be borrowed has been borrowed.

Everything that could be outsourced has been outsourced.

We have reached the limits of a model that has consumed everything it can. Productivity has flatlined for over a decade, public debt has climbed to historic highs, and essential services are stretched beyond capacity – all clear signs of a system running on fumes.

Growth is no longer possible without causing harm – yet the political class demands more of it, because they have no alternative story to tell.

Why Politicians Still Worship Growth

Politicians cling to growth because it is the only metric that makes the system appear functional.

Without growth, the cracks become visible. Without growth, the failures can no longer be hidden. Without growth, the political class has nothing left to point to when asked what they have achieved.

Growth has become a political shield – a way to avoid confronting reality.

This is why political culture is obsessed with growth to the point where it seems more important than life itself. Because without growth, the truth becomes unavoidable.

Why People Still Believe in Growth

One of the most powerful forces keeping the growth narrative alive is something I’ve written about many times: paradigm blindness.

People assume growth is good because they assume growth benefits them. They believe they are personally gaining from the system – even as the evidence of harm becomes unavoidable. They defend the model because they think they understand it, even though they don’t.

Paradigm blindness keeps people trapped in a narrative that no longer serves them. It keeps them believing that the system is working for them, even as it actively works against them.

The Consequences of Mistaking GDP for Prosperity

Mistaking GDP for prosperity has led Britain into a state of profound fragility.

Public services have collapsed. Communities have hollowed out. Inequality has deepened. Environmental destruction has accelerated. People have become poorer in real terms.

Yet GDP has risen. And politicians have pointed to that rise as proof that everything is fine.

This is the danger of growth as a political narrative: it allows leaders to claim success even as society falls apart.

The Question That Changes Everything

So let me ask you directly:

When politicians talk about growth, what do you think they mean?

Are they talking about your wellbeing? Your community? Your future? Your quality of life?

Or are they talking about a number that has nothing to do with any of those things?

Once you confront this question honestly, the entire political narrative begins to unravel.

What Comes After Growth

Britain does not need more growth. Britain needs reconstruction.

Reconstruction begins with honesty. It begins with recognising that the growth model has reached its limits. It begins with accepting that GDP is not prosperity. It begins with rebuilding the foundations that were hollowed out in the pursuit of a number.

A post-growth future is not a step backwards. It doesn’t mean stopping progress; it means redefining it – measuring success by wellbeing, resilience, and sustainability rather than by the speed of financial turnover.

It is the first step toward rebuilding what has been lost – resilience, community, stability, and genuine prosperity.

A Final Thought

Growth is not what you think it is. It is not what politicians tell you it is. It is not what the system pretends it is.

Understanding the truth about growth is the first step toward understanding why everything feels like it is falling apart – and why real change begins with rejecting the illusion.