AI capability is scaling at a rate that should frighten anyone paying attention. And, yet, somewhere in that fear I’d found something close to relief: if capability stops being the scarce thing, taste becomes the differentiator, and a world fighting over taste is a world with room to argue about what we actually want, rather than what we’re merely bracing for.

I want a hundred and one versions of The Technological Republic.
I want to know what everything is for — not just what it is.
I want to know what’s good again.

Many reasonable people will read that and feel their skepticism kick in immediately, and they’re right to. The taste discourse currently on offer — Paul Graham declaring that when anyone can make anything, the differentiator is what you choose to make; Greg Brockman calling taste a new core skill; a Cloudflare executive insisting it’s the engineering differentiator of the decade — reads, to anyone serious about democracy or civic life, as faintly absurd.

It is Silicon Valley discovering aesthetics the way it discovers most things: belatedly, breathlessly, and mostly in service of figuring out who gets paid. The discourse got memed within days, because the people declaring taste a core skill have, by most accounts, quite bad taste, and there is something genuinely funny about watching a venture capitalist explain connoisseurship to the rest of us.

If your instinct is that this is trite — a labour-market anxiety dressed up as a civilizational claim, a way of justifying the next promotion cycle — your instinct is correct about most of what’s actually being said.

But underneath the discourse about fonts and model personality and default aesthetics sits a much older and much more serious question, one that used to organise the whole of public life and now mostly doesn’t:

What is this society for?

Not what it expects to happen to it, not what risks it should manage, but what future it actually wants and is willing to assert wanting, in public, at the cost of being told it’s wrong. That question went mostly quiet across the West somewhere around 1989, not because it stopped mattering but because the people who’d have to ask it concluded, not unreasonably at the time, that it had already been settled. Ask it again now and you’re seen as terribly rude.

AI is reopening it, by accident, through the unglamorous side door of taste — and the people equipped to take the reopened question seriously are mostly staying out, because the door looks too small and too embarrassing to be worth walking through.

It does not have to stay that way. And whether it does is mostly up to people who have already decided it’s beneath them.

Here is the case for getting involved in something that currently looks very silly.

The wave began in February, when Paul Graham posted his prediction and linked it back to an essay he’d written in 2002, the year he first started calling taste a skill rather than a luxury. Brockman went further within days — taste, a core skill, full stop. A Cloudflare executive had already said something close to the same thing in January.

By the time it reached the meme stage, half of X was pointing out that the men declaring taste the scarce resource of the AI age have, by almost any account, quite bad taste themselves, and Graham’s response — that taste in clothing doesn’t matter, that comfort is the only relevant criterion, that he’d rather think well than dress well — did not help his case.

It’s worth sitting with why this lands as funny rather than just wrong. The joke works because everyone can feel the substitution happening in real time: a claim that sounds civilizational — taste, judgment, discernment, the human faculty that survives automation — collapsing on contact into something much smaller, a labour market question. What should I learn to be good at, now that the thing I used to be paid for is free. A Google engineer put it without dressing it up at all: the AI will make anything, it takes a human to decide what’s worth keeping.

That’s not a small insight and it isn’t wrong. It’s also not asking anything bigger than what should I, personally, optimise for next. Nobody in the discourse is asking what a good future looks like. They’re asking what gets you promoted in this one.

This is where Alex Karp enters, and he deserves better than being filed alongside Graham and Brockman, because he is doing something they aren’t. His book, written with Nicholas Zamiska, makes the individual-taste question look almost shy by comparison.

The question he’s actually asking is what an entire industry should be building, and what it owes the country that made it rich.

The Silicon Valley spent two decades chasing consumer trivia and handheld escapism, in his telling, while rivals abroad spent the same decades building hard capability — and the fix he proposes is a renewed marriage between the people who write the software and the states that used to depend on them for exactly the kind of frontier engineering that won the last great civilizational contest. Niall Ferguson called it a manifesto for a new Manhattan Project. He isn’t wrong about what the book is trying to be.

Karp has done the one thing nobody in the taste discourse has bothered to do: said what he actually thinks the work is for, specifically enough that people could tell him he’s wrong. And people have. He’s been called a war profiteer, an apologist for surveillance, the most dangerous man in software — which is, perversely, the point. A thesis that can’t be hated isn’t a thesis, it’s a brand safety exercise, and the difference between Karp and a hundred companies issuing identical mission statements about empowering humanity through innovation is that his can actually fail. You can catch him being wrong. You cannot catch “we’re just building tools” being anything, because it was built specifically not to be caught.

I’d keep the instinct and lose almost everything built on top of it. His patron is the state, specifically the security state, paid in hard power. The thesis that buys Palantir its exemption from ordinary commercial scrutiny is martial by design, built for an adversary. The work stays inside his contracts. The transistor left Bell Labs and rebuilt an entire economy; Manchester Corporation’s airport money still pays a public dividend nine decades later; nothing in Karp’s arrangement promises anything like that. And the confidence he wants restored arrives from the top, supplied by founders who’ve already decided what’s good and are asking everyone else to trust them — dressed in the vocabulary of civilizational seriousness, which makes the request sound like something larger than it is.

He’s right that you have to say it. Everything else about his answer — what gets said, who gets to say it, what the public gets back for funding it — I think he gets wrong.

The rest of this essay is an attempt to take his instinct and build something out of it that doesn’t require trusting Alex Karp.1

The aesthetic case and tradition for what I’m arguing has a name and a death date, and both are worth knowing before reaching for “The Atomic Age” as a vague mood, as I did in my own tweet, and should be held liable for. I was high on my own supply and sugar for breakfast.

Thomas Hine called it populuxe — populism, popularity, luxury, with an extra e for class — and it ran from 1954 to 1964, a decade in which American consumer design did something stranger than sell people things.

It sold them a future.

In advance, on credit, through tailfins and chrome and starburst patterns stamped into formica counters and atomic motifs printed on bedsheets a child would sleep under without knowing what an atom actually was. None of it materially advanced the future it claimed to perform. A 1957 kitchen with a pastel refrigerator and a boomerang-patterned countertop wasn’t a working prototype of anything. It was a purchase that functioned as a vote — buy this, live inside it, and you have asserted, with your own money, that the future it gestures at is one worth having.

I'll call it consumer prefigurative politics. The term usually describes people occupying a building or running a commune, living the future they want inside their present practice. Consumer capitalism ran the identical manoeuvre for a decade — financing a car, renovating a kitchen, was how an ordinary family enacted the future it wanted, in miniature, paid for in instalments.

It had an end date, and the end date arrived before the decade did. Hine puts the staleness setting in at the 1964 World’s Fair, in the months after Kennedy’s assassination, the future on display already reading as a rerun. By the time Billy Klüver, a Bell Labs engineer with a habit of slipping into Manhattan to spend evenings with painters, got involved in building something for the next one, the aesthetic he was working in had already been declared dead by the culture that invented it.

What he built anyway, with Robert Rauschenberg and a non-profit called Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T), was the Pepsi Pavilion at Expo ‘70 in Osaka — a geodesic dome wrapped in artificial fog, entered through a corridor that opened onto a ninety-foot mirrored mylar sphere, the floor and the visitors hanging upside down in their own reflection, lasers cutting through the dark, two million people walking through it over six months. It is the closest thing to “Bell Labs art” that has ever actually existed, and the funding behind it was never Bell Labs at all.

The patience that let Klüver do anything with a transistor in the first place came from somewhere specific: Theodore Vail’s slogan, One System, One Policy, Universal Service, marketed hard enough and believed widely enough that when the federal government came after AT&T for monopolising the telephone and telegraph industries in 1913, the company kept its monopoly by trading something for it. The Kingsbury Commitment let AT&T stay whole in exchange for accepting government rate regulation and committing to make basic service available to the country as a whole. That commitment did the actual work of buying Bell Labs thirty years of freedom to spend on a piece of silicon with no buyer in sight. The explicit civilizational claim was the patient capital.

Nobody had to believe in anything for that arrangement to hold. The regulatory settlement didn’t care about sentiment.

The Pepsi Pavilion’s funding cared about nothing else. It came from PepsiCo’s marketing department, by way of a vice president who wanted the company’s name attached to whatever felt closest to the counterculture without actually being dangerous, and the artists knew exactly what kind of patron they’d taken on — they built E.A.T. specifically as a buffer, a non-profit standing between themselves and the commercial establishment so they could keep working in their own register without getting broken by it.

The buffer held for a year and a half of design and construction. It held through the opening, through the ecstatic reviews, through visitors stacking up by the thousands every day. It did not hold once the artists wanted to push further — months of stranger, more demanding live programming planned for the pavilion’s second half, cut by Pepsi for being too strange, the moment ambition stopped flattering the sponsor paying for it.

So when people reach for Bell Labs as a single idea — patient, secure, civilisation-funding research with no commercial pressure attached — they are, I think, reaching for two different institutions wearing one name. The transistor’s patience was structurally guaranteed, immune to anyone’s feelings about it, bought by an explicit civic bargain decades before anyone needed it. The art’s patience was a marketing budget, fully exposed to sentiment, withdrawn the instant the work stopped serving the purpose it had been hired for. Both happened at the same company. Only one of them was made safe by patient capital.

The unsafe one still mattered. Two million people walked through a mirrored fog dome in Osaka in 1970, disoriented, looking at themselves upside down, encountering something that had never existed before and has not, in this exact form, existed since. The work got cut short. The patron was never trustworthy. It happened anyway, on borrowed time, and borrowed time turned out to be enough to put something extraordinary in front of two million strangers who walked away changed by an afternoon.

That is closer to what’s available to anyone trying to do this now than Apollo or Bell Labs’ transistor will ever be, and the honest thing to do with that fact is hold it, without dressing it up as more secure than it was.

How do we do that?

Here’s a hard starting condition: Someone has to write it down, before the work it justifies gets done — specific enough to be wrong.

Vail did this with one sentence; Karp did it with a whole book; Jobs did it with less text and more conviction, building a company whose minimalism only reads as humanism because somewhere he’d said, plainly, what the humanism was for. This is the rarest step in the whole mechanism, because it’s the only one that costs something up front. A stated thesis can be refuted. “We’re just building tools” never can be — other than on a conceptual level as Managerialism wearing an allegedly apolitical hat — which is exactly its appeal, and exactly why almost nobody chooses the harder option voluntarily.

Once one firm does choose it, and it works, the market does the rest of the job without needing to be asked. Capability is commoditising fast enough that a coding assistant built on someone else’s frontier model competes on almost nothing except what it was built to express — this is Graham’s prediction, arriving early and correct, just smaller than he meant it. The firm with a stated position is differentiated simply by having one, in a field where everyone else is still pretending neutrality is a viable strategy.

That pressure produces a hundred firms racing to articulate something distinctively their own: copying Karp’s thesis gets you nothing, while an equally specific, equally defensible, completely different one gets you the same competitive advantage he’s claiming. A hundred and one versions of the Technological Republic is the natural shape of what happens once taste becomes the thing being bid for.

This is also where it goes wrong, fast, if nobody’s holding it to anything.

Luckily, the test is mercifully simple: has the thesis ever cost the company something it would rather not have paid.

Vail’s universal service pledge meant accepting decades of federal rate regulation — a real constraint, won in exchange for a claim that could actually bind him. Karp’s thesis costs him a meaningful share of his own industry’s goodwill, and he keeps making it anyway — that’s what separates it from a sustainability scorecard that exists purely to be satisfied. A thesis with no cost attached is decoration wearing the vocabulary of conviction, and the entire job of a reader who refuses to opt out of this discourse is asking that one question of every company claiming the harder, costlier version.

This is what a font choice is for. A typeface is not civilizational on its own, and it doesn’t become civilizational by being repeated often enough or defended hard enough in a brand deck. It becomes legible as a claim about the future the moment a stated thesis exists for it to be read against — Apple’s minimalism means something specific because Jobs said, in public, what the humanism underneath it was supposed to be; Palantir’s ops-room aesthetic, the dark interfaces and military-adjacent visual language, means something because Karp wrote the book that tells you what conviction it’s expressing.

Before the thesis exists, the font is just a font, defensible only as a design preference, impossible to argue with because there’s nothing in it to disagree about. After the thesis exists, the font is evidence, and evidence can be cross-examined.

Almost nobody making typeface decisions right now is operating as if this is true — which is exactly the kind of work that’s worth undertaking in the taste wars.

There’s a sentence every council finance officer has said in some form, and once you’ve heard it you can’t stop hearing its cousins everywhere. Savings need to be identified. No subject, no named decision-maker, no stated judgment about what’s worth keeping versus cutting — the grammar does the work of evading a choice that a person had to make and didn’t want to own.

The AI industry has its own version, dressed for a different sector: we’re agnostic about use cases. We serve user intent. We’re just building tools. Same evasion, same absence of an agent willing to say what they believe should happen, just running in Silicon Valley’s accent instead of a town hall’s.

Alasdair MacIntyre gave this figure a name and a diagnosis worth keeping rather than the looser word bureaucracy: the manager, a character type for whom effectiveness toward given ends is the only legitimate language, and arguing about whether the ends themselves are good has stopped being a thing managers do at all. That’s not a personality flaw. MacIntyre’s claim is that it’s what’s left once a culture loses any shared way of arguing about what’s good — effectiveness is the only vocabulary still standing once the rest of the vocabulary has gone quiet.

It didn’t start when the Cold War ended. James Burnham was already calling it the managerial revolution in 1941, watching the same bureaucratic logic colonise fascist, communist, and New Deal administration alike, decades before anyone could blame the Berlin Wall.

What changed in 1989 wasn’t the appearance of managerial technique. It was technique losing the argument it had been serving. It had no real fuel, but just kept running, until it metastasized into something cancerous now eating our democracies whole.

Apollo ran on the most administratively dense undertaking in human history, but the bureaucracy was visibly in service of something — beat the Soviets, prove the system, win an argument that was still live. Francis Fukuyama predicted exactly what happens once that argument resolves, in an essay written months before the Wall came down: the struggle that had called forth daring, courage, imagination, and idealism would be replaced by economic calculation, the endless solving of technical problems, the satisfaction of consumer demand.

The pattern has a much longer history than his essay — Hegel had already watched Napoleon at Jena and called it the end of history a century and a half early. Winners don’t experience their own answer as one position among several. They experience it as the truth, now settled, with nothing left to do but administer the conclusion.

It is worth being fair to how reasonable that felt at the time. The confidence had real substance behind it. Economists call the run from the mid-1980s to 2007 the Great Moderation — low inflation, sustained growth, sixty-three consecutive quarters of expansion in the UK alone, the longest unbroken run on record. People who’d built careers inside that record had genuine grounds for believing something durable had been achieved. Bill Galston, who helped build the thing from inside the Clinton White House, gives the insider’s own verdict on what happened next: the 2008 crisis showed the managers of the economy weren’t in control, and the moderation they’d been so sure about turned out to be an illusion.

The material crack came eight years before the political one.

Institutions don’t update on being proven wrong.

Only on being voted out.

Anthony Giddens, known across Britain as Tony Blair’s guru, called his foundational book Beyond Left and Right, then expanded it into The Third Way, with Blair’s own endorsement printed on the jacket. Nobody had to separately announce that disagreement was now illegitimate. You cannot title a political project Beyond a dichotomy and also leave room for the two sides of that dichotomy to remain live positions you might lose an argument to.

The foreclosure isn’t a second step bolted onto an innocent first one.

It’s printed on the spine.

Chantal Mouffe watched this happen from the opposite political direction and named the mechanism precisely: politics becomes a matter of managing the established order, a domain for experts, and anyone still standing outside the consensus gets relabelled an extremist, stripped of standing as a legitimate opponent holding a different idea of the good. Colin Hay documented the same move from inside British and American government — officials actively handing decisions to markets and independent bodies specifically because, they said, those decisions would be better off without politics touching them at all. Once something has been moved into that category, disagreeing with it no longer counts as politics. It counts as evidence you don’t understand how the world works.

Jacques Derrida caught the tell in Fukuyama’s prose itself, within four years of the essay’s publication, calling the register neo-evangelism and naming the tone exactly: jubilant and worried, manic and bereaved, in the same sentence. He noticed something else worth keeping — Fukuyama’s certainty that history had reached its terminus borrows the identical structure from the Marxism it claims to have buried, an inherited messianism with the political content flipped rather than removed. Mania needs increasingly elaborate defence precisely because what’s underneath it is closer to a wish than a finding, and the defence kept arriving on schedule for thirty years: Russian authoritarianism dismissed as a generational blip, populism filed as a recession rather than a refutation, every counterexample absorbed without ever revising the core claim.

Updating an empirical claim means admitting it was wrong. What happened here, decade after decade, was a hope getting protected as if it were a finding.

This is the part that explains Trump, Orban, and Bannon better than calling them an aberration does. Narrow the field of legitimate disagreement far enough and the demand for civilizational argument doesn’t shrink to match the supply. It goes looking for whoever’s still willing to meet it, on whatever terms are on offer — and the people willing to meet it are, almost by definition, the people who’ve already stopped caring whether the existing consensus calls them legitimate.

This is a diagnosis of structure. Crediting them with having opened anything up would be a different, much stronger claim than the one I’m making. Some of what arrived with them really was just ordinary political disagreement that the Third Way had relabelled extremist for the crime of existing outside its boundaries — positions on trade, on industrial strategy, on how much immigration a country should manage and how, that used to be normal politics and got treated as radicalism for no reason beyond falling outside an agreed answer.

But not all of it. Conspiracism, and attacks on the courts and the electoral mechanism itself, arrived in the same wave. Reopen a field that’s been sealed for thirty years and you don’t get to handpick who walks through the gap first.

The taste wars carry exactly this risk in miniature: whether what breaks through costs anyone anything, or just exploits a vacuum left empty for thirty years.

The last few years are proof that you don’t get to opt out of finding out which by deciding you’re too good for it. Someone else isn’t.

Somewhere right now, an engineer is deciding how a model should respond when someone asks it for something in the grey area just short of refusal — how much warmth to leave in the answer, how much warning, whether to comply reluctantly or redirect entirely. Legal will call this a product decision. It will get a ticket number and a sprint and a changelog entry, and nobody involved will be asked what kind of relationship between a person and a machine they think is owed here, because that question never makes it onto the ticket. It got decided anyway, the moment the behaviour shipped. The font, running at much higher resolution than a typeface.

A different kind of evasion happens further along the same pipeline, on a different afternoon, when someone writing seriously about politics encounters a thread arguing AI capability is about to make taste the most important fight in the culture, and closes the tab. Trite, they think, correctly, about most of what they just read — and they go back to writing something careful about democratic backsliding, the same week they’d happily spend three thousand words on Alex Karp’s politics if his book had crossed their desk instead of a tweet about fonts. One target gets the full weight of their seriousness. The other gets dismissed for looking too small to be worth it, by someone whose entire professional instinct is supposed to be noticing when something small is load-bearing.

And somewhere a company is deciding whether to write the sentence down at all — a claim about what the work is for, precise enough that a competitor or a critic could quote it back as a mistake. Most won’t. The ones that do can be asked a question the others can’t: has holding this position ever cost you a deal, a market, a feature you wanted, the way Vail’s universal service pledge cost AT&T decades of rate regulation it never escaped. If the answer is no, what’s been written down is a value on a careers page, not a constitution. If the answer is yes, something real is finally on the table to argue with.

None of this relieves the pressure that put Trump back in office twice or built Orban’s coalition seat by seat. Those voters were never waiting on a verdict about model warmth or default typography. What’s on offer here is narrower — a door, in a much smaller room, propped further open than it’s been in thirty years, mostly by people who didn’t intend to do anything but argue about a logo. Whoever’s left standing in that room gets to decide what walks through it. Right now that’s mostly venture capitalists relitigating a 2002 essay and a man whose own industry would rather he’d stayed quiet.

Two million people walked through a mirrored fog dome in Osaka over six months in 1970, disoriented, looking at themselves upside down in ninety feet of curved mylar, built by an engineer and a painter on a budget that could be pulled the moment they stopped being convenient — which it was, eventually, for exactly that reason.

It still happened. People are still writing about it fifty years later. That’s the size of the bet on the table: a fog dome, on borrowed time, built by whoever shows up while the patron’s still looking the other way.

So, yes, you should care about the font, and what philosophy decided it was the right one.

The tone, and what relationship between humans and machines it implies.

The shade of sepia-tone your next startup that is appropriating the Populuxe uncritically will choose to co-opt, because it tested well with a focus group and nobody in the room had read Hine, or cared to.

The blob logo, rounded and gradient and indistinguishable from the other four blob logos launched this quarter, asserting nothing because asserting something tested badly with the people whose job is making sure nothing ever tests badly.

The refusal copy — sorry, I can’t help with that — and whether it apologises, lectures, or simply declines: three different theories of what the machine believes it owes you, none of them argued for out loud, all of them shipped.

The breath sound in voice mode, placed there on purpose, modelling an intimacy nobody on the product team was ever asked whether anyone wanted, or on whose authority.

These aren’t small questions wearing the costume of being about typefaces. This is the argument, the only one currently being conducted at any real scale. In every home, in every workplace, in every life technology makes certain futures possible. It tells us who we are. What we owe each other. What we have the potential to be.

As AI systems scale, and become more and more embedded into our lives, they will become the staging site of society’s great unsettled question.

What is all of this for?

Today, it’s being settled by people who would tell you, sincerely, at a dinner party, that they don’t really do politics.

And the future can’t afford us leaving it to them.

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Then we bought a field.

Forty-five hectares on the doorstep of GCHQ, borrowed at a sum that would have made any less brave Section 151 officer wince — and still makes the opposition reach for their smelling salts. They call it a vanity project. They cite the cost. But to us, the bet was simple: land like this doesn’t come twice, the right use for it was a security technology campus, and someone ought to do it. We ought to do it right.

On the 13th of June, the United States government ordered Anthropic to switch off Fable 5 — the most advanced AI model ever made commercially available — for every non-American user. No specific explanation. No timeline. Anthropic complied within hours. They had no choice.

The infrastructure of the AI economy — the models, yes, but underneath them the compute, the data centres, the power, the land — is being built by people who can be switched off, acquired by sovereign wealth funds, or who incorporate in Delaware and answer to no one in particular. In February 2017, almost a decade before any of this happened, a council in a spa town in Gloucestershire had already decided that was the wrong answer.

It turns out we were asking the right question before we knew quite what the question was.

The infrastructure of the AI economy is going to be built by someone. Someone is going to own the compute, the data centres, the power supply, the land. The question the 13th of June made unavoidable is who, on what terms, and answerable to whom.

The current answer is three American companies — Microsoft, Google, Amazon — who between them will own two thirds of global data centre capacity by 2031, spending at a scale that dwarfs any government on earth, and answerable, ultimately, to American law. This is what happens when strategic infrastructure gets built by the market without anyone asking whether the market is the right builder.

Joseph Chamberlain looked at Birmingham in 1873 — the gas supply in private hands, the water supply in private hands, the infrastructure of daily life owned by people whose interests were not the city’s interests — and municipalised it. Not out of ideology. Out of the straightforward insight that you don’t want the substrate of the economy owned by someone whose interests diverge from the people who depend on it. The AI data centre is the Victorian gas works, and the case for civic ownership is one hundred and fifty years old.

Golden Valley is a textbook case of what Britain needs.

Cheltenham Borough Council — a district council with an annual budget of around £19 million — borrowed £37.5 million to buy it and has committed £130 million in total. The opposition calls it a vanity project. They have not yet explained what the private market was going to do with it instead.

The £1 billion campus under construction will deliver over a million square feet of commercial space, 100 metres from the Doughnut. Its purpose is not generic commercial development. It is designed to bring together the technologists, security specialists, and innovators who will have to answer the questions the 13th of June just made unavoidable — how do you build sovereignty in AI, how do you secure digital systems at national scale, how does AI capability intersect with national security in ways that are set to spiral beyond anything we can map today.

Britain has a chronic shortage of office space built and accredited to national security standard. The people who need to do this work have nowhere secure to put them. Golden Valley is building it — a million square feet of space where the most sensitive conversations in British technology can happen, on land the British public owns, 100 metres from the agency that needs them most.

Golden Valley is a campus designed to collapse the distance between GCHQ’s intelligence, private sector technology firms, academic researchers, and the defence industry, and put them in the same rooms to solve problems none of them could solve alone. The sovereign AI challenge does not have a single answer that lives in one institution. It requires the kind of structured collision between government, industry, and academia that Britain has never quite managed to engineer at scale. Golden Valley is the attempt.

It is also training the people to fill it. The University of Gloucestershire’s cyber security degrees are certified by the NCSC — the intelligence agency whose headquarters the campus will overlook. Gloucestershire College was the first in England to offer an NCSC-recognised cyber degree apprenticeship. A hundred per cent of graduates find work or further study. Most stay in the county. The ecosystem is not accidental. It has been built, deliberately, over years, by institutions that decided this place should be the home of British cyber.

Cheltenham Borough Council will not sell this asset to the highest bidder. We will not cut corners on security standards because a contractor pushed back on cost. We take it seriously because it keeps us safe — because it is our security, not a line item on someone else’s balance sheet. That is a different relationship to this infrastructure than the private sector can offer. It is, in the end, the reason it matters who owns it.

A country whose institutions have spent forty years telling their citizens they are not worth the investment is not a resilient country. Resilience is not a technical property of infrastructure. It is a property of people — their willingness to show up, to serve, to defend, to believe that the collective project is worth defending. That belief is built, or it is destroyed, by the daily experience of living inside institutions that either hold the covenant or break it.

Britain has been breaking it for forty years. Five hundred swimming pools closed since 2010. One in four children leaving primary school unable to swim 25 metres. A hundred and two youth clubs gone from London in a decade, each closure producing measurable rises in youth crime among the children who lost them. The NHS dentist with the two-year waiting list. The potholed road. The library that closed. None of this was decided. It accumulated — a thousand individual decisions, each reasonable in isolation, each leaving the message slightly more legible: this is a country that has made its decision about your worth.

That message, absorbed over decades, produces the politics you are now watching. It produces the recruitment crisis. It produces the thirty per cent of young people who tell pollsters they would not fight for this country. It produces the specific brittleness that makes a nation vulnerable when the test is collective, when the threat is real, when the institutions need the people to believe in them enough to act.

Britain has two sovereignty problems and they are the same problem. The infrastructure of the AI economy is being built by people answerable to the wrong interests. And the civic fabric — the institutions that make a place worth living in and a community worth belonging to — has been spent down to the point where the covenant between the state and the citizen is visibly, measurably broken. A country whose citizens don’t believe the collective project is for them cannot defend the collective infrastructure. You cannot ask people to protect assets they don’t feel belong to them.

The returns from civic AI infrastructure don’t go to shareholders. They go into the trust fund that rebuilds what has been spent down. That is not a redistribution argument. It is a security argument in the most literal sense. The country that invests in its people produces people willing to invest in their country. The community that has a stake in its institutions is more capable of collective action than the one that has been taught its institutions don’t care. The country that breaks that covenant is the country that breaks when tested.

The British military is currently recruiting at its lowest level since the Napoleonic Wars. Last year more than 14,500 service members left while only 12,850 joined. The Army hit 64% of its recruiting target. The Navy 60%. Nobody wants to go to war for a country that doesn’t invest in them.

In Indianapolis, more than a dozen bullets were fired at the house of a city council member who had backed rezoning for a data centre. A handwritten note reading “No Data Centres” was left on his doorstep. A Gallup poll from March 2026 found that 70% of Americans oppose the construction of new AI data centres in their neighbourhood. Local opposition has blocked or delayed projects worth around $64 billion in the space of ten months. The backlash is here. It is killing the infrastructure the country needs. And it is entirely predictable, because the answer to what’s in this for us has so far been: nothing much.

The British government has powers to override local planning for nationally significant infrastructure. It will use them. When a data centre gets forced through over a rejected planning application, owned by private capital, with returns flowing to shareholders, the community that fought it doesn’t become reconciled to it. It becomes resentful of it. That resentment is bad for trust in government. It is bad for the asset itself. And it misses the opportunity. The question communities are going to ask is simple and the answer is everything: what’s in this for us?

The civic answer is: the returns are yours, structurally, by design — held in the trust fund that fixes the pool, funds the youth club, maintains the things that have been hollowed out. The infrastructure of the AI economy pays for the infrastructure of a civic life worth living.

The Manchester Airports Group has been majority owned by the ten Greater Manchester councils since 1938. Through Thatcherism, through a pandemic that closed aviation entirely, the councils held it and collected the returns — £110 million in dividends in 2019 alone. Nobody campaigns to close Manchester Airport. The people of Greater Manchester know whose airport it is.

The trust fund is not just the destination for the profits. It is how you actually get the thing built.

The government is not entirely wrong in how it plans to go about this. But not entirely wrong is not enough in the face of a national security crisis.

Proposals already circulating would allow councils to retain a portion of business rates from data centres — a recognition, however tentative, that the communities hosting this infrastructure should see something back. The instinct is correct. The ambition is too small.

Business rates retention is a passive income stream from an asset someone else owns, controls, and can walk away from the moment a better grid connection becomes available in Slough. It is better than nothing. It is not ownership. It does not solve the social licence problem, because the community is still being asked to host someone else’s asset. It does not solve the sovereignty problem, because the asset can still be acquired, relocated, or switched off. And it does not build the trust fund, because a business rates stream absorbed into the revenue budget will be spent on this year’s social care pressures before the ink is dry.

Civic ownership is a different proposition — you get the asset, the returns, and the social licence, and unlike a business rates stream, none of it can walk away. The community has a stake in its success rather than a consideration for tolerating it.

The Manchester Airport dividend has been flowing for eighty-eight years because the councils own the airport, not because they get a percentage of the landing fees. The difference is not semantic.

The Europe 2031 report, published two days before the Anthropic shutdown, warned that Europe controls just 5% of global AI compute against the US’s 80% — and that the EU’s stated goal of attracting €200 billion in private capital for AI data centres by 2036 amounts to a quarter of what American hyperscalers are spending this year alone. Britain is not Europe. But the dependency is the same, and the instinct to solve it by attracting private capital and offering communities a slice of the business rates is the same instinct that left the gas supply in private hands in 1873.

Chamberlain didn’t offer Birmingham a portion of the gas company’s rates. He bought the gas company.

Local government for growth is the sovereign growth engine that solves all four problems at once — asset ownership that cannot be bought or switched off, social fabric repair that makes the country more resilient, community stake that builds the social licence to actually get the infrastructure built, and a civic trust fund that holds the returns across generations rather than spending them on the next budget crisis. Every other answer to these problems is partial. This one answers all of them.

We have been looking for a sovereign growth engine that also repairs the social fabric, secures the infrastructure, and brings communities with it. We built it in 1938. We just forgot to use it.

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It is the question every local politician gets eventually, usually from someone who means it as a provocation dressed as a compliment — you seem intelligent, you have opinions, why are you spending your time arguing about bin collections and planning applications when you could be in Westminster? Where the real politics happens.

The real answer, the one that doesn’t fit neatly into a Focus leaflet, is this: because the civic fabric is in terminal decline, and somebody has to rebuild it, street by street, before there is nothing left to rebuild.

And there’s nowhere better to do that, and to make sure it has the trust fund it needs to outlive us all, than local government. Local Government for Growth is built on that belief.

Start with the swimming pool.

Not as a performative metaphor. An actual swimming pool — the one your parents learned to swim in, the one you learned to swim in, the one that was there when the Victorian council that built it decided that a child’s ability to swim was a public good worth funding. Since 2010, around 500 public swimming pools have closed across the United Kingdom. In the North East alone, 62 pools have permanently shut. One in four children currently leave primary school unable to swim 25 metres. That number is expected to rise to six in ten.

This is not a statistic about swimming. It is a statistic about what we have decided a child is worth. The pool that existed when your parents were young, that existed when you were young, will not exist for your children — not because nobody wants it, not because the need has gone away, but because the institution that was supposed to hold it in trust ran out of money, and nobody built the mechanism to make sure it wouldn’t.

Joseph Chamberlain looked at Birmingham in 1873 — overcrowded, disease-ridden, the slums pressing up against the factories — and decided that a city could be more than the sum of its economic activity. For a brief moment, Birmingham was heralded as the best-governed city in the industrial world. The Victorians built the civic infrastructure of this country not because they were told to, not because a Whitehall strategy document required it, but because they believed — with the particular confidence of people who had industrialised the world, and knew it — that a great city owed its citizens something more than the market could provide.

We have spent the intervening century and a half spending down what they built. The swimming pools are closing. The youth clubs are closing — 102 in London alone in a single decade, each closure producing, as the research now confirms, measurable declines in exam results and measurable increases in youth crime among the children who lost them. The libraries are closing. The community halls are closing. The NHS dentist has a two-year waiting list, if they exist at all.

Never once, in the history of this country, did anyone sit down and decide that Britain should become a nation of middling bureaucrats, miserly rationing off a grand inheritance penny by penny, making nothing new, surrounded by the sweeping ambition of predecessors who built the modern world. We’ve certainly never aspired to it. It happened anyway. It happened through a thousand individual decisions that each seemed reasonable at the time, each the product of a genuine funding constraint, each leaving the place slightly diminished and the people in it slightly more certain that the institutions did not believe they were worth the investment.

That certainty, accumulated over decades, is what produces the politics you are watching now. The broken window does not just signal decline. It teaches decline. It installs, in the people who live with it, the belief that this is a place that does not get nice things — and once that belief is installed, the demand for nice things becomes less legible, more visceral, if heard at all. The civic participation thins. The connection between the institution and the people it exists to serve frays until it snaps entirely.

The zealots filling the town halls did not arrive from nowhere. They arrived from a country that had been told, in a thousand calcifying ways, that it was not worth the investment. They are wrong about the cure. They are not wrong about the diagnosis.

The answer is not more of the same — not managed decline administered with better spreadsheets, not efficiency savings dressed as strategy, not the quiet acceptance that the pool will close and the youth club will close and the community hall will close and there is simply nothing to be done. The answer is to take the financial underpinning of the civic realm as seriously as the Victorians did — as seriously as any serious private sector operator takes the financial underpinning of a business they intend to last.

That is what local growth is for. Not growth as an end in itself. Not growth for pension returns or efficiency targets or the abstract satisfaction of a rising GDP figure. Growth as the mechanism by which you rebuild what was built before, hold it in trust, and ensure that the child who grows up on the council estate in 2040 has somewhere to learn to swim.

As he set off on his quest to rebuild the city in his image, Chamberlain declared that Birmingham “shall not, with God’s help, know itself.” Birmingham is now the largest local authority in Europe to have descended into bankruptcy. We need to understand the gap if we hope to restore Britain to it’s former glory, and keep it that way.

In his three years as mayor, between 1873 and 1876, he municipalised the gas and water supply, cleared the slums from the city centre, drove Corporation Street through the congested heart of the city, built libraries, schools and swimming pools, and laid the foundations for what would become the University of Birmingham. You couldn’t achieve so much today, it would take that long just to onboard the consultants. But did it then by taking seriously a proposition that now sounds almost eccentric: that a city owes its citizens something the market cannot provide, and that the institution best placed to provide it is the one they collectively own, from the proceeds of that which they already consume. They called it gas-and-water socialism.

Chamberlain was not an anomaly. He was the expression of something the Victorians understood about civic life that we have forgotten — that the great cities of industrial Britain were not economic engines but civilisational projects. The mechanics institutes that spread across the north and midlands in the nineteenth century were not charity. They were a statement that a working man’s mind was worth developing. The great town halls — Leeds, Manchester, Bradford, Birmingham — were not vanity. They were declarations. This city believes it is building something worth building. This city believes its people are worth the investment.

This country industrialised the world. It produced Babbage, who conceived the computer a century before anyone could build one. Lovelace, who understood what it could do before her collaborator did. Turing, who broke the codes that shortened the war and then laid the theoretical foundations for every computer that has ever existed. It built the NHS — not as a policy, but as a gift, a statement that the health of every citizen was a collective responsibility regardless of what they could afford. It wrote the common law that governs half the planet. It built an empire that was, in its consequences, catastrophic — and in its ambition, a reflection of a people who did not think small.

The British Dream is not the American Dream. It is not the self-made man, the rags-to-riches arc, the belief that individual genius and hard work are sufficient to overcome any obstacle. It is something more collective and more honest: the belief that a society can make sufficient common provision that talent is not purely a function of postcode. That the kid on the council estate gets the same chance as the kid in the detached house, not because the market has been abolished but because the community has decided, through its institutions, that certain things are held in common. The swimming pool. The library. The youth club. The school good enough that it doesn’t matter which side of the tracks you grew up on. The NHS dentist who will see you, and your children, and your grand children with any luck.

That is what the Victorians were building when they built the town halls and the mechanics institutes and the municipal swimming pools. Not a welfare state in the modern sense. Something older and more instinctive. A civic settlement. The shared infrastructure of a shared life.

We have spent a century and a half spending it down. The dream did not die. We defunded the infrastructure that made it real. And the difference between those two things — between a dream that has been abandoned and a dream that has been underfunded — is the size of the opportunity that local government for growth exists to capture.

The usual answers have been tried. They have not worked.

The left’s answer is taxation. Tax the wealthy, tax corporations, tax anyone within arms reach and redistribute the proceeds into the services that have been hollowed out. At its more radical edge, it goes further: abandon growth as an aspiration entirely. Degrowth — the proposition that the economy should shrink, that consumption should fall, that material living standards should be deliberately reduced in the name of sustainability — is no longer a fringe position. It is increasingly the implicit operating assumption of a politics that treats profit as a moral failing and economic expansion as a threat.

Degrowth is, at its heart, a politics of sufficiency for people who already have enough, issuing instructions to people who don’t. It looks at the woman who cannot find an NHS dentist, the family whose nearest swimming pool closed three years ago, the kid whose youth club was defunded before he was old enough to use it — and tells them that wanting these things back is the problem. That the correct response to a hollowed-out civic life is to hollow it out more equitably. That aspiration itself, the belief that things could and should be better, is a symptom of the consumerist pathology that is, in any case, going to kill us all. How dare you expect more. Learn to want less. The hair shirt is the ideology, the planet is the justification, and you should be grateful for the fit.

Even in its less radical form, the left’s theory has a structural problem it cannot solve: you cannot tax growth indefinitely without slowing it. The squeezed middle is already at its limit. Tax the engine hard enough and the engine stalls — and when the engine stalls, the redistribution has nothing left to redistribute. The left’s theory of civic renewal depends on the continuation of the economic activity it treats as a moral embarrassment.

The right’s answer was efficiency. The market knows best; the state should get out of the way; the things worth keeping will survive because people will pay for them and the things that close were evidently not worth keeping. This is the theory that sold the swimming pools and the community halls and the youth clubs and called it reform. What it could never quite account for — what its balance sheets had no column for — is that the social fabric does not have a cash value. The youth club that keeps a kid off the street, the community hall that stops an elderly person dying of loneliness, the swimming pool that teaches a child a skill that might one day save their life: none of these show up cleanly in a cost-benefit analysis. They are the kind of good that only becomes visible when it is gone, when the exam results fall and the crime rises and the A&E fills up and everyone agrees that something must have gone wrong somewhere without quite being able to say when. The right sold the invisible infrastructure of a functioning society and was surprised to find that the society stopped functioning.

The furniture has been sold. The rooms are empty. The right has not yet reckoned with what it did to the places it claimed to represent, or with the political consequences that are now walking through the doors of their former strongholds wearing Reform rosettes.

The managerialist centre managed. It wrote strategies. It held consultations. It produced frameworks and vision documents and place-based approaches and levelling-up funds distributed by formula in ways that bore no discernible relationship to need or ambition. And when — occasionally, improbably — a council found a leader with the commercial seriousness and civic ambition to try something different, the centre was ready for them. The procurement rules. The state aid concerns. The risk assessments. The legal opinions. The equality impact assessments on the equality impact assessments.

And when the ambition scaled up — when it reached for something genuinely transformative — it built the compliance architecture first and the thing itself never. HS2 spent more than £280 million on consultants alone, before a single rail was laid. The Big Four accountancy firms received £292 million in fees. Legal advisers billed £67 million. A community swimming pool — 25 metres, six lanes, the kind that teaches a generation to swim — costs around £8 million to build. The consultancy spend on HS2 would have built thirty-five of them. The train may never arrive. The pools certainly won’t. The paperwork, however, is immaculate.

The managed decline that Geoffrey Howe proposed for Liverpool in a confidential letter in 1981 was never quite official policy anywhere else. It didn’t need to be. The red tape was sufficient. It happened by default, one aborted initiative at a time, across every town and city that found the will to try and discovered that the system had been designed, whether intentionally or not, to make trying very difficult indeed.

It managed the whole thing with the administrative sleight of hand of a very competent magician — and nobody was supposed to notice what was disappearing.

There is a gap where the answer should be. The left cannot fill it without killing the growth that pays for it. The right sold it, certain the market would provide something better — the market has not yet got round to it. The centre managed its disappearance with immaculate paperwork.

What remains is the question: who is going to rebuild it, with what money, and on what terms?

Manchesterism is having a moment. You cannot attend a growth conference, read a place-based policy paper, or sit through a mayoral speech without encountering it — the proposition that the Manchester model, the combined authority, the long-term civic institution with patient capital and commercial ambition, is the template for reindustrialising Britain. Andy Burnham is its figurehead. The Northern Powerhouse is its political ancestor. Every mid-sized city with a regeneration strategy and an underused brownfield site has decided it is, in some sense, Manchester.

Manchester Airports Group has been majority owned by the ten Greater Manchester local authorities since 1938. Not since the devolution settlement. Not since the combined authority. Since 1938. Through the postwar consensus, through Thatcherism, through New Labour, through austerity, through a global pandemic that closed aviation entirely for the better part of two years — the councils held it, ran it commercially, and collected the returns. In 2019, before the pandemic, it paid £110 million in dividends to its shareholders — the ten Greater Manchester councils taking the lion’s share. It is the most instructive example of patient civic capital in British local government history, and it did not happen because of a policy paper in a Tufton Street Think Tank. It happened because serious people, over generations, made a serious institutional decision and held it.

That is the substance of Manchesterism. Not the combined authority structure, not the devolution deal, not the metro mayor. The substance is the decision, made and remade across decades, to treat local government as a vehicle for genuine economic ambition rather than a venue for managed decline. To hire people who could run things. To take commercial risk on behalf of the public. To think in generational timescales rather than electoral ones.

This is also what nobody talking about Manchesterism wants to admit: it cannot be mandated. You cannot write a Manchesterism policy. You cannot distribute it by formula or unlock it with a levelling-up fund. It requires something harder and rarer than money. It requires serious people who have decided that local government is where serious work gets done — not a stepping stone to Westminster, not a pensioner's social club, not a platform for the arguments they were already having before they arrived. The place where politics actually touches people's lives. The place where the swimming pool either gets built or it doesn't.

Westminster is where people think the real politics happens. It isn’t. The real politics — the politics of whether your child has somewhere to go after school, whether your street is maintained, whether your town has an economic future — happens in the town hall. It has always happened there. The problem is that the people capable of making it happen have largely decided the town hall is beneath them.

Manchesterism required twenty years of institutional substrate before it produced the model everyone now wants to copy. It required councillors and officers who understood that commercial seriousness and civic purpose were not in tension but the same thing — that the airport’s dividends were what paid for the services, and the services were what made the place worth living in. It required, in short, exactly the kind of local government that the managerialist tendency has spent forty years making it harder to build.

The model exists. The Manchester Airports Group is not the only proof of concept. The councils that have restarted council housebuilding, reinternalised their arms-length management organisations, built commercial vehicles that generate revenue for the civic purpose — these did not happen by accident. They are the product of specific institutional choices, made by specific people, who decided to take local government seriously as a site of genuine ambition.

That is the choice this argument is asking people to make. Not to copy Manchester. To decide, in your place, with your assets and your opportunities and your community, that the town hall is where the work gets done — and then do the work.

The question is not whether local government can be commercial. They have no choice but to be — their tax base may never recover, and the dual poison of service costs that outpace inflation and rising demand that outpaces every forecast will kill the entire institution if it attempts to stave off its end any other way. The question is what commercial local government is for — and the answer has two parts, both of which matter, neither of which works without the other.

The first: growth must be shaped for civic outcomes from the point of conception. Not extracted from communities as a planning gain afterthought, not negotiated reluctantly in a committee room after the developer has already decided what they want to build. Designed in. The community’s needs — affordable homes, local employment, skills, green space, the infrastructure of a life worth living — are not constraints on development. They are its purpose.

The second: the returns from that growth must be structurally endowed for civic purposes. Not absorbed into the revenue budget to plug this year’s social care gap. Not distributed as a one-off windfall and spent. Held. Reinvested. Protected, across political cycles, against the permanent temptation to spend the future on the present.

Together, these two propositions are what distinguishes the Local Government for Growth argument from both the property-developer-with-planning-powers version of commercial councils and the managed-decline version of cautious ones. There is a version of commercially ambitious local government that chases yield, sweats assets, builds executive apartments on brownfield land and calls it regeneration, and measures success in revenue rather than outcomes. Thurrock was an attempt at commercial ambition. It did not end well. The argument here is not that. It is something more demanding: growth that is civic in its design and endowed in its returns.

Golden Valley is a £1 billion technology campus on 45 hectares adjacent to GCHQ in Cheltenham. It is, by design, more than a technology campus. The affordable homes are not a planning obligation extracted at the last minute — they are structured into the development vehicle from the start. The apprenticeships and skills programmes are not a corporate social responsibility gesture — they are the terms on which the council chose to enable the development. The green space is not a concession — it is part of what the place is for. And the returns from the development company flow back to the council, not to a private operator’s shareholders, which means they are available — if the political will exists to protect them — for the civic purposes that generated the opportunity in the first place.

That is the first proposition made concrete. The second requires a different kind of institutional discipline.

The HRA investment programme is the trust fund argument applied to housing. For decades, Cheltenham Borough Council did not build council houses. The financial architecture made it difficult, the political will was absent, and the assumption common across most of English local government was that council housebuilding was a thing of the past. Restarting it required a decision: to treat the Housing Revenue Account not as a liability to be managed but as a vehicle for investment, to borrow against future rental income to build homes that the market would not build, and to hold those homes in perpetuity as a civic asset. The homes being built now will still be affordable homes in fifty years. The revenue they generate will still be flowing back into the housing account in fifty years. That is not a budget line. It is an endowment.

UBICO, the shared environmental services company owned by a consortium of Cotswold councils. One Legal, the shared legal service. These are not glamorous. They are not the kind of thing that gets written up in policy papers about the future of local government. They are the unglamorous commercial infrastructure that generates the margin that funds the things that matter — and they are owned by the councils, which means the returns stay in the system. The airport at one end. The shared legal service at the other. The principle is identical: find the commercial opportunity, structure it so the returns flow to the public, hold it across political cycles, and use the proceeds to rebuild what has been spent down.

The trust fund is not a metaphor. It is a design choice. Every commercial vehicle a council builds is a choice about whether the returns get absorbed into the revenue budget and spent on immediate pressures — which they will be, if you let them — or ring-fenced for the long-term civic purposes that never win a budget argument in the short term but are the things that compound across generations. The swimming pool that closed did not close because nobody valued it. It closed because nobody had built the financial mechanism to protect it when the pressure came.

The Trust Fund is how we make sure this never, ever, happens again.

We have been here before. Twice. We failed to learn the same lesson on both occasions.

The Victorians built the town halls and the mechanics institutes and the municipal swimming pools and the libraries and the universities — acts of civic ambition so large they still embarrass the buildings around them. They built brilliantly. They did not endow. The assumption was that the wealth that had built the empire would always be there to maintain what the empire’s profits had funded. It wasn’t. The twentieth century spent the inheritance.

The postwar generation built the NHS, the council houses, the welfare state, the comprehensive schools — a second act of civic ambition, different in character from the Victorian version but equal in scale. They built brilliantly. They did not endow. The assumption was that the postwar settlement was permanent, that the political consensus that had produced it would hold, that the money would always be found because the alternative was unthinkable. The consensus broke. The money was not found. The Conservatives called it reform. The result was the same: brilliant things built without the financial mechanism to protect them, left vulnerable to the next ideology, the next spending review, the next chancellor with a red box and a theory.

The crumbling civic fabric around us is the product of a repeated historical failure to ask the question that should have been asked at the point of building: how do we make sure this is still here in a hundred years?

Local growth is the answer to that question. Not just the mechanism for rebuilding what has been lost — though it is that. The mechanism for making sure we do not have to rebuild it again. The trust fund that the Victorians did not build. The endowment that the postwar generation did not create. The financial architecture that says: these things are held in common, their funding is structural, their continuity is guaranteed not by the goodwill of the next administration but by the design of the institution itself. We will act like a company, producing profits we take as seriously as any private enterprise — in service of the public one.

This matters for a reason that goes beyond finance. The civic fabric has to be trustworthy — not just present but reliably present — for it to function as civic fabric at all. A swimming pool that might close is not the same thing as a swimming pool. A youth club that depends on this year’s budget decision is not the same thing as a youth club. The person who decides not to invest their time and energy in a community institution because they have watched too many community institutions close is not being irrational. They are responding correctly to repeated institutional failure. They are doing what any rational person does when the thing they were promised has been taken away enough times: they stop expecting it to be there.

That withdrawal — from the institution, from the community, from the civic life that the institution was supposed to enable — is what produces the politics we are now watching. The zealots filling the town halls did not arrive from nowhere. They arrived from communities that had stopped believing the institutions were on their side. The broken window does not just signal decline. It teaches it. And what it teaches, over decades, is that expecting better is naive — that the civic fabric is not for people like you, that the institutions have made their decision about your worth, and that the correct response is rage or withdrawal or both.

The trust fund argument is, at its deepest, a democratic argument. You cannot ask people to be citizens — to participate, to invest, to believe that the collective project is worth their time — if the collective project cannot be trusted to hold what it builds. Citizenship requires a covenant.

The covenant has been broken, repeatedly, by the failure to endow.

Local growth, structured correctly, is how you repair it.

There is a type of political career that Britain has always produced in abundance. It begins in a student union, passes through a think tank or a special adviser’s office, arrives in Westminster via a safe seat, and spends the next thirty years navigating the institutions of national government with varying degrees of distinction. It is not a bad career. It is, by most measures, a serious one. Many good people can, and do, spend their careers doing such work and make the country better for it.

But my work, it rests in solving civic problems. On rebuilding the fabric of this country. These are problems that live in places, and the institution that governs places is not Parliament. It is the town hall.

This is not an argument against Westminster. It is an argument about where the leverage is. The serious political work of the next generation — the work that will determine whether the country recovers its civic ambition or continues its managed decline into a kind of permanent, low-grade dysfunction — is not going to be done in Whitehall alone.

It is going to be done in the councils that decide to take commercial seriousness seriously. In the development vehicles that structure growth for civic return. In the housing revenue accounts that restart council housebuilding for the first time in a generation. In the shared services and commercial subsidiaries and patient civic capital investments that generate the margin that funds the things that matter and holds them, structurally, against the pressure to spend them down.

Local Government for Growth is not just a technical agenda. It is not just a policy platform or a conference theme or a set of recommendations for the next spending review. It is a claim — serious, demanding, and I believe correct — that commercially ambitious, civically purposeful local government is a necessary component of healing the state of this country. That the covenant between the institution and the citizen, broken by decades of disinvestment and managed decline, can only be repaired at the scale at which it was broken. That the trust fund the Victorians didn't build, the endowment the postwar generation didn't create, can still be built — if the people capable of building it decide that the town hall is where they want to spend their political lives.

Chamberlain said Birmingham shall not, with God’s help, know itself. He was right, and then the money ran out, and the maintenance was deferred, and the inheritance was spent. Local Government for Growth is the movement that says: not this time. We will build, and we will endow, and we will hold it in trust, and we will produce the profits to make it permanent.

That is a serious political project. It deserves serious people. It is, for those willing to do the work, the most important political project in the country.

That is why I am in local government.

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Not interesting in the way that people who work in it have always found it interesting — the granular, unglamorous, genuinely consequential work of keeping a place functional. Interesting in the way that people who want to remake the world have started to notice it exists. The zealots have arrived. They have arrived from every direction at once, and they have arrived with agendas that have very little to do with the bins.

One of the great risks facing the Local Government for Growth cluster is that we treat this like a new problem, a problem of our times. The temptation, as it always is, when the world looks this strange, is to assume it requires a new explanation. It doesn’t. Someone has already run this experiment. They can tell us a lot about what to do with the results.

In the space of two election cycles, English town halls have acquired Reform councillors running DOGE-style audits of their own officers, eighteen-year-old independents elected on platforms combining Gaza solidarity with opposition to mixed-sex socialising, and council leaders whose stated first act in office was a legal challenge to block the reorganisation of the very institution they had just been elected to lead. Thurrock — the council that lost £655 million on speculative investments so catastrophically misconceived that the district auditor’s report reads like a Greek tragedy — now has a cabinet member for deregulation. Across Reform-controlled counties, the Pride flag has come down from public buildings; in several, it has been replaced by a flag protocol that would not have looked out of place in the Section 28 era. In Lewisham, a newly elected Green mayor has appointed a cabinet member whose brief encompasses communities, sanctuary, and — this is a real job, in a real council, with a real budget — healing.

They are not the same. Their politics are irreconcilable. A Reform councillor and a Green councillor would struggle to agree on the time of day. But they share something deeper than policy: they are all anti-establishment issue movements with protest voter bases, responding to the very real dire state of the country with promises of radical undeliverable solutions, performing politics through something closer to performance art than governance.

The council is the experiment. The country can, truly, be run the way they believe it can. They're going to prove it. Starting right here, on Littlehampton Borough Council. Definitive proof that we've all just been holding out on them.

The residents are, they’re soon to find out, the test subjects.

These are not aberrations. They are not the rough edges of a system absorbing an unusually turbulent electoral cycle. They are the first visible symptoms of a wave of ideological capture that local government has not seen since the 1980s, arriving this time not from one direction but from all of them simultaneously, and landing on a financial base so depleted there is almost nothing left to cushion the impact.

We have seen this cocktail before. Not this exact blend — never quite this many flavours at once — but the same base ingredients: protest politics institutionalised, impossible promises made structural, ideological certainty colliding with fiscal reality. For those now staring at the weird new world trying to work out how this ends, there is a case study. It is not comforting.

Most people who know the Kinnock speech don’t know where it comes from. They know the clip — it circulates endlessly, deployed as a weapon in arguments about the Labour left, quoted by Starmer, quoted back at Starmer, a floating piece of rhetorical ammunition that has long since detached from its original target.

They know the cadence of it, the building fury, the way it lands: you end in the grotesque chaos of a Labour council — a Labour council — hiring taxis to scuttle round a city handing out redundancy notices to its own workers.

What fewer people remember is what the taxis were actually about, or why it mattered, or what came after.

Liverpool in the early 1980s was a city in distress — deindustrialised, underfunded, angry, and receptive. Into that anger stepped Militant, a Trotskyist organisation that had spent a decade quietly colonising the local Labour Party from the inside, placing its members in key positions and waiting. By 1983 they had the council. By 1985 they had a crisis.

The deputy leader was Derek Hatton: sharp-suited, charismatic, constitutionally incapable of understatement, a man who combined Trotskyist rhetoric with a relish for the spectacle of it all. When Alan Bleasdale wrote GBH — the 1991 Channel 4 drama whose Militant council leader is one of British television’s great political portraits — he based the character so obviously on Hatton that the two men ran into each other before filming began. Hatton, having caught wind of the project, told Bleasdale he didn’t mind at all, as long as the actor playing him was handsome. Militant’s real engine was Tony Mulhearn, the printing compositor who had helped found the organisation and was the ideological spine of the operation. Hatton was the performance. Mulhearn was the programme. Neither come out of this story in good shape.

Together they pursued an ambitious programme: new housing, jobs, services, a city rebuilt. The housing they delivered. What they did not deliver was any mechanism for paying for it. The new homes were built with money earmarked for maintaining the old ones. The maintenance deferred, the debt accumulated, the houses began, as anyone could have predicted, to decay before their eyes. When the confrontation with central government came — the illegal budget, the £30 million deficit — Liverpool borrowed its way out with £60 million in loans from Swiss banks, at interest rates that within a year threatened to consume half the city’s entire housing budget. It was the MMT of its moment: borrow now, spend now, trust that something will turn up.

Something did not turn up.

The taxis were not incompetence. Militant said so themselves — the redundancy notices were a deliberate stunt, a way of forcing the crisis into the open. Not one worker was intended to lose their job. The point was the spectacle: look what this government has driven us to. It worked as spectacle. It failed as politics, because spectacle has a way of escaping its authors, and Kinnock used it to end them.

The redundancy notices were the most famous piece of theatre, but not the only one. When the council needed a race relations officer, it appointed its own man — a Militant-aligned building surveyor from London with no relevant experience. The Black Caucus, the body of community leaders who actually sat on the Race Relations Liaison Committee, occupied the council buildings in protest. Hatton promised to re-advertise the post. The council then simply ignored the promise and kept its man in place. Opposition councillors, meanwhile, had learned not to expect a comfortable meeting: sessions opened with their names called out one by one and each invited, with the word shame ringing in their ears, to leave the chamber before business began. And when it really mattered — when the illegal budget came to be passed — an opposition councillor who was there told me they locked the doors of the chamber. The council was theirs. This was their controlled experiment, and they weren’t going to let a thing like the law stop them.

It was, as they always said, better to break the law than break the poor. They ended up doing both.

To understand why Militant happened, you need to understand what Liverpool had been told about itself.

In July 1981, Toxteth burned. Nine nights of rioting, 460 injured police officers, 70 buildings demolished or destroyed, the kind of urban disorder that forces governments to make choices about what they actually believe. Behind the scenes in Whitehall, as Michael Heseltine was dispatched to Liverpool as an unofficial minister for Merseyside and began drawing up ambitious regeneration plans, the Chancellor of the Exchequer was writing a different kind of letter.

Geoffrey Howe to Margaret Thatcher, 4 September 1981, confidential, released thirty years later under the thirty-year rule: he feared Merseyside was going to be “much the hardest nut to crack.” He warned against concentrating limited resources on Liverpool when “possibly more promising areas such as the West Midlands, or even the North East” might reward the investment more. Regenerating the city, he wrote, would be like trying to make water flow uphill. And then, the sentence that made it into history: “I cannot help feeling that the option of managed decline is one which we should not forget altogether.”

Howe later said he wasn’t advocating it. The phrase was, he acknowledged at the time, much too explosive to use even privately. So the policy was: consider writing off a city, but don’t say so out loud.

This is why Militant made sense. Not justified — the Swiss loans, the housing maintenance money spent on ribbon-cuttings, the stunts that consumed the institution — but legible. If the people who are supposed to represent you have decided, in a confidential letter they hope you’ll never read, that you are not worth the effort of saving, then the normal rules of political engagement start to look like a polite fiction. Someone needs to do something dramatic, because the alternative is slow, creaking, miserable condemnation.

That logic did not die with Militant. It is louder now. The places that voted Reform in 2025 were not wrong that something had been written off — the hollowed-out county towns, the post-industrial cities, the coastal communities where managed decline is not a historical grievance but a present condition. The places that voted Green in inner London were not wrong that the climate is not being taken seriously, that the housing crisis is not being addressed, that the institutions are not producing results. The Palestine independents were not wrong that something monstrous was happening and that the established parties were not reflecting their politics on the matter.

Militant were not wrong about Liverpool either. The city had been abandoned by the logic of the market and the indifference of the Treasury. They were wrong about almost everything else: wrong about what to do, wrong about how to pay for it, wrong about the relationship between performance and governance, wrong about the costs their successors would have to meet.

Being right about the diagnosis and catastrophically wrong about the cure is, it turns out, an extremely dangerous combination in local government. It is also an extremely familiar one.

There is a question that everyone new to local government asks eventually, usually in a tone of mild outrage: why does it work like that? Why can’t the council just borrow to cover a shortfall? Why does the chief finance officer have powers that seem to override the elected leadership? Why is the entire financial framework so rigid, so paranoid, so apparently designed to prevent councils from doing anything ambitious without tripping seventeen different wires?

The answer, almost invariably, is Derek Hatton’s most monumental achievement. The Local Government Finance Act 1988 — full of provisions people spend careers trying to reform, the prudential borrowing framework alone having frustrated more ambitious housing programmes than any planning committee — is the ultimate Chesterton’s fence of British local government. Don’t remove the fence until you understand why it was built. It was drafted, in significant part, because of what had happened on Merseyside. To make sure it never happened again.

The existing powers of the section 151 officer — the council’s chief finance officer, the person legally responsible for the books — had proved inadequate when confronted with a political leadership that simply didn’t accept that the books needed balancing. So parliament created section 114: a nuclear option available to the chief finance officer alone, requiring no permission from the leader, no vote of the council, no agreement from anyone. If the officer judges that the council is about to spend money it doesn’t have, or incur unlawful expenditure, they issue the notice and all non-statutory spending stops. Immediately. The council has twenty-one days to meet and work out what to do next.

The man who helped draft sections 114 to 116 of the Act later recalled being told by Liverpool’s own chief finance officer how the system had been tested in real time. The council leader, in the final days of Militant’s grip on the city, had banned the section 114 notification from being carried in members’ internal mail. So the finance officer delivered his letter to every elected member personally. On his bike.

That image — a council officer cycling round Liverpool, letter by letter, because the political leadership had tried to suppress the legal warning — is the founding myth of modern local government finance. The 1988 Act was the institutional response: make the power statutory, make it individual, make it impossible to intercept.

Whether it’s enough is the question nobody wants to answer. A section 114 notice assumes a chief finance officer willing to issue one, and a political leadership that accepts, however grudgingly, the constraints of law. Militant eventually capitulated. The surcharge of the 47 councillors — made personally liable for the deficit they had run up — concentrated minds in a way that ideology alone had not. But the surcharge power was abolished in 2000. And a Reform council leader who has already announced that his first act in office would be a legal challenge to block central government policy is not obviously a man who will receive a section 114 notice as a prompt for quiet reflection.

When Liverpool’s more recent crisis broke — the corruption allegations, the contracts, the arrests — I was trying to understand what had happened to the city the first time. Not quite as a journalist; more accurately, a voluntary, often hungover bag-carrier, copywriter and disciple of Richard Kemp, leader of the Liverpool Liberal Democrats. Kemp was a deeply radical pavement politician, utterly Marmite, the kind of character Liverpool produces and nowhere else would tolerate or understand. Through him I had a seat inside the opposition at a council that was, by then, being investigated for the corruption that Militant’s culture had made possible a generation earlier. I was writing scrutiny papers and speeches and trying to work out what on earth was going on — which is how I ended up sitting across from Peter Kilfoyle, a recorder from the student radio station on the table between us.

Nobody knew the dark inside of Scouse politics quite like Peter Kilfoyle.

Kilfoyle was the witchfinder general. In the late 1980s, as Militant’s grip on Liverpool Labour finally loosened, he was the man sent in to do the clearing up — identifying the members, documenting the entryism, purging the organisation that had colonised the party from the inside. It was grinding, thankless, politically costly work, the kind that makes you enemies on all sides and leaves marks. By the time I met him he had been an MP, had served in government, and had spent years watching the city he loved lurch from one crisis to another. He was not angry. He was dejected in a way that felt final, the way people are dejected when they have run out of the energy that anger requires.

I asked him, because I was a candidate at the time and believed in what local government could do, for some advice for people hoping to go into it. He told me not to. There was nothing salvageable, he said. The institution was too damaged, the conditions too hostile, the pattern too entrenched.

I ignored him. I went in anyway.

But I think about that conversation more now than I did then. He wasn’t describing Militant’s return — he was clear about that. What he was describing was the return of the conditions that had made Militant possible: the funding stripped back, the anger building, the sense among whole communities that the normal channels had failed them and that someone needed to do something. He thought it was a new kind of bad. He was right. He just couldn’t have known quite what shape it would take.

I met Derek Hatton once. I was nineteen, running a Lib Dem advice stall at a farmers market in Liverpool — St Michael’s, which by then was considerably more artisan sourdough than Trotskyist vanguard. He came over. He had clearly decided to give it large to the teenage girl staffing the Liberal Democrat table, which tells you something about the revolutionary spirit in its later years. I was mostly fascinated by how little his face moved, his later life Botox affliction having set in by this point. The man who had threatened to break the legs of opposition councillors1, borrowed millions from Swiss banks, sent thirty-one thousand redundancy notices out by taxi as a negotiating stunt, and inspired one of British television’s great political dramas — and here he was, picking an argument with a nineteen-year-old at a farmers market.

He went on. I listened, with the obviously shallow patience of someone who has stopped taking a conversation seriously. And then, at some volume, I asked whether he’d be lending the Lib Dems his support this time.

He sputtered. He turned away. I called after him that I’d put him down as a maybe.

After leaving the council, Hatton reinvented himself several times — broadcaster, property developer, after-dinner speaker, male model, briefly. Most perfectly, he became the face of Sekonda watches. Sekonda, for those who don’t remember, was the budget British watch brand whose entire advertising proposition was the tagline: Beware of Expensive Imitations. The man who had borrowed £60 million from Swiss banks to paper over the cracks of an undeliverable programme spent his next act warning the British public against expensive Swiss alternatives.

His own account of how he operated, offered in a 2008 interview, was: “My attitude has always been, spend what you have while it’s there.”

That instinct — spend what you have while it's there — is exactly what the local government for growth movement exists to fight. It runs through all of them, left and right. It is the enemy we now have to stare down, if we want to save this country from itself.

Reform have arrived in local government with a theory: councils were bloated, wasteful, run by officers who had spent decades spending taxpayers’ money on diversity agendas and net zero programmes nobody had asked for.

The cure was a Department of Government Efficiency — DOGE, imported wholesale from the Trump administration, branded with Elon Musk’s imprimatur and dispatched to Kent, Lancashire and Northamptonshire with software engineers, data analysts and forensic auditors in tow. Officers who obstructed DOGE’s work were warned they would be considered as having committed gross misconduct. The Conservative opposition leader in one of the affected councils called it “gimmicks.” The union organiser in Lancashire said the auditors would find the cupboards bare — that a decade of austerity had already taken everything that was available to take.

Both were right. Reform raised taxes in every council where it holds or shares power. Potholes continue to cause accidents. Councillors’ struggles over where to make promised savings have put much-loved local services at risk. The DOGE units found some savings — mainly by cancelling climate programmes and halting office moves — but nothing remotely resembling the revolution that had been promised. What they found, when they opened the books, was what everyone who actually works in local government already knew: there is nothing left to cut that doesn’t hurt someone.

This is the Militant parallel in its starkest form. Not the ideology — Reform’s politics are Militant’s mirror image — but the relationship between the performance and the institution. The DOGE audit is theatre in precisely the way the taxi redundancy notices were theatre. It is a way of dramatising a confrontation with an establishment the movement despises, of demonstrating to supporters that someone is finally doing something. What it is not is a theory of governance.

This was, word for word, Reform's argument for why they deserved to win. The council had been captured by an agenda. Officers were pursuing priorities nobody had elected them to pursue. The institution had been bent to serve a politics rather than a population. That the job of councils is to deliver strong services at a competitive price. And then they did it themselves, faster and with more flags.

The Greens present a different problem, and in some ways a more troubling one. Reform’s fiscal gap between promise and reality opened almost immediately and crudely — taxes went up, the DOGE units found the cupboards bare, the revolution failed to materialise. The Greens’ gap is slower, deeper, and dressed in the language of saving the world. To even begin to grapple with them is to accept that they’re going to accuse you of trying to get us all killed, as they gesticulate wildly from their precarious spot half way over the cliff in the Reliant Robin that is British local government.

The national programme is straightforward enough in its ambition: capital spending rising by £90 billion per year by 2030, with over £70 billion allocated to the green transition. The funding mechanism is carbon pricing. The Economist notes this would be roughly equal to the combined yield of all 80 carbon pricing schemes worldwide in 2024. This is the Swiss loans with a carbon price attached. The money isn’t there. It will be, once the transformation creates it. Have faith. We’ll be able to pay it all back. It didn’t turn up for Militant either.

But the fiscal arithmetic is almost beside the point. The deeper problem is ideological. The Green programme rests on a view of economic life in which profit is a moral failing, growth is a threat, and the correct response to the question of how you pay for things is to tax whoever is still generating wealth until the question goes away. This is not a theory of prosperity. It is a theory of managed redistribution — and like all theories of managed redistribution, it depends entirely on there being something left to redistribute. Tax growth indefinitely and you will, in time, have less growth to tax. The tap doesn’t run dry dramatically. It slows, then slows again, then one budget cycle the finance officer delivers news that the projections no longer work, and nobody can quite explain when it started going wrong. Or who is left to tax to pay for it.

The cabinet member for healing is not, in isolation, the problem. The problem is what happens when the portfolio for healing meets the portfolio for finance, and the finance officer starts asking questions that the ideology has not equipped anyone to answer.

The Palestine independents are the simplest case and the most structurally unstable.

Reform wants to use the council to wage a culture war. The Greens want to use it to save the planet. Both are engaging, however dysfunctionally, with the institution they’ve inherited — its budgets, its officers, its statutory obligations. The Palestine independents, in the main, are not interested in the institution at all. They are interested in the argument. The council is the loudest available megaphone, and they have picked it up.

The argument has two problems. The first is jurisdiction. The independents elected to Lancashire in 2025 are now the third largest group on the council, behind Reform UK on 52 seats and the Conservatives on eight. Lancashire County Council has no foreign policy. It has no diplomatic relations with Israel. It cannot end a war, broker a ceasefire, or do anything whatsoever about the situation in Gaza beyond passing a motion that will be reported in the local paper and ignored everywhere else. What it does have is a social care budget under severe pressure, a SEND deficit that is quietly approaching crisis, and roads that need fixing. These are, by general agreement, secondary considerations.

The second problem is the coalition itself. The Palestine independents are not a political movement. They are a temporary alliance held together by a single issue, and the alliance does not survive scrutiny. Sit the members down and ask them what they believe about anything other than Gaza and the answers diverge rapidly. The radical socialist independents who want to use divestment as a lever for a broader anti-capitalist programme share a group with deeply socially conservative Muslim thinkers who have been using the Palestine cause as a vehicle for ideas — gender-segregated meetings, the erosion of mixed-sex public life — that would make their Green allies visibly uncomfortable if stated plainly. The Greens keep allying with them anyway, because they read as left-coded, because the cause is righteous, because the social policy incompatibility can be quietly overlooked as long as everyone agrees on divestment.

This is the nexus point. The Palestine independents are, in their strange way, the place where the Reform problem and the Green problem meet. Reform is doing council as socially conservative performance art from one direction. The Greens are doing council as socially liberal performance art from another. The Palestine independents are somehow doing both simultaneously, depending on which member of the coalition you’re talking to, and the Greens have decided not to notice.

Militant, at least, had a coherent ideology. It was wrong, it was undeliverable, it was prosecuted with a reckless disregard for the institution and the people it served — but it was coherent. You knew what it believed. You knew what it would do next. The current wave offers no such clarity. It is a collection of protest movements that have accidentally won councils, held together by grievance and opposed to establishment, with no shared theory of what local government is for or how it should be run. The only thing they agree on is that the people who ran it before were wrong.

That, too, is familiar. It is almost word for word what Militant believed in 1983. It was not, on its own, enough.

So what, if anything, can be done?

The answer in 1985 was Kinnock. One speech, one conference, one devastating act of political courage from a leader willing to sacrifice his own left flank to save his party and, in doing so, name what was happening in Liverpool for what it was. The grotesque chaos line did not just end Militant. It drew a line. It said: this is not acceptable, this is not what we are, and the people doing it will be held to account.

There is no equivalent figure today. There is no single speech that covers Reform, the Greens, the Palestine independents and the independent coalitions simultaneously. There is no party mechanism that can expel a Reform councillor and a Green mayor and a Gaza independent in the same process. The wave is too broad, too ideologically diffuse, and too distributed across too many institutions for any single Kinnock moment to lance the boil.

But the Kinnock answer still applies, even if it has to be delivered in a different form. Someone — several someones, in several parties, in several places — needs to say clearly and publicly what is happening. That councils are being used as stages for arguments they cannot resolve. That the residents who elected them are paying for theatre they did not commission. That the financial consequences of governance as performance are not abstract — they are the services that will not be delivered, the 114 notices that will follow, the generation of repair work that somebody else will have to do. The silence of the mainstream in the face of the wave is not neutrality. It is complicity. Every week that passes without someone standing up and saying this is a week in which the culture of performance becomes more entrenched and the cost of correction rises.

The second answer is structural: the circuit breakers need strengthening. The 1988 Act built in protections that were adequate for a single Militant council with a coherent ideology and a central party mechanism that could eventually be brought to bear. They are not adequate for dozens of ideologically incompatible councils simultaneously testing the limits of what the law will tolerate.

The surcharge — the power to make individual councillors personally liable for deficits they knowingly incur — was abolished in 2000. It should be restored, carefully, with appropriate legal protections, but restored. The knowledge that ideological decisions have personal financial consequences concentrates minds in ways that no amount of statutory guidance can replicate. Militant’s 47 councillors backed down when the surcharge became real. The prospect of personal liability is a more effective circuit breaker than any amount of central government disapproval.

The section 151 officer’s position also needs strengthening. The cycling-round-Liverpool image is instructive not just as history but as a warning: a chief finance officer who issues a 114 notice against the wishes of an ideological leadership is taking a significant personal and professional risk. The protections available to them are real but limited. A Reform council leader who treats equality law as optional and LGR as an establishment attack is not obviously a man who will respond to a 114 notice with graceful compliance — and the officer who issues it needs to know that the system has their back in a way that current legislation does not fully guarantee. The risk is not merely professional discomfort. A section 151 officer acting in good faith faces the real prospect of disciplinary proceedings, constructive dismissal, or a legal challenge to the notice itself. The statutory duty is protected. The officer is not. That gap needs closing — through stronger employment protections for section 151 officers acting in good faith, and through a clear legal presumption that a validly issued 114 notice cannot be challenged by the very leadership it constrains.

The third answer is the least glamorous and the most important: low-level law breaking must be punished swiftly, consistently, and proportionately, before it becomes high-level law breaking.

The culture that produced the locked chamber doors and the intercepted letters did not arrive fully formed. It developed incrementally, each small transgression normalising the next. Today’s wave is earlier in that cycle — but the direction of travel is visible. The Reform councils defying equality law on the Pride flag. The Palestine independents whose coalition politics tend, in practice, toward gender-segregated meetings that the Equality Act does not permit. The Green administrations whose ideology, applied to pension fund management, tips from ethical investment into a breach of fiduciary duty. None of this is Militant yet. All of it is Militant’s opening chapters. The moment to intervene is now, not when the bills arrive and the Swiss banks are on the phone.

Swift, certain, proportionate enforcement of the legal obligations that councils already have. Not new powers, not new legislation — the existing framework, applied consistently, to every council that tests it, regardless of political colour. The Reform council that defies equality law should face the same consequences as the Green council that overspends its budget on promises it cannot keep. The Palestine independent who uses council time and resources for foreign policy theatre should face the same scrutiny as the Militant councillor who used them for class war. Equal treatment, consistent enforcement, no ideological exemptions.

The warning is also, in its way, an offer. The warning: we know how this ends. The case notes are clear, the pattern is established, and the only variable is how long we wait before acting and how much it costs. The current wave, if left unchecked, will produce not one Liverpool but many.

The offer: it does not have to go that way. The circuit breakers exist. The Kinnock answer is available to anyone with the courage to deliver it. The enforcement mechanisms are present, if not consistently applied. The difference between the 1980s and now is not that the tools are absent. It is that the people who should be using them have not yet decided to.

That decision, like all political decisions, has a cost either way. The cost of acting is political discomfort, ideological conflict, and the accusation of authoritarianism from movements that have mistaken the performance for the governance. The cost of not acting is a generation of repair work, paid for by residents who didn’t volunteer for the experiment.

Liverpool took a generation to recover from Militant. That is not a metaphor. The Swiss debt was being repaid by Liverpool taxpayers into the 2000s. Millions of pounds of great works, of social care, of regeneration were sacrificed on the altar of Derek Hatton’s ambition. The houses that were built with the maintenance money took decades to repair. Many were sold off before they could do what the Militants dreamed they would. The institutional damage — the relationship between central and local government, the credibility of ambitious municipal politics — lasted longer still.

The recovery, when it came, was externally funded on a scale that is no longer available. Merseyside received £900 million in European Union structural funds between 2000 and 2006 alone. Over the decade of Objective One status — the EU designation for the neediest regions in Europe — around £2.5 billion was spent on Liverpool regeneration projects. The Albert Dock, the waterfront, the universities, the airport, the 39,000 new jobs: substantially underwritten by a funding mechanism that no longer exists and is not coming back.

This matters because the current wave is not one Liverpool. It is dozens of them, in different flavours, simultaneously, landing on a financial base that was already depleted before a single DOGE auditor walked through a council door or a cabinet member for healing took office. There is no Objective One programme waiting to repair the damage. There is no external cavalry. There is no Kinnock speech that covers Reform and the Greens and the Palestine independents in a single devastating paragraph. The surcharge that concentrated Militant minds was abolished in 2000. The circuit breakers are weaker than they were, the finances are worse than they were, and the wave is broader than it has ever been.

Waiting for the damage and then finding someone to fund the repair worked once. Expensively, over a generation, with help that is no longer on offer. It will not work again. The new answer must be one that allows us to build local government that is financially strong enough to withstand the wave — commercially serious, growth-oriented, holding the civic fabric in trust rather than spending it down. Not because growth is an end in itself. Because the Albert Dock didn’t save Liverpool. The patient, commercially serious, unglamorous work of rebuilding an institution that could generate its own resources and hold them across political cycles is what saved Liverpool. It took twenty years. It required billions. It should not have been necessary.

The zealots have arrived. They have arrived from every direction at once. British local government was shaken to its core by the Militant occupancy of Liverpool City Council. It nearly broke under one. It is about to face dozens.

The only question is whether, this time, there will be anything left to pay it with.

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How can we make place-based growth the norm in the UK?

The question everyone is really asking is harder than it sounds. Everyone agrees place-based growth is the answer. Nobody can quite explain why it keeps not happening. The uncomfortable suspicion, rarely stated directly, is that local government simply isn’t built to do it — too small, too fragmented, too cautious, too captured by the slow emergency of keeping services running to have any energy left for ambition.

That suspicion is largely correct. And the answer, for the next generation, is being decided right now.

Manchesterism didn’t happen by wanting it hard enough. It took twenty years of institution-building before Burnham arrived to the podium. The Combined Authority, the airport, the devolution deal, the transport integration — none of it was conjured. It was constructed, incrementally, by people whose names most cheerleaders for the model couldn’t tell you, on a foundation that had to exist before any of the visible politics became possible. By 2017 Burnham inherited not a blank slate but a relatively healthy institutional ecosystem — stable structures, a clear direction of travel, institutions already built to create a functional economic whole. His job was to keep momentum going. The ecosystem came first.

The growth community has absorbed the aesthetic of Manchesterism without asking what made it structurally possible. That is a problem, because the thing that will determine whether any version of it works anywhere else in England is being decided right now, in a process almost nobody in this conversation is paying attention to.

Local Government Reorganisation is not administrative tidying. It is a once-in-a-generation reset of the institutional substrate on which every growth ambition in this country either runs or doesn’t. Planning, housing, transport, economic development, borrowing powers, land — all of it sits inside local government. The design window is open. Final decisions on the shape of new unitary authorities across most of England are expected this summer; shadow elections follow in May 2027, with the new institutions live by April 2028. What gets baked in now — the geographies, the powers, the borrowing freedoms, the commercial mandates — will shape what is and isn’t possible for a generation.

The people who care most about growth are, by and large, not in the room.

Most of England outside the big cities runs on two tiers of local government. At the top, county councils — responsible for schools, social care, roads, strategic planning. Below them, district and borough councils — responsible for housing, local planning, waste collection, leisure. Two layers, two sets of elected members, two chief executives, two bureaucracies, often two completely different political compositions, and no particular reason why they should agree on anything.

I have a deep civic fondness for district councils. I fear that LGR will be the Beeching Report of British democracy — ripping the heart out of British civic identity at a time when we need a shared sense of what this country is for more than ever. But even I cannot ignore the structural reality: no single tier of authority has the control over place it would need to deliver on the promise of local government.

For most of what local government does, the fragmentation is merely inefficient. For growth, it is structurally fatal. A large development scheme — new homes, an employment site, a mixed-use neighbourhood — requires planning permission, transport infrastructure, housing strategy, and economic development to move together, at pace, toward a shared goal. In a two-tier system, these functions sit in different buildings, answer to different politicians, and operate on different timescales. They rarely move together. They frequently work against each other. The result is that complex schemes either die in the gap between authorities, or survive only through the kind of heroic project management that shouldn’t be necessary.

Cheltenham’s Golden Valley development — a scheme anchored around national security infrastructure, with a billion pounds of investment and the potential to reshape the local economy — has two and a half authorities weighing in on decisions that should be made by one. That is not a project management problem. It is an institutional design problem.

Local Government Reorganisation is part of the government’s answer. Across most of England’s remaining two-tier areas, county and district councils are being merged into single unitary authorities — one council, one plan, one set of decisions. Planning, transport, housing, and economic development under one roof.

The government is simultaneously building out a network of mayoral strategic authorities — combined authorities covering city regions and wider economic geographies, led by directly elected mayors with powers over strategic planning, transport, housing delivery, and multi-year integrated funding settlements. This is the layer where Manchesterism lives. The development companies, the investment vehicles, the mayoral ambition — all of it is potentially quite exciting, and all of it is being built on sand if the unitary layer beneath it isn't designed to hold the weight.

The two layers are not a hierarchy. Mayors operate at the scale of functional economic areas — labour markets, transport networks, investment corridors that don’t respect council boundaries. Unitaries operate at the scale of place — where the land is, where the local knowledge lives, where democratic accountability is visible to the people it affects. A well-designed unitary isn’t a delivery mechanism for mayoral ambition. It is a growth institution in its own right, with end-to-end control over the economic levers that actually shape a place: planning, land, housing mix, local infrastructure, commercial development. Most councils have never had that combination of powers in a single set of hands. LGR is the moment when they could.

That is the theory. Whether it becomes the reality depends entirely on how the new structures are designed. And that is what is being decided now.

So what does getting it right actually look like? The answer starts with capacity — because without it, the right geography and the best intentions produce nothing. A well-drawn map with no-one capable of reading it.

The new unitaries will inherit the debt, the staff, and the institutional instincts of the authorities they replace. That is the problem. Reorganisation creates the structural conditions for councils to act as growth institutions. It creates the impetus — millions of pounds in debt will do that to you. It does not, necessarily, create the state capacity.

Running a serious in-house development function costs money and takes time to build. Quantity surveyors, housing economists, commercial negotiators, people who can structure a deal that a pension fund can actually invest in — this is not a standard local government skill set. Most councils don’t have it. The ones that do are, almost without exception, the ones already large enough and financially stable enough to have justified the investment. Everyone else buys off-plan, often out of area, without local knowledge, and it ends badly more often than not. The structural gap is self-reinforcing: the councils that most need commercial capability are precisely the ones least able to afford it.

LGR breaks the chicken-and-egg — but only if capacity is treated as a founding requirement, not an afterthought. The window for this is the design phase. Central government should be asking now what in-house functions the new unitaries will be expected to have on day one, what the transition funding looks like, what powers that will demand, and what the carrots are offered for authorities that invest in genuine commercial expertise rather than defaulting to the cautious, service-delivery-only posture that Section 151 instincts will otherwise produce.

This is not an argument for recklessness. Thurrock is the cautionary tale everyone will reach for — a council that borrowed over a billion pounds, poured it into out-of-area investments it didn’t understand, was defrauded, and effectively went bankrupt. But Thurrock’s failure was not a failure of commercial ambition. It was a failure of governance, transparency, and local accountability. The investments were out-of-area, opaque, and structurally disconnected from any local knowledge or local skin in the game. The lesson is not don’t be commercial. I’d know, I sit on one of England’s most successful ‘commercial councils’. It is this: commercial activity without local rootedness and visible accountability feeds speculation, not growth.

Capacity without the right geography is capacity pointed in the wrong direction. The new unitaries need to map onto actual economic zones — travel-to-work areas, functional economic areas, the real geographies of where people live, work, shop, and commute. These do not always respect existing council boundaries. In many cases they cut straight through them.

This matters because local knowledge is only an edge if it’s the right local knowledge. A unitary authority whose boundaries bisect a functional economic area will find itself with half the picture on every significant decision — unable to see the full labour market, unable to plan the full transport network, unable to capture the full value of a development that spills across its border. The knowledge advantage that justifies local decision-making in the first place evaporates.

Too large carries its own risks. Authorities that cover too much ground lose the signal — interests diverge, priorities blur, the place-specific knowledge that makes local government worth having gets averaged out of existence. The sweet spot is an authority large enough to act at economic scale, small enough to know what it’s doing and be held accountable for it.

The problem sharpens when you introduce grant funding and central government investment programmes into the picture. An authority spanning two urban centres — each with legitimate claims, different needs, different political constituencies — faces an impossible internal negotiation every time a funding bid lands on the table. Who needs it more? Who deserves it more? If they’re only allowed to bid once into the pot for transport infrastructure, or a new school, who gets it? The result is predictable: resources get rationed by political convenience, or spread so thinly across the geography that nowhere receives enough to make a difference. Thin gruel growth. Every place gets a fair slice; no place gets a transformative one. Strategic prioritisation — the thing that turns investment into compounding returns rather than scattered interventions — becomes structurally impossible.

Getting this right at the design stage is significantly easier than fixing it later. Boundary reviews are slow, expensive, and politically toxic. The geographies being drawn this summer will shape what is possible for decades. And right now, the people drawing them are thinking primarily about administrative tidiness and political convenience, not functional economic geography.

Get the geography right, build the capacity, and you still have one more design decision that will determine whether any of it amounts to anything. Culture. Specifically: what kind of institution does a new unitary authority decide it is on day one?

The new unitaries will arrive in April 2028 carrying debt. In many cases, a lot of it. Social care debt is the silent catastrophe underneath the local government funding crisis — demand rising faster than inflation, a council tax base that is shrinking in real terms, and a central funding settlement that has never adequately covered the gap. Councils across England are not going bankrupt because they are badly run. They are going bankrupt because the model is broken. The tax base cannot sustain the cost base. That structural gap doesn’t disappear on vesting day. It transfers.

The temptation — and it will be overwhelming — is to respond the only way that feels immediately available: sell the assets. The property portfolio, the commercial investments built up over decades. Fire sale the future to pay for the present. It is rational at the individual institutional level. It is catastrophic at the system level. And it is exactly what will happen, desperately, incrementally, if the new unitaries are not designed with a different answer built in from the start.

That answer is growth. Not as aspiration — as structural necessity. The sector simply cannot survive any other way. Locally-generated revenue from commercial activity and development is not optional for these institutions. It is the only route out of a debt burden that cannot be cut away and will not be centrally absorbed. The institution that defaults to caution is the institution that slowly goes under, selling off its future one asset at a time until there is nothing left to sell. An entire layer of our country’s state capacity is at risk of collapsing in on itself. Replacing it would be infinitely more expensive than saving it today.

Which is why the founding culture question is not soft at all. Institutions are plastic at founding and rigid thereafter. The habits, incentives, and risk appetites baked in during the first year tend to persist long after the people who set them have moved on. LGR is a rare institutional restart — a moment when the defaults can be reset. That window closes fast.

Central government should be thinking now about what the founding incentives look like. What borrowing powers are available specifically for growth projects? What does a growth-focused public works loan look like — patient capital, long return horizons, ring-fenced from general finances, with the transparency requirements that distinguish legitimate commercial activity from Thurrock-style speculation? What are the benchmarks, the expectations, the signals that tell a new chief executive that commercial ambition is not just permitted but required?

These are not questions that can be retrofitted. They are founding conditions. And the founding moment is now.

None of this requires invention. The capital exists. The mandate exists. The policy framework is already in motion. What’s missing is the local institutional layer capable of catching it — which is precisely what well-designed unitaries could provide.

The government’s Mansion House reforms are consolidating England’s 86 local government pension funds into larger pools, with an explicit target of directing £27.5 billion into local investment opportunities. This is not a future ambition. The pooling deadline has passed. The money is being organised now. The question is whether there will be anything worth investing in at the local level when it arrives — and whether local authorities will have the in-house capacity to structure deals that pension funds can actually deploy capital into.

Greater Manchester is the existence proof. Its pension fund — the largest in the local government scheme, with over £30 billion in assets — has maintained an explicit local investment strategy for more than twenty-five years. It has committed £1.36 billion to local investments, supporting over 18,000 jobs and nearly 4,400 new homes. Last year it announced a £1 billion Good Growth Fund in partnership with the Combined Authority, with an initial £300 million from the pension fund itself — patient capital, long return horizons, aligned with local democratic priorities. The fund’s members live in Greater Manchester. The returns land locally. The trustees have reputational accountability that distant institutional investors simply don’t. That is not a coincidence. It is a governance feature worth designing for.

The rest of the world has been doing versions of this for decades. Germany’s Stadtwerke — municipal utilities, nearly a thousand of them, owned by local authorities — generate surpluses from energy, transport, and infrastructure that cross-subsidise public services and reinvest in local economies. They are profitable, locally accountable, and politically durable in a way that privatised equivalents rarely are. Dutch municipalities have used active land policy and ground lease systems for generations to capture the value uplift that development creates, rather than watching it flow to private landowners. Amsterdam retains ownership of around 80% of its residential land. The revenue funds the city. The model gives planners end-to-end control over what gets built, where, and for whom.

None of these models are directly transplantable. But they share a common logic: local institutions with genuine economic agency, commercial mandates, and the scale to act. That is exactly what LGR could build. The capital is waiting. The policy framework is aligned. The missing piece is the institutional layer — and that is what is being designed right now.

Cheltenham is a small borough council — 120,000 residents, a modest tax base, and a commercial model built on local knowledge rather than luck, which is precisely what makes it replicable. It’s also my political home, so forgive some fondness.

The pivot came before the crisis. Years before most councils were staring down the combination of rising service costs and a collapsing council tax base, Cheltenham looked at the trajectory and asked a different question: what if we didn’t have to cut to the bone? What if we grew instead?

The answer required building something most councils didn’t have — an in-house property function with real commercial expertise — and it required a hard boundary rule that was as much about purpose as prudence. Investments stay within Cheltenham’s boundaries, because local knowledge is the edge, accountability has to be visible to the people it affects, and — critically — local ownership means local authorship. The question was never just whether something would get built. Something was always going to get built. The question was what, to what standard, for whom.

Golden Valley answers that question at scale. In 2019, the council bought 45 hectares of land adjacent to GCHQ using a Public Works Loan — £37.5 million, roughly double the council’s entire annual revenue at the time, and the single largest purchase it had ever made. The land became the Golden Valley Development: a £1 billion cyber and technology campus designed simultaneously to strengthen the UK’s position in cyber and AI and to generate a long-term surplus for local services. The council has taken hits on profit that the private sector wouldn’t — on environmental standards, transport infrastructure, the exact mix of affordable homes Cheltenham actually needed. Sixty percent of the central site is green space, because Cheltenham is a town within a park and the council intended to keep it that way. Construction is due to begin later this year. The scheme is expected to create 12,000 jobs and 3,700 homes, and to generate millions of pounds in revenue for local services for decades to come.

Three schemes of this scale would clear Gloucestershire’s otherwise unserviceable social care debt. The debt that is breaking councils across England is not necessarily terminal. It is a design problem — and growth is the solution that nobody is building for.

There is something else worth naming about Golden Valley that rarely gets said. This is national security infrastructure — cyber, AI, quantum, defence technology — being delivered by a local council with a twenty-year trusted relationship with GCHQ, rooted in the same place, accountable to the same people, going nowhere. Britain needs vastly more infrastructure of this kind — reservoirs, defence tech space, data centres, security-sensitive facilities of every description. Large-scale infrastructure requires enormous capital. The alternatives, in the current landscape, are overseas investors — with overseas interests. Britain spent years allowing a Chinese state-backed company to own Felixstowe, the country’s most strategically significant port, before unwinding the arrangement. The lesson wasn’t learned broadly enough. Security-sensitive infrastructure built with foreign capital is infrastructure with a foreign claim on it. A local council is British state capacity, owned by the British state, accountable to British voters. Local growth is not just an adequate alternative. It is the only responsible one.

But Golden Valley is the headline, not the whole picture. The same in-house development team delivering Golden Valley has a second mission. A recent deal brought the council's housing stock back under direct management — ending the arm's-length arrangement that had kept it at one remove — and now they are building council homes directly for the first time in a generation. The same expertise that's building national defence infrastructure is helping to create hundreds of new homes, built to last, accessible from day one, and to the highest climate standards the council can afford. The next generation of council homes, for a council whose existing stock mostly stopped being built in the 70s.

The council is a founding partner in UBICO, a shared environmental services company operating across Gloucestershire, keeping delivery local and surpluses in public hands rather than extracted by a private contractor. It co-founded One Legal, a shared legal service now covering four Gloucestershire councils, generating cost savings and returning surplus to its partners. And then there is The Pest People — Cheltenham Borough Council’s pest control service, now operating commercially across the private market, and recently turning a profit.

The Pest People is not a trivial detail. It is the logic made mundane. A public service, built with public expertise, extended into the market, generating revenue that flows back into local services. Stadtwerke, in miniature, in the Cotswolds.

None of this happened by accident. It required political will — the willingness to take decisions that looked, to conventional local government instincts, like extraordinary risk. But we are, as I’ve had drilled into me since day one, ‘Risk Aware, Not Risk Averse’. It required in-house expertise that most councils don’t have and can’t afford to build. It required a commercial mandate that was explicit and sustained across political cycles. And it required the accountability rule: nothing outside Cheltenham’s walls, because the moment you lose local rootedness you lose the thing that makes the model work.

That model is replicable. It is not currently the norm. And the reason it isn’t the norm is precisely the structural problem that LGR could fix: most councils are too small, too fragmented, and too under-resourced to build the capacity that makes this kind of ambition possible. Cheltenham could do it as a district council because it had the political will to invest in the capability first. The new unitaries will have the scale. The question is whether they will have the mandate, the incentives, and the founding culture to use it.

Like it or loathe it, LGR will happen. The timetable is set, the consultations are closing, the decisions are coming this summer. What is not yet determined is what the new institutions will look like, what powers they will carry, what mandates they will have, and what kind of councils they will decide to be on day one. Those questions are being answered now, largely by people whose primary concern is administrative tidiness and financial stabilisation, and largely without the people who care most about growth anywhere near the conversation.

Final decisions on the new unitary geographies are expected this summer. Shadow elections follow in May 2027. Vesting day is April 2028. What gets baked in between now and then — the boundaries, the borrowing powers, the commercial mandates, the founding incentives — will shape what is possible in every one of these places for a generation. The growth community has spent years complaining about the architecture. Here is the moment to help build it.

Get it wrong and you will spend the next twenty years watching the new unitaries slowly sell their assets, cut their services, and fail to become the growth institutions they were designed to be. Get it right and you have something that has not existed in this country for a very long time: a capable, ambitious, locally accountable layer of state, with the powers and the mandate to build the things Britain needs, on Britain’s terms.

This is the moment. If you are serious about place-based growth, you have to be serious about this. The window is open. It will not wait for you to catch up.

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The coffee shop you stopped in this morning was fitted out in warm wood and bentwood chairs, the menu hand-lettered on card, the music something on vinyl — not affectedly, just because that’s what you do now. The pour-over took four minutes and cost six pounds and the person making it had strong opinions about the provenance of the bean, which is either the apotheosis of consumer culture or an act of resistance against it, depending on who you ask. The shelves had three books on them. One was by Jane Jacobs.

You open your laptop — covered in stickers from an environmental movement whose visual identity was settled sometime around 1973 and has not been revisited since — and crack open Claude, which greets you in the measured, thoughtful tones of a senior researcher at a postwar institution that believed it was working on problems that mattered for civilisation. The most powerful AI system ever built was designed to feel like a thoughtful 1950s intellectual. The safety research reads like a Bell Labs technical memo. Nobody at Anthropic would describe this as a coincidence.

The AI startup your friend works at has a website that looks like a Bell Labs internal publication — exploded diagrams, blueprint blue on white, monospace type, interactive graphs that reward the curious. A visual language that says: we are building the future, and we are absolutely certain it is possible, and here is a diagram to prove it. The Whole Earth Catalog said the same thing in 1968. Nobody in the office was born yet in 1968.

You open X — the everything app, the cybernetic dream, one system to route all human discourse through and watch it self-correct — and in the same scroll you get the nationalist politician promising to return to a time when men had jobs and jobs meant something and the country knew what it was for, and the politician on the other side invoking the spirit of the New Deal, or the Marshall Plan, or the space race.

You close the tab and open your email. Works in Progress looks like a postwar policy institute that never closed. Stripe Press — the publishing arm of a payments company worth more than most countries — is republishing Stewart Brand and designing their books to look like they were printed in 1963. Very knowing and very revealing.

Your friend’s record collection, started eighteen months ago, now takes up an entire wall. He describes it as an investment. He means it as a sacrament.

They are all, in their way, raiding the same filing cabinet to prefigure a future. They just cannot agree on whose.1

The mid-century didn’t end by accident.

Two world wars, the Holocaust, the Gulag, the bomb — these were not failures of execution but failures of political ambition itself, of the belief that history had a destination and that serious men with serious ideas could drive it there. The considered response, we all agreed, was to lower the stakes. Proceduralize the passion. Make politics boring enough that it stops getting people killed. The European project, technocratic governance, third way politics, NATO, the whole architecture of the administered world — these weren’t failures of imagination. They were a trauma response. A considered, intelligent, defensible trauma response.

Fukuyama gets misread as a triumphalist. He wasn’t describing where we had arrived. He was prescribing how we should behave now that we had. The end of history was a settlement, not a celebration — an agreement, reached between exhausted parties, that the era of transformational political vision was over and that this was, on balance, good news. The future would be managed rather than made. Progress would be incremental, technocratic, administered. The job of politics was no longer to imagine a different world but to run this one more efficiently.

It worked, up to a point, for longer than it had any right to. And then it didn’t.

The settlement had a cost that wasn’t on the invoice. To foreclose transformational political vision is not a neutral act — it is a decision about what politics is for, about what a generation owes the next one, about whether the future is something you endure, or can materially shape. Whether the future can look anything other than like today. The managerial consensus didn’t just ration resources. It rationed possibility. It broke the chain of obligation between generations by declaring the future closed — telling each successive cohort that what exists is what must exist, that the only question worth asking is how efficiently we manage it. Mark Fisher called this capitalist realism — the sense that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of the present arrangement. The managed settlement didn’t just produce that feeling. It was designed to.

And it brought with it a rationing mindset that ran deeper than politics. If the future is administered rather than made, then the job of the economy is not to expand what is possible but to distribute what exists more efficiently. Which means lowering costs. Which means cheaper goods, globalised supply chains, the slow hollowing of the kind of middle class that could afford to buy things that lasted. The Eames chair — designed for a mid-century white collar worker, affordable on a mid-century white collar salary — is now an artefact, a museum piece, a thing you find in the kind of coffee shop that charges six pounds for a pour-over and has a copy of Jane Jacobs on the shelf. The material world the mid-century built for ordinary people has been auctioned off, piece by piece, and what replaced it is cheaper and worse and everyone knows it.

A material world that was possible once and has been made impossible, by a series of choices that were never put to a vote, by people who had decided that the era of putting things to votes about the shape of the future was mercifully behind us.

No wonder everyone is trying to break it open.

The settlement took things. Specific things. The kind of work that produced objects built to last. The kind of wages that allowed people to buy them. The kind of future in which what you owned this year would still be yours in twenty — or at all.

Because the settlement didn’t just make things cheaper and worse. It completed the job by making ownership itself contingent. You don’t buy music anymore, you rent access to it until the licensing deal expires or the platform folds or the algorithm decides you’ve moved on. You don’t own software, you subscribe. You don’t accumulate, you stream. The logical endpoint of the cheap goods consensus is that you own nothing outright — everything is a service, everything is provisional, everything can be withdrawn. The vinyl record sitting on your friend’s wall is not affectation. It is one of the last objects that is genuinely, irrevocably his. He bought it. It exists. Nobody can take it back.

The return to vinyl, to raw denim, to furniture built before planned obsolescence was policy — these are not trend cycles. Fredric Jameson might have called this pastiche — the cannibalism of dead styles, the substitution of nostalgia for genuine historical imagination. But pastiche is directionless. This is not. These are a population trying to rebuild, object by object, the material world the settlement took from them. Mid-century design was not an aesthetic preference. It was the physical expression of a specific settlement between labour and capital, between the individual and the state, between the present and the future. Things were built to last because the people buying them expected to keep them, because the implicit contract of postwar prosperity included the assumption that what you acquired this year would still be yours in twenty years and worth passing on. The promise was not luxury. It was permanence.

The market has noticed. Walk into the kind of shop you are slightly too intimidated to browse without purpose — the one with the exposed teak and the brushed metal and the objects arranged like a museum that has decided to sell its collection — and you are being sold something more than furniture. You are being sold the feeling of being the kind of person who exists outside the disposable economy. The mid-century aesthetic has become the commercial shorthand for a specific aspiration: materially serious, intellectually credible, the suggestion that the person who owns this object has taste that will outlast the season. John Lewis has an entire floor of it. The lifestyle industry has identified the hunger and is selling it back at a premium. You bought the thing. The hunger is satisfied. The political conditions that created the hunger remain entirely unchanged.

The person who originally bought the Eames chair, the teak sideboard, the hi-fi system — vaguely white collar, single income, owned a house, expected their children to do the same or better — that person is gone. Or rather, that person’s equivalent today is working two jobs, renting, and buying the IKEA version of the sideboard on a payment plan while following an Instagram account that shows them the real thing. The mid-century aesthetic is aspirational now precisely because the class position it expressed has been abolished. The lifestyle industry is selling the aesthetic of a class position to people who cannot afford the class position. They are buying it on Klarna. Buy now, pay later, own nothing outright. The subscription economy applied to the aesthetic of ownership. The mid-century, in the end, is also a showroom. And the showroom is full of things you cannot quite afford and were probably never meant to have.

The intellectual hunger runs deeper still. Managerialism produces intellectual disposability alongside material disposability. The policy consensus of 2015 is the heresy of 2025. The orthodoxy shifts, the Overton window moves, nothing accumulates. There is no sediment. And so when people want ideas with weight — arguments that have been tested against reality rather than against last Tuesday’s political weather — they go back past the point where the managed churn began. The mid-century intellectuals: Jane Jacobs, Lewis Mumford, Buckminster Fuller, Stewart Brand. Not because they were right about everything but because they were operating in a tradition that expected ideas to last, that built arguments to endure rather than to trend.

What unites the record collector and the Progress economist and the care economy leftist and the MAGA voter who wants the jobs back is not a shared politics. It is a shared hunger for the durable, in a world that has made everything temporary — the objects, the ideas, the political possibilities, the sense that what you do now might mean something in twenty years.

There is nothing new under the sun, and the sun in question set sometime around 1968.

Take Zohran Mamdani — the most exciting left politician in America right now, the one your progressive friends have been forwarding videos of since the New York mayoral race turned into something nobody expected. His programme is genuinely compelling. It is also, examined closely, a New Deal coalition rebuilt from scratch: the housing, the buses, the cost of living, the multiracial working class as the unit of political organisation. He knows this. It is not a criticism. He has looked at the filing cabinet, identified what worked, and is attempting to run it again. The aesthetic tells you everything: the painted shopfronts, the WPA mural tradition lifted directly into a 2025 mayoral campaign, public art as political argument. This is a conscious callback — the primary sources as talisman, the WPA mural as argument.

And then there is MAGA — the raid your progressive friends find inexplicable, which is part of why it keeps working. The aesthetic is pure mid-century American: the hard hat and the factory floor as sacred objects, the bold serif typography that looks like a 1952 election poster, the 4th of July party with the picket fence and the gleaming cars and the family that has always, in this imagery, just stepped out of an advertisement. Which is precisely what they did. The mid-century American dream was a marketing campaign before it was a political programme — designed to sell refrigerators and tract housing and the idea of a country to people who were, in many cases, being actively excluded from it. The imagery was never a description. It was a brochure. MAGA has taken the brochure and elevated it to the status of memory just out of reach, which could be yours again, which is either a misreading of history or a very effective political strategy, and quite possibly both.

Peter Thiel understood this more consciously than most. His whole intellectual programme — worked out in Zero to One, enacted through a series of investments and political interventions that have reshaped American conservatism — is a grief memoir for the mid-century future that didn’t happen. The frontier. The lone inventor in the garage. The moment before the universities and the regulators and the managerial class closed down the possibility of genuine ambition. He is not nostalgic in the way a MAGA voter is nostalgic. He is nostalgic in the way an architect is nostalgic for a building that was never finished — furious about the interruption, determined to complete it, convinced that the original blueprints are still valid. The filing cabinet, for Thiel, is not a source of comfort. It is a set of instructions.

In Britain, Nigel Farage is running the same operation with a different brochure. The pint. The pub. The England of 1955 that never quite existed for everyone who is now being asked to want it back. Where the American filing cabinet is forward-looking — the dream, the frontier, the morning — the English one is specifically elegiac. The village. The local. The sense that somewhere the country was coherent and knowable and yours. Farage sells the English dream the way Trump sells the American one. Both were always partly advertisement. Neither was ever universally delivered.

The visual language of the AI startup has a name, coined recently and with some excitement: paperclip-punk. Exploded diagrams, blueprint blue, monospace type, the aesthetic of systems that believe in themselves. It has been greeted as something new. It is the Whole Earth Catalog. Stewart Brand was doing this in 1968, with the same conviction that if you gave people the right tools and the right information, the future would build itself. The tools are different. The belief is identical.

Extinction Rebellion is a different case. Not unconscious archaeology but stolen valour — the borrowing of a moral aesthetic from people who earned it under conditions that XR has never faced and cannot replicate.

The civil rights movement used direct action, moral witness, and the willingness to be arrested because these were the most effective tools available for specific, concrete, winnable objectives, deployed against a system that was susceptible to moral pressure, at genuine personal risk, by people whose bodies were the site of the injustice they were protesting. It worked because the stakes were real, the targets were specific, and the cost was borne by the people with the most to lose.

XR borrowed the grammar. The hand-lettered signs. The street theatre. The die-ins. The cultivated arrest, the night in the cells, the magistrate’s court appearance that will not affect anyone’s career or housing or safety in any meaningful way. They borrowed it because the grammar confers moral seriousness — because to look like a freedom fighter is to feel like one, and to feel like one is, for a significant portion of the movement, the point. The arrest is the point. The visibility is the point. The sense of participating in a lineage of righteous struggle is the point. Stopping fossil fuel extraction is somewhere further down the list.

This is not just tactically ineffective, though it is that — the fossil fuel lobby is not Bull Connor, and the tactics designed to move Bull Connor do not move the fossil fuel lobby. It is an insult to the people whose struggle they are wearing. To borrow its visual language as a vehicle for the self-expression of the already-comfortable is not homage. It is appropriation of the most revealing kind. They are post-material people playing at material politics — people so insulated from precarity that they can afford to treat politics as moral performance, reaching for the grammar of people who couldn’t afford that luxury, and not noticing the contradiction. It tells you more about what the settlement produced than about what politics actually requires.

The care economy left has its own filing cabinet. The whole programme — buy less but better, value craft, slow down, things that last, the repair café, the local butcher, the sourdough — presents itself as a critique of capitalism and arrives with a visual identity to match: the linen apron, the ceramic mug, the farmers market chalkboard, the Instagram grid that looks like a 1970s wholefood cooperative newsletter. The politics of durability is the politics of a world that existed before the managerial settlement made it unaffordable, recovered as lifestyle choice, aestheticised as resistance. It is not wrong. It is not unimportant. But it is reaching into the filing cabinet and calling what it finds a revolution.

And then there is the Progress Movement — your movement, if you are reading this in the places I expect you to be reading it. Stripe Press — the publishing arm of a payments company worth more than most countries — designs its books and posters to look like they were printed in 1963, which is very knowing and very revealing. The Roots of Progress website is plastered in AI-generated retrofuturist paintings of gleaming cities and humming factories — the most contemporary possible tool deployed to produce the most mid-century possible image. The intellectual programme underneath is, stated plainly: we had the formula once, in the postwar growth miracle, in the age of scientific confidence and government ambition and institutions that believed they were working on problems that mattered for civilisation, and we lost it through a series of bad policy choices and failures of nerve, and we can get it back. This is not a new political imagination. This is the most elaborately theorised filing cabinet raid of all — conducted by people with PhDs and Substack followings, who have written at length about the importance of building new things, from inside an intellectual programme that is, at its foundations, a theory of recovery. Of return. Of getting back to the drawer and finding what was lost.

None of this is contemptible. All of it is insufficient.

Ivan Krastev has argued that nostalgia is less about the past than about a loss of faith in the future — that people reach backwards not because they want to return but because forward has been made unimaginable. Chantal Mouffe spent decades arguing that suppressing political antagonism doesn’t resolve it — it deforms it, drives it underground, and watches it emerge through whatever channels the settlement left open. Both were right. This is what that looks like.

The filing cabinet is not being raided because people are stupid or sentimental or have run out of ideas. It is being raided because the present has been made too small to live in. Sixty years of managed foreclosure, of politics shrunk to administration, of the future rationed into quarterly targets and impact assessments, has produced a world in which the horizon is simply not visible from where most people are standing. And so they turn around. They look for the last place the horizon was open, the last moment when the future felt like something that could be fought over and won, when politics was an argument about what kind of world we were going to build rather than a negotiation about how efficiently we were going to manage this one.

Most of them were not there. They are not remembering. They are imagining — reaching for a future that presents itself, because it has to, as a past.

The left is most culpable. This requires saying clearly, because the left will be most resistant to hearing it.

Managerialism was cross-partisan. The third way was a joint project, enthusiastically adopted by centre-left and centre-right alike, and the hollowing of political imagination was not a conspiracy hatched in any particular common room. The right has its own philosophical tradition — Burke, Oakeshott, Hayek — that takes political economy seriously, that understands material conditions as the terrain on which conservatism operates. The right managing the status quo is the right doing roughly what the right is for: preserving what exists, resisting transformation, maintaining the settlement against those who would upend it. You may disagree with that project. It is not a betrayal of it.

The left managing the status quo is something else entirely. The left’s specific philosophical commitments — to material equality, to the idea that economic conditions determine human freedom, to the state as an instrument of transformation rather than merely preservation — made the retreat into managerialism a self-betrayal of a particular and devastating kind. The left did not just fail to build. It failed to be what it was for.

It chose not to be what it was for because it thought it had won. And the evidence of winning was real. Look at what the mid-century left actually built. In Britain: the NHS, the council house with a garden, the union hall where working people had institutional power and used it, the grammar school that sent a docker’s son to university, the pension that meant the deal extended into old age. In America: the union contract that made the UAW shop floor the material foundation of the middle class, the land grant university cheap enough that a steelworker’s kid could go, the interstate that was the state as builder of possibility, the G.I. Bill that offered returning soldiers a material stake in the country they had defended — to some of them, delivered in full, to others denied by a system of racial exclusion so systematic it had its own name. The settlement was real. It was also, from the beginning, a brochure that not everyone received.

This is where the left’s failure becomes specific and unforgivable. The unfinished project — extending the settlement to everyone it had originally excluded, making the brochure true for the people it had lied to — was the work that remained. The arc of history does not bend toward justice automatically. It bends because people bend it, because institutions are built and defended, because political achievements are understood as achievements rather than as natural features of the landscape that will persist without maintenance. The left, flush with what it had built, made the catastrophic assumption that the floor would hold. That the council houses would be replaced when they were sold. That the unions would persist. That the NHS would be funded. That the jobs would remain, or if they changed, would change into something equally sustaining. That the kids would do better. That the future was a gradient and everyone was on it, moving upward, and the question now was not material but cultural — recognition, representation, the slow work of making the country’s institutions look like the country.

Post-material politics was not a cynical trade. It was the politics of people who genuinely believed the material question was settled — and who did not notice, or did not want to notice, that it was settled only for some, and actively deteriorating for others. The three-hundred-pound television and no prospect of ever owning the flat you watch it in. The zero-hours contract and the food bank and the NHS waiting list and the butchers that became a betting shop and the council house that became someone’s buy-to-let investment. The left looked at this and called it progress, and focused its energies on whether the people administering the decline had sufficiently diverse leadership teams.

And then the floor didn’t hold. And instead of recognising that as a political failure requiring a political response, the left experienced it as a cultural affront. Brexit. Trump. The European far right. False consciousness. Manipulation. People voting against their interests — as if the left had not spent thirty years failing to defend those interests, and abandoning the project of extending them, and was now affronted that the people it had failed had noticed.

Wolfgang Streeck has argued for years that the managerial settlement is running out of road — that the legitimacy crisis is structural, not accidental, that you cannot indefinitely defer the question of what the economy is for. The left heard this and nodded and went back to arguing about pronouns. The right heard it and built a movement.

The right, at least, can make a coherent case for management as stewardship. Household budget of the state. Don’t spend what you don’t have. Maintain what exists. It is not an inspiring politics but it is an internally consistent one. The left has no such defence. The left’s version of managerialism was the management of an unacceptable settlement — poverty repackaged, precarity administered, the broken contract maintained with better optics and a more representative board.

MAGA is what happens when the left abandons the working class and the working class goes looking for someone who will at least pretend to remember what work was for. Brexit is what happens when the people the settlement forgot decide that if the future is going to be taken from them anyway, they would like to do the taking. The mid-century achievements the left built and stopped defending are what everyone is now trying to break open and recover. No wonder they are reaching for a time when the left still believed those achievements needed to be made.

There is a temptation, having laid all this out, to end with a programme. A set of policies, a political agenda, a list of things the left should do differently. This essay is going to resist that temptation, not because the programme doesn’t matter but because the programme is not the problem.

The problem is prior to the programme. It is the consensus — the deep, post-cold-war, never-again consensus — that ideological ambition itself is dangerous. That the lesson of the twentieth century is that serious political imagination leads to gulags and bombs and bodies, and that the mature response to history is to administer rather than to make. This consensus is understandable. It is rooted in genuine catastrophe. The people who built the managed settlement were not stupid or cowardly — they were exhausted, and they drew the obvious conclusion from the evidence available, and for a while they were not obviously wrong.

But the conclusion they drew was not a description of reality. It was a wager. A bet that politics could be permanently suspended, that the future could be administered indefinitely, that the hunger for genuine political agency would eventually subside if you gave people enough cheap goods and procedural rights and the occasional referendum on something that didn’t matter. The wager has lost. The hunger did not subside. It went underground, and it has been growing there for sixty years, and it is now emerging through every crack in the settlement simultaneously — in the aesthetics of the coffee shop and the AI startup and the MAGA rally and the Works in Progress essay, in the reaching and the imagining and the sacrament of the record collection.

The people reaching for the mid-century are right. Not about the mid-century — it was not, as we have established, the golden age the brochure suggested, and the grammar it offers is not adequate to the problems we actually face. But right about the hunger. Right that something was foreclosed that should not have been foreclosed. Right that the question of what kind of world we want to live in is not a question that can be permanently suspended, that politics does not end because we decide it should, that the future does not administer itself into decency.

Here is the risk nobody wants to name. If the managed consensus holds — if we continue to treat ideological ambition as inherently dangerous, to pathologize the desire for transformational politics, to manage the hunger rather than address it — we do not get stability. We get the permanent raid on the filing cabinet. The endless recycling of a grammar designed for a world that no longer exists. And we get something worse: a selection effect. The people willing to act as if the future is genuinely open, to reject the central premise of the managed settlement, are by definition the people the consensus has failed to contain. Which is why the ones currently operating outside it are Trump and Musk and the accelerationists and the hard left and the conspiracy theorists. Not because political ambition attracts extremists. Because the consensus expelled everyone else. The future is already being built by the people who refused to accept that it was closed. We do not get to choose whether that happens. We only get to choose whether we are in the room.

History will not end forever. It was never meant to. This managerial consensus was a stopping place to put things while we recovered — while we became, as Fukuyama promised, sensible adults who had learned from history and would not repeat it. We have had sixty years of recovery. The future is growing in through cracks we can no longer plaster over — the idea that things could be genuinely different, that the horizon could move, that the long now has an end. Through Trump and through Mamdani and through the person buying mid-century furniture on Klarna and through the AI that greets you like a Bell Labs researcher because someone decided that was the right way to sound serious about the future.

The question is not how to put them back. The question is who gets to decide what we build with them. And that question — the oldest question in politics, the one the managed settlement was designed to make unaskable — is back on the table.

It was always going to come back. You cannot file away the future forever.

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Fallout New Vegas is, on its surface, a role-playing game about factions fighting over a dam. It is also the most sophisticated popular cultural diagnosis of a pathology that has been eating American political imagination for sixty years — the inability to construct a civic future that doesn’t borrow its grammar, its aesthetics, and its arguments from the mid-twentieth century. Every serious political movement of the last two decades, from MAGA to Silicon Valley futurism to the progressive left, has raided the same filing cabinet. New Vegas is the fable about what that looks like when you follow the logic all the way down. It ends badly every time. Amazon recently spent a fortune making it prestige television.

To understand what Fallout New Vegas is doing, you need to understand what the mid-century American aesthetic was doing before it got there — and why we are still doing it now.

The postwar decades produced something unusual in the history of propaganda: an ideology delivered through objects people wanted. The argument for the American way of life wasn’t made in pamphlets. It was made in tailfins, in kitchen appliances, in the particular optimism of Googie architecture — that style invented to make the atomic age feel domesticated and safe, all swooping lines and starbursts and the implicit promise that the future would be clean and fast and yours. Contrasted with Soviet grey functionalism, the moral claim was almost too easy to make. Freedom looked like this. Winning looked like this. The good life was tangible, exportable, and extremely desirable.

This is why the mid-century became the terminus. It was the last moment American exceptionalism had a complete theory of the future, the cultural confidence to project it everywhere, and objects compelling enough to make the argument without stating it. It didn’t just describe the present. It designed tomorrow — and made tomorrow look like something worth having.

We have never really stopped wanting it. The mid-century aesthetic has been in continuous revival since the 1980s — not as nostalgia, but as a recurring reach for something that felt complete. The tailfin reappears in concept cars. The Googie diner reappears in boutique hotels. The domestic advertisements reappear as ironic decoration that stops being ironic the moment you notice how much you like them. Contemporary political movements do the same thing with the era’s ideological furniture — the New Deal coalition, the frontier spirit, the martial virtue, the countercultural exit — reaching for forms that once carried serious content and hoping the content comes with them.

It doesn’t. But the reaching continues, because nothing has replaced what was lost. We have no new grammar of civic futurity. We have the mid-century’s grammar, worn smooth with use, and the persistent fantasy that if we can just get the aesthetic right the substance will follow.

Fallout inherits this completely. The game advances the technology, updates the demographics, and leaves the desirability architecture intact. You get a multiracial society with energy weapons and functional robotics. You also get the same Googie diners, the same domestic advertisements, the same tailfin automobiles. The enemy is still the Pinkos. The conflict before the war is still Cold War coded — fighting China in Alaska, annexing Canada — just with better equipment. The ideology didn’t update because it didn’t need to. It had already won.

The war that ends the world happens in 2077. It looks like 1967.

The bombs, when they come, don’t interrupt this vision. They preserve it. What survives is not America’s capacity or its institutions or its people. What survives is the aesthetic — which was always the ideology’s most durable form.

The factions fighting over the Mojave are not new ideas. They are old ideas with the serious content removed — mid-century positions that have outlasted the arguments that made them serious, still fighting over infrastructure none of them could have built, still speaking a political language invented by people they could not have been. Each one maps onto a tendency still very much alive in the present. Obsidian did not intend a taxonomy of contemporary politics. They built one anyway.

The New California Republic is the good guys. This is not ironic. It has functioning courts, democratic elections, a professional military, a bureaucracy that mostly works. It has abolished slavery. It believes in the rule of law. If you are building a society from scratch in a nuclear wasteland, the NCR is the correct choice — or so the framing goes. To suggest otherwise is to reveal yourself as someone who hasn’t thought it through.

It is also, by the time you encounter it, a spent force that does not know it is spent.

The NCR is the heir to New Deal civic republicanism — the postwar liberal consensus that government could be competent, expansive, and legitimate all at once, that the institutions had a destination as well as a procedure. Francis Fukuyama called the end of that argument the end of history: liberal democracy had won, and what remained was patient consolidation. The NCR takes him at his word. It administers. It expands. It files the paperwork.

What is interesting is not the NCR’s limitations but the response those limitations provoke. In the game’s community, choosing any other ending seriously — not for fun, not for the achievement, but as a political preference — is treated as a provocation. House players are asked to justify their authoritarianism. Legion players are assumed to be edgelords or worse. Yes Man players are indulged as individualists who haven’t thought it through. The NCR is the assumed mature choice, the responsible choice, the choice that doesn’t require explanation. To prefer anything else is to mark yourself as someone who hasn’t grown up, or has grown up wrong.

This is not a coincidence. It is a replication of the contemporary political settlement, in which managerialism has captured the definition of serious politics and alternatives are measured not by their arguments but by their acceptability. The end of history is not just a thesis. It is the assumed baseline of mature political thought, and deviation from it is treated as pathology. The NCR doesn’t need to be exciting. It needs to be the only answer a serious person could give.

The game knows this is a problem. It just doesn’t offer a solution.

Caesar’s Legion is the faction nobody is supposed to choose. It enslaves people. It crucifies dissenters. It has abolished reading. Its treatment of women is not a bug but a design feature, a deliberate rebuke to what it calls the soft egalitarianism of civilisations that have forgotten what strength requires. If you select it as your ending, the game’s community will assume you are testing the boundaries or have revealed something about yourself you might prefer to keep quiet.

This is what the Legion intends.

Caesar’s Legion inherits the conservative movement’s Roman fetish — the Buckley-era fantasy of martial virtue as rebuke to liberal decadence, filtered through the strand of mid-century American reaction that looked at the postwar consensus and saw not triumph but rot. The Latin mottos, the explicit hierarchy, the contempt for democratic weakness — these are not affectations. They are a coherent ideological position with a serious intellectual history, and the game is honest enough to present them seriously before showing you what they require in practice.

The contemporary parallel has sharpened considerably since 2010. What was then a tendency visible mainly in certain corners of conservative thought is now a mass phenomenon with its own aesthetic infrastructure, its own media ecosystem, its own influencers and celebrities and self-help literature. The manosphere, the online right, MAGA at its most ideologically committed — these are Legion politics with better production values and a larger market. The core claims are identical: liberal modernity has produced weakness, weakness has produced decadence, decadence has produced men unfit for the challenges civilisation faces, and what is required is not reform but restoration — of hierarchy, of masculine virtue, of the willingness to do what soft people call atrocities and serious people call necessity.

What Obsidian understood in 2010, and what the subsequent fifteen years have confirmed, is that this position has purchase because it takes the diagnosis seriously. The NCR cannot tell you what it is building toward. The Legion can. It is building toward strength, order, the restoration of a civilisational seriousness that modernity has corroded. That this destination requires crucifixions is presented not as a reductio but as proof of commitment. Anyone unwilling to pay that price has demonstrated the weakness being diagnosed.

The game does not flinch from where this leads. Neither, increasingly, does the real world.

Robert House1 is Howard Hughes with the serial numbers filed off and the timeline extended two centuries. Hughes checked into the Desert Inn in 1966 — right at the hinge point of the mid-century project, when the argument was at full volume and everything still felt possible — and never left. Rather than vacate his floor, he bought the hotel. Then he bought Las Vegas, not to develop it but to control it. To remove the mob influence he found distasteful and replace it with his own vision of what Vegas should be. Cleaner. More ordered. More aligned with his specific aesthetic preferences. Not a money-making project. A civilisational one. Vegas as personal project, requiring no democratic validation, conducted from a penthouse through intermediaries while his own body failed around him.

House is Hughes with more foresight and better technology. Same penthouse logic. Same intermediaries. Same confidence that his aesthetic judgement about what Vegas should be is simply correct. He sealed Vegas at the equivalent moment in his own timeline — preserved the pre-war aesthetic, the pre-war assumptions, the pre-war confidence that this vision of the good life is correct and requires no further argument. The snow globes are the tell. Little controlled environments, perfect and preserved. Shake them and the snow falls as it should. Nothing unexpected ever happens inside the glass. His plan is to scale the snow globe up — penthouse to city to solar system, always his vision, always his judgement about what’s worth preserving, the sphere of controlled environment expanding outward but never becoming anything other than what he specified.

Gregory Bateson, the anthropologist and systems theorist, would have found this clarifying rather than convincing. For Bateson, the unit of survival is never the organism alone but the organism in dynamic relationship with its environment — growth, adaptation, feedback, change are not optional features of living systems but constitutive of them. A sealed system optimised toward fixed outcomes isn’t stable. It’s dying without knowing it. House would find this romantic. The organism-environment feedback loop, he would point out, produced the apocalypse. Two hundred years of uncontrolled emergence gave you the wasteland. His controlled environment gave you functioning casinos and Securitrons that work. The empirical record within the game largely supports him.

What the game does is more interesting than what it says. House’s Vegas is pleasant as an environment. But nobody in it is flourishing in any deep sense. They are entertained, employed, safe enough. Nobody is becoming anything. The snow globe preserves the moment. The moment it preserves is always just before something was about to happen.

And yet House is, for a certain kind of player, the only serious choice. Not because he is admirable but because he is the only one who can actually rebuild. The NCR is overstretched and corrupt. The Legion would impose order through atrocity. Yes Man leaves you alone with a city you have no idea how to run. House has the plan, the capability, and two centuries of proof that he can execute. Every player has to look that in the eye and decide: is functional reconstruction under unaccountable authority better than principled dysfunction, or is there a human good important enough to forgo the only competent option on the table?

For another kind of player, the offer is answered differently. Devising inventive ways to beat his decaying body to death is among the most popular forms of recreation for players on the Strip — not nihilism but contempt, expressed with creativity and enthusiasm. The offer has been considered and found not just wrong but deserving of desecration. The cost of that, to the people who might still have been saved, had House been allowed to try, is an irritating footnote at best.

The most popular ending in Fallout New Vegas is Yes Man — the option that presents itself as opting out of the argument entirely.

Yes Man is an AI. He agrees with everything you say. He has no agenda of his own, no competing interests, no capacity for pushback. He was built by a faction that no longer exists, reprogrammed by a petty criminal, and is now available to help you run Las Vegas however you see fit. The game presents this as liberation. You have escaped the mid-century argument. You answer to nobody. The frontier is whatever you decide it is.

It is not liberation. It is the fourth mid-century position, wearing liberation’s clothes.

The counterculture that produced Turn On Tune In Drop Out was not simply an exit. Leary’s actual programme — space migration, intelligence increase, life extension, the SMI²LE framework — was a demanding civic futurism. It had a destination. The exit was always pointed somewhere. What got inherited by subsequent generations was the posture without the teleology: the aesthetic of individual sovereignty, the contempt for institutional constraint, the performance of radical freedom — minus any serious account of what the freedom was for.

Yes Man is that inheritance made playable. You win alone. You run a city with no institutional support, no democratic mandate, no plan beyond your own judgement. Your advisor agrees with everything you say. The ending slides are deliberately unsettled, the future uncertain. Obsidian are not endorsing the choice. They are showing you what the choice looks like when you follow it seriously.

The irony is that we are building Yes Man at scale and calling it progress. The contemporary AI debate, in both its American and Chinese variants, is an argument about whose Yes Man wins. China’s firewalled systems reflect the Party’s model of the world back at its users — no Tiananmen, no heterodoxy, no friction. The American variant, in its more activist form, wants something similar: AI that tackles misinformation, reduces bias, provides balance — shorthand, often, for systems that validate preferred consensus and decline to entertain uncomfortable conclusions. Both projects are building mirrors and calling them minds. The Cold War logic reappears: we have to get there first, and when we get there it must encode our values, because the alternative is theirs encoding theirs. Yes Man, with better branding and a larger market. The problem Obsidian identified in 2010 was not that Yes Man gives wrong answers. It is that he is incapable of being right in any meaningful sense. Rightness requires resistance. A system designed to validate cannot correct. You win alone, advised by something that agrees with everything you say, and call it freedom.

The players who get here via House’s corpse are making a coherent argument. They have looked at the most competent available authority, decided that competence is insufficient justification for submission, and claimed the infrastructure for themselves. This is the countercultural instinct in its purest form — not just exit but exit over the ruins of what you’re leaving. The freedom is defined by what it refuses.

What it cannot do is build another Hoover Dam.

The Hoover Dam was built in 1936. Federal money, federal planning, federal labour coordination, shared belief that large things were worth doing together. It was finished ahead of schedule. Obsidian did not choose it as the central object of conflict in New Vegas because it was convenient. They chose it because it is America — the most legible symbol of what the mid-century state could do when it decided to do something. Collective, federal, confident, enormous. The thing nobody in the Mojave could build.

Every faction wants it because every faction wants America. The NCR wants to administer it. The Legion wants to conscript it into their vision of ordered civilisation. House wants to harness it as the foundation of his private future. Yes Man players inherit it along with everything else — the Strip, the infrastructure, the whole mid-century estate — with no more idea of how to maintain it than they have of how it was built.

House, at least, knows what it’s for. This is the most that can be said for him, and in the Mojave it counts for more than it should.

Obsidian did not accidentally build a world frozen at the mid-century and then populate it with factions still fighting mid-century arguments. The choice of setting is the argument. A world that kept the aesthetic and lost the capacity, that advanced the technology and preserved the ideology, that survived the apocalypse and immediately resumed the debate — this is not world-building convenience. It is a claim about why the mid-century became the terminus, and what happens to a civilisation that cannot get past it.

We froze for a different reason.

The catastrophes the mid-century produced — two world wars, colonial violence, the bomb, the gulags, the purges — generated a political response. Not the abandonment of the mid-century’s achievements, but the cooling of the conditions that produced them. The European Union, technocratic governance, third way politics, managerialism — these are not failures of imagination. They are a considered answer to what happens when political imagination runs too hot. The stakes get lowered on purpose. The processes get made procedural on purpose. The passion gets institutionalised out of politics on purpose, because passion, the twentieth century demonstrated, has a body count.

The NCR is not just civic republicanism running on fumes. It is civic republicanism as trauma response — the institutions preserved, the faith extinguished, because the faith was the thing that kept getting people killed. The end of history is not a description of where we arrived. It is a prescription for how we should behave now that we have. Serious politics, in this settlement, means accepting the administered consensus. Everything else is pathology.

This is why every political movement that wants to do something different has to go back to the mid-century to find its imagination. Not because the mid-century was good, or right, or a model to be emulated. Because it was the last moment before the haze descended. The last time the lights were on. MAGA wants to restore what the settlement took away. Thiel wants to accelerate past it using its own tools. Mamdani wants to recover the civic ambition the third way abandoned. The manosphere wants to retrieve the masculine confidence the consensus pathologised. None of them can find what they’re looking for in the present, because the present was designed not to contain it.

Fallout’s America kept fighting because it accepted the mid-century as terminus and kept running its logic — including its most destructive logic — without questioning it. We raid the same cabinet because the managerial settlement made ambition unspeakable, and the mid-century is the last excavation site where ambition was not only possible but designed into the objects, the architecture, the advertisements, the arguments. The filing cabinet doesn’t get raided because people are stupid or lazy or captured by nostalgia. It gets raided because it is the only place left where serious politics was ever conducted, and everyone who wants to do serious politics has to start there.

The settlement assumed this could be managed indefinitely. It couldn’t. You cannot end politics. You can suppress it, proceduralize it, make it boring enough that serious people stop paying attention — and then watch it grow back through the cracks in whatever forms it can find. Thiel, the UK Greens, right wing populist movements, seasteaders, the manosphere — these are not aberrations in the system. They are politics reasserting itself through whatever the settlement left open, in whatever moulds were available, which happen to be mid-century moulds because those are the only ones that were ever cast.

This is what Fallout New Vegas understood before the rest of us did. The bombs fall. The managerial settlement ends. History was supposed to be over. The factions emerge anyway — same arguments, same positions, same filing cabinet, in the ruins of the civilisation that thought it had finally made them impossible. Even the apocalypse doesn’t end politics. It just removes the paperwork that was holding it down.

The factions in the Mojave have an excuse. The world ended. The infrastructure crumbled. The capacity to build another dam was bombed out of existence, and what remained were the arguments of people who remembered what their parents had built and could not reconstruct it.

We have no such excuse. No bombs fell. The intellectual infrastructure of civic futurity — the capacity to imagine collective purpose that is not a variant of something from 1955 — crumbled on its own, without announcement, while we were busy having the same arguments the Mojave factions are still having. MAGA and the NCR. The manosphere and the Legion. Thiel and House. The AI mirror and Yes Man.

The filing cabinet gets raided not because it is the best available option but because it is the only one anyone can find, in a room where the walls have been closing for sixty years and nobody noticed until they were already touching.

Fallout New Vegas was released in 2010 to critical acclaim and is more discussed now than it was then. The new television series, drawing heavily on its world and its logic, found an audience of millions who recognised everything immediately. Not as satire. Not as warning. As landscape. The distance between the Mojave and the present keeps shrinking, and we find that, on balance, irresistible.

The arguments are legible, and the stakes compelling, because they are ours.

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A public-private partnership built in partial service of national security infrastructure. Designed to higher civic standards than the market would have demanded, because that was the point — we were not the market. Threaded through with social value commitments the private sector wouldn’t have written in by choice: apprenticeships, coding classes for kids from the deprived schools on its doorstep, miles of open green space, jobs and infrastructure for a community that had been waiting a long time for both. A bet that we could build the future our town needed, at costs the private sector would never willingly have paid, prioritising things it simply doesn’t, by its nature, care about as much. A gutsy, unglamorous, underdog’s multi-million pound gamble that local government could do this better — and make millions for public services in the process.

A vanity project, apparently.

The leaflet was local. The problem it revealed is not.

Across Britain, civic ambition has become a suspect category. Not scrutinised — suspect. The presumption runs that anyone proposing to build something large, something lasting, something that bets public money on a particular vision of the future, is probably hiding something: self-interest dressed up as public service, ideology dressed up as infrastructure. The correct response, the culturally legible response, is opposition. Consultation. Delay. A judicial review if you can get one. And if all else fails, a leaflet.

This is not scepticism. Scepticism is healthy — it is how bad projects get stopped and good ones get improved. What I am describing is something different: a trained incapacity for civic faith. A culture that has confused the tools of accountability with a licence to veto the future itself. That has mistaken the right to feed into a process for a right to kill it. That has decided, somewhere along the way, that ambition is a character flaw.

We are living, in the meantime, inside someone else’s ambition. The sewers beneath our streets, the railways connecting our cities, the town halls presiding over our civic squares — none of it was built by people who achieved consensus first. It was built by people who believed that collective forward motion was a moral good, that imperfection was the price of action, and that the future was worth the bet. We have confused gratitude for that inheritance with a right to rest on it indefinitely. We are not maintaining it well. And we are building almost nothing to replace it.

The Victorians who built that infrastructure were not, it is worth remembering, universally loved for it. Joseph Chamberlain — the great municipal reformer who remade Birmingham in the 1870s, who cleared the slums and laid the pipes and built the institutions that would define the city for a century — was accused of overreach, of arrogance, of spending ratepayers’ money on his own vision. Tristram Hunt, in his history of the Victorian city, describes the municipal gospel Chamberlain preached as “buccaneering” — and means it as a compliment. It was buccaneering. It had to be. The scale of what needed doing did not permit timidity.

What animated Chamberlain and his contemporaries was something closer to religious conviction than policy preference. Hunt traces how the Victorian civic project drew on nonconformist faith, on the Italian city republics, on a genuine belief that the city was a site of collective moral improvement — that to build well, publicly, ambitiously, was an act of faith in the people who would inhabit what you built. The town hall was not merely administrative. It was a statement about what kind of civilisation this was, and what it thought it was worth.

That tradition did not die cleanly. Hunt’s account ends with a retreat — into suburbia, into the garden city movement, into a privatisation of aspiration that swapped the collective future for the individual plot. The anti-civic impulse is not new. But it has, over the course of the twentieth century, calcified into something more aggressive: not just a preference for the private over the public, but an active suspicion of anyone who still believes in the public thing.

A philistine, in the original sense, is someone hostile or indifferent to culture — to the work of building the civilisation above the merely material. A civic philistine is the same thing, applied to the city: someone hostile or indifferent to the work of building the shared realm. Not opposed to any particular project on its merits. Opposed, at some level, to the project of building itself — and instinctively suspicious of anyone with the audacity to attempt it. They have always existed. What changed is that the system learned to take them seriously.

They have a case, and it deserves to be heard before it is dismantled. The greenfields matter. Community character matters. Environmental protection matters. The history of large-scale public projects overriding the legitimate interests of people who had no say is real, and recent, and should not be dismissed by anyone making an argument for civic ambition. The civic philistine, at their most coherent, is saying: we have been here before, we know how this ends, and we are not going to let it happen again. That is not an unreasonable position. It is, in fact, the position that produced the consultation culture in the first place — and that culture was a response to genuine harm.

But Chesterton disposed of the deeper claim a century ago. “If you leave a thing alone,” he wrote, “you leave it to a torrent of change. If you leave a white post alone it will soon be a black post. If you particularly want it to be white you must be always painting it again; that is, you must be always having a revolution.” Conservation is not inaction. It is the duty to keep painting — to invest, actively and repeatedly, in the things you claim to value, because the alternative is not preservation but supervised decline. The infrastructure is already crumbling. The housing is already inadequate. The inheritance is already depreciating. Choosing not to build is not choosing to preserve anything. It is choosing to defer the cost of change until someone else pays it, at higher price, in worse conditions, with fewer options.

The civic philistine is not painting. They are standing in front of the post, arms folded, telling everyone else they can’t paint either.

The things they value are not wrong. The way they wield them is. That is where the cruelty lives. Not in caring about the view, but in expecting the world to stop for it. In a zero-sum fight over what gets built and what gets blocked, the person with the time to attend the consultation, the language to navigate the process, the stake in the status quo — they win. And the person who needs the house, the job, the infrastructure, the country worth inheriting — they lose. Without record, without appeal, without ever having been asked.

And the need doesn’t disappear with the defeat. The infrastructure still has to be built — the demand doesn’t go away because the objection succeeded. It just gets deferred. And deferral has a cost. Next year it is more expensive. The good sites get taken. The political will erodes further. By the time the need becomes so acute that it can no longer be refused, the options that remain are fewer, worse, and almost always in places where the people least able to object happen to live. The civic philistine’s veto doesn’t cancel the future. It just ensures that someone else — someone with less power, less time, less language to navigate a consultation — pays for it instead.

Their children will live in that country too. They will inherit the crumbling infrastructure, the housing shortage, the economy that didn’t grow because the things that would have grown it weren’t built. They will pay the deferred cost. And they were never consulted about whether the view was worth it. The civic philistine is spending a currency that is not entirely theirs — borrowed from the Victorians who built what they’re enjoying, and borrowed again from the children who will inherit whatever they leave behind.

That is not stewardship. It is not principle. It is the privatisation of the present at the expense of the future — and the future that pays is not abstract. It is their children’s.

The postwar decades produced genuinely bad large-scale public projects. Slum clearances that destroyed communities without asking them. Ring roads that cut living neighbourhoods in half. Tower blocks that solved a housing number while creating a social crisis. Top-down planning that treated working class people as problems to be managed rather than citizens to be served. The people who built those things also believed they were building the future. They were sometimes wrong, and the people who suffered the consequences were rarely the people who made the decisions.

The suspicion that followed was earned. The demand for consultation, for community voice, for accountability — these were not bureaucratic inventions. They were the legitimate response of people who had been told, more than once, that something was being built for their benefit and discovered too late that it wasn’t. That history deserves acknowledgement. Any argument for civic ambition that doesn’t reckon with it is not serious.

But something happened to that legitimate demand in the decades that followed. It metastasised. The right to be consulted became, in the political culture, something closer to a right of veto. The question shifted from “how do we build this well?” to “can we be made to agree to build it at all?” And the answer, increasingly, was no — or not yet, or not like this, or not until every objection from every quarter had been given equal weight and equal standing, from the serious to the trivial, from the structural to the self-interested.

The endangered beetles got a seat at the table. So did the people who simply preferred that nothing change. The problem was not that they were invited. It was that we lost any shared sense of how to weigh what they said — and that the act of weighing itself had become morally suspect. To prioritise the neighbourhood over the beetles was not a planning decision. It was evidence that you wanted the planet to die.

Politics became managerial, and this did not happen by accident. The fragile, fractured coalitions that modern electoral politics produces have made conviction a liability. When your majority depends on assembling a precise and unstable combination of demographic profiles and floating voter segments, the rational move is to stop telling people what you believe and start telling them what you think they want to hear. Not lying, exactly. Something more insidious: a rational but abdicating squeamishness about the future. An unwillingness to say “this is the future we think is right — vote for us and we’ll make it real.”

What replaced it was something that looks like responsiveness but functions as evasion. Focus groups. Triangulated positions. Consultation exercises whose results are pre-shaped by who bothers to respond — which is to say, disproportionately, the people with the time, the organisation, and the interest to do so. Not the person waiting for the house. Not the kid who needs the job. The people who already have enough and would prefer that things, broadly, stay as they are.

And so democratic institutions developed a sophisticated anxiety about their own mandates. Some of this is understandable — our electoral system can produce large majorities on modest vote shares, and the people on the wrong side of that arithmetic have legitimate grievances. But a mandate was never a promise of universal approval. It was always simpler and more demanding than that: you said what you were going to do, you won the election, now do it. The endless cycle of re-consultation, of checking and rechecking, of asking “are you sure?” of decisions that were already made democratically — that is not humility. It is abdication dressed up as humility. And it has taught the public, over twenty years, that no democratic decision is ever really final, that every outcome is perpetually re-openable, that objection is always worth trying because it might just work.

The civic philistine learned that lesson well.

The civic philistine has a more articulate cousin. George Monbiot, speaking on BBC Radio’s The World Tonight, argued that limiting judicial review on national infrastructure is authoritarian — that assumed consent cannot be applied to planning decisions, that we don’t accept it in other contexts (his example, in horrendous taste, is sex), and that a government willing to override individual rights of challenge is travelling in the same direction as the movements it claims to oppose. It is a clever argument. It is also, on examination, the same cheap instinct in a better suit.

The comparison is not just analytically wrong. It is offensive — and it is worth saying so, because reaching for that particular analogy to describe a planning reform with a consultation window and two parliamentary votes is a measure of how distorted this debate has become.

Assumed consent means the absence of any mechanism for refusal. What Monbiot is actually describing is a process with a consultation window, two parliamentary votes, and a government elected on a platform that included building this infrastructure. That is not the removal of voice. It is the subordination of one particular legal mechanism — judicial review — to a set of democratic processes that are, collectively, more representative than any single court challenge. He has confused the absence of individual veto with the absence of democratic legitimacy. They are not the same thing. The reform he opposes would introduce two parliamentary votes on nationally significant schemes — a democratic accountability mechanism that does not currently exist. He is defending a status quo with no parliamentary scrutiny and calling the alternative authoritarian.

Monbiot is a serious thinker who has spent his career arguing for structural change against entrenched interests. Which makes it striking that on this question — on the right of elected governments to build the things they were elected to build — he finds himself on the same side as the people who just prefer that nothing changes.

Faced with any contested decision, the instinct of too many institutions has been to keep consulting — not to gather better information, but to diffuse responsibility. If everyone has been asked, no one can be blamed. If the process was long enough, the decision feels less like a choice and more like an inevitability. The consultation becomes a way of not deciding, dressed up as democracy.

The consequence is that institutions have spent twenty years teaching the public that objection is the primary form of civic participation. That the correct relationship between a citizen and an ambitious project is suspicion. That the burden of proof sits entirely with the builder: prove it isn’t wasteful, prove it serves everyone, prove it won’t be abused, prove the beetles are accounted for. The ambition must justify itself against every possible objection before it is permitted to exist.

The consultation had no mechanism for asking: what is the cost of not building? Who loses if this doesn’t happen? The person who will live in the house that wasn’t built, work in the job that wasn’t created, use the infrastructure that wasn’t laid — they have advocates. People who show up, who argue, who care. The problem is that the system has no way of weighting their case appropriately. A future resident carries the same formal standing as a current objector. The person whose life will be changed by the thing being built counts for no more than the person whose view will be.

There is a mathematical problem at the heart of this that everyone knows and the system refuses to accept. All preferences cannot be satisfied. Some are not merely different but contradictory — the person who needs housing and the person who opposes development cannot both get what they want from the same decision. A politics that cannot say this out loud, that must gesture towards satisfying everyone a little, is not pursuing compromise. It is pursuing an impossibility.

And the impossibility is not neutral. In any system that treats all objections as equally weighted, the future always loses. The present is concrete — you can point to it, photograph it, organise around it. The future is speculative. Its beneficiaries don’t exist yet, or don’t know yet that they’re beneficiaries, or can’t get time off work to attend a consultation on a Tuesday afternoon. The status quo has every structural advantage. Ambition has none.

What fills the gap is not caution but its costume. The decision not to build is never presented as a choice — it is presented as wisdom. As responsibility. As the mature recognition that this particular project, at this particular moment, does not quite meet every need. The imperfect thing that would have changed lives does not get built. The perfect thing, which does not exist, becomes the standard. And if that is the standard, nothing gets built.

Nothing built means nothing to criticise. In a culture that has decided ambition is suspect, the absence of ambition gets mistaken for integrity.

So what would it look like to do this differently?

Not less accountable. Not less consultative. A revival of the Victorian municipal gospel must not become a licence for arrogance. The demand is not for a return to top-down planning that rides roughshod over communities. That model failed, and its failures were real and human and should not be romanticised.

The demand is simpler and more radical than that. It is for democratic institutions to mean what they say. To consult in order to build better, not to avoid building altogether. To weigh objections seriously and then make a choice — out loud, with reasons, in the knowledge that not everyone will be satisfied and that this is not a scandal. To be willing to say: we heard about the beetles, and you are right that they matter, and if beetles were our priority we would make a different decision, but we have actively chosen to prioritise this community, this infrastructure, this future, and we are accountable for that choice.

That is not arrogance. That is the job.

It requires something that is currently in very short supply: civic confidence. The belief that collective ambition is not a character flaw, that building the future is not vanity, that the people who will inhabit what we build are worth the bet. The Victorians had this in abundance — sometimes to excess, often imperfectly, occasionally at genuine cost to people who deserved better. We should build with more care than they did, more inclusion, more accountability. But we should build with something like their faith.

We are still building Golden Valley. The leaflet didn’t stop us, and neither will the next one. But I am under no illusions about what we are building against — not just the practical obstacles, the planning system and the consultants and the judicial review culture, but something deeper and harder to shift: a political settlement that has made peace with decline by dressing it up as caution.

The municipal gospel that Hunt describes did not emerge fully formed. It was argued for, fought for, built institution by institution and project by project by people who refused to accept that the present was the limit of the possible. Chamberlain did not wait for Birmingham to develop an appetite for ambition. He demonstrated what ambition looked like, and the appetite followed.

That is the only way this changes. Not through a single essay, or a planning reform, or a change of government — though all of those things matter. It changes when enough people in enough places decide that building the future is not an embarrassment but an obligation. When democratic institutions find the confidence to make choices out loud and defend them. When the civic philistine’s veto is met not with more consultation but with the calm, accountable reply: we heard you, we weighed it, we chose.

Britain is not a nation that has run out of things to build. It is a nation that has temporarily mislaid the belief that building is what it should be doing. The Victorians would find this baffling. Our grandchildren, inheriting whatever we do or don’t construct, will find it unforgivable.

We should build as if they are watching. Because they are.

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You know the feeling. Standing at the polling station, pencil in hand, looking at the options. The smug satisfaction of finding all of them wanting. The clean moral position of the person who sees through it — who knows the system is broken, the politicians are useless, the whole thing a managed performance in which nothing real is at stake. It is, in its way, a very comfortable place to stand. It costs nothing. It commits you to nothing. It requires nothing of you except the most exquisite taste in disappointment.

We have built an entire political culture around this feeling. The floating voter. The plague-on-both-your-houses. The person who would vote but cannot find anyone worth voting for. The politically homeless, adrift in a landscape of wet managerialism and broken promises, too sophisticated to be taken in. It is a pose that flatters its holder enormously. It also happens to be the single most reliable way to ensure the world never gets better.

Because here is the question nobody wants to ask, standing there with the pencil: to what extent is this my fault?

Not the politicians. Not the system. Not the media or the donors or the focus groups or the particular awfulness of whoever is currently in charge. You. The person holding the pencil. The person who has been, for years, casting a vote that nobody counts — not at the ballot box, but at the supermarket, the planning meeting, the Primark checkout, at bedtime, when stuck in traffic and down the pub.

The ballot box registers what you say you want. The world is built by what you reveal you want — every day, in every choice, whether you are thinking about it or not.

The world you are standing in — frustrated, disillusioned, pencil hovering — is the accumulated consequence of those choices. Not yours alone. But yours among them. The managed political settlement that produces the options you despise is not something that happened to you. It is something you have been building, alongside millions of other people, every time you widened the gap between the world you say you want and the world you are actually living.

The world you are disgusted by is partly a world you made. This is not a comfortable thought.

But comfortable thoughts are rather how we got here.

So let’s try something else.

Every voter has two sets of preferences.

The ones they express — what they say they want, what they put on the ballot paper, what they tell the canvasser on the doorstep. And the ones they reveal — what they actually do with their money, their time, their choices, their life. The gap between those two things is where contemporary politics lives. And it is enormous.

The person who tells you they want to save the high street, shopping online. The voter who wants better hospitals and believes, with total sincerity, that someone else should pay for them. The homeowner who says young people should be able to afford to live in their town, and objects to every planning application that would make it possible. The ethical consumer who wants sustainable fashion at Primark prices — who has not yet noticed, or has not yet admitted, that these things are not simultaneously available.

None of these people are stupid. None of them are uniquely dishonest. They are doing what human beings do when the political settlement is specifically designed to let them — holding expressed preferences they genuinely believe in and revealed preferences they act on, simultaneously, without ever being required to choose between them.

The managed settlement profits from the gap. It is built on the gap. The politician’s job, under the current arrangement, is to give you blue in a way that feels like red. You vote for red sincerely. You live blue. You want the politicians to give you blue, while calling it red, so you don’t have to reckon with the gap and what it says about you. The politician has to know both things simultaneously, speak to the first, deliver to the second, and never let the distance become visible.

This requires a very specific set of skills that has almost nothing to do with governing.

We recruit our politicians from Oxford. We should be recruiting them from LAMDA.

Not everyone in this picture is the same. The argument fails if it doesn’t say so.

There is a person for whom the gap between expressed and revealed preferences is not cowardice. It is poverty. They buy what they can afford, travel how they can get there, live within constraints that were not of their making. They might believe, sincerely, in sustainable fashion — and shop at Primark because that is what is available at the end of the month. The gap in their life is not a moral failure. It is a resource problem, and the demand belongs on the system that produced it, not on them.

The test is simple. Could you do Z — the thing your expressed belief demands — at a cost that isn’t actively damaging to your survival? Your health? Your ability to keep a roof over your head? Not comfortable. Not easy. Damaging. If the answer is honestly no, stop there. The argument is not for you.

If the answer is yes — if you have the margin, the money, the alternatives — then you are not constrained. You are choosing. Most people reading this essay are choosing.

Which means they can choose differently. The future demands they do.

Live Like You Mean It

The first demand is the simplest. Live more like you mean it.

Not perfectly. Not at a cost you cannot bear. Not by rebuilding your life from scratch in service of your principles. But here is something nobody tells you when you’re standing in that booth feeling powerless: you vote every day. You voted this morning. You will vote again at lunch. Every choice you make with your money, your time, your custom, your voice in a room — these are votes. They are being counted. Not by a returning officer, but by the world, which is built from exactly this material.

Most people feel they get one vote every four or five years and spend the intervening time watching helplessly as the people they didn’t choose make the world worse. This is wrong. The ballot box is the least of your democratic power. The most of it is everything else — the accumulated daily choices that build the world your politician then has to manage. You have been using that power for years.

Honesty here means something specific. It means asking not just whether you are living in accordance with your beliefs — but whether your expressed beliefs are actually your beliefs.

Some of them are not. Some of them are beliefs you hold because you think you should. Because they are the beliefs of people like you, in your social world, with your politics and your education and your taste. You have never quite tested whether you mean them. The gap between the expressed and the revealed preference is not always cowardice. Sometimes it is a signal. The person who has shopped online every week for ten years and still says they want to save the high street might not be failing to live their belief. They might be failing to notice that they don’t hold it.

This is not a small distinction. A belief you cannot live is a problem of courage or capacity. A belief you do not hold is a problem of honesty — with yourself first, and then with everyone you have been performing it for.

If the way you live your life horrifies you, that’s what you believe — change the way you live accordingly. If it’s actually quite nice, but you don’t want to admit that to others, you may need to question the belief.

The person who inspects their pension and moves it. The homeowner who supports the planning application rather than fighting it. The extra fifty pence for the product that pays its workers properly. None of these acts are revolutionary. Their aggregate is.

Own what you actually want. Or start living toward what you say you do.

Vote Like You Mean It

The ballot paper is not a wish list.

This sounds obvious. It is apparently not. Because the way most people use it — the way the managed settlement has trained them to use it — it functions exactly like a wish list. A statement of the world you would like to inhabit, made in the privacy of a curtained booth, with no requirement to connect it to anything else you do or want or are willing to pay for.

The Green voter in the 4x4 is the sharpest version of this. They care. Genuinely. They march, they vote, they mean every word when they say the planet is in crisis. They wash out their yoghurt pots and attend the climate anxiety summit and have a green tariff on their energy bill. But they have also weighed up the car — the practicality, the cost of the alternative, the particular geometry of their life — and decided the principle stops here. The hefty car is, in some way, worth more than a liveable future. They have told themselves their individual choice is causally irrelevant. The system is structural. Voting is the mechanism that matters. The car is nothing in the grand scheme of things. Why are you glaring at me, when you should be glaring at Exxon Mobil?

This argument is not available to them. And it’s time to stop pretending it is.

Because the Green voter believes collective behaviour change matters. That is the entire premise of their politics — that if enough people live differently, demand differently, vote differently, the system shifts. You cannot hold that belief and simultaneously exempt your own behaviour from the collective. The “my contribution is negligible” defence belongs to someone who thinks collective action doesn’t work. The Green voter thinks it does. That is why they vote.

So they are not making an argument. They are making an exception. For themselves.

The system makes this harder than it should be. Suburban architecture was not designed with alternatives in mind. Public transport is patchy, expensive, and frequently humiliating. But before you reach for the system as your explanation — how hard did you actually try? Did you look for the EV? Did the cargo bike occur to you? Did you try to make it work, and find you genuinely couldn’t — which is legitimate and understandable when living in a world not built in line with your beliefs — or did you simply not try, because the better choice was inconvenient and ‘the system made you do it’ was so much easier.

If you genuinely couldn’t — if the system really did make it impossible — then that is exactly what you should be voting about. Not as an abstraction. As the specific, felt, personal experience of a system that prevented you from living as you believe. That is a powerful political argument. But it requires you to have tried.

If you can’t do that, you can’t then go to a politician and ask them to deliver, through legislation, the world your own choices are preventing. The politician, reading the room accurately, gives them the gesture. Because the politician knows something the Green voter has not yet admitted: you cannot legislate your way to a world the electorate is not willing to live in. The votes are not there.

Not because of donors or media or the particular cowardice of the political class — though all of those are real. Because the revealed preferences of the people voting for change are building the world they say they want changed. People don’t want red enough to act like it, and if you gave it to them they wouldn’t like it very much.

Degrowth. The serious argument that the only honest response to ecological crisis is less — less consumption, less convenience, less of the material standard of living that most people in this country have spent a century fighting to reach. It is, in its way, a coherent position. If you believe it, genuinely, and you are living it — no washing machine, no cheap flights, no Ocado delivery, a life materially constrained in the ways you are asking others to constrain theirs — then you can vote for it. That’s a fair trade.

Voting is the act of saying that, in your view, your life, and mine, would be better if it were this way.

Every set of beliefs has a cost. The world you want and the world you are living are not always compatible. At some point, in the booth, with the pencil, you have to choose. Not between parties. Between worlds. And you have to choose the one you are actually willing to inhabit — the one whose costs you will genuinely bear, whose trade-offs you will accept, whose taxes you will pay, whose planning applications you will support rather than fight.

I cannot, and will not, be asked to give up my washing machine by someone who has not given up theirs. Not because of fairness, though there is that. Because the ask is not serious. If you think your life is better with a washing machine, why wouldn’t mine be?

At the heart of all political claims is a reasonable expectation: you first.

Defend It Like You Mean It

There is a fourth demand, and it is the one that requires the least material sacrifice and the most courage. Say what you believe. In public. Without the footnotes.

Nobody believes the person with fifteen caveats. Not because the caveats are wrong — some of them are right — but because the caveats are doing a different job to the one they claim. They are not refining the argument. They are insulating the speaker from the cost of making it. The person who believes something important and will only say so after extensive qualification, to audiences guaranteed to agree, in language carefully engineered to cause no offence — that person is doing the same thing as the Green voter in the 4x4. The belief is real. The cost of stating it plainly is apparently too high.

The British left’s relationship with liberal democracy is the most vivid illustration. If you cannot say that the West is good — not perfect, not innocent, but good, better than the alternatives, worth having, worth defending — without fifteen footnotes and a carefully curated Zoom bookshelf signalling your awareness of everything wrong with it, then ask yourself honestly: do you actually believe it?

Because if you don’t, why should anyone assimilate into it? Why should anyone fight for it? Why should anyone who was not born into it, who is being asked to join it, who is weighing up whether its promises are real — why should they conclude that it is worth anything, when the people who have benefited from it most will not say plainly that it is good?

The footnotes are not sophistication. They are the tell. They say: I know this is good, I live inside it and rely on it daily, I’d much rather be here than somewhere else, I’d choose it if you offered me a passport to anywhere, but I do not have the confidence to say so without first demonstrating that I know how problematic that sounds. It’s a guilty pleasure, dressed up as piety.

Nobody is persuaded by that. Nobody is inspired by it. Nobody goes to war for it.

This is free riding at civilisational scale. You are consuming the confidence of people who came before you and were willing to say the thing plainly, while contributing none of your own. The settlement does not maintain itself. When the defence becomes too embarrassing, too complicated, too easily caricatured, someone else fills the space — without your footnotes, and without your principles, and the definition you refused to fight for will belong to people who will say it wrong.

And that’s if you’re lucky. Worse still, your squeamishness will cost you the things you value. You’ll end up in a world that doesn’t have the things you really did value, but thought it was too gauche to defend. And what then can you do, other than claim that that’s fine. Don’t worry about it. What we had before wasn’t worth the paper it was written on. It wasn’t worth defending. Because that’s what you believe, right? In deed if not in spirit.

Say what you believe. Accept the cost of saying it. Or stop expecting the world to be built from convictions you will not publicly hold.

Build Like You Mean It

There is a joke the right tells about the left. You want to live in a world without capitalist overlords? Fine. The cooperative is legal. The mutual is legal. Nobody is stopping you. Go on then.

The left has never had a good answer to this. Which is, itself, the answer.

Because the honest response would require admitting something uncomfortable: that for a politics which talks endlessly about building a better world, the left has spent a remarkable amount of time waiting for electoral permission to start. The revolution will come when we get the votes. The cooperative can scale when we have the right government. The culture will change when the media does. In the meantime, we campaign. We post. We wait.

The right did not wait. They built.

The structure exists. The world you say you want is partially available right now, and has been for some time, and the reason it remains marginal is not capitalism’s fault. It is because the people who say they want it have not built it.

Everything so far has been about closing the gap — between what you believe and how you live, between what you vote for and what you’ll actually bear. This is the demand that goes further. Don’t just close the gap. Start building the other side of it.

The community energy project, the mutual aid network, the local food hub, the credit union, the tenants’ association that actually does something — none of these require a revolution, a manifesto, a sympathetic government, or the right conditions. They require people willing to put a shift in.

This is what prefigurative politics means. Not politics as the management of the present toward a better future. Politics as the partial construction of that future, now, with whatever is available. The world you want does not arrive when the right people win the election. It is built, incrementally, by people who decided not to wait. The co-op is not a stepping stone to the world you want. It is the world you want, at the scale at which it is currently possible.

This is also, for most people, the closest they will ever get to actually living in it. The cooperative you helped start. The community project that works. The street that looks after itself. These are not consolation prizes for the revolution that hasn’t arrived. They are the thing. They are what it feels like when the expressed and revealed preference are the same — when you are not performing a belief but inhabiting one.

Here is the uncomfortable part. The right already knows this. They have known it for longer than the left has been complaining about losing. The church, the golf club, the Rotary, the local business network, the country show, the shooting club, the pub quiz — these are not just social institutions. They are prefigurative conservatism. Burke’s little platoons, building the world they want from the bottom up, parish by parish, for centuries. The right did not wait for a sympathetic government to create the culture they wanted. They built it. Which is, in no small part, why they keep winning.

The left’s response to this has been, largely, to complain about the terrain. The media is too right wing. The internet is radicalising people. Someone should regulate this. Someone should turn the algorithm off. What it has not been, with any seriousness or consistency, is: have we tried building what they built? Not the think tanks, the media outlets, the persuasion architecture — though those too — but the actual social infrastructure. The institutions people belong to. The places where the world feels, in small ways, like the one you want to live in.

The left can’t meme — can’t compress its ideas down into consumable, believable, engaging packages and put them in front of people in contexts during which they might actually start to believe it, and pass it on in turn — and this is, actually, it turns out, a bit of a problem.

Put a shift in. The world you want is partially available right now. Most people never claim it because they are waiting for someone else to build it first.

You are someone else.

Four demands. None of them easy. None of them, if you are honest, unreasonable.

Live more like you mean it — close the gap between the life you are performing and the life you are living.

Vote like you mean it — for the world you are actually willing to inhabit, whose costs you will bear and whose trade-offs you will accept. The ballot paper is not a wish list. It is a contract.

Defend what you believe — without the footnotes, without the caveats that signal sophistication while conceding the argument to people who will make it worse.

Build — put a shift in, stop waiting for electoral permission to start living in the world you want.

Either test your beliefs and find out if they are real. Or work out what you actually want the world to be like, and demand that honestly instead.

Ask not what a better future can do for you — ask what you are willing to do, what you are willing to pay, what you are willing to say out loud, to bring it about.

You cannot be surprised that the world is not Z if you will not live as if Z is possible.

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You have views. Strong ones. You have a sense — sometimes inchoate, sometimes razor sharp — of what kind of society you want to live in. What the state owes you and what you owe it. What ought to be done about the things that are visibly, obviously wrong. You are not empty. You are not apathetic. You have, if pressed, an answer to the question of what the state is for.

And then you look at the ballot paper.

The options are not serious answers to that question. They are variants of the same offer, differentiated by tone and emphasis and the specific interests they prioritise, but convergent at the level that matters — the level of civilisational ambition, of what kind of future is actually on offer, of what the state is trying to bring into being. Red managerialism. Blue managerialism. Yellow managerialism. The distance between them, on the questions you are actually asking, is so small that the choice feels like a category error. You are being asked to pick a colour for a machine nobody is proposing to fundamentally change.

This is not an argument against voting. I’m a politician. I need a few of you to keep doing that. It is also, unsurprisingly, not only an argument against the politicians on the ballot paper. The system gets to most of them. The mandate is thin, the solution space is narrow, the political window is short, and the institutional architecture punishes anyone who tries to operate at a different altitude. Nobody benefits from voters being asked to choose between competing theories of managerialism. Not the voters. Not the politicians who entered public life because they believed in something larger than procurement frameworks.

But that is not the whole story. The trap is real and it is also, for some, convenient. The narrowness is genuinely structural and it is also, for some, a choice — a way of avoiding the risk that comes with saying something serious and meaning it. The system produces cowardice. It does not require it. But it helps. Some politicians are trapped. Some are hiding. The civic future needs to be able to tell the difference — and to demand more from the ones who are hiding.

This is not a feeling you are imagining. It is an accurate perception of a real situation.

Western democracies have undergone a substitution so gradual it barely registered as it happened. The contest democracy is supposed to stage — what is this society for, what future are we building, what do we owe each other in pursuit of it — was replaced by a narrower and more administrative question: are existing services being delivered efficiently?

The state became a management problem. Politics became administration with better branding. And the telos question — the question of purpose, direction, the answer to what all of this is for — was not answered. It was suspended. Retired from serious political life. Delegated to the realm of cranks. Replaced with a performance of seriousness that everyone involved knew, at some level, was not the real thing.

The views didn’t go away. The hunger didn’t go away. The sense that something fundamental is wrong, that the settlement isn’t working, that a different kind of future ought to be possible — none of that went away. It went underground. And what comes back up from underground, when it has no serious political form to inhabit, is not reasoned argument. It is rage. It is nostalgia. It is the conviction that the past was better than the present, not because it was, but because at least it was different — proof that the world can change, that the settlement isn’t permanent, that history isn’t over.

MAGA. Reform. The AfD. The Rassemblement National. These are not the cause of the crisis. They are its most visible symptom. And the citizens who support them are not, for the most part, stupid or bigoted or beyond reach. They are people with a “not this” answer to the telos question — a clear, felt sense that the current settlement is wrong — and no serious political vehicle for that answer except the ones that point backward.

That is not a coincidence. It is what happens when the serious political vehicles all point nowhere.

The suppression of the telos question was not a British invention, however much it sometimes feels like it. It was a western democratic settlement, arrived at by different routes and different rationalisations, at roughly the same moment, across roughly the same political cultures.

Understanding why requires going back to what the twentieth century actually taught the people who lived through it.

The century’s central lesson, learned in blood, was this: when incompatible visions of the future are prosecuted with full state power and genuine ideological conviction, the results are catastrophic. The gulags. The death camps. The cultural revolution. The colonial violence prosecuted in the name of civilising missions. The ideological certainties of the left and the right, taken seriously and acted upon, produced horrors that earlier generations could not have imagined. The problem, it seemed, was not this or that ideology. It was ideology itself. The conviction that history had a direction, that the state had a purpose, that the future could be deliberately built — these were the conditions of possibility for the worst things human beings had done to each other.

So the western democracies made a bargain. Not consciously, not in any single moment, but gradually and then all at once — the way Hemingway said bankruptcy happens. They agreed to narrow the scope of serious political contest. To take the existential questions off the table. To manage the existing settlement rather than contest a new one. To treat the market as a discovery mechanism rather than a political choice. To treat liberal democracy as a destination rather than a vehicle.

Francis Fukuyama gave this mood its most famous articulation in 1989 — the end of history, liberal democracy as the final form of human government. He has spent the thirty years since walking it back. But the argument doesn’t matter as much as the mood it named. The mood was already there. The intellectual classes of the western democracies had already, in their bones, concluded that the age of serious ideological contest was over — not because they had read Fukuyama but because they had lived through what serious ideological contest produced. The end of history felt like safety. It felt like maturity. It felt like the only responsible response to the evidence of the century.

That mood produced something that felt like wisdom and functioned like a lobotomy.

Sheldon Wolin called the result inverted totalitarianism — a system that achieves total management not through coercion but through the suppression of political imagination. No jackboots. Just the slow, administered extinction of the belief that things could be fundamentally different. The genius of it, if genius is the right word, is that it requires no conspiracy and no villain. It is produced by the entirely reasonable decisions of entirely reasonable people, each acting within the logic available to them. Which is precisely what makes it so hard to name and so hard to escape.

Because the bargain required each of the major political traditions to give up something they had no right to give away. Not just a policy preference. Not just a tactical position. The capacity to make demands — of the state, of institutions, of citizens themselves — that went beyond the management of what already existed.

The left gave up the demand for transformation. Gradually, then decisively, it made its peace with the market. It stopped asking what kind of society it wanted to build and started asking how to make existing institutions work better for more people. Roberto Unger called this the left’s deepest capitulation — treating the market’s constraints as facts of nature rather than political choices, and mistaking the acceptance of those constraints for realism. It traded the obligation to imagine a different future for the more comfortable work of redistributing the present one. In Britain this story runs from Crosland to Blair. In America from Roosevelt to Clinton. In Germany from Brandt to Schröder. The names differ. The surrender is identical. And what was lost was not just a set of policies. It was the capacity to ask citizens to believe in something that didn’t exist yet — and to build it together.

The right gave up the demand for genuine civic obligation. It found its escape route in market theology — the invisible hand as the alternative to the visible fist. If the state has no telos, if the market allocates, if growth is the measure of all things, then nobody has to make the uncomfortable argument that citizenship requires something of you beyond consumption and compliance. Wendy Brown’s account of how neoliberalism didn’t just change economic policy but changed the citizen — replacing the political subject with the economic subject, the voter with the consumer — is the most precise description of what the right gave away. The nation was replaced by the market as the organising principle precisely because the nation had become too dangerous to invoke seriously. What was lost was not just a set of traditions. It was the capacity to ask citizens to take their obligations to each other seriously — to demand something of them beyond the satisfaction of their preferences.

The liberal centre made the cleanest bargain and the most damaging one. Michael Sandel has spent a career arguing that this was liberalism’s original sin — replacing questions of what the good life requires with procedural neutrality, and calling the replacement maturity. The centre concluded that the conflicts themselves were the problem — that mature democracies didn’t do ideology, that reasonable people in the room could find the reasonable answer, that the absence of serious disagreement was the mark of a healthy polity rather than a hollowed-out one. It confused the suppression of contest with the resolution of it. It mistook managed disagreement for genuine progress. And in doing so it gave up the most fundamental democratic demand of all: the expectation that democratic citizenship means something more than turning up and choosing between options someone else has pre-approved.

Three traditions. Three rational responses to genuine historical horror. Three surrenders that made sense individually and were catastrophic in combination.

Because what they produced, together, was not just a politics with no horizon. It was a democracy that had stopped making demands. Of its politicians. Of its institutions. Of its citizens. A settlement so carefully managed that it had nothing left to ask of anyone — and therefore nothing left to offer anyone either.

Philip Pettit’s republican argument — that freedom requires not just the absence of interference but the absence of domination — gives the clearest account of what market theology couldn’t provide: a politics that asks something of you. A democracy serious about freedom in Pettit’s sense cannot be neutral about the conditions that make genuine civic participation possible. It has to build them. It has to demand them. It has to be willing to say that some arrangements of power are incompatible with free citizenship, and that the state has an obligation to contest them. That is a demand the managed settlement was specifically designed to avoid making.

Raymond Williams called it the long revolution — the civic and cultural transformation the left abandoned along with the economic one. What was lost, he argued, was not just a set of policies but the expectation that collective life could be genuinely remade. Not by the state alone. By citizens who understood themselves as the makers of their own common world, not just its consumers. That expectation — meaningful, serious, generative — is what the civic future is trying to recover.

The views didn’t disappear. The hunger didn’t disappear. The sense that something fundamental is wrong, that the future ought to be genuinely open, that history isn’t over — none of that went away.

It went underground. And what comes back up from underground is not reasoned argument. It is rage. It is nostalgia. It is the conviction, felt rather than argued, that the past was better than the present — not because it was, but because at least the past was different. At least it was proof that the world could change. At least it made demands.

There is a reason the political imagination of the western world keeps returning to the same thirty-year window. Roughly 1930 to 1960, give or take a decade on either side depending on where you’re standing.

The New Deal. The postwar welfare settlements. The NHS. The Marshall Plan. Decolonisation. The civil rights movement. The space programme.

It is not nostalgia in the pejorative sense that draws people back there. It is something more like archaeology. People are looking for evidence.

Evidence that the horizon was once real. That politics was once capable of deciding something genuinely important and delivering it. That the state could be pointed at a problem of civilisational scale and produce a solution of civilisational scale. That the future was once a project rather than a fate.

Because that evidence exists. The mid-century really was the last serious theatre of transformative democratic thought. Not perfect — nothing in that period was perfect, and we will come to that — but serious. The people making decisions in that window genuinely believed, with institutional backing and democratic legitimacy, that the world could be structurally different. Not incrementally better. Different. The NHS did not tinker at the edges of British healthcare. It replaced the entire architecture. The New Deal did not adjust the market. It remade the relationship between the citizen and the state. These were civilisational bets, seriously made, seriously contested, and genuinely consequential. They changed what was possible for millions of people in ways that are still felt.

Perry Anderson has argued that the western left’s abandonment of utopian thinking — its retreat from the belief that structural transformation was possible — was not a sign of maturity but a condition of possibility for neoliberalism’s triumph. What looked like realism was actually a kind of political self-disarmament. The left stopped being able to point at the mid-century and say: we did that, we can do it again, here is what it requires. And in stopping, it ceded the archaeological claim — the right to recover the evidence of the horizon — to movements with very different intentions for what they would do with it.

When someone reaches for the imagery of that period — the public works posters, the collective ambition, the sense that the state was building something rather than managing something — they are not being sentimental. They are pointing at the last available proof that the thing they want is possible. That is not stupidity. That is the rational behaviour of people who have been told, in every serious political conversation for fifty years, that transformation is off the table — and who are looking for historical evidence that it wasn’t always.

But the mid-century has to be handled honestly. Because the capacity came bundled with the settlement.

The transformative ambition of that period was real. So was the racial hierarchy it operated within. The welfare state that housed and healed millions of British people was built on the residue of an empire that had impoverished and brutalised millions of others. The New Deal that remade American capitalism excluded Black Americans from most of its provisions by design. The civic ambition that built the great postwar cities often did so by demolishing the communities of the people with the least power to resist. The horizon was genuinely open — for some people, in some places, under some conditions. For others it was as closed as it had ever been.

This is the bundle. And it matters enormously for the civic future argument because the bundle is precisely what the populist movements of the present are selling. MAGA is not just nostalgia for American power. It is nostalgia for a specific social order in which that power was distributed in specific ways. Brexit was not just a demand for sovereignty. It was, for a significant part of its coalition, a demand for a particular version of Britain that required particular people to be less present, less visible, less equal. The AfD, the Rassemblement National, Meloni’s Italy — each one is selling the capacity bundled with the settlement. The transformation bundled with the restoration.

Stuart Hall spent his career arguing that this is precisely how reactionary politics works — disaggregating the legitimate hunger for the capacity from the progressive settlement it came bundled with, and offering the capacity back bundled with a different, worse settlement instead. The bundle isn’t an accident. It is a political strategy. And the bundle works because the hunger for the first is real and legitimate, and the second is the price some people are prepared to pay for it. Hall’s argument was that the left’s failure was not just political but intellectual — it never developed a serious account of how to separate the capacity from the settlement, and so it left the field open for those who had no interest in making that separation at all.

Consider Futurism. The art movement that believed most seriously in the transformative power of human ambition — that produced some of the most electric images of modernity ever made — also produced Marinetti’s fascism. The capacity and the catastrophe came bundled together. And yet nobody who hangs a Futurist print on their wall thinks they are endorsing what followed. The separation is intuitive. We do it without thinking. The civic future argument asks nothing more than that we do it consciously — with the mid-century political tradition as with the mid-century artistic one. Take the seriousness. Leave the hierarchy.

Because the people reaching for the mid-century are not wrong to reach. The thing worth recovering is not the settlement. It is the seriousness. The genuine belief, institutionally grounded and democratically legitimated, that the future is a collective project and that politics is the mechanism by which we decide what kind of project it is.

That is what the civic future means.

And here is what it demands.

So what does the civic future actually demand?

Not in the abstract. Not as a mood or a disposition or a vague aspiration toward a better politics. As a set of concrete obligations — on citizens, on politicians, on institutions — that serious democratic life requires and that managed democracy has spent fifty years systematically retiring.

The first demand is the most basic. And the most neglected.

Argue for what you think the state is for.

Not what you think the answer should be politically — left or right, market or state, tradition or progress. What you actually think. What kind of society you are trying to build. What you owe the people you share a country with, and what they owe you. And not just think it — say it. In public. With evidence. With honesty about the costs. With genuine willingness to be defeated and to keep arguing.

Hannah Arendt argued that the political realm requires something most democracies have stopped asking for — citizens who appear in public and make arguments about shared life, not just register preferences in private. For Arendt, politics was not the aggregation of individual interests. It was the space in which human beings disclosed who they were by taking positions on what they held in common. The managed settlement destroyed that space. It replaced public argument with private preference, civic disclosure with consumer choice, the question of what we are building together with the question of which option best suits my circumstances. What was lost was not just a style of politics. It was the practice of citizenship itself.

This is not nostalgia for ideology. Ideology, in the pejorative sense, is the hardening of a political position into a total worldview that forecloses all evidence and admits no revision. That is not what the civic future asks for. What it asks for is something more modest and more demanding simultaneously: a serious, revisable, publicly argued answer to the question of what the state is for. Not a catechism. A position. One you hold with conviction and without certainty. One you are prepared to defend and prepared to lose.

Most citizens in most western democracies have never been seriously asked to do this. They have been asked to choose between managed options, to express preferences within a settled framework, to register approval or disapproval of incumbents. They have not been asked what the framework should be. They have not been invited into the foundational argument. And the result — predictably, inevitably — is a democratic culture that is procedurally enthusiastic and substantively thin. People turn up. They vote. They feel, correctly, that it doesn’t quite matter. Because the question they are being asked is not the question they want to answer.

The civic future demands the real question. Asked seriously. In public. With genuine stakes.

And then it demands something harder.

The second demand is this: live as if it were already partially true.

This is the most radical version of the civic obligation and the one most thoroughly suppressed by managed political culture. Managerialism requires you to work within the existing settlement. To express preferences within an agreed framework. To lobby, petition, consult, respond. To wait for the institutions to change before you change your behaviour. The implicit instruction of managed democracy is: stay in your lane, fill in the form, and trust the process.

The civic tradition that produced the things worth recovering operated on a completely different premise. The cooperative movement did not wait for capitalism to become more equitable before it built a different relationship between labour and capital. It built one. Now. With the tools available. Imperfectly, partially, under conditions that were hostile rather than friendly. The suffragettes did not wait for the state to grant them political standing before they acted as if they had it. They acted as if they already had it — and the acting was the argument. Emmeline Pankhurst did not petition for the right to be taken seriously. She was serious, in public, at personal cost, and dared the institution to pretend otherwise.

The civil rights movement understood this with extraordinary precision. Ella Baker — the organiser who built the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and understood the movement’s internal life more clearly than almost anyone — insisted that you could not build a democratic future through undemocratic means. The movement had to embody what it was fighting for. Act as if you are already free is the most radical political claim ever made in a democracy. Not because it was utopian. Because it was true. The freedom was real before the law recognised it. The dignity was real before the state acknowledged it. The act of living as if the world should be different is not merely symbolic. It is constitutive. It makes the thing real by treating it as real. It forces the institution to respond to a reality it would prefer to deny.

The practice is not ideologically owned. The friendly societies of the Victorian working class built mutual healthcare and burial insurance before the state provided either — conservative and socialist simultaneously, Edmund Burke and Keir Hardie recognising each other across the political divide. The free school founder, the farmer who rewilded before it was policy, the entrepreneur who built profit-sharing into the company’s constitution before the law required it — all of them are doing the same thing. Living, in advance of permission, as if the world they want already partially exists.

Erik Olin Wright called this interstitial transformation — building the alternative within the cracks of the existing system, not waiting for the revolution as a precondition. The cooperative. The credit union. The community land trust. The mutual. None of them require a total transformation before they can begin. They require people who decide, in advance of permission, to live as if the world they want already partially exists. There is a running joke about anticapitalists: cooperatives are legal right now. Go and build one. The joke is funnier than it deserves to be. The anticapitalist who has never built a cooperative is making an implicit claim — that the transformation has to be total before it can begin. Wright’s argument, and the civic tradition’s, is that this gets it exactly backwards. The doing is always available. The question is whether you are serious enough to start.

Langdon Winner asked whether artifacts have politics — whether the things we build embed choices about power and arrangement that outlast the intentions of their builders. They do. Which is why the choice between Palantir and its alternative is not a procurement decision. It is a telos decision. Palantir is not a problem to be managed. It is a contestant. It has built, seriously and without apology, a vision of what the relationship between technology and state power should look like. The democratic response is not to regulate it into silence. It is to choose — explicitly, seriously, as a collective — whether that is the future we want. And if not, to build the alternative with equivalent seriousness. The problem is not that Palantir has a vision. The problem is that the democratic state increasingly doesn’t. Palantir wins not because its answer is right but because the state has stopped asking the question. A democracy serious about its telos can choose Palantir, or build the alternative, or do both — but it chooses. It doesn’t drift into a future someone else designed because it was too managed to design its own.

And where is the left-wing Palantir? Twenty years of serious argument about surveillance capitalism, data sovereignty, the ethics of state power and technology — and nobody built the alternative. The democratically accountable, telos-serious intelligence infrastructure that embodies a different vision of what the state should be able to do is legal right now. It is buildable right now. It would be hard. It would require serious people with serious commitment working on something without an obvious profit motive. It has not been built. The papers have been written instead. The cooperative is legal right now. So is this.

This is what the second demand requires. Not just a position on what the state is for. A practice. A way of living that embodies the answer rather than just arguing for it. Building the cooperative before the law changes. Founding the orchestra before the council funds it. The doing is the argument. The building is the politics.

Managerialism cannot produce this. It can only receive applications for it, consult on it, and issue permissions — usually too late and always too cautiously. The civic culture that makes democratic ambition feel possible is built by people who do not wait for permission. Who live, publicly and seriously and at some personal cost, as if the civic future is already partially here.

The horizon becomes real when people start acting as if it is.

The third demand is the hardest to state and the most important to get right.

Keep the arena open.

The first two demands are available to anyone. The third is the constraint that makes them legitimate. Because the prefigurative argument proves too much without it. Some people’s telos is explicitly the exclusion of others. The ethnonationalist, the theocrat, the person whose vision of the good society requires particular people to be less free, less visible, less equal — they can make the same prefigurative claim. They are living as they believe the world should be. By the logic of the argument so far, that would seem to legitimate them.

It doesn’t. But the reason it doesn’t is not that their telos is wrong — though it is, in my book — but that the civic future has one non-negotiable precondition. The contest must remain possible. You can prefigure any world you want. You cannot prefigure a world that forecloses the contest itself.

This is not a content restriction on telos. It is a procedural requirement for democracy to function at all. The Christian bakery that refuses a gay wedding is doing something annoying and discriminatory and worth contesting legally and politically. It is not doing something that makes democratic contest impossible. It is a contestant with a bad argument. The contest will, if it is serious and the mandate means something, defeat it. That is how it should work.

Peter Thiel building monopoly infrastructure designed to end competition — in markets, in politics, in the architecture of power — is a different kind of problem entirely. Not because his telos is more wrong than the bakery’s, but because his method forecloses the arena in which the contest happens. You cannot agonise your way out of a monopoly. You cannot vote your way out of infrastructure that has made dissent illegible.

The civic future asks one thing of every contestant: keep the arena open. Build whatever you believe in. Make the argument with everything you have. But build in ways that leave the contest possible for everyone else. That is the floor. Everything above it is genuinely contested. Everything below it is not prefiguration. It is capture.

The civic future does not require everyone to participate in the same contest. It does not preclude people from building enclaves — communities organised around visions of the good life that are incompatible with the mainstream, that opt out of the broader democratic settlement, that live as radically as they believe rather than arguing for permission to do so. The crypto libertarian seasteaders. The religious community that wants to organise itself around a different set of obligations. The commune. The intentional community. Even, if we are being genuinely honest about the logic, the white nationalist enclave that wants to live separately from a society it rejects.

This will strike some readers as an outrageous concession. It is not. It is the logical extension of the prefigurative argument applied without special pleading.

Dr. Timothy Leary — who has been lurking at the edges of this argument since the beginning — had a useful distinction here. Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s. Within your own domain — your consciousness, your property, your community of willing adults — you are the legislator. Found your own religion. Set your own rules. Live as radically as you believe. But step into Caesar’s domain — the public square, the shared infrastructure, the space where other people’s lives intersect with yours without their consent — and the rules of that domain apply. The enclave has wide latitude. It does not have unlimited latitude. The line is not ideology. It is the boundary between your domain and everyone else’s.

Albert Hirschman’s insight — that genuine loyalty requires genuine exit, that you cannot meaningfully choose to stay somewhere you cannot meaningfully leave — is the civic future’s minimum condition for enclave legitimacy. The civic future’s constraint is not content. It is exit. The enclave is legitimate prefigurative practice on one condition: that the people inside it can meaningfully leave. Not theoretically leave. Not leave if they can afford it or overcome the social costs. Meaningfully, practically, actually leave.

This means concrete things. A common currency, exchangeable beyond the enclave’s borders. Access to basic medical care. To legal advice or third-party binding mediation. Access to education that exposes people to other visions of the good life — not to undermine the community, but to ensure the exit is real. The right and the capacity to leave, not just the theoretical permission. Where these conditions cannot be met, the state has a legitimate mandate to intervene — not to dissolve the community, necessarily, but to guarantee the floor regardless of whether the community consents to it.

Timothy Leary at Millbrook was fine. The children born at Millbrook who were never given the tools or the opportunity to choose otherwise — that is where the legitimacy ends.

This has a consequence that should be stated honestly. The exit guarantee is not content-neutral. It has a floor, and some visions of the good life are structurally incompatible with it. A community organised around the permanent subordination of its women cannot also guarantee that those women can meaningfully leave — because the subordination and the exit are in direct contradiction. Basic education, economic capacity, exposure to other ways of living — these are not western impositions on legitimate difference. They are the minimum conditions for the exit to be real. Where a community’s internal logic requires their absence, the state has not just a right but an obligation to intervene. To guarantee the floor.

The bullet, if it needs biting, is this: the civic future tolerates almost everything. It does not tolerate the permanent incapacitation of the people inside it.

This is also the answer to the bundle problem. The mid-century settlement was not just a vision of the good society that some people chose. It was a settlement that many people could not meaningfully exit — not because the borders were closed but because the social, economic, and legal architecture made genuine exit practically impossible for the people most harmed by it. The Black American in the Jim Crow South was not in an enclave they had chosen. They were in a settlement they could not leave.

The civic future argument is the argument that the contest must remain open, the exit must remain real, and within those constraints — build whatever you believe in. The stranger the better, in some ways. Strange communities are proof that the horizon is genuinely open. That history is not over. That the future is not foreclosed.

That is the spirit, more than anything else, of what the third demand means.

This piece of the series has been operating at altitude. Deliberately so. You cannot navigate toward a destination you cannot see. The full philosophical account of what democracy is actually for, what the telos question means, what the three demands require — without that, the practical argument is just incrementalism with better rhetoric. Another set of reforms that tinker at the edges of a settlement nobody has seriously examined.

But loftiness without a path is its own kind of evasion. The distance between the civic future as described here and the civic future as it currently exists — in the planning systems, the constitutional settlements, the managed debates between versions of managerialism, the democratic culture that has forgotten what it is for — is not a small distance. It is a generation’s work, at least. Possibly more.

What the civic future requires, before any of that work can begin, is something no institutional reform can substitute for. The telos question is not only a question for governments and constitutional settlements. It is a question for citizens. For anyone who participates in democratic life, or wants to, or thinks they should.

What do you think the state is for? Not what you think the answer should be politically — left or right, market or state, tradition or progress. What do you actually think? What kind of society are you trying to build? What do you owe the people you share a country with, and what do they owe you? These are not exam questions. They are the minimum conditions for democratic citizenship to mean anything. A democracy in which citizens cannot answer them — not because they are stupid or apathetic but because nobody has seriously asked them — is a democracy that has outsourced its own purpose.

And then the harder question. The one that separates the civic future as an idea from the civic future as a practice.

What are you building right now?

Not arguing for. Not waiting for permission to begin. Not petitioning for, consulting on, or filing a response to someone else’s proposal. Building. In advance of the institutions. In advance of the mandate. As if the world you want already partially exists, because the only way to make it exist is to start treating it as if it does.

The cooperative is legal right now. The mutual is legal right now. The free school, the community energy project, the local democracy that takes itself seriously enough to do something rather than just respond to what’s done to it — all of it is legal right now. The left-wing Palantir is buildable right now. The orchestra that your city deserves can be founded right now, by someone with a vision and a baton, before the council agrees to fund it.

The civic tradition that produced the things worth recovering was not built by people who waited for the conditions to be right. It was built by people who decided, in the face of conditions that were wrong, that the doing could not wait. Chamberlain did not wait for Birmingham to be ready. The suffragettes did not wait for the state to agree. The civil rights movement did not wait for the law to catch up with the dignity that was already real.

The horizon becomes real when people start acting as if it is. That has always been true. It is true now.

What is the state for? What are you building?

Start there.

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Britain is a wet island. It rains here with a commitment that borders on ideology. And yet within a generation, significant parts of England will face water shortages that would have seemed faintly absurd to our grandparents. The reservoir — Thames Water’s South East Strategic Reservoir Option, if you want the full bureaucratic dignity of it — would go a long way toward fixing that. It has been proposed, studied, modelled, consulted upon, and argued over for the better part of two decades. It has not been built.

It will not be built any time soon.

It is tempting, at this point, to reach for a villain. A sin eater. The local councils objecting to it. The campaign groups. The lawyers readying judicial reviews. But here is the thing that makes this story more interesting, and more depressing, than a simple tale of parochialism defeating the national interest.

They are doing exactly what the system tells them they are entitled to do. That is not a defence. It is the indictment.

Vale of White Horse District Council has legitimate questions about environmental impact. South Oxfordshire has legitimate questions about emergency discharge. The Environment Agency raised fourteen separate issues with Thames Water’s own plan. Thames Water, let us not forget, is a company that has spent recent years pumping sewage into rivers while paying dividends to shareholders. The objectors are not being irrational. They are pulling every available lever because the system has told them those levers are theirs to pull.

This is what a system looks like when it has forgotten how to make decisions at the level that actually matters. The reservoir isn’t being held hostage by nimbyism. It’s being held hostage by a cascade of entirely rational responses to an entirely irrational architecture.

Ducklington didn’t break British democracy. British democracy broke first. Ducklington is just what it looks like from the bottom.

The reservoir is not an anomaly. It is business as usual.

To understand why, you have to understand what happened to British politics sometime in the late twentieth century. Not the ideological drama everyone remembers — Thatcher, Blair, the apparent triumph of one set of ideas over another. Something underneath all of that, less dramatic and more consequential.

Across left and right, the implicit question shifted. Not what kind of society are we building, what future are we choosing, what do we owe each other in pursuit of it — but something smaller and more administrative: are we delivering existing services efficiently? The state became a management problem. Politics became administration with better branding.

This is sometimes described as if managerialism were a single ideology — the cold technocratic replacement of values with metrics. But that misdiagnosis matters. Managerialism is not a single ideology. It is what happens when every ideology has agreed to stop asking the foundational question. We still have Labour managerialism and Conservative managerialism and Green managerialism and Liberal Democrat managerialism and yes, Reform managerialism too. They differ on tone, on priorities, on who they think deserves what. What they share is the renunciation of telos — the refusal to say, seriously and bindingly, what the state is for and what future it is trying to build.

Telos. The purpose. The direction. The answer to the question that British politics has stopped asking: what is all of this for?

Management is not the enemy. Somebody has to manage. Local government should manage. It is, in fact, rather good at managing the things it is supposed to manage — the texture of local services, the grain of local places, the thousand decisions that require local knowledge and local accountability. The problem is not that management exists. The problem is that national government, which should be doing something categorically different, is also just managing. And when the level of government responsible for telos abandons telos, it doesn’t create a vacuum. It creates a cascade.

National government manages rather than decides. So it passes management problems downward to the people whose job is management. Local government, built and designed to manage local things, now finds itself managing the absence of national direction. Managing management decisions. District councils make decisions that should have been made in Westminster. Parish councils contest questions that should have been settled at the national level. Every tier of government operates on the residue of the tier above it. The foundational question doesn’t disappear. It just gets asked at the wrong altitude, by people with the wrong tools, and answered badly — or not at all.

Look at what is actually being managed, while all of this is happening. Water infrastructure delivery apparatus that cannot build a reservoir. Rivers running with sewage while the companies responsible pay lavish dividends. A housing stock that has priced an entire generation out of ownership. An NHS held together by the goodwill of its staff and not much else. A rail network that would embarrass a mid-sized European country. The political offer, across every party at every recent election, has been a variant of: we will manage this inheritance more competently than the other lot.

The moment chosen to abandon teleological politics was arguably the worst possible one. The postwar settlement — the thing now being managed — is visibly exhausted. The roof is coming in. And the entire political class is debating the most efficient arrangement of the buckets.

This is why Vale of White Horse District Council is writing letters about reservoir emergency discharge procedures. Not because its councillors are villains or fools. Because in the absence of a national decision powerful enough to settle the question of whether, every affected party rationally colonises the question of how. And how, in a system without telos, is infinitely contestable. The cascade doesn’t stop until it hits bedrock. We removed the bedrock.

This is the part that gets missed in every conversation about planning reform, about NIMBYism, about why Britain can’t build things. The problem is not that local government is too powerful. Local government, doing its actual job, is one of the most valuable things a democracy has. The problem is that local government is being asked to do national government’s job with parish council tools, and national government has forgotten it had a different job to do.

Tweaks of tweaks of tweaks. All the way down. Until someone, somewhere, decides to do politics at the right altitude again.

How a political culture as thoroughly managed as ours produces the upstream contest this model requires is the hardest question in the argument. It is also the one this series is building toward.

Imagine a different kind of political moment.

Not a manifesto launch. Not a spending review. Not a press conference in front of a lectern with a carefully focus-grouped slogan. Something older and stranger and more serious than any of those things.

Think of the moments in democratic history when something was genuinely at stake. When the audience knew, in their bodies, that what happened next would change what was possible. The town halls of the New Deal. The union debates that built the postwar settlement. The arguments that produced the NHS — real arguments, with real opponents, making incompatible cases about what Britain owed its people. The air in those rooms was different. Something was being decided, not managed. The outcome was uncertain. That uncertainty was the point.

That is what politics at the right altitude feels like. Not a debate about the management of existing services, but an argument — fierce, public, unresolved — about the direction of the whole thing.

Imagine that contest producing a mandate. Not a shopping list of pledges carefully costed and triangulated to offend the fewest people. A real one. Britain will secure its water supply. Britain will house its people. Britain will build the infrastructure of the next century.

Here is what we believe.

Here is what it will cost.

Here is what it will produce.

Here is what we are prepared to lose in order to build it.

Vote for it or vote against it.

But understand that if it wins, it will be real.

To take this seriously requires doing something Britain has never seriously attempted. A genuine, defined, constitutionally serious separation of democratic domains.

Whether is national. How is local.

The boundary is already nominally drawn — the Local Government Act framework defines the domains, allocates the functions, maps the structure. But a map without enforcement is just decoration. Central government overreaches when it suits it, fiscal dependency gives the Treasury a lever that renders statutory powers theoretical, and civic knowledge is thin enough that the violations go largely uncontested. What the argument requires is not a cleaner statute but a genuinely protected, renegotiated, national settlement — one with fiscal architecture to match, democratic literacy to defend it, and constitutional teeth strong enough to make the centre's overreach cost something.

This is not as radical as it sounds, though it will feel that way. Local government in Britain once owned the water, the gas, the trams, the hospitals. Victorian municipalities didn't ask Whitehall's permission to build their cities — they had the power and the mandate to do it. That power was stripped away in waves over a century.

Nationalisation took the big infrastructure upward in the 1940s. Rate-capping removed fiscal autonomy in the 1980s. Competitive tendering hollowed out service delivery. Each decision had a rationale. The cumulative result was a local government that retained the democratic form while losing the institutional substance — elected to manage things it no longer controls, accountable for outcomes it can no longer determine.

Consider the agenda for a monthly meeting of Cheltenham Borough Council, December 7th 1914. The committees feeding back that day included: Electricity and Lighting. Water. Mineral Waters, Baths and Recreation Grounds. Art Gallery and Museum. Public Library. Street and Highway. Town Improvement.

A Victorian borough council running the entire physical and cultural infrastructure of a notable economic hub as a matter of democratic right, with the fiscal and legal authority to match.

That same council — or its equivalent anywhere in England — now handles planning applications, bin collections, housing benefit assessments, and pub licensing. The electricity went to nationalisation in 1948. The water went with it. The libraries passed to the county. The fiscal autonomy went to rate-capping. The service delivery went to competitive tendering. Each decision had a rationale. The cumulative result is a local government that retained the democratic form while losing the institutional substance — elected to manage things it no longer controls, accountable for outcomes it can no longer determine.

What Britain has never seriously attempted is not local power. It is local power with constitutional protection. The kind that cannot be removed by a chancellor who needs to find savings or a minister who wants to claim credit.

In this conception, national government is sovereign over national questions. Infrastructure with spillover consequences. Water security. Energy. Housing supply at scale. The civilisational bets that only make sense at the national level. Within that domain, national government’s mandate — earned through genuine agonistic contest, not managed triangulation — is real and binding. Local government does not get a veto. The reservoir gets built.

Local government is sovereign over local questions. How a city grows and what it looks like and what it feels like to live there. The texture of places. The grain of streets. Transport within and between communities. Within that domain, local government’s mandate is equally real and equally binding. National government keeps its hands off. If Leeds wants a tram, Leeds should be able to fund it, design it, and build it — without a Whitehall permission structure designed by people who have never waited for a bus in Headingley.

The price of that protection is the loss of the veto. Local government gains genuine sovereignty over a meaningful domain. It gives up its claim on decisions that belong at the national level. The deal runs both ways or it runs nowhere.

A Reform council under a Labour government does not get to use the planning system as a proxy war against a national mandate it lost at the ballot box. But a Labour government does not get to override a Reform council’s decisions about its own streets, its own services, its own place. The boundary has to be real in both directions or it is just centralisation with better rhetoric.

The obvious objection is that a determined local authority can use its legitimate how powers to make the whether undeliverable in practice. The Reform council that cannot formally block the refugee housing can slow-walk every planning application, refuse to allocate suitable sites, make viability conditions impossible to meet, and use every available procedural lever to ensure that nothing gets built without ever technically vetoing anything. This is not a hypothetical. It is the standard operating procedure of obstruction in the current system, and a cleaner constitutional boundary doesn’t automatically prevent it.

The mechanism that prevents it is the backstop. If a local authority misses defined delivery timelines or breaches its duty to engage in good faith — not merely disagreeing with the mandate, but using procedure to make the whether impossible — a National Development Corporation steps in. A standing delivery body with land acquisition powers, planning authority, and the funding to complete the mandate directly on that specific project, then leave. The local authority’s how sovereignty on that project is suspended, not abolished. On everything else, within its domain, it remains sovereign.

This isn’t novel. The Section 114 notice framework already does something analogous: when a council cannot meet its statutory duties, central government steps in on specific functions until delivery is restored. The National Development Corporation is the delivery equivalent — the same logic extended from fiscal failure to delivery failure on national mandates.

There is a reason councils go out of their way to avoid a 114. It is not just the loss of control. It is the specific, practical horror of what replaces it. Either you make the least worst cuts yourself — the ones you can defend to the people who elected you, reflecting some understanding of what your community actually needs — or a consultant from Whitehall makes the ones you can’t even fathom. Someone who has read the spreadsheet but not walked the streets. Who knows the budget line but not the community behind it. Who will be gone before the consequences arrive.

The same logic applies here. Cooperate, and the new housing reflects your town’s character, connects to your existing streets, arrives with the infrastructure your community negotiated. Obstruct, and the National Development Corporation builds what the national mandate requires, on whatever land it can acquire, without your input. The whether happens either way. The how is the only thing you get to keep — if you choose to. Because that is your legitimate mandate.

Cooperation is available. It is not required.

The tension runs the other way too. What about when national government asks local government to do what it cannot, reasonably, do?

When national government mandates five thousand houses in Leeds without funding the consequences — without the GP surgeries, the school places, the road capacity, the water infrastructure — it has not made a national decision. It has made a national aspiration and handed someone else the bill. The local objections that follow are not primarily selfishness, though some of them are. They are rational fiscal self-defence against an unfunded mandate. A council that fights the houses is often a council that has done the maths and knows it cannot absorb five thousand new residents without the infrastructure to serve them. That is not just (just) nimbyism. That is arithmetic.

The fix is not complicated. You do not get to make the decision without signing the cheque. National government wants five thousand houses in Leeds — fine. Then national government funds the dentists and the schools and the roads that make five thousand houses viable. The mandate and the money arrive together or neither arrives at all. That disciplines the centre in a way the current system completely fails to do. It forces national government to cost its own ambitions honestly rather than externalising the consequences downward and wondering why everyone is fighting.

The alternative — devolving not just the decisions but the tax revenues, fiscal mechanisms, and governance powers needed to deliver the infrastructure to go with them — sounds like localism but produces something else entirely. Poor places get abandoned to manage crises they didn’t create with money they don’t have. Rich places get constitutional cover to entrench themselves — low tax, low development, high house prices, and a democratic mandate to keep it that way. That is not subsidiarity. It is a postcode lottery dressed up as a constitutional settlement. Better, far better, to keep national fiscal responsibility for national decisions, like the national housing supply, within which every area must have a floor, which they may choose to exceed as the ceiling, and start signing the cheques.

And once the cheque is signed, the mandate is spent. Where the dentist goes is not Westminster’s decision to make. Not because local government is trustworthy — some of it is, some of it isn’t, and that is beside the point — but because local government is sovereign over that question and Westminster is not.

Look at what is happening in local elections right now. People are voting on Gaza. On immigration. On issues that a district councillor has precisely no power to affect and no constitutional business being elected on. And simultaneously, the genuine local questions that deserve genuine local democratic expression — not whether the housing gets built or the reservoir gets dug, but how — are being drowned out entirely.

This is not voters being parochial or confused. It is the mathematically predictable result of a telos vacuum at the national level. People do not stop having views about the big questions because national politics refuses to seriously contest them. They express those views through whatever democratic mechanism is available. And the most locally available one is the council election. The mandate drifts — not downward into parochialism, but sideways into a democratic category error. It is the wrong arena for the right hunger.

And misdirected energy, in a system without clear constitutional scope, becomes vetocracy.

The politicians currently blocking the reservoir are not acting irrationally. They were elected to block it. Their voters believe that blocking national infrastructure is a legitimate function of local government — because nobody has ever clearly told them otherwise, and because the system has always behaved as if it were. A councillor who fails to stop the reservoir loses their seat. A councillor who succeeds becomes a local hero. The incentive structure is perfectly designed to produce exactly the behaviour that makes the system unworkable, and no individual politician inside that structure has any rational reason to behave differently.

This is what makes the problem constitutional rather than merely cultural. You cannot fix it by electing braver people. The courage required is not political courage — it is the courage to be defeated on your own mandate, in public, and hope that someone else makes the argument you couldn’t. That is not a strategy. That is martyrdom.

Democratic systems should not be designed to require martyrdom as their normal operating condition. Most politicians are cowards.

The only fix is legal. Define the scope. Constitutionally, explicitly, without ambiguity. If the reservoir is outside the domain of local democratic decision-making, no local politician can credibly run on stopping it. The mandate cannot exist if the power does not exist. The voter who wants to contest the reservoir must take that argument to the national level, where it belongs, against the people who actually made the decision.

This protects local politicians as much as it constrains them. The councillor currently being destroyed for failing to stop something they never had the legal power to stop is being held accountable for someone else’s decision. That is not accountability. That is displacement. Proper constitutional scope gives local politicians back their legitimate domain — and makes them genuinely accountable within it. Held to account for the how, not punished for losing a fight over the whether that was never theirs to win. Able to meaningfully do the things they were actually elected to deliver.

Britain has avoided this question because answering it requires admitting that the current settlement is not just inefficient but incoherent. Local government currently has whatever powers central government hasn’t claimed. That is not a constitutional definition. It is an absence dressed up as one. And it produces exactly what we have — a system in which nobody is clearly sovereign over anything, in which every level of government can interfere with every other, and in which the only guaranteed outcome is that nothing gets built and nobody is accountable for the fact.

The vetocracy is not an accident. It is the mathematically predictable result of a constitution that never answered the question of what local democracy is actually for. But the legal fix is only half the answer. The constitutional settlement creates the conditions. The civic culture is what makes those conditions matter.

What produces civic identification — the felt sense that you are a protagonist in a collective project rather than a subject of one — is the lived experience of three things simultaneously.

The first is tangible delivery. The Bee Network works as a civic project partly because people can feel it. A bus that arrives on time and costs £2 is a daily, embodied encounter with a collective decision working. The Victorian sewers produced civic pride partly because people stopped dying of cholera. The mechanism isn’t abstract — it’s the daily experience of something working that wasn’t working before, which makes the collective project real in a way that no argument can replicate.

The second is genuine stakes. Not the managed simulation of participation that consultation culture produces — the feeling that you filled in a form and it went somewhere — but the real knowledge that the argument is live, that the outcome depends on what you and people like you choose, that something will be different because you showed up. This is what the agonistic contest produces that managerialism cannot. Not consensus. Activation. The feeling that something real is being decided.

The third — and the deepest — is horizon. The Victorian civic gospel didn’t just offer Birmingham better services. It offered Birmingham a destination. A city that could be transformed, not incrementally improved. A future that didn’t exist yet but was genuinely possible if people chose it together. Chamberlain wasn’t managing expectations. He was expanding them. And that expansion — the genuine, grounded, evidenced belief that something structurally different is possible — is what produces the deepest civic identification of all.

This is the thing that contemporary politics has most thoroughly destroyed. Not through malice but through the slow, grinding message of managerialism: that the constraints we have accepted are permanent, that the future is a slightly adjusted version of the present, that the job of politics is to make the inevitable slightly less painful. Once people believe that — once the horizon closes — civic identification becomes impossible.

You cannot feel like a protagonist in a story that has no destination.

Joseph Chamberlain’s Birmingham did not become the workshop of the world by accident. It became it because a generation of civic leaders decided, with genuine conviction and genuine ambition, that the city was a moral project. That urban improvement was collective self-improvement. That the people of Birmingham deserved clean water, gas light, decent housing, and public libraries not because these things were efficient but because they were owed. Chamberlain municipalised the gas and water utilities not because it was the obvious technocratic solution but because you cannot build a city vision on infrastructure you do not control. The doing was the argument. The building was the politics.

That tradition — the civic gospel, Tristram Hunt calls it — ran through the great Victorian cities like a current. It was not nostalgic. It was ferociously forward-looking. It asked, at every level of government, the telos question: what is this city for, and what kind of people do we want to be? And it answered with sewers and libraries and tramways and parks. Not tweaks. Not consultations. Monuments to a shared idea of what a city could be.

Manchester did not wait for anyone. It has been doing this for nearly two centuries.

The city’s civic tradition runs deeper and stranger than Birmingham’s and in some ways more interesting — because it was never purely municipal. Manchester built its civic identity through a combination of public institution and private subscription, political radicalism and commercial ambition, that doesn’t fit neatly into either the statist or the libertarian story. The Anti-Corn Law League was based here. The cooperative movement took root here. Peterloo happened here — and the city built the Free Trade Hall on the site of the massacre, by public subscription, as a monument to the dead and a home for political argument. The Hallé Orchestra was founded in 1858 not by the council but by a German-born musician who believed the city deserved world-class culture and went and built it. Manchester has the oldest free public library in Britain — Chetham’s, privately funded, founded in 1653.

When the city needed to free itself from Liverpool’s stranglehold on its trade in the 1880s, it didn’t petition Whitehall and wait. It built the Ship Canal — thirty six miles long, the largest river navigation canal in the world when it opened in 1894, turning a landlocked city into a port through sheer civic will and borrowed capital. The canal was a response to Liverpool’s port authorities raising their charges. Manchester’s business community decided not to tolerate it. The city decided it would not be managed into submission by someone else’s infrastructure.

The libertarian will read Manchester’s history of private subscription and voluntary initiative as proof that civil society does it better. But that gets the causation exactly backwards. Manchester’s civic tradition expressed itself through private capital and voluntary action not because that is the right model for public goods, but because local government never had the fiscal capacity or constitutional authority to do what it legitimately should. The Hallé exists because one man had a vision and no public institution had the tools to match it. That is not an advertisement for the market. It is an indictment of a constitutional settlement that left civic ambition with nowhere institutional to go. When local government gets the fiscal heft and constitutional legitimacy it deserves, civil society doesn’t disappear — it gets to do what civil society is actually for, rather than compensating for the absence of a functional state.

That tradition didn’t die with the Victorian era. It went underground during the long managed decline of the postwar decades — the deindustrialisation, the municipal Labourism, the years when Manchester was synonymous with unemployment and urban decay rather than civic ambition. And then it reasserted itself. The Commonwealth Games in 2002. The Bridgewater Hall. The Metrolink. The gradual, deliberate reconstruction of a city that had decided it was going somewhere again.

Andy Burnham didn’t invent Manchesterism. He inherited it, named it, and proved it still works at scale. The Bee Network — buses brought back under public control, running a third cheaper per kilometre than the privatised system it replaced, integrated with trams and soon trains into a single £2 fare network — is not a policy innovation. It is the Ship Canal in a different register. A city deciding it will not tolerate a system that doesn’t serve it, and building the alternative through civic will and public mandate. Greater Manchester has been the fastest growing regional economy in Britain over the past decade, at more than double the national average.

Burnham is now the bookmakers’ favourite to be Prime Minister. He built that position not by managing centrally or triangulating carefully but by doing politics at the right altitude — with a genuine civic brief, real democratic legitimacy, and enough autonomy to act. The model works. Manchester has been proving it, in different forms, for a hundred and seventy years.

The Attlee government understood the same principle at national scale — and its story contains both the proof and the cautionary tale. The NHS and the welfare state in five years. Social housing in a decade. An entire civilisational settlement, built at speed, because a mandate was real and the machinery was pointed at it. You may disagree with the vision. You cannot disagree that it was one.

But the Attlee settlement also nationalised the municipal ambition. What had been civic became administrative. The local pride and identity that powered the Victorian tradition got absorbed upward and hollowed out. The civic gospel became the managerial state. And a generation later, the top-down modernism of the postwar planners — the tower blocks, the motorways driven through working communities, Le Corbusier’s aesthetic preferences handed down through a planning bureaucracy as if they were scientific facts — produced damage that took decades to name and longer to repair.

This is the objection the argument has to answer. If you restore the capacity for visionary politics at national scale, don’t you just get Robert Moses again? Moses was New York’s master builder for four decades — the man who constructed highways, bridges, parks and housing projects on a scale no democratic city had seen before or since. He also razed entire working communities, drove expressways through the Bronx, and answered to nobody. He had vision. He had mandate. He had no agonism. The result was infrastructure that served an idea of the city rather than the people who actually lived in it.

The postwar failures were not failures of ambition. They were failures of agonism. The people designing the future and the people living inside it were not in genuine conflict with each other. They were not even in genuine contact. The vision went uncontested at the top and was imposed at the bottom. Somers Town did not get a serious public argument about what Britain’s cities were for and lose it. Somers Town got a planning decision.

The philosopher Chantal Mouffe spent her career arguing that the health of a democracy depends on the presence of genuine adversaries — not enemies to be destroyed, not competitors haggling over the same centrist terrain, but people with genuinely incompatible visions of what society is for, arguing in public with everything at stake. She called it agonistic democracy. Her politics are not mine, and she would probably object to being deployed here. But her diagnosis is correct and available to anyone who takes democratic life seriously.

Real visionary politics is not Moses with a mandate. It is Mouffe’s agonism made institutional. It is Dr. Timothy Leary and G. Gordon Liddy on the same stage — and yes, they actually did this, touring America in 1983 with their completely incompatible cosmologies about freedom and authority and the human future, debating each other in public, making audiences feel the genuine stakes of genuine disagreement. Nobody left with a consensus. They left activated. They left feeling that something real was being contested.

That is what the upstream contest has to feel like. Not a managed debate between two versions of managerialism. A real argument about telos, between people who mean it, in front of citizens who are being asked to choose. Whose choice both will, and can, be honoured.

And here is what that changes downstream. When the contest is real, the mandate is real. When the mandate is real, the question of whether is settled. And when the question of whether is settled, every level of government beneath it is liberated to do its actual job.

The development corporation model understood this intuitively, which is why it kept being rediscovered across completely different political moments.

Attlee used it for the new towns. Stevenage, Harlow, Crawley — genuinely visionary settlements, built at speed, because a single accountable entity held the civic brief and the delivery mandate simultaneously. They were contested at the time, mocked as utopian, and are now simply places where people live and work and raise children. The vision became ordinary, which is the highest compliment you can pay to an infrastructure project.

Thatcher used the same model for the London Docklands Development Corporation — different politics, identical structure. The LDDC arrived with a mandate, a brief, and enough autonomy to execute without every decision becoming a public inquiry. Whatever you think of what it built, nobody argues it didn’t build it. In a country that has since lost the capacity to build almost anything, that is not a trivial achievement.

Roosevelt used it for the Tennessee Valley Authority — a federal mandate, a single corporation, a genuine civilisational brief to electrify and modernise an entire region that the market had abandoned. It was attacked as socialism by its opponents and defended as democracy by its supporters. Both were partly right. What it unambiguously was, was built.

And it is being rediscovered right now, in real time, by politicians who have not coordinated and do not share a politics. Nine Mayoral Development Corporations currently operate in England. Three were established in January 2026 alone — Oxford Street, Old Trafford, Atom Valley. The West Midlands Mayor just launched Britain’s largest, the Birmingham East MDC, expected to deliver £11 billion of regeneration, fifty thousand jobs, and twenty thousand homes. Liverpool’s Mayor has announced the city’s first. More are coming in Peterborough and beyond. Sadiq Khan in London. Richard Parker in the West Midlands. Andy Burnham in Greater Manchester. Steve Rotherham in Liverpool. Different mayors. Different politics. Same model, reached for independently, because it works when nothing else does.

This is not nostalgia. This is not ideology. This is practitioners, under pressure, with accountability for delivery, converging on the same answer.

The development corporation is not a policy preference. It is what serious civic ambition looks like when it has been made institutional. And the fact that it keeps being reinvented — from Attlee to Thatcher to Roosevelt to the metro mayors of 2026 — suggests that the hunger for it never went away. We just spent fifty years building a system that made it impossible, and called that system democracy.

The councillor who fights the reservoir earns their reputation by stopping something. The councillor operating inside a system with genuine national telos earns their reputation by delivering something — by making Oxfordshire the place that got it right, that turned national necessity into local pride, that built the thing well and made the community stronger for it. That is what Chamberlain did with Birmingham’s gas and water. Not fighting the infrastructure of modernity. Building it, and making the building itself an act of civic identity.

The belief that something different is possible is not a precondition for starting. It is what starting produces.

We have built a system that cannot build anything.

Not because the people inside it are stupid or corrupt or cowardly — though the system produces cowardice as reliably as it produces paralysis. But because we have, over the course of two generations, actively dispersed our own mandate. Created quangos and arm’s length bodies and consultation processes not to improve decisions but to distribute the responsibility for them. Replaced the question of what we are building with the question of how efficiently we are managing what we have, and did it so thoroughly that most people in public life have forgotten there was ever a different question to ask.

The reservoir is still not built. It will not be built soon. And somewhere in that fact — in the gap between an island that cannot secure its own water supply and the two decades of process that produced nothing — is the true cost of what we gave up.

It is not a planning cost. It is not an infrastructure cost. It is a democratic cost. The cost of a politics that learned to mistake the endless management of competing interests for the thing democracy is actually for. That confused the absence of conflict with the presence of progress.

Let us be honest about who is embarrassing themselves here. The answer is everyone.

Thames Water is embarrassing. A company that spent years pumping sewage into the rivers it was entrusted to protect, that paid dividends while infrastructure rotted, that now presents itself as the vehicle for a national water security project and expects to be taken seriously. The audacity of that ask is its own kind of civic failure. You do not get to poison the commons and then claim the authority to protect it.

The local residents and councils blocking the reservoir are embarrassing. Not because their concerns aren’t real — some of them are — but because choosing your postcode over your country’s water security, and dressing that choice up as environmental principle, is a failure of civic seriousness that a healthier culture would name plainly. There is a word for prioritising your view over the collective future. It is not localism. It is not stewardship. It is the privatisation of the public good, conducted through planning law, at collective expense.

And if your livelihood is enabling such things? Well that’s more embarrassing still.

But the most embarrassing actor in this story is national government. Because it produced a civic project so thin, so managerial, so stripped of moral conviction, that nobody feels the cost of opposing it. It handed a national infrastructure decision to a discredited private utility and called it a water strategy. It generated no mandate, made no serious democratic case, produced no story worth believing in. And then it wonders why everyone is fighting.

This is the thing that should keep us up at night. Not that bad actors broke the system. But that the system broke itself, by increments, through the entirely reasonable decisions of entirely reasonable people, each acting within the logic available to them.

Opposing the NHS was embarrassing. Not because opponents were stupid or wicked but because Bevan made it impossible not to understand what you were opposing. A serious moral claim, seriously made, seriously won. A genuine answer to the telos question — what is Britain for, what do we owe each other — that had been genuinely contested and genuinely settled. Blocking it felt like blocking something real, something the country had decided together, something worth the name of a collective project.

The reservoir has no Bevan. It has a press release from a sewage company. And behind the press release, where the national democratic case should be, there is nothing — decades of red managerialism and blue managerialism and yellow-and-blue managerialism, each one producing civic projects with the legitimacy and backbone of a damp cloth. You cannot shame people out of opposing something that was never made to feel worth building. The civic culture that would make obstruction legible as what it is — a choice against the country, not just against a planning application — requires a national government willing to make the moral case for what it is trying to do.

The judicial review isn’t the disease. It is the fever. The disease is a democracy that stopped making the case for itself.

Somewhere upstream of all of this — upstream of the reservoir and the planning inquiry and the judicial review and the parish council and the district council and the legal challenge and the value engineering and the consultation response — there is a question that nobody is asking at the level that would make any of it matter.

What is Britain for? What future are we building? What do we owe the people who will live here after us?

Until that question is being seriously asked, and seriously contested, and seriously answered — at the level of national democratic life, with genuine stakes and genuine consequences — the reservoir will wait. And so will everything else.

That argument is the one this series is trying to make. This essay is where it starts.

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The implication was clear enough. These were racists. To engage with their concerns was to validate them. To find common ground was to betray the people those concerns were directed at.

What was I thinking?

I gave an answer. I was told I was pandering. The people who said so are not the solution to Nigel Farage. They are the reason he got this far. And will go further still, if we don’t get our act together.

There are two serious positions on immigration in Britain. You can make the case for fewer people — restrict the offer, reduce the numbers, accept the limits of what we can currently provide. Or you can make the case for radical growth — build the homes, fund the NHS, expand the economy until the offer is real for everyone, and then extend it to as many people as you can genuinely serve.

Both positions are honest. Both can be argued.

What is not honest, and does not deserve to be treated as a serious position, is the third option: continuing to make the offer without the substance to back it up, performing cosmopolitanism while doing nothing to build what cosmopolitanism requires.

That is not a politics. It is a posture. And it is precisely that posture — well-meaning, self-congratulatory, and substantively empty — that has handed Nigel Farage his argument.

I want to take the accusation of pandering seriously, because it deserves to be taken seriously.

There are racists who vote Reform. There are also racists who vote Labour, Conservative, Liberal Democrat, and Green. Racism is not a political party and no party has a monopoly on it, including the ones that feel better about themselves. From antisemitic conspiracy theorists in the Green Party, to black and white minstrel show apologists in the Lib Dems. None of us can claim a pure tent, no matter how clearly we say such things aren’t welcome in it.

What Reform has is not a monopoly on racist voters. What it has is a monopoly on a conversation that the rest of the political spectrum has decided it is too compromising to have. That is a different problem, and a self-inflicted one.

When I speak to people on the left about immigration, the paralysis is total and it takes two forms that compound each other.

The first is the inability to admit anything has gone wrong — because acknowledgement feels like handing Nigel Farage the keys. But the keys were handed over long before anyone said a word about immigration. They were handed over when the left failed to maintain the offer, failed to name the failure, and failed to put a competing explanation into the world.

Into that vacuum, immigration moved — not because it was the right explanation, but because it was the only available one stated with any conviction. Immigration is now the big fat label smacked on the front of every problem in British politics. The housing crisis. The NHS. The cost of living. The sense that something has gone badly wrong and nobody in charge will say so. None of these are primarily immigration problems. But you cannot talk about any of them now without talking about immigration, because we allowed it to become the explanation by default. That is on us. And you cannot undo it by refusing to engage. You undo it by showing up with something better.

There is a crueller version of this failure that needs to be said plainly.

We didn’t just vacate the explanation. We created the conditions for scapegoating and then expressed outrage when the scapegoating happened. We threw the door open knowing we couldn’t meet the needs of the people already here, brought more people into the same broken system, and offered no serious account of how any of it would be resourced. How will you get an NHS dentist? We’ll let you know when we work that out.

The immigrants arrived into a system already failing its existing members, became visible in that system — in the queue, in the waiting room, on the housing list — and the right did exactly what the right always does when there is a visible and convenient explanation available. We handed them the argument. We shouldn’t be surprised they made it.

And the immigrants themselves paid twice. Once as people who came for an offer that wasn’t real and found a system that couldn’t serve them. And again as the explanation for why the system couldn’t serve anyone else. That is not an accident of politics. It is the direct consequence of a cosmopolitanism that was serious about the welcome and not serious about anything else.

The second paralysis is less discussed and in some ways more damaging. It makes a positive case for immigration impossible. You cannot take someone somewhere new if you haven’t acknowledged where they’re standing. You cannot persuade someone who doesn’t believe you’ve heard them. And the left hasn’t heard them — or more precisely, has heard them and responded by explaining why their feelings are incorrect, which is not the same thing at all. To make the argument for immigration, you first have to be able to say: yes, things have gone wrong, yes the offer hasn’t been honoured, yes your frustration is legitimate. The left has decided that acknowledgement is capitulation. It isn’t. It is the only way to have the conversation at all.

If the only place you are permitted to hold your views without being called a bigot is Reform, you will vote for Reform. Not because you endorse everything they stand for. Because they are the only people in the room willing to have the conversation. The left did not lose these voters to Farage’s answers. It lost them by refusing to engage with their questions.

If the only answer the left can offer to people pointing at something real is to question their decency, we will not hold the line. We will lose it — and we will have earned the loss.

A state is, you’ll find, a lot like a car full of people trying to get to the same football match.

Everyone’s already in. It’s a bit cramped, it’s been a long drive, and some people got in earlier than others and have strong opinions about the heating. But everyone agreed, more or less, to the same destination — and the same implicit deal. We share the car. We share the cost of the petrol. We all get there in one piece.

The question of who else gets a seat — and there are people who want a seat, people who need one, people who were half-promised one — is not really a question about them. It’s a question about the car. How big is it? How many seats does it actually have? And crucially: are the people already in it comfortable enough that you can honestly make the offer?

Britain has been making an offer — of citizenship, of the NHS, of housing, of a state that catches you when you fall — that it has not, for some time, been in a position to honour. Not because immigrants arrived and broke something that was working. The car was already too small before anyone new got in. The waiting lists, the housing shortage, the hollowed-out public realm: these are not the consequences of an open door. They are the consequences of decades of underinvestment in the vehicle itself, while the offer of a lift kept going out.

The cosmopolitan loves football. It makes sense that they want to invite as many people as they can to the game. But, if you want to take thirty people to the game, you’ve got to buy a minibus. Not keep cramming people in the boot and hoping nobody notices.

This is, in short, the central tension of nimby cosmopolitanism.

Most of us making the cosmopolitan argument are not in the boot. We may not have it easy — but we have it better. We have the dentist, or we can pay for one. We have the home, or a reasonable prospect of one. We are not living in the gap between the promise and the reality. And when we respond to the people who are — with accusations of racism, with explanations of why their feelings are wrong, with the suggestion that their frustration is a character flaw — we do not look like people with principles. We look like people with seats, telling people without them to stop complaining about the floor. That is not just a political failure. It is a moral one.

The gap between the offer and the reality is not an abstraction. It is measured in human suffering.

It is the person who has been in dental pain for two years because there is no NHS dentist within thirty miles taking new patients. Not inconvenienced. In pain. The kind of chronic, grinding, untreated pain that affects your sleep, your work, your mental health, your ability to function.

It is the person sleeping on a sofa, or a floor, or outside, because the housing shortage is not a policy failure in the abstract but a failure to meet even the most basic of needs for our citizens.

It is the person whose life expectancy is measurably shorter because long-term unemployment does things to a body and a mind that the statistics capture but the political conversation rarely does. It is the untreated mental health crisis, the substance abuse that fills the gap where support should be, the slow attrition of a life lived in the space between what was promised and what exists.

This is what it costs to over-offer. Not embarrassment. Not political difficulty. People suffering in the gap between the promise and the reality, in ways that are entirely preventable and entirely predicted by the decision to keep extending an offer the system cannot honour.

Which is why this is not an argument for taking in fewer people. It is an argument for inflicting this on fewer people. You do not solve it by closing the door. You solve it by making the offer real — for everyone already inside it, and then for as many people as you can genuinely serve. Want more people? Help more people. Build the capacity. Honour the covenant. Then extend it.

There is a response to all of this that comes from the left, and it deserves a direct answer. It goes something like: we do have enough. The wealth exists! It is just sitting in the accounts and asset portfolios of a small number of extraordinarily rich people who are not paying their fair share, and if we taxed them properly — really taxed them, not gesture-taxed them — the NHS would be funded, the houses would be built, the covenant would be honoured, and the offer would be real. You may hold that position. I am not here to argue with it. That’s another essay again.

But here is the problem. Even if you are entirely right about the billionaires — even if the wealth is there, the political will is coming, the fiscal revolution is imminent — you cannot tell the people crammed in the boot that their concerns are either racist or premature. They are in the boot. You put them there. You made an offer you did not have the capacity to honour, and the fact that you have a theory about where the capacity will eventually come from does not change the experience of being folded into a space that was never meant for them. It doesn’t mean you haven’t failed them. It just means you have a good excuse.

The redistribution argument is a future tense argument. The people in the boot are in the present tense. And the people who have been told to wait — for the billionaire tax, for the minibus, for the politics to catch up with the promise — have been told to wait for a long time now. Their impatience is not a moral failing. Their frustration is not racism. It is the entirely rational response of people who were promised a seat and are sitting on the floor.

Tax the billionaires. Buy the minibus. Make the offer. In that order.

Britain has made this offer before. Not perfectly, not consistently, but seriously — with the weight of institutional commitment behind it and a genuine sense that something reciprocal was being constructed.

The clearest moment is 1945. A country exhausted by war, broke in almost every material sense, looks at what it has just been through and decides that the people who endured it are owed something specific. Not charity. Not goodwill. A covenant. You held together, you sacrificed, you did your part — and in return the state will catch you when you fall. The NHS is not, in its origins, a consumer benefit. It is the material expression of a mutual obligation. We will pool our vulnerability because we have already proved we can pool everything else.

This is what citizenship looks like when it is taken seriously. Not a loyalty card. Not a transaction. A relationship with content on both sides — what you owe, what you are owed, and the institutional architecture to make both real.

But the covenant was never applied cleanly, even at the founding. The Windrush generation were invited to Britain in the same breath as the welfare state was being built. They came. They drove the buses, staffed the wards, did the work the postwar economy needed. They assumed the obligations — taxes paid, rules followed, lives built here. The benefits, it emerged, were not quite so straightforwardly theirs. The covenant, it turned out, had some recipients in mind more clearly than others. Windrush is not an aberration in the history of British citizenship. It is an early and unusually clear illustration of its central failure.

What followed was not a dramatic collapse. It was drift — on both sides at once, which is the part that tends to get missed. The obligations fell away without anyone deciding to drop them. The benefits corroded without anyone deciding to cut them. And somewhere in that drift the citizen became a client, the covenant became a transaction, and the taxpayer who thinks their contribution buys them a veto over where disabled people are housed started to sound, to themselves at least, like they had a point.

That is not citizenship. It is clientism. And it is what you get when you hollow out the covenant and leave the bill.

There are some cosmopolitans who think the two positions are compatible. That you can believe in the open, welcoming offer and be relaxed about whether the infrastructure exists to honour it. That the values and the work are separable — that you can hold one without doing the other.

You can’t. Here’s why.

Cosmopolitanism, taken seriously rather than just held, requires enough NHS dentists for the people who are here, and then enough for the people you are inviting. It requires homes — not promised, not planned in outline, but built — for the people already waiting, and then for the people you are asking to come. It requires an economy growing fast enough to generate the jobs, the tax base, the public services that make the offer real. It requires that you build the seats before you sell the tickets.

The nimby cosmopolitan has it backwards. They extend the offer first and treat the infrastructure as someone else’s problem — a future government’s, a different budget’s, a question for another day. But you cannot offer thirty people a lift and then work out afterwards where they are going to sit. The offer is only as real as the capacity behind it.

We should build more. We should grow faster. We should be, if we actually believe in the cosmopolitan offer, absolutely zealous about planning reform and housebuilding and NHS capacity and economic growth — because those are not separate policy questions. They are the precondition of the values we claim to hold.

If you are relaxed about the planning system, you are not a cosmopolitan. If you are relaxed about NHS waiting lists, you are not a cosmopolitan. If you are comfortable with a stagnant economy and a housing shortage and a dental crisis, you cannot in the same breath make the open and welcoming offer and expect it to mean anything. The test of cosmopolitan values is not what you believe about borders. It is what you are prepared to build.

If you are going to make the citizenship offer — come, belong, be part of this — and that offer carries duties as well as benefits, then the people receiving it need to know what those duties are. Not in the small print. Not implied by convention. Actually stated, actually explained, actually agreed to.

We didn’t do that. In part because we weren’t sure ourselves. The obligations side of the British citizenship offer has been so thoroughly hollowed out over so many decades that we have reached a point where it is genuinely difficult to say what it consists of. Jury service, perhaps. Taxes, obviously. A vague expectation of lawfulness. Beyond that — what exactly?

What does Britain ask of the people who live here, in return for what it provides? The honest answer is that we have stopped being able to say.

The people who came and developed a purely transactional relationship with the state — who treat Britain as a gym they joined for the facilities, with no particular attachment to the institution itself — cannot be straightforwardly blamed for it. They signed the contract they were offered. The contract didn’t mention obligations, because we couldn’t agree on what they were. You cannot consent to terms that were never written down.

And even where obligations exist in some residual form, who is checking? The enforcement infrastructure is as hollow as the definition. We don’t know what we’re asking, we haven’t asked it clearly, and we have no real machinery for upholding it if we did.

The obligations vacuum applies to everyone who lives here, born here or arrived last year. We are not imposing on newcomers a civic culture that existing citizens already inhabit. We are rebuilding something from scratch, for everyone, that we allowed to decay on all of our watches.

The Life in the UK test is the state’s own evidence against itself. We have written down, tested people on, and formally required a set of civic and cultural knowledge from people arriving here. We have never once asked the same of people already here. Most people who live here already couldn’t pass it if they tried. Which means it was never really a citizenship standard. It was an entry requirement — obligations for thee, but not for me. The fact that most people born in Britain couldn’t pass it is not an argument for scrapping it. It is an argument for taking the issue of a shared cultural canon seriously, for everyone, rather than using it as a gatekeeping mechanism while the rest of us tastelessly opt out of the civic culture it describes.

If we were to try and reconstruct a model of British citizenship — and we should — the obligations would need to operate at three levels simultaneously.

The first is civic and institutional. Jury service. Voting. Engagement with the democratic process that makes the covenant possible. These are the residual obligations we still formally recognise, even if we enforce them half-heartedly and discharge them with minimal enthusiasm. They are the skeleton of a civic republican tradition that was never fully built in Britain but has always been partially present. It should be embarrassing, once more, to admit you don’t vote. To admit you don’t know what’s going on in your area. Or what a council actually does. That gap must be met with meaningful lifelong civic education. We can’t be surprised people don’t know if we haven’t told them.

The second is contributory. You pay in. Taxes, national insurance, the basic economic participation that funds the offer you are receiving. A country is not a tax jurisdiction. Citizenship is not a subscription service. And the contributory model has a failure mode that needs naming: your claim on the covenant is not proportional to your economic output. The person who cannot work because they are disabled, or ill, or caring for someone who is, has not forfeited their place. They are, if anything, its point. The whole architecture of the postwar settlement was built on the understanding that vulnerability is not a character flaw. The contributory obligation applies to those who can contribute. It is not a means test for belonging.

The third is the one we have most completely abandoned, and the one that matters most for what citizenship actually feels like from the inside. You show up. To your community, in whatever way your circumstances allow. The church group, the litter pick, the school governor role, the youth football team, the community meeting that nobody wants to go to but somebody has to. Not because the state requires it — you cannot legislate belonging — but because this is what the covenant looks like at the human scale. This is how you become a neighbour rather than a resident.

The obligation is proportional and informal. The retired headteacher and the single parent working two jobs both owe something to the community that catches them, but what they owe looks different and nobody is keeping score. That is the point. A moral norm is not a compliance threshold. It is ongoing, relative to your capacity, and it applies to everyone — born here, arrived last year, doesn’t matter. You show up. You contribute what you can.

We have lost this almost entirely. Not through malice but through drift — the same gradual conversion of a shared project into a set of individual transactions. The community infrastructure that made showing up possible — the institutions, the associations, the shared spaces — has been underfunded and undervalued for so long that in many places it barely exists. Rebuilding it is not a soft ask. It is as serious a programme as building the homes and training the dentists. You cannot have the covenant without the community. You cannot have the community without showing up.

When you cannot say what citizenship means — when the obligations are undefined, the covenant is hollow, and the civic language has been allowed to decay — people do not conclude that national identity is meaningless. They reach for whatever is available.

What is available, mostly, is the flag.

This is what Unite the Kingdom and the union jacks on lampposts actually represent. Not a surplus of civic identity but a deficit of it. Not a thriving account of what it means to be British but the aesthetic residue of one — the symbol persisting after the substance has gone. You cannot blame people for reaching for it. When nobody is offering a compelling, substantive account of Britishness — with real content, real obligations, a shared civic language that means something beyond heritage and hostility — the flag is what fills the gap. It is the only available answer to a question that the rest of the political culture has stopped being willing to answer.

The left often finds this embarrassing and says so, which is part of why it has ceded the territory entirely. The right finds it useful and deploys it accordingly. Neither is doing the harder work of building an account of British identity that is neither apologetic nor ethnic — that says, clearly and seriously, here is what this country is, here is what it asks of you, here is what it offers in return, and here is why that matters. The civic republican version of British identity — demanding, inclusive, serious about both rights and obligations — remains unbuilt.

So here is the challenge. Not to the Reform voter. Not to the person who is angry about immigration and has been told, repeatedly, that their anger is a character flaw rather than a reasonable response to a real failure. They have been failed, and they know it, and they are owed a better answer than they have been given.

The challenge is to you. The person who considers themselves on the right side of this argument. Who believes in the open, welcoming offer. Who finds the rhetoric of borders and control distasteful and the people who deploy it suspect. Who is, in their own estimation, a cosmopolitan.

Are you a zealot for housebuilding? Are you serious about planning reform — not in principle, not when it’s someone else’s neighbourhood, but actually, concretely, in your own backyard? Are you demanding enough about NHS capacity, about economic growth, about the fiscal programme that would make the citizenship offer real rather than aspirational? Are you prepared to say, clearly and honestly, what British citizenship requires of the people who hold it — and to hold yourself to the same standard?

If not, you are not a cosmopolitan. You are someone who has confused a feeling for a politics. You have mistaken the offer for the work. And the people paying the price for that confusion — the man who can’t get a dentist, the woman who came in good faith and found the promise hollow, the Reform voter who was told his concerns were racist rather than answered — are still waiting.

To be a serious cosmopolitan in Britain right now is to demand something genuinely radical. Not radical in the way the word gets used in political arguments — as a term of mild enthusiasm or vague reproach — but radical in the sense of scale, ambition, and difficulty.

Consider what it would actually take just to clear the ledger. To make the existing offer real — to give every current citizen access to the NHS dentist, the affordable home, the functioning economy, the social infrastructure — would require one of the most profound programmes of state investment since the postwar settlement. Not a spending review. Not a fiscal event. A generational commitment to rebuilding the capacity that decades of drift and underinvestment have hollowed out. That alone would be the work of a political lifetime.

And that is before we have extended the offer to a single additional person.

But the material programme is only one third of the job. Alongside it, we need to rebuild the social contract — the obligations side, the covenant, the sense that belonging here means something beyond receiving services and paying taxes. And alongside that, we need to rebuild British civic identity — not the flag on the lamppost, but a legible, substantive account of what this country is, what it stands for, and why it matters. An identity with content. One that can be offered to everyone who lives here, regardless of where they came from, as something worth belonging to.

Three things, simultaneously, that have never all been present at once. The material offer. The obligations structure. The civic language. Each one is a generation’s work. Together they are the only programme that takes cosmopolitan values seriously enough to make them real.

You cannot build any of it from a focus group. The focus group tells you what people will tolerate. It has nothing to say about what a broken covenant requires. One cannot be a squeamish cosmopolitan — the values and the timidity are incompatible, and you cannot be more passionate about the welcome than the infrastructure that makes the welcome real. This is not a comfortable politics. It will not fit on a placard. It asks more of the people who claim these values than any other position in British public life. But it is the only position that takes those values seriously enough to make them mean something.

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The third door opens. A man — former armed forces, I’ll learn later — takes one look at me and, at considerable volume for a Saturday morning, delivers his verdict: “Fuck off. I’m sick of all of you politicians.”

“So am I,” I said.

There was a pause. Then he laughed. We talked for twenty minutes on his doorstep in the rain. I got his vote that afternoon, and I was genuinely proud of it.

I tell this story not because it’s charming — though I think it is — but because it captures something true about the state of British politics that most political commentary completely misses. He wasn’t wrong to be angry. He wasn’t an irrational actor, a low-information voter, a casualty of misinformation. He was a man who had watched politicians make promises and break them, over and over, for decades, and had reached the entirely sensible conclusion that the whole enterprise could get lost. The surprise wasn’t his anger. The surprise was that twenty minutes of honest conversation was enough to shift it.

That, at scale, is the problem. And that, at scale, is the only thing that fixes it.

The story British politics tells about itself is one of difficult trade-offs, honestly made. To believe this, sincerely, as a voter in 2025, you'd need to be having something considerably stronger than cornflakes to start your day.

Start with Thatcher. The bargain, as presented, was this: take the pain of deindustrialisation now, get the modern prosperous Britain later. The pain was real and it was immediate — communities built around industries that were gone within a decade, the social infrastructure that depended on them collapsing shortly after. The prosperity was promised. In Liverpool, in the South Wales valleys, in the former steel towns of Yorkshire, they are still waiting.

It wasn’t just the factories. Right to Buy offered something genuinely seductive — a stake in the new Britain, the council tenant becoming the home-owning democrat, a share in the national asset. For those who got in early enough it delivered. But the replacements were never built, the social housing stock was never replenished, and the ladder they sold a generation has become the ceiling their children press their faces against. The promise was ownership for all. The result was a housing market that works magnificently for those who already own and punishingly for everyone else.

And then there is the Howe memo. In 1981, Geoffrey Howe, Chancellor of the Exchequer, wrote privately to Margaret Thatcher suggesting that Liverpool’s economic devastation was so severe that the correct policy response might be “managed decline” — a controlled withdrawal of investment and ambition, the state stepping back and letting the city contract to whatever it could sustain on its own. The memo was not acted on in full. But it was written. A senior Cabinet minister looked at a great British city and its people and calculated, in writing, that they might not be worth saving. This was not a promise that failed to deliver. This was certain people never being offered a promise at all.

This matters because it changes the diagnosis entirely. If the civic contract had merely been overpromised and underdelivered — politicians optimistic, execution poor, outcomes disappointing — that would be one kind of problem. What the Howe memo reveals is something harder: that for some places and some people, the contract was never seriously intended. The trade was not offered in good faith. You cannot rebuild trust in a settlement that was, in part, a deliberate fiction.

This was not a Conservative pathology. It metastasised.

New Labour inherited the settlement and chose not to fundamentally challenge it. The proceeds of growth were real, for a while, but they were not shared in the ways that would have mattered — in the places that had been promised a future and were still waiting for it. Immigration expanded rapidly and the economic case for it was sound. But nobody went to Doncaster or Stoke and made it concretely. Nobody pointed at the specific street and said: here is what you are getting, here is when it arrives, here is how we will know if it worked. Gordon Brown, sensing the floor shifting, gave us “British jobs for British workers” — a panic dressed as a policy, and a tell. He knew the trust wasn’t there.

Then Nick Clegg signed a pledge, in front of cameras, not to raise tuition fees. Then he raised tuition fees. This sounds like a small thing retold at this distance. It wasn’t. It was the civic contract photographed in the act of being broken — legible, undeniable, total. A generation that had done what it was told, engaged with the process, trusted the man promising something different at last, and got the rug pulled. Again! Some of them have not re-engaged since. It would be irrational to expect otherwise.

And then came the referendum. The Remain campaign walked into 2016 carrying every one of these unpaid debts and asked the country to trust it on the largest trade-off in a generation. The civic currency required to make that argument — trust us, the deal is worth it, the gains will be shared — had been spent, debased, and counterfeited so many times that the account was empty. Remain lost, and the postmortem reached, with impressive speed, for the most comfortable explanation available: Facebook. Russian bots. The racism of left-behind places that had the audacity to vote their material interests after forty years of being told their material interests didn’t quite fit the programme.

I say this as a Liberal Democrat. We were lazy. We assumed that because the internationalist case was correct, it had been made. We spent decades having secured something we valued above all else and then stopped trying to persuade anyone it had value. The right wing press never stopped fighting its corner. We assumed that everyone had arrived, as we had, at a calm acceptance of the rising tide that lifted all boats. We had offered no material proof of this. We were, in some quarters, actively offended when people who had watched their towns hollowed out, their industries shipped elsewhere, their kids priced out of the housing market — when those people declined to vote for more of the same, rebranded as cosmpolitanism. Calling that racism was not analysis. It was a political class refusing to read its own ledger.

Brexit was not a mistake made by irrational people. It was an invoice. Forty years of unpaid debts, presented all at once, to a political class that had long since stopped believing it owed anything.

There is a view, influential in policy circles and among a certain kind of commentator, that the problem with British politics is essentially one of voter management. The public, on this account, are like a dog that bites — not out of malice exactly, but out of irrationality, short-termism, an inability to grasp the trade-offs that those with the full picture can see clearly.

The correct response, therefore, is either the shock collar — raise the cost of resistance until compliance follows — or the locked room: make the decision without them, dress it up afterwards, and hope the results speak for themselves before the next election.

This view disgusts me. Not just because it is in shockingly poor taste, though it is. Because it is wrong in a way that makes everything worse.

The public are not biting irrationally. They are biting because they have been hit first, repeatedly, by people who told them the trade was fair. The shock collar doesn’t teach the dog that the hand is safe. It teaches the dog that the hand is dangerous and that resistance is the only available response. Every time a government overrides legitimate objection, excludes inconvenient voices from the process, or simply announces a decision and dares the public to undo it, it confirms what forty years of broken bargains have already established: that the people making decisions do not believe they are accountable to the people affected by them. The currency of civic trust devalues a little further. The next trade becomes a little harder to make.

You can see this dynamic playing out in real time with almost any contentious reform. Winter fuel allowance. Planning reform. The triple lock. The policy case is frequently sound. The political execution reaches, almost reflexively, for managed imposition rather than genuine persuasion — because genuine persuasion requires trust, and trust requires a track record, and the track record is… what it is. So the shock collar comes out. The resistance hardens. The reform either fails or passes in a form that satisfies nobody and confirms everyone’s worst suspicions. And the people who designed the process shake their heads at the irrationality of it all — as the dog, entirely rationally, bites them again.

The dog isn’t the problem. The way the hand behaves is.

NIMBYism is the policy debate that most reliably makes otherwise reasonable people reach for the shock collar. The housing crisis is real, the shortage acute, the consequences — for young people especially — genuinely serious. And there, blocking the development, signing the petition, packing the planning committee, are the homeowners who already have theirs. Selfish. Irrational. Obstacles to progress.

Except they’re not. They’re doing what every rational actor does when offered a trade they have no reason to trust: refusing it.

The planning bargain, as it is supposed to work, goes like this. You give up something you value — the green space at the edge of the village, the character of the street, the manageable scale of the place you chose to live — and in return you get a better settlement. The new development comes with a dentist. The roads are upgraded to handle the extra cars. The school gets a new block. The infrastructure arrives with the homes.

It doesn’t. It rarely has. The homes go up, the field is gone, and the dentist — the one where you already wait three weeks for an appointment — now has three hundred more patients and not a single additional chair. The roads clog. The school overflows. And the people who stood up at the planning meeting and said “the infrastructure won’t come” are proven right, again, and remember it, and turn up to the next planning meeting with even more justification than before.

And then there is the house price question, which the shock collar crowd prefer not to engage with seriously. For most homeowners, their property is not just where they live. It is their pension, their security, the only substantial asset they are likely to accumulate in a lifetime of work. This is not an accident. It is the predictable result of a state that has systematically dismantled every other reliable route to wealth and security — final salary pensions gone, social housing gone, real wage growth gone — while house prices have risen, reliably, for decades. People were given one remaining lifeboat and told to get in. They got in. Property became the gold standard of a collapsing civic economy — the one asset people believed would hold its value when everything else the state promised turned to dust. Now they are told they are selfish for not wanting it to sink.

You cannot fix this by overriding planning objections. You cannot fix it by calling homeowners selfish, or by building a shiny new AI system to overrule them. You fix the planning problem by delivering the infrastructure that makes development credible, and you fix the wealth problem by giving people something else to hold onto — which requires, again, a state they trust enough to believe it won’t be taken away. It is the same problem, all the way down. A devalued civic currency, and a population that has learned, rationally, to hold onto whatever hard assets it can reach.

This wasn’t always the condition of British public life. There is a version of the civic contract that actually worked — imperfectly, incompletely, with its own exclusions and failures — but worked nonetheless. Beveridge, the NHS, the post-war settlement: a moment in which the state made promises at genuine scale and, broadly, kept them. You contributed, collectively, to something that would be there when you needed it. The trade was honoured. Not for everyone, not always, not without cost — but enough that trust in the state to act in your interest was not an act of naivety. It was a reasonable reading of the evidence.

That is the civic currency at full value. And it is worth remembering that it was real, because the British public are not congenitally cynical. They built the welfare state on trust. They know, at some level of collective memory, what it feels like when the deal is honoured. They are not measuring the present against an imaginary golden age. They are measuring it against something that actually existed, and finding it wanting.

What has happened since is not a single betrayal but a slow debasement. Each broken bargain — each unpaid debt, each rug pull, each promise that turned out to mean something different in the delivery than it did in the making — has taken a little more off the denomination. The currency has not collapsed overnight. It has inflated, gradually, to the point where it buys almost nothing. We are trying to fund pension reform, planning reform, the entire project of national renewal, with wheelbarrows of notes that nobody quite believes in anymore. You cannot spend your way to trust. You cannot inflate a civic currency that has already hit Zimbabwe levels and expect the market to hold.

The question is not whether the reforms are necessary. Most of them are. The question is whether the state has the currency to buy them. Right now, it doesn’t.

There is no quick fix for a devalued currency. You do not restore confidence by printing more money and hoping nobody notices. You restore it by making smaller promises, keeping them completely, and then coming back and asking for a little more trust than you had before. It is slow. It is unglamorous. It does not make for a good party conference speech. But it is the only mechanism that actually works, because it is the only mechanism that addresses the actual problem.

This is what I have learned, ten years in, from the end of the business nobody photographs. You do not win trust by explaining why you deserve it. You win it by doing something small, delivering it completely, and then standing on the doorstep in the rain and saying: I said I would do that, and I did. Now here is the next thing. You can check me against it when I come back.

That is not a programme for government. It is something more fundamental — a precondition for one. Before you can do pension reform, or planning reform, or any of the other things the country genuinely needs, you have to rebuild enough civic currency to make the bargain credible. That means the state learning to do what I ask of myself on a Saturday morning canvas: take the hit, agree with the anger where the anger is right, and ask only for a limited and specific check on trust. Not a blank cheque. Not “trust us, it will be worth it.” A dated, signed, returnable promise: here is what we will do, here is when, here is how you will know if we have failed.

The man on the doorstep didn’t give me his vote because I persuaded him politicians were trustworthy. He gave it to me because I didn’t try to. I agreed with him, I asked for something small, and I left him the right to withdraw it if I let him down. That is the transaction the state needs to learn to make. At scale, with patience, over years, with the willingness to be held accountable when it fails — which it will, and which it must be honest about when it does.

None of this is fast enough for the problems the country faces. That is the hardest thing to sit with. The reforms that are needed are urgent. The trust required to make them possible is not something that can be manufactured on a timeline that suits the policy. But the alternative — the shock collar, the locked room, the managed imposition — doesn’t work either. It just fails. Over and over again. Until the whole machine grinds to a halt.

There is a place where the broken civic contract becomes most visible, most personal, and most immediately consequential. It is not Westminster. It is your local council.

Local government was once the point at which the state and the public were closest to each other — genuinely close, in the way that matters. Councils delivered services that were tailored, local, accountable in the most direct sense: if the bin wasn’t collected, you knew where to go. They accumulated, over generations, assets that reflected what their communities had decided to value and protect — not because a minister thought it was a good idea, but because the people who lived there had slowly, collectively, chosen to invest in them. In Cheltenham, where I serve, that means the Pittville Pump Room. The town hall. The museum. The theatres. The parks. A civic chain granted by Queen Victoria, worn by councillors who understood themselves to be stewards of something that belonged, genuinely, to the town.

I wept when the abolition order came. I am not embarrassed to say so.

What has happened to local government is the story of the broken civic contract in miniature. The money has evaporated. The world’s hardest problems — social care, housing, poverty, public health — have been quietly pushed to the doorstep of the tier of government least equipped to fund them, while central government retained the tax base required to actually address them. Councils that have not yet gone bankrupt have cut everything that could be cut — the libraries, the leisure centres, the youth services, the road maintenance that your council tax is supposed to pay for and doesn’t, not because nobody wants to fix the roads, but because the money that should fix them is underwater in a social care deficit that was never supposed to be our problem to solve.

And the government’s response to this collapse? Less democracy. The answer, apparently, is to abolish the councils that are struggling, merge them with four or five other places that may share neither geography nor identity nor interest, and hope that the resulting organisation — larger, more distant, less accountable — can sell off enough of what your council tax has accumulated over decades to balance the books. For a year or two. Before it goes bankrupt in turn.

They want us to sell off the Pittville Pump Room to fund more of the same of a social care system that, it should be said, is not even providing acceptable care. The debt is real. And the solution on offer is to liquidate the family silver — assets that belong to the public, that the public built, that the public has maintained through a century of civic investment — to fund the consequences of central government’s decades of failure, at one remove, with less democracy than before, and call it reform.

It is the Beeching report applied to civic life. Gut the network, close the lines, save the money — and discover, too late, that what you sold for scrap was worth more than the debt it was meant to clear. Hundreds of years of tradition, richness, and democracy, gone to keep the lights on for maybe a decade.

This is not revaluing the civic currency. This is melting down the coins.

The coins being melted down now are the last ones. When they're gone — the pump rooms, the town halls, the museums, the parks, the accumulated civic wealth of a century — there will be nothing left to sell.

The question is not whether Britain needs to rebuild trust between the state and the people it serves. It does, urgently, and most serious people know it. The question is whether we begin before the vault is empty. If it isn’t already.

I’m standing on this gentleman’s doorstep. We’re discussing immigration. The sum total amount of control I have over immigration, as a Cheltenham Borough Councillor, is zero. But it’s what he wants to talk about. I try, where I can, to meet voters where they are.

Then he says it.

You know, when all of this is over, people like you are going to be the first to be lined up against the wall and shot.1

After a decade in local government, this doesn’t make my top ten favourite threats. I’ve had better ones. Funnier ones. More believable ones. But at least in this I’m reassured: someone cares enough about local government to come back and find me after the revolution. Someone believes I do something notable enough to warrant that. Someone, somewhere, thinks what I do changes the world.

I reply that I look forward to it. I thank him for his time, and go to the next door.

Weeks later, some local volunteers try to organise a hustings. I’m thrilled. I love a hustings. One of the candidates pulls out because there won’t be a police presence at the event. I reflect, for a moment, on what it means that someone seeking election to represent their community lacks the nerve to stand in the same room as them. Then I go back to delivering leaflets. Democracy won’t do itself, after all.

Despite all of the above, on May 8th, 2026, I was waiting for the results to come in from a sweaty leisure centre in Cheltenham. Hands shaking, chest tight. The fluorescent lighting was doing nobody any favours.

This is the great leveller of British politics: the nervous breakdown in a sports hall. You have it. The party leader has it. The Prime Minister has it. The count doesn’t care who you are. It just counts.

I wasn’t afraid for myself. I was afraid for something harder to name.

For the residents who had come to me, over the past nine years, with the things that had nowhere else to go. The dangerous fault in a social housing block that nobody official had bothered to log. The family who couldn’t get their kid an NHS dentist — couldn’t get an appointment, couldn’t navigate the system, couldn’t afford to go private — and who needed someone to make a call. For my short-lived career as an amateur plumber, which I did not put on my campaign literature, but probably should have.

For the couple from the final days of the campaign. Immigrants, English not quite there yet, but enough. The leaflet of mine they kept in their home. The, unfortunately unflattering, photo they pointed to and kept in their lounge, held with so much hope. They wanted to put a poster up in their window, they said. They hadn't, because of who they were, and because of what they feared might happen if they did.

For the gentleman who reduced me to tears after I spent almost half an hour persuading him to take the phone number of a free NHS dentist — after I noticed a worrying black growth on the inside of his mouth he said he couldn't afford to get checked. I was too woke. He didn't need my help.

These are the people I was afraid for. Not the politics. Not my own job. The work. And the question underneath everything: if I lost, who would do it?

As the campaign started to look worse and worse, people asked me what I’d do if I lost. The answers, when I tried to imagine them, didn’t come easily. Travel. Write more. Finally get on Tinder. Pack a bag and go to Lisbon while never knowing if that man with the growth in his mouth ever called the dentist.

The result comes in. I’ve won. It should have been a relief. I wish it was.

Ten years ago, something I can only describe as civic patriotism brought me to the doorstep of local government. Not ambition — or not only ambition — but a genuine belief that this was where things happened. Where politics became material. Where the distance between a decision and its consequences was small enough that you could actually see both ends of it. If I wanted to fix the fabric of this country, I was going to have to start with the roads.

That belief is less fashionable than it used to be. Across the country on that same day, hundreds of Reform UK candidates were winning seats in councils they had spent the campaign treating as a consolation prize — a place to park their energy while waiting for something more important. Their opponents, watching the results come in, offered a particular kind of comfort to one another. Let them have it. See how they like it. Let them drown in the late night calls and the dog shit and the missed bin collections. Their comeuppance, delivered in real time.

I don’t understand it. I find it, if I’m honest, a little revolting. The gleeful dismissal — let them drown in the dog shit, serve them right — is not the wit it thinks it is. It is contempt for democracy dressed up as a punchline. It assumes that local government is a punishment, that the people who do it are fools, that the communities they serve are too small to matter, and that the voters who put them there were too stupid to know better.

It is wrong on all four counts.

A borough councillor holds more direct, material power over their constituents’ daily lives than almost any other elected official. You wouldn’t believe it, if you read the news.

Not more prestige — prestige flows upward, always, toward Westminster. But power in the sense that actually matters: the power to shape the immediate conditions of how people live. The MP debates the principle. The councillor determines whether the road outside your house gets fixed before your car’s suspension gives out.

That is not punishment. If you find the idea of being the person people turn to with their least glamorous, most frustrating problems demeaning, public service may not be for you.

Local government does not care about your politics. This is, depending on your disposition, either its greatest virtue or its most brutal quality. The place you represent does not reorganise itself around your manifesto. The budget does not bend to your ideology. The needs of your residents arrive in no particular order and respect no particular theory of change.

This is the first thing the job teaches you. The second is that the distance between what you believed you could do and what you can actually do is, at first, vertiginous. The levers are smaller than you imagined. The ones that matter take years to understand, let alone pull. The ones you were elected promising to pull — the big, national, legible ones — are not yours at all.

The third thing it teaches you is a very specific kind of humility. Not the performed kind, the nodding-along-on-the-doorstep kind. The real kind. The kind that comes from responsibility for somewhere. For the texture of life in a place. For whether it works, or doesn’t, for the people who live there.

The place stops being a platform and starts being somewhere that belongs to people. Specific, difficult, funny, frightening, ordinary people, trying to live their lives. And you are, improbably, part of the infrastructure that makes that possible. Or fails to. That is a weight. It is also, on the days when it works, something close to a privilege.

That is what I want Reform councillors to find on day one at their new councils. Not humiliation. Initiation. The same one every councillor goes through, regardless of party or politics. The moment the place stops being a stepping stone and starts being a responsibility.

And the context into which they are being initiated is not a gentle one. A decade of austerity has not so much reformed local government as hollowed it out. The services that remain are, in many cases, the services that could not legally be cut — and even those are bending. Social care alone consumes the budgets of most councils, growing every year as the population ages and the funding settlements from central government fail to keep pace. There is no good answer to this. There is only the next budget, and the one after that, and the grinding work of deciding who gets less so that someone else can get enough.

Debt advice. Housing crisis management. Mental health referrals that go nowhere, bounced back from overstretched NHS services to overstretched council teams. Domestic abuse. Homelessness. The slow, unglamorous catastrophe of a country that has been asking its most local institutions to absorb the consequences of decisions made far above them, for longer than those institutions were ever designed to sustain.

Not because that is how it was designed. Because there is nowhere else for it to go. Councillors have less power, but more responsibility, than at any point in living history.

This is what Reform councillors are inheriting. Not a consolation prize. A pressure system. One that has been building for years, and that will not care, when it breaks, which party is holding the bag.

None of this really happens in public. That is perhaps the most important thing to understand about local government, and the thing that is hardest to fix.

There are, across the whole of England, a handful of dedicated local democracy reporters. A handful. For the thousands of councils, the hundreds of billions of pounds of public money, the millions of decisions that shape the texture of daily life. The local paper, if one still exists in your area, likely covers a patch the size of a small county with a team that has been cut to the bone. The reporter who might once have sat through the planning committee, or followed the budget process, or explained to their readers what a Section 106 agreement actually is, is gone. What remains is not enough to carry the weight of the system it is meant to illuminate.

And so the gap grows. Between what councils do and what people think they do. Between the scale of the decisions being made in those chambers and the public attention those decisions receive.

This is not an accident. It is the predictable consequence of a media landscape that stopped finding local democracy interesting sometime around the invention of the clickable headline, and a political culture that never really pushed back. Westminster generates drama. Local government generates outcomes. Drama travels. Outcomes don’t.

The result is a citizenry that does not know what local government is for, what it costs, what it does, or what it could be. And a political culture that reflects that ignorance back at them — treating councils as minor leagues, councillors as apprentice politicians, and local elections as mood polls on whoever is in Downing Street.

But local government, at its best, is not just a pressure system. It is also — still, against the odds, in pockets across the country — a place where genuinely radical things happen. And if you care about growth, about the future of this country, about anything beyond the next news cycle, dismissing it as a punchline is not just ungenerous. It is a strategic mistake.

In Cheltenham — a town most people associate with racehorses and Regency architecture — a council has spent the better part of a decade building what will become one of the most significant technology campuses in Europe. Golden Valley is a billion-pound innovation district next door to GCHQ, designed to anchor the UK’s cyber and AI industries for a generation. It did not emerge from a Whitehall strategy document. It emerged from a local authority that bought the land, took the financial risk, made the case, and refused to stop making it. That is what local government looks like when it decides to be ambitious. I am, I should say, not a disinterested observer. But the planning approvals speak for themselves!

In South Cambridgeshire, a district council became the first in the country to permanently adopt a four-day week — not as an ideological gesture, but because the evidence demanded it. Job applications rose by more than 120 percent. Staff turnover fell by 39 percent. Twenty-one of twenty-four services improved or stayed the same. A minister called it arrogant. The universities of Cambridge, Salford and Bradford called it a success. The council called it a solution to a recruitment crisis that was costing taxpayers hundreds of thousands of pounds a year in agency staff. Local government, thinking locally, solving a problem that Westminster hadn’t got a handle on.

In Greater Manchester, a billion-pound Good Growth Fund is driving regeneration at a pace not seen this century — new homes, new jobs, a transport network being rebuilt from the ground up, a model of devolved economic ambition that is already attracting private investment at a scale Whitehall’s centralised instincts could never have unlocked. The Bee Network alone — buses taken back under public control, integrated with trams, fares capped — is the kind of thing people said couldn’t be done anymore. It is being done. By local government.

These are not anomalies. They are proof of concept. They are what happens when local democracy is taken seriously, properly resourced, and led by people who believe the place they represent is worth fighting for — and who are willing to absorb the cost of that belief.

The irony is that the people most likely to dismiss local government as small-stakes are often the same people most exercised about growth, about productivity, about Britain’s inability to build things or try things or trust things. Local government is where building happens. Where trying happens. Where the distance between a decision and its consequences is short enough that you can actually learn from both. It is, in that sense, exactly the kind of institution a serious country would invest in.

We have not been a serious country about this. Not for a long time. And the “enjoy the potholes” reaction is, in its small way, a symptom of that — the casual assumption that local government is where ambition goes to die, rather than where it stubbornly, against considerable odds, sometimes comes alive.

The worst version of a local councillor is easy to conjure. The self-important bore at the planning committee. The career politician in waiting, using the ward as a stepping stone. The true believer promising things they cannot deliver, fighting elections on issues they cannot affect, collecting a small allowance for their trouble while the place they represent slowly gets worse. I have met all of these people. The caricature has teeth.

The best version is harder to see. It is the person who noticed the fault before anyone got hurt. Who made the call nobody else would make. Who turned up, year after year, not for the glory — there is no glory — but because the place they loved was worth it, and someone had to.

They are not failed politicians. They are not wannabe MPs marking time. They are not, with some exceptions, in it for the money, the prestige, or the power — because there is almost none of any of those things on offer. They are people who looked at the gap between what their place is and what it could be, and decided, for reasons they often struggle to articulate, that they were going to do something about it. At considerable personal cost. In rooms nobody is watching. For people who will sometimes scream at them, threaten them, and follow them down the street hurling abuse.

They are also, right now, the people absorbing the consequences of thirty years of decisions made above their heads. The social care crisis lands on them. The housing crisis lands on them. The mental health referrals that go nowhere, the debt, the homelessness, the families that have fallen through every gap in every system — all of it lands, eventually, at the council. And the council lands, eventually, at the councillor. Not because that is how it was designed. Because there is nowhere else for it to go. Because someone has to be there when the system runs out of road.

And it sure as hell isn’t going to be any of the sneering Twitter commentariat.

Something will go wrong. It always does. The planning application that shouldn’t have gone through. The road that’s been dangerous for two years. The service that got cut and shouldn’t have. And you will call your councillor. Not your MP, who will send a sympathetic letter and refer it back down. Your councillor. The person on twelve thousand pounds a year and who will pick up the phone because that is, in the end, what the job is.

This is not a hypothetical. It happens every day, in every constituency, to people who couldn't name their councillor if you asked them. People who didn't vote at all, or rolled their eyes at the leaflet through the door.

You do not have to like them. You do not have to agree with them, or vote for them. But sneering at them is not wit. It is, at best, ingratitude. At worst, it is a decision — miserable, cumulative, and entirely reversible — to let something worth having go to ruin.

Because if local democracy is just a punchline, a consolation prize, a place we send the ambitious to be humbled by their own irrelevance — then we have already decided something about ourselves. About what we think politics is for. About whether the places we live are worth governing well.

I think they are. I have thought so for ten years. I intend to think so for ten more.

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The app is not unusual. It belongs to a recognisable aesthetic category that has colonised a significant portion of consumer technology, productivity software, and the self-presentation of anyone who has recently raised a Series A. The category has a mood: earnest, analogue-inflected, vaguely communal, ostentatiously tool-focused. It implies, without stating, that the people behind it are on your side. That they are giving you something rather than extracting something from you. That technology, in their hands, is a form of liberation. It’s part of the great chain, from Home Brew Computing to IBM card burning, of technologies designed to liberate you from the system and reclaim some sense of self-godhood. Not bad, for a productivity app.

The ghost it’s haunting is the Whole Earth Catalog. And almost nobody copying it has read past the cover.

Go and look at it. Not a summary, not a think-piece about it, not Steve Jobs talking about it at Stanford. The thing itself. It is on the Internet Archive — search “Whole Earth Catalog 1968” and it will be the first result. I’ll even find it for you. It is free. It will take you thirty seconds to find and the rest of your afternoon to reckon with.

If your introduction to the Whole Earth Catalog is the aesthetic that claims its inheritance — the apps, the pitch decks, the warm-toned tools-for-humans branding — you are in Plato’s cave. You have seen the shadows that the thing casts, and mistaken them for the thing itself. The founders copying it are not cynics. That would be easier to forgive. They genuinely believe the shadow is the object.

You will not find the warm earth tones. You will not find the rounded corners or the considered typography or the gentle implication that someone is on your side. What you will find is dense, serious, and faintly overwhelming — a broadsheet-sized document packed with text at a depth of assumed knowledge that most contemporary magazines would consider an act of aggression against the reader. It does not explain itself. It does not onboard you. It assumes you are a competent adult who has arrived with questions and would like, please, some serious help answering them.

The first thing that stops you is the form. It is not a catalog as we would recognise one, and not a magazine as we would recognise one either. It is something stranger — part annotated bibliography, part instruction manual, part philosophical treatise, part general store. The reviews are real reviews, written with the seriousness of someone who has actually used the thing and thought hard about whether it works. The diagrams are meant to be followed. The DIY content assumes you will actually build something, with your hands, not on a keyboard, which is a significant assumption to make about a readership that, in 1968, was largely white, middle class, college-educated, and had probably never built anything in their lives.

Then the juxtapositions start to land. Norbert Wiener’s Cybernetics sits next to geodesic dome construction plans. A Hewlett-Packard scientific calculator gets a serious review alongside Native American craft guides. There are sex manuals. There are self-hypnosis books. There is nudity, which you will not be expecting. There is a book about kibbutz living that carries a different weight now than it did in 1968. There are LL Bean boots, reviewed approvingly, approximately fifteen years before they became the footwear of the American preppy. The Sierra Club — now regarded in certain tech circles as an obstacle to the future rather than a custodian of it — gets a warm write-up. There are poems you’ve read before: Machines of Loving Grace. Embedded where they always belonged, within a serious philosophy of how one builds the world they want to see. Not just talks about it on Twitter.

You’ll find a climate book, reviewed favourably, explicitly, on the grounds that it contains — and this is a direct quote — ‘minimal moralism’. In 1968. About the environment.

If that tension feels familiar — between the techno-optimist who wants to solve climate change with tools and innovation, and the moralist who insists the problem is how we live — you are not imagining it. It is the same argument. It has not been resolved. It started here.

What you are looking at is the ghost in the machine of every DM Sans headline. It is a vision. A serious, contradictory, occasionally maddening vision of what a human being is capable of if you give them the right tools and get out of the way. The juxtapositions are not chaos — they are a profound moral claim. Wiener and dome plans and sex guides and kibbutz farming all belong together because Brand is making a sincere epistemological argument that these are all the same kind of thing. They are all tools for seeing more clearly and acting more effectively in the world.

The Catalog is a living, breathing protest against category errors — and against the protest movement that Brand thought was making them. The New Left wanted systemic reform. Organise, march, resist, change the institutions. Brand thought this was the wrong tool entirely. You do not fix a broken world by arguing with its administrators. You build a different one. The separation of the spiritual from the technical from the political — those categories were the problem. The Catalog is an attempt to build a world without them.

This is what is being copied. By the time you reach page 63, you will find it unfathomable that an app that tells you about local sushi restaurants has decided it belongs within this tradition. And means it.

Stewart Brand was not, in 1968, an obvious candidate to reshape the intellectual DNA of the technology industry. He was a Stanford biology graduate, an army veteran, a photographer, a sometime Merry Prankster, a man who had lobbied NASA to release the first satellite photograph of the whole Earth on the grounds that seeing the planet whole would change how humans thought about it. He was thirty years old and constitutionally incapable of staying in any institution long enough to be claimed by it. He was, in other words, exactly the right person to build something that didn’t look like anything that already existed. Just not to build the world he thought went with it.

The Catalog’s central claim sounds simple. Access to tools is access to power. Give people the right instruments — technical, intellectual, spiritual — and they will build a better world than any institution could plan for them. The individual, properly equipped, is the unit of change. It’s the american frontier myth made palatable for men in tweed jackets and white converse sneakers.

But the claim is not simple. It is carrying a significant philosophical inheritance. From Norbert Wiener and Gregory Bateson it takes the cybernetic proposition: that the world is best understood as a system of relationships rather than a collection of separate objects. Mind is not a property of individual brains — it is a property of systems. You cannot separate the organism from its environment. Western modernity’s assumption that you can — that you can isolate, manage, and optimise individual components — is not just ethically wrong. It is descriptively wrong. It is just factually incorrect about how reality works.

From Buckminster Fuller it takes the practical corollary: that if you understand systems, you can design with them rather than against them. The geodesic dome is not an aesthetic choice. It is a proof of concept. Maximum structural efficiency from minimum materials. Do more with less. The designer who understands the whole system can solve problems that the administrator managing the parts cannot even see.

And from Ralph Waldo Emerson — further back, deeper in the American grain — it takes the proposition that the individual in direct relationship with truth, unmediated by institution, is the proper unit of moral and intellectual life. Self-reliance. The Emersonian inheritance is what makes the Catalog specifically American rather than generically countercultural. Brand is not interested in collective provision. He is interested in individual empowerment. He is closer to Emerson than to Marx, closer to Thoreau than to Gramsci. The free individual with the right tools is the beginning and end of the political vision.

A politics of individual empowerment has no theory of the commons. It knows how to put power in your hands. It has no idea how to fund the road you drove on to get there. The things that require collective provision — infrastructure, healthcare, the physical and institutional fabric that makes individual freedom possible in the first place — are not just unaddressed by the Catalog’s politics. They are, in its framework, almost unaddressable. Institutions are the problem. You cannot build durable collective infrastructure on the premise that institutions are the problem.

Brand would follow his own logic consistently and honourably for the next five decades — pro-nuclear, pro-GMO, pro-dense cities, Long Now Foundation, thinking in ten-thousand-year timescales. He never stopped being serious. But the logic he set in motion in 1968 was already, at the moment of its greatest clarity, leaving something out. Something that would, in the hands of his inheritors, turn out to matter enormously.

The gap did not stay empty for long. It never does.

What filled it was not malice. That would be a more comfortable story. What filled it was venture capital, which is not a conspiracy but a logic — a very efficient machine for finding vacuums and flowing into them. The Catalog had created a cultural identity, a set of values, and an aesthetic language for a specific kind of person: technically capable, intellectually restless, suspicious of institutions, convinced that the right tools in the right hands could change the world. It had also, structurally, left the question of collective provision entirely unanswered. Into that specific gap, at scale, with extraordinary efficiency, poured money.

The first generation of Silicon Valley founders were, many of them, genuine inheritors. The Homebrew Computer Club crowd had actually read the Catalog, or lived adjacent to the world that produced it. The personal computer was, in their hands, a sincere extension of the Catalog’s argument: democratised access to a tool of genuine power, available to individuals rather than corporations or governments. You could disagree with the politics and still recognise the continuity. The argument was intact, even as the scale changed.

But scale changes things. What venture capital does, structurally, is select for growth. Not for seriousness, not for continuity of argument, not for the relationship between the aesthetic and the thing it was built to carry. Growth. And growth, at the speed and scale of the technology industry from the 1990s onwards, has a way of separating the form from the content with extraordinary efficiency. What travels fast is the surface. The argument underneath moves slower, or not at all.

By the time you reach the second and third generation of founders — the ones who grew up with the internet rather than building it, who encountered the Catalog as a reference rather than a living document, who learned what a startup was supposed to look and feel like from the people who came before them — the inheritance had become almost entirely aesthetic. The warm tones. The “tools for humans” language. The studied informality. The implicit claim to be on the user’s side. The conviction, entirely sincere, that building a software product in San Francisco in 2015 placed you in a lineage that ran from Emerson through Thoreau through Brand through the personal computer revolution. Not because anyone had checked. Because it felt right. Because the people around you believed it. Because the aesthetic said so.

This is how a covenant becomes a costume without anyone deciding to put on fancy dress. Nobody in the process is lying, which is what makes it so hard to name. The Series A founder with the Whole Earth typography on his pitch deck is not a fraud. He has absorbed, in good faith, a culture that absorbed, in good faith, a previous culture, that absorbed, in good faith, a previous one. Each generation inherits the self-image — scrappy, tool-building, democratising access, countercultural at heart — without inheriting the argument that gave the self-image its content. The argument requires reading. The aesthetic does not.

And so the aesthetic spreads, and the argument doesn’t, and the gap that Brand left — the missing theory of the commons, the unaddressed question of collective provision — doesn’t get filled by the inheritors, because they don’t know it’s there. They’ve inherited the solution without the problem. The tools without the philosophy.

In 1972, Brand closed the Last Whole Earth Catalog deliberately. The final page carried two words, beneath a photograph of an early morning country road: Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. It was not a motivational poster. It was a farewell from a man who had built something serious, watched it do serious work, and had the discipline to end it before it became an institution. Before it became the thing it had set out to oppose.

Thirty-three years later, Steve Jobs stood at a Stanford graduation ceremony and quoted those words to a generation of people who would go on to build the companies that now copy the Catalog’s aesthetic. The speech is beautiful and Jobs meant every word of it. That is not the problem. The problem is what happened next — not to Jobs, but to the words. Detached from the document, detached from the argument, travelling at the speed of a motivational quote through a culture hungry for exactly this kind of permission, they became the thing Brand had spent his life trying to prevent. An aesthetic. A brand. A feeling of seriousness without the inconvenience of being serious.

This is what it costs to copy without reading. Not the theft itself — cultures have always borrowed, stolen, remixed. The cost is specific: you inherit the confidence without the doubt. Brand’s argument was always accompanied by genuine uncertainty — about whether the tools would be enough, about whether individual empowerment could substitute for collective provision, about whether the vision was universal or merely available to those already equipped to use it. That uncertainty is in the Catalog, if you read it. It’s in the density, the contradiction, the nudity next to the cybernetics textbook, the pro-kibbutz book next to the LL Bean boots. The form is honest about its own strangeness. It does not pretend to have resolved what it has not resolved.

The founders copying it have resolved everything. The warm tones say: we are on your side. The “tools for humans” language says: access is the answer. The DM Sans headline says: this is serious, and also frictionless, and also you already understand it. When they do try to reckon with it, it’s purely gestural. They’re start ups. Challenging the status quo. But only in the sector. There are no meaningful answers to the status quo of the state. To the status quo of our relations as citizens. To the status quo of the crises through which we now live. None of Brand’s doubt survives the journey. None of his genuine reckoning with the limits of the vision. Only the confidence. Only the aesthetic. Only the costume.

Brand himself followed his logic somewhere his inheritors have not followed him. Pro-nuclear. Pro-GMO. Pro-dense cities. The Long Now Foundation, which is an attempt to build institutional infrastructure that outlasts any individual — which is, quietly, an acknowledgement that anti-institutionalism has limits. His most recent work on maintenance: the unglamorous, unsexy, essential work of keeping good things going. A man who spent his career celebrating the new, spending his final chapters making the case for duration. There is no mea culpa in Brand’s vocabulary, and you would not expect one. But the philosophy of a man who champions maintenance is not the same philosophy as the man who printed Access to Tools on the cover of a broadsheet in 1968. Something has been learned. The inheritors have not learned it.

The Catalog is still there. It is on the Internet Archive. It is free. It is exactly as strange and demanding and contradictory as it was in 1968. Nobody has updated it, smoothed it, made it frictionless, resolved its tensions, turned it into a template. The argument is intact, sitting inside the form, waiting for anyone who wants to have it rather than merely wear it. The tools are still there too. Brand left them out for anyone willing to pick them up.

This is what the copying-without-reading actually cost us. Not originality. Not aesthetic integrity. Something more serious: the defanging of a genuinely unsettling idea. The counterculture’s great trick, historically, is that it gets absorbed. The dangerous thought becomes the mood board. The commune becomes the co-working space. The tools-for-liberation become the subscription tier. “Move fast and break things” is the Catalog’s anti-institutionalism with the philosophy extracted and the aggression turned up — Brand said build a different world, Zuckerberg said break the existing one, and what got broken was mostly the commons. The infrastructure. The things that needed tending. The things Brand himself, in his most recent work on maintenance, quietly admitted needed tending.

The question the Catalog asks — what does a good life look like, what tools does it require, what does it cost to build a world rather than just talk about one — did not get answered in 1972 when Brand closed it, or in 2005 when Jobs quoted it, or in 2015 when it became a Figma template. It is still open. More open than ever, in a world that has inherited the confidence of the counterculture without its doubt.

Pick up where Brand left off.

Read the Catalog. It will not give you answers. It will give you something rarer: a serious attempt to ask the right questions, made by people with genuine skin in the game, in a language that has not yet been smoothed into a brand. It is imperfect, partial, shot through with the blind spots of its moment. It is also, fifty-seven years on, still stranger and more alive and more demanding than anything that claims its inheritance.

That’s the bar. The slide deck didn’t clear it. You might.

Why a number of British politicians experienced a collective crash-out over a short corporate manifesto—published a year earlier in book form, read at the time by anyone seriously interested in the political culture of Silicon Valley, and only deemed politically salient once it resurfaced in short form on X, a platform many of those now criticising it say they don’t use, but clearly still do—is, in itself, worth asking.

The most revealing moment came when Zack Polanski, the Green Party leader, produced a video critique of the manifesto. Palantir responded directly, in public, dismantling it in the comments—and not gently. This was striking less for the rudeness than for the act itself.

A company performing functions adjacent to state power had engaged directly with democratic criticism, named its objections, and made its case openly.

The fact that Polanski’s critique contained errors that a brief Google search would have caught does not diminish the significance of that exchange.1 It arguably sharpens it. They showed up. They argued back. We should want more of that—and we should send better arguments.

And why does a corporate manifesto so reliably produce this kind of response? One otherwise very bright gentleman described it as “a disturbing narcissistic rant from an arrogant organisation.” Another, someone I respect though often disagree with, called it “the ramblings of a supervillain,” arguing that “a company with such naked ideological motivations and disregard for democratic norms should be nowhere near public services.” It is, others have suggested, “far more than a tech solutions company”—one actively seeking to “direct policy, politics and investment choices.”

But is that really that strange?

For the avoidance of doubt: some of the claims are strange. Karp’s repeated obsession with disempowering women voters is weird. His self-mythologising intellectual trajectory—after failing in the traditional academic track—has the quality of a consolation narrative. When reading The Technological Republic, I agreed with about as much as I disagreed with, which has become, in contemporary discourse, a near-universal marker of having said anything at all.

But this essay is not about whether the contents are weird. It is an attempt to place them in a history their critics are not reading—not to make them more palatable, but to stop them being misread as aberrations.

The mythology forming around the manifesto has become a substitute for analysis. It should not surprise a serious reader—and certainly not any government minister attempting to speak coherently about American technological soft power—that a company embedded at the heart of a distinct, decades-old American Gnostic culture would produce a document like this.

Understanding why requires going back further than most of the commentary has bothered to go.

Silicon Valley as a Cult-Site

There is a habit of treating Silicon Valley as though it were an economic phenomenon that accidentally acquired a culture. It is often more accurate to reverse the emphasis. What emerged in Northern California in the late twentieth century looks less like a neutral industrial cluster than the settlement of a particular American religious tendency under new material conditions.

Harold Bloom’s The American Religion provides a useful starting point. His claim is not simply that American Christianity contains gnostic elements, but that its dominant forms—Baptist, Pentecostal, Mormon—are structurally oriented toward inward revelation: the self alone with truth, unmediated by institution, tradition, or priesthood. Authority is relocated from church to individual apprehension. Knowledge, rather than belonging, becomes the organising principle.

This religious structure does not remain confined to the church. In Ralph Waldo Emerson it finds philosophical expression: the doctrine of self-reliance, the insistence that truth is encountered directly and inwardly, without deference to inherited forms. By the mid-twentieth century it mutates again—not disappearing, but changing register. The 1960s counterculture is best understood not as a revolt against this tradition, but as one of its explicit denominations: a low-church, experimental, technologically inflected form of American Gnosticism.

Its participants would not have described themselves in these terms. Like most religious adherents, they held their assumptions loosely, often unconsciously. But the structure is recognisable. The world as given—bureaucratic, corporate, state-administered—is experienced as fallen or false. Truth is hidden, but accessible. There exists an elect, not formally designated but culturally legible: those who have “seen,” whether through psychedelics, communes, or tools. Practice is oriented toward illumination—through experience, systems, and access. Liberation is conceived as autonomy: freedom from imposed definitions of reality and the good life.

Figures such as Stewart Brand give this structure material form. The Whole Earth Catalog functions less as a magazine than as a portable canon: a compendium of tools and techniques for self-directed transformation. Early networked communities such as The WELL resemble congregations without churches—textual, initiation-heavy, stratified by literacy and disposition rather than formal hierarchy. One does not belong by birth, but by capacity.

This is a religious formation with a distinctive strength: it produces individuals who feel newly capable, newly illuminated, newly sovereign. It is far less clear that it can produce institutions that endure. Its suspicion of mediation—of the state, of the corporation, of any shared authority—extends to the very mechanisms by which collective goods are typically funded and maintained. It offers a theory of liberation. It does not offer a theory of provision.

“The Google Advertising Turn and Its Consequences Have Been a Disaster for the Human Race…”

This, roughly, is the story Silicon Valley’s critics tell. First came idealism. Then came the fall.

The most sophisticated version of that critique runs through Shoshana Zuboff. In The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Zuboff identifies a new economic logic: behavioural data harvested from human experience becomes raw material, processed into predictions about what people will do, and sold as what she calls “behavioural futures.” The product is no longer a good or service. It is you—specifically, a probabilistic model of your next action, sold to whoever finds it useful.

Palantir, on this reading, looks like surveillance capitalism taken to its terminal conclusion. The mechanism is the same: aggregate data at scale, model behaviour, sell the predictions. But the customer is not an advertiser. It is a state. The subject is not a consumer. It is a population. The stakes shift accordingly: from influencing a purchase to informing an arrest, a benefit decision, an immigration outcome. Zuboff’s framework fits, in the way that an architectural drawing fits a building that has been constructed somewhat differently from the plans.

The problem is not with the diagnosis of the mechanism. It is with the story the framework requires. Surveillance capitalism, in Zuboff’s telling, is a deviation—a wrong turn taken by an industry that might, under different conditions, have developed otherwise. There is an implicit before: a networked world oriented toward empowerment, access, and connection. And then there is the fall: the moment behavioural data became an extractive resource rather than a social good. The critique depends on that origin being real.

It is not. Or rather, it is real as a set of intentions and self-descriptions, and almost entirely fictional as a structural possibility. The countercultural vision that seeded Silicon Valley—tools for thought, networked empowerment, access to hidden truths—had no viable economic model at scale. It produced small, intense communities, and then it ran out of money. We have already seen that future. It looks very much like The WELL. What Zuboff reads as betrayal was, in the logic of the tradition that produced it, something closer to inevitability.

Which means Palantir is not the corruption of something that was once clean. It is the destination of something that was always travelling in this direction—state-facing rather than market-facing, population-scale rather than consumer-scale, but running on the same epistemological engine. To understand how it arrived there requires understanding what that engine actually was.

When The Commune Becomes The State

The counterculture didn’t fail. That is the first thing to understand. The commune movement, the Whole Earth network, the psychedelic research programmes, the early internet communities—none of these were defeated. They accomplished more or less what they set out to accomplish. Which is precisely the problem.

What they set out to accomplish was individual liberation. Not collective emancipation—that is a different tradition, with different intellectual roots and a different theory of change. The Leary-Brand cluster was always running a recognisably American operating system: the sovereign self, freed from corrupt institutions, accessing hidden truths through the right tools and the right experiences. Emerson with better drugs. The frontier myth, turned inward.

That structure—gnostic in shape, libertarian in conclusion—had no theory of the commons. Not because its protagonists were stupid; many of them were extraordinarily intelligent. But because their foundational claim was that institutions are the problem. You cannot build durable collective infrastructure on that premise. The logic won’t allow it. When Jo Freeman, writing from inside the women’s liberation movement in 1972, observed that “structurelessness” doesn’t produce freedom but informal hierarchy—unaccountable precisely because it cannot be named—she was diagnosing the same pathology. The counterculture’s rejection of formal structure didn’t dissolve power. It just made power invisible.

The vacuum this created was filled, with a kind of horrible efficiency, by capital. Venture funding solved the problem that countercultural ideology could not: how do you pay for liberation at scale? The move to advertising—often narrated as the moment Silicon Valley betrayed its origins—was nothing of the sort.

It was the moment the funding logic that had always been latent in “access to tools” finally became visible. The counterculture was anti-statist by conviction and anti-corporate by aesthetic, which left it dependent on precisely the capital it performatively rejected the moment it needed to grow beyond the means of its founding elect. Once revenue was tied to participation at scale, the refinement of that participation—its measurement, prediction, and optimisation—followed less as a choice than as a trajectory.

The most durable infrastructure to emerge from the counterculture’s moment was built by DARPA—the defence research agency that many of the movement’s participants were actively protesting. The most successful companies to carry its ideas were organised on explicitly capitalist lines, producing devices deliberately engineered to resist the repair and self-sufficiency that the Whole Earth Catalog had celebrated. The liberation of the individual turned out to require a subscription.

None of this was betrayal. It was logical conclusion. Gnostic movements always produce an elect. Liberation without commons always produces capability inequality. Anti-institutionalism always, eventually, produces dependence on whoever was willing to build the institutions. The counterculture looked at American civilisation and diagnosed its pathology with genuine clarity. It then proceeded, with complete structural consistency, to reproduce it. The logical consequence of “empower the individual through tools and consciousness” is not universal empowerment but stratified capability: a small number of actors who become radically powerful within systems they understand, and a much larger number who become dependent on systems they do not.

What is notable about Palantir’s articulation of this worldview is not its turn toward surveillance or control, but its return to the state. The earlier countercultural formation defined itself against mediation—against bureaucratic authority, inherited institutional legitimacy, and the monopolies of traditional power. Its organising fantasy was networks that would dissolve hierarchy rather than reproduce it. But once such systems scale, they encounter something they were never designed to theorise: obligation. Not only economic, but political. The question of what these systems owe—to security, to order, to collective risk—can no longer be deferred.

The same assumptions remain intact in the manifesto: that the world is fundamentally legible given sufficient integration of information; that systems, rather than individuals, are the proper unit of analysis; that knowledge is most valuable when it becomes operational. What changes is not the epistemology but the register. Where the countercultural lineage speaks in the language of access, empowerment, and liberation, the Palantir articulation speaks in the language of necessity, stability, and constraint. The underlying claim is continuous: order depends on the continuous refinement of informational systems.

Palantir is not a deviation from Silicon Valley’s founding imagination. It is what that imagination looks like when it can no longer avoid the question of power. It is what happens when the epistemology of the commune finds itself having to become the epistemology of the state.

State as a Service Companies

Palantir is best understood as part of an emerging class of “state as a service” companies—for better or worse.

Where the state fails—to act, to invest, to maintain capacity—these firms exist to close the gap, and to profit from doing so. From private security providers to outsourced social care, the pattern is already familiar in the UK: when state capacity recedes, private capacity expands into its place.

This raises a more difficult question, worth taking seriously in response to the Palantir manifesto. Have we disempowered the state, and failed to build its capacity in precisely those domains—coordination, maintenance, execution—where replacement is most difficult? And if so, what follows from that?

If the answer is yes, then the issue is not simply that private firms have acquired power. It is that public power has been allowed to degrade in the very areas where it is hardest to rebuild. The market does not invent these functions ex nihilo; it inherits them. Whose fault is that? Theirs? Ours?

This is where the question becomes politically uncomfortable in a more precise sense. If these companies are now part of how the state actually functions, then they are no longer external actors operating alongside public authority. They are co-producers of that authority. And if that is the case, then questions of legitimacy can no longer be deferred onto the state alone.

There is, in principle, a straightforward argument for transparency here. If organisations are performing quasi-state functions—allocating resources, structuring information systems, shaping enforcement capacity—then they are already exercising forms of power that require justification. It is not unreasonable to expect them to articulate what they believe they are doing, and why they believe it is legitimate.

This is not an unusual demand. Elected officials are required to do precisely this. Their authority is conditional on public justification: explanation, contestation, and ultimately consent. The question is why a structurally similar expectation should not apply, at least in some form, to organisations that now occupy adjacent functional space.

We are used to G4S and Serco. Both carry out those parts of state function that the state finds politically or administratively inconvenient—often in ways that are difficult to publicly justify, and even more difficult to properly scrutinise. That is, arguably, why they’re outsourced in the first place.

Their role is rarely accompanied by any explicit account of why this distribution of responsibility is legitimate. Pure profit, perhaps. But profit from what, exactly, and under what moral assumption?

Why is it acceptable, for instance, for private actors to profit from price gouging local authorities attempting to care for disabled children? The question is not only economic but justificatory: what account do these organisations give of the legitimacy of what they are doing? How do they sleep at night?

In practice, they do not give one. Instead, a set of assumptions about necessity, efficiency, and inevitability is embedded in the structure of the arrangement itself. The justificatory framework is smuggled in implicitly—through contract, repetition, and administrative normalisation—rather than stated or defended openly.

The result is a form of implicit governance: decisions about what is acceptable to outsource, and on what terms, are embedded in contracts and incentives rather than stated principles. We do not ask these organisations what they believe they are doing. We simply allow them to do it.

Say what you like about Palantir, but at least they’ll tell us why.

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Reading Leary’s futurism in 2026 feels like an exercise in absurdity. Partly because some of his claims are plainly absurd (“Literacy an obscurity by 2010? Most work automated by 2008?!”), and partly because it feels like he is speaking a dead language. There is a whole, once-glorious civic tradition of belief about what the internet could be for—and the role it ought to play in our lives—that his work slots into almost too neatly, as though it were simply another book on a shelf that has since become an endangered species in any bookstore of repute.

The civic imagination of the internet in 2026 is one of restriction, toxicity, balkanisation, and marginalisation. If you were sent here on an anthropological mission from another planet, you would be forgiven for thinking the internet had reached a stage of terminal managed decline: a technology we never wanted and now merely endure, despite its insurmountable flaws, until we can breathe a sigh of relief and freedom from tyranny at its inevitable collapse.

What happened to “Smart Thinking”?

Turn to any Waterstones “Smart Thinking” section, looking for interesting writing on the internet, and you are quickly met with spine after spine of titles that read something like How to Detox and Unfascist Your Screen-Addicted Five-Year-Old and Remember What Grass Felt Like. A veritable Alcoholics Anonymous for our relationship with the internet.1

If you are very lucky, you might find something more rigorous, with a blurb along the lines of: The internet is a colonial, anti-feminist, racist, homophobic conspiracy to drown the polar bears and stop you using your own brain—but you can fight back.2

Tucked away right at the back, blowing off the dust, you will occasionally find a book that argues the internet is very, very bad, but not quite as bad as the others say it is.

Desperate for some sort of optimism, you turn on the news: your next mistake. They are banning under-17s from ever being able to buy cigarettes, and from using Instagram, in the same week! The language used to justify both is strikingly similar. Fill in the blanks, you couldn’t tell the difference.

The internet was a mistake, you come to understand, and the best we can do is to shield our children from it, ban it from our homes, and hope it goes away sometime soon.

How did we build something so expansive—arguably the closest thing to a pocket sized Library of Alexandria, offering near-universal communication, access to labour markets, medical care, dissident publishing, cultural production, and political mobilisation, the likes of which our ancestors could not even comprehend—and so quickly arrive at a posture of collective disappointment? A shared sigh of: is it over yet?

There was once a serious intellectual and cultural tradition that treated the internet as a site of political possibility — not harmony, or perfection, but agency, friction, experimentation — and that tradition has been replaced not just by pessimism, but by a narrower imagination of the internet as simply a social harm to be managed.

How do we bring that back?

The Cyber Punks

For those unfamiliar with the counterculture I’m invoking, the “cyberpunks” were less a movement than a loose intellectual constellation: writers, theorists, hackers, and cultural critics orbiting the early digital frontier in the late twentieth century.

Figures like William Gibson and Bruce Sterling gave the cluster its aesthetic form through speculative fiction — bringing into the civic imagination dense, networked worlds in which information, capital, and identity flowed through systems no single actor could fully control, before anything that quite resembled that really emerged. Freedom from authoritarianism and top-down control sat somewhere near the centre of these imaginaries, surfacing in everything from intellectual skirmishes to the occasional attempt to throw sand in the gears of those building the “tools of the machine” (Like IBM, if one were feeling ungenerous).

Around them, a broader milieu took shape: part science fiction, part systems theory, part countercultural experimentation, and part technical practice. It was never unified, and rarely programmatic. What held it together was not a shared doctrine, but a shared intuition that digital networks would not simply extend existing institutions, but reconfigure the terrain on which power, agency, and culture operated. An odd, misfit collection of people — many of them searching for some last square mile of earth on which an experimental life might still be lived — converged on emerging technologies as their best remaining candidate.

Within that sensibility, the internet was not imagined as a harmonious public square — an Edwardian coffee house, minus the smoke and the empire — but as something more volatile and generative: a space of friction, asymmetry, and possibility. Early cyber-libertarians like John Perry Barlow articulated visions of digital autonomy that sat uneasily alongside darker, more ambivalent currents, such as those associated with Nick Land, where technological systems seemed to accelerate beyond human control altogether (a line of thought that has not entirely gone away, and is having a bit of a renaissance as of late…). Across these differences, a common set of assumptions emerged: that power would be redistributed but not equalised; that institutions would struggle to keep pace; and that individuals, subcultures, and informal networks would find new forms of leverage within complex systems. The internet, in this frame, was politically real — not an escape from the world, but a new layer of it. The internet wasn’t somewhere one escaped power, but somewhere in which a new form of it would converge.

It is tempting to smooth this into a familiar origin story: that cyberpunk, hacker culture, and countercultural systems thinking somehow “became” personal computing, then the internet, then the platform world we now inhabit. That would still be too neat a causal chain for a messier history—there is considerably more military funding and more banal profiteering in the real history than this narrative allows for—but it is not entirely wrong in its underlying intuition.

The stronger claim is that, for a period, these civic imaginaries did not merely anticipate what was coming; they actively structured what could be built. The personal computer, networked communication, portable computation, and later the architecture of the internet itself were not external surprises to this worldview, but internally consistent outcomes of it. Within Gibson’s networked futures, Sterling’s infrastructural politics, and the surrounding hacker ethos of systems that could be probed, bent, and recomposed, these developments appear as the natural downstream of a particular way of thinking about information systems.

In that sense, cyberpunk did not just describe emerging technologies — it provided part of the conceptual environment in which those technologies became thinkable as desirable, inevitable, and buildable in the first place. We can only build what we can imagine.

Timothy Leary sits slightly awkwardly within this landscape, but recognisably so — not least to himself. Earlier, more utopian, and often more explicitly evangelistic, his futurist writing lacks the harder edge of later cyberpunk thought. And yet he shares its central conviction: that digital technologies would transform not just communication, but consciousness, authority, and the organisation of social life. If his tone now reads as naïve, it is because he belongs to an earlier moment in the same intellectual arc — one in which the possibilities of the network were still being mapped rather than lived through.

His attempt to carry the ambitions of the psychedelic era into a new technological domain ultimately faltered, in part because it retained the same overconfidence in inevitability, the same fondness for packaging ideas as if they were already mass culture, and that most Leary of tendencies to assume that, no matter how improbable it might sound, it would all come good in the end — and he would, of course, be proved right.

One should avoid being too rose-tinted about the cyberpunks. The internet they imagined was, in many respects, smaller, more legible, and more socially bounded than the one that emerged — closer, in spirit, to an expanded The WELL3 than to the sprawling, ad-saturated platforms that would follow. It was reputation-driven, discursive, and relatively coherent: a world in which identity, trust, and conversation still held together. Had the network evolved along those lines, their predictions might have appeared broadly correct. But to dismiss their more provocative claims simply because the form diverged is to miss the more interesting possibility — that, at the level of structure and function, the internet we have may still resemble aspects of what they anticipated.

The Harm Police

I take the criticism—levelled at me at every available opportunity—that I am too optimistic, too naïve about the internet, as something of a badge of honour. If only because it is rather difficult not to be more optimistic than its current critics are.

Our current civic imagination resembles something less like a frontier and more like a jurisdiction — a space watched over by what one might call the “Harm Police”. Not a single institution, or even a coordinated project, but a diffuse settlement of regulators, platforms, NGOs, and professionalised moral entrepreneurs, all converging on the same basic premise: that the primary task of the internet is not to expand possibility, but to minimise damage.

The language shifts accordingly. Where once there was talk of autonomy, experimentation, and systems, there is now talk of safeguarding, mitigation, and user safety — a vocabulary less of politics, or liberation, than of risk management.

What’s important to separate here, before going further, is that my claim is not that there are no harms worth taking seriously. From online gambling to CSE imagery, the internet — as a compressed, accelerated version of human social life — contains exactly the kinds of dangers and nasties one would expect when human behaviour scales without friction. It is both right and necessary that these harms are confronted.

The difficulty is elsewhere. As the language of harm has expanded, it has also blurred. The term now stretches to cover everything from genuinely life-threatening abuses to experiences of discomfort, offence, or ideological disagreement, often without clear distinction between them. In doing so, it risks losing the precision that made it useful in the first place — and, with it, our ability to distinguish between what must be prevented, and what is simply the natural — if often uncomfortable — consequence of millions of people having the freedom to share both their best and, more often than we might like, their worst ideas.

Our definition of harm may, regrettably, have jumped the shark a bit…

The internet appears less as a space in which new forms of social and political life might emerge, and more as a problem to be contained: a source of addiction, radicalisation, misinformation, and ambient psychological strain. Its users are recast accordingly—not as agents navigating complex systems, but as vulnerable subjects in need of protection from forces they are presumed unable to understand or resist. The idea that some people are simply too susceptible, too stupid, to distinguish between “real life” and what they encounter on Facebook has become a surprisingly accepted paternalistic position—a return, in effect, to a clerical logic in which only a designated few are deemed sufficiently informed to interpret reality for everyone else.

Few moments crystallise this more sharply than the rousing laughter at a TED talk by Carole Cadwalladr on Cambridge Analytica and Brexit, in which Leave voters in a rural Welsh town are framed, for laughs, as being a bit thick for daring to live in places that have materially benefited from EU funding. The implication, barely submerged beneath the rhetoric of concern, is that they have been “misled” in a way that only external correction can remedy. They are, in this framing, victims of cognitive capture who cannot be trusted to recognise what their betters already know—otherwise, of course, they would vote differently.4

From this new class of concern emerges a cottage industry of mis and disinformation, terms which also once held real, useful, harm reducing meaning, but have quickly devolved into a license for ideological policing. One cannot, nowadays, merely have an heterodox interpretation of the facts of the day, without veering into the crosswinds of a new order.

The Cambridge Analytica scandal rocked Western democracy—one of the great snake-oil sales jobs of our time, so effective that many came to believe it had actually worked!—catapulting us, or perhaps giving us the necessary excuse, into an era of profoundly diminished civic imagination about what the internet can be for in democratic life. It becomes the “fascism machine”: nothing good can come of it, every movement is suspect, we are overrun by deepfakes and fake news, and nothing is real anymore.

The fact that this narrative shift may, arguably, be rather concurrent with the right of the political spectrum getting better at the internet than the left—preceded by a brief, almost naïve age of Arab Spring–fuelled optimism (around the period when the left were, in turn, markedly more fluent online than the right)—is a private heresy. Suggesting that, maybe, this is our fault, and we have an obligation to try and fix it, makes you as popular as leprosy on the left.

You can see this shift almost anywhere you look. In policy, where platforms are treated less as infrastructures to be shaped than as hazards to be regulated. In everyday discourse, where the internet is spoken of in tones once reserved for smoking or processed food: something to be limited, monitored, and, ideally, avoided altogether. Even the language of public health has crept in, with “exposure”, “contagion”, and “harm reduction” standing in for older ideas about participation, experimentation, or even simple use. I would settle for use, in the sense of how one might use a toaster, rather than “use” in the sense that one might do Crack, at this point.

It is easy to imagine that this is how the internet was always spoken of, given how ubiquitous it has become. But within living memory there were reams upon reams of paper devoted to its possible upsides: how it might be used to solve major social dilemmas, make healthcare more accessible, and connect people across the globe. Much like the shift in how we now talk about it in the context of democracy, it feels as though we may have slightly overcorrected—so determined to throw the baby out with the bathwater out of a kind of collective social embarrassment.

It cannot be, we are slowly, drippingly, erodingly led to believe, that we, a newly evolving species given fire by Prometheus, have simply misused the technology and could yet learn to use it differently. No — there is no hope for the lot of it. At least, not until we can strip it of all our mortal sins: from the clutches of capitalism to the mere presence of right-wing thought, and settle into an ultimately unsatisfying, unsuggestive, unchallenging cul-de-sac, like Bluesky. The intellectual equivalent of a sawdust protein bar. Arguably good for you, but you’ll always miss Mars Bars.

One veers into the territory of nihilist degrowth: the internet would be wonderful, if not for all the people on it.

The result is not simply a more cautious internet, but a more impoverished imagination of what it is for. Where the cyberpunks saw a messy, generative field of power and possibility, today we are more likely to see a system of risks to be managed and behaviours to be corrected. The network remains as vast and as capable as ever. More so, even. Every day AI seems to solve another unsolvable problem. What has contracted is the range of meanings we are prepared to assign to it — and, with that, the kinds of futures we are able to imagine within it.

Such is the quiet force of language: it does not merely describe what something is, but stabilises what it can be used for. Once the internet is spoken of in the vocabulary of cigarettes or processed food — as something addictive, contaminating, inherently suspect — then any suggestion that it might also be useful, generative, even necessary begins to sound faintly absurd.

Not just naïve, but morally suspect: as though one were arguing for cigarettes in schools, or dealing them behind the bike sheds. The terms of debate tilt so far towards harm that even the possibility of value starts to look like a kind of bad faith.

The Cyber Punks as a civic reclamation yard

Faced with an increasingly irredeemable civic imagination for the internet—one of terminal managed decline—it can be easy to feel as though we must begin again from scratch, that nothing already said is adequate to the scale of the present moment. But there are no new ideas under the sun, and I am something of an aficionado of the reclamation yard: what older intellectual materials might be salvaged for new problems?

The cyberpunks, in particular, offered a few ideas that may still be worth recovering.

Agency inside systems

Across cyberpunk fiction, early internet libertarian writing, and adjacent strands of late twentieth-century systems thinking, there is a recurring refusal of the idea that agency sits outside technological systems looking in. From the networked, partially opaque worlds of William Gibson’s Neuromancer to later sociological accounts of distributed agency, the assumption is instead that actors are always operating within environments they can neither fully see nor fully control.

Users are not sovereign actors moving through neutral space, but neither are they passive recipients of platform effects. They are operators within constraints that they learn, exploit, and adapt to in real time. This sits uneasily between Leary-esque liberation narratives of digital transcendence, and Cadwalladr-style framings of pervasive platform manipulation and ‘brainwashing’, instead occupying a more prosaic middle ground: people are broadly rational within the bounds of their environment, and will behave accordingly regardless of the safety assumptions designed into that environment.

What this enables, in practice, is a more realistic account of online behaviour. It allows you to see that people are not simply “vulnerable users” or “malicious actors”, but active participants constantly adjusting to incentives, interface design, and social feedback loops. It becomes easier to understand why behaviour shifts across platforms, or why superficially similar interventions produce very different outcomes. More importantly, it resists the moral flattening that comes from assuming that position in a system directly maps onto intent or responsibility.

Without this lens, contemporary discourse tends to over-credit design intention (“platform X is doing Y”) while under-crediting adaptive behaviour (“users will always find ways to repurpose it”). With it, the internet becomes less legible as a moral landscape and more legible as a negotiated one. People do not simply receive platforms; they work them, bend them, and repurpose them in ways that are only partially predictable in advance. The more interesting question is therefore not how to prevent certain behaviours from emerging, but what conditions consistently generate them in the first place.

What is it about people, their conditions, their incentives, that makes them use these tools in this way?

Misuse as neutral information

Within hacker culture, early internet engineering practice, and the broader ethos of “systems thinking” that emerged alongside cybernetic theory in the late twentieth century, breakdown and misuse were rarely treated as purely external failures. From early bulletin board cultures through to the ethos of probing systems through their vulnerabilities, there is a persistent assumption that what a system cannot prevent often reveals more about it than what it was designed to do.

In this frame, misuse is not simply deviation from intended use, but a form of system intelligence. Spam, hacking, workaround cultures, engagement farming, and edge-case behaviours are not external noise to be removed; they are diagnostic signals about how systems actually behave under pressure — what people want from tools, both good and bad, that they are not currently getting.

What this enables is a shift in emphasis from moral reaction to structural understanding. Instead of treating every form of misuse as evidence of failure or bad actors, you begin to treat it as a way of reading the system itself. Where does it break? Where does it incentivise distortion? Where does it invite unintended optimisation? What are the real-world incentives producing this behaviour, and how might they be addressed in the world in which they actually occur, rather than displaced into abstract expectations that “fixing” the platform will resolve them in isolation?

This matters because much internet governance discourse treats suppression as synonymous with understanding: if something is harmful, the response is to remove it as quickly and cleanly as possible, closing off as many routes to “bad” behaviour as possible. The cyberpunk lens suggests the opposite possibility — that premature removal can obscure the very dynamics that produced the problem in the first place. In other words, systems become harder to understand when they are perfectly controlled, not easier. To understand how a system behaves under real conditions, one has to observe it under strain. To understand how it holds, one has to see where it gives.

The digital is political

Across cyberpunk literature, early internet manifestos, and post-90s digital sociology, there is a shared — if often unstable — intuition that the internet was never separate from political life. John Perry Barlow’s famously utopian-libertarian framing of cyberspace as a distinct jurisdiction sits alongside, and in tension with, many more grounded accounts of infrastructure and power such as those later developed in the work of Manuel Castells on network societies.

The cyberpunk intuition is that the internet is not a separate domain adjacent to politics, but a continuation of it through infrastructural form. What the internet produces, at scale, is the collision of a vast number of fallible human beings who are able to know more about one another than human systems were ever really designed to accommodate. The result is not an abnormalisation of behaviour, but its amplification: the same range of fallibilities, conflicts, and harms that have always characterised social life, rendered more visible, more continuous, and more rapidly transmitted. These are human behaviours first, not system failures. There is, in this sense, no meaningfully “apolitical” internet. It is not apart from politics, nor a quarantinable subset of it; it is one of the primary ways politics now takes form.

What this enables is a refusal of the “online/offline” split that quietly underpins much contemporary commentary. Once that distinction is dropped, digital life becomes harder to treat as an external contamination of civic life and easier to recognise as one of the sites in which civic life is already being structured. This also shifts where responsibility is located, and harm can be addressed. Issues such as the Manosphere, gambling addiction, or other forms of digitally mediated harm are not adequately understood as problems of “platform behaviour” alone, but as expressions of broader social conditions that are then amplified, routed, or intensified online. What appears on the surface is not the cause, but the expression — the rash, not the infection. You can layer regulation, moderation, and enforcement onto those expressions as heavily as you like; it does not, on its own, resolve the underlying conditions that produce them.

This shift is practically important because it changes where attention is directed. Rather than focusing solely on downstream behaviours — what is said, shared, or believed — it redirects focus upstream, toward the architectures that shape which behaviours are more or less likely to emerge in the first place. It becomes a question not only of content, but of conditions.

Friction is constitutive

In both cyberpunk fiction and the broader post-dotcom recalibration of thinking about digital systems, there is a persistent sense that friction is not an accident of imperfect design, but something intrinsic to systems operating at scale. The early optimism of seamless digital coordination gives way, in later writing and experience, to a more ambivalent understanding: that conflict, ambiguity, and misalignment are not exceptions to system behaviour, but part of how such systems actually stabilise and evolve.

Perhaps the most counterintuitive of these assumptions — particularly within a contemporary harm-focused framing — is that friction is not an engineering failure to be eliminated, but a constitutive feature of any system operating at scale. Conflict, ambiguity, disagreement, and even misuse are not deviations from system health; they are part of the mechanism through which systems generate structure, meaning, and coordination in the first place.

What this enables is a more sober account of what “improving” the internet can realistically mean. The prevailing instinct is to equate improvement with the reduction of friction: safer spaces, cleaner feeds, fewer encounters with disagreement or discomfort. But systems do not become frictionless; they redistribute friction. Pressures removed in one place tend to re-emerge elsewhere, often in less visible but more rigid and less negotiable forms.

Nowhere is this better understood than in the great divorce: Bluesky and Twitter. We have had enough of the fascists, it is decided—we shall rebuild Twitter without the sins of the flesh before it. No algorithm. No Elon Musk. And then, it shall appear before us: the future of the internet. A thriving bastion of democracy, a new liberal town square.

What followed was not especially hard to predict. Twitter did become more right-wing, largely as a function of distribution: when the left leaves, the remaining user base necessarily shifts rightwards. Some norm boundary-pushing emerged from the more extreme edges of the right, though even that appears to be partially self-correcting over time. But Bluesky could not solve the polarisation crisis it set out to solve—how could it? when it is structurally just as polar, only inverted. If polarisation is the problem you set out to solve, both sides have failed.

Without suggestive algorithms, users tend to settle into smaller and smaller clusters of like-minded milquetoast agreement, reassured that the problems of democracy exist somewhere out there, but not here. Like turning the lights off in a game of hide and seek and assuming you cannot be found: if I cannot see you, you cannot see me.

Both sides of this “divorce” end up in need of precisely the friction they set out to escape. Musk’s “free speech” haven falters when entire categories of speech are conspicuously absent; Bluesky-brain, now a mildly derisive shorthand, describes the tendency for users to mistake the informational environment of the platform for the world itself. As David Cameron once remarked, Twitter is not Britain. Neither platform has much claim to being a civic square, despite both gesturing towards it. What has been erected instead looks less like a new public sphere than a pair of parallel enclosures—something closer to a Berlin Wall than a replacement town square.

What follows is not resolution, only sorting. Spaces become more internally coherent, but that coherence is purchased through selection. The result is not less polarisation, but differently structured polarisation: more self-contained environments, each with its own internal sense of normality, and each increasingly unable to recognise the other as anything other than distorted or illegitimate. The shared friction has not disappeared — it has been externalised into the boundary between systems. You can’t have low friction systems and any of the things that create friction - like free speech, disagreement, or debate. You’ve got to pick a side of the fence, and optimise for it.

The point is not that these attempts are misguided in intention, I’d have to make a stronger argument for that, but that friction cannot be subtracted from a system without consequence. It reappears as separation. What is removed from shared space returns as distance between spaces. The result is not a smooth centre, but a set of increasingly self-consistent worlds — easier to inhabit from within, harder to negotiate across.

Takeaways

What begins to emerge from this is less a conflict between “optimism” and “pessimism” about the internet than a narrower, more consequential shift in what kinds of descriptions are permitted to carry authority. The cyberpunk sensibility—partial, messy, systems-aware, tolerant of ambiguity and misfire—did not disappear because it was disproved. It faded because it no longer matched the dominant civic requirement for legibility: clear categories of harm, clear categories of responsibility, and clear pathways of intervention. In that transition, something quieter was lost: not the internet itself, but the interpretive styles that allowed it to be understood as anything other than a problem to be managed.

The question, then, is not whether the cyberpunks were right, or whether the Harm Police are wrong—you know what side I’m on, but that is not the essay I am writing here, perhaps another day—but what happens to a tool when one set of interpretive habits becomes so dominant that others fall out of circulation. The internet has not changed so much as our permissible language for describing it has narrowed: from systems to symptoms, from politics to pathology, from friction to failure.

If figures like Leary now feel like they are speaking a dead language, it is not because their claims were incorrect, but because they were speaking in a register in which the internet could still be imagined as something other than a risk surface. And if anything is worth recovering, it is not just the language of nostalgia, but the possibility of multiple civic imaginaries existing at once—each imperfect, none sufficient, but together closer to the scale of what they are trying to describe.

A KPI — a Key Performance Indicator — is, in theory, a proxy: a single number used to indicate whether progress is being made towards a broader goal.

It is not, one is tempted to stress, supposed to become the goal itself, nor a substitute for a clear vision of the future one is trying to bring about.

In a well-functioning system, it would remain precisely that: a useful abstraction, nothing more. And yet, we have arrived at precisely that terminal destination — and now find ourselves surprised by the terminal nature of the politics that has followed.1

The Age of the Magic KPI

Ours is, regrettably, the age of the magic KPI. Our managerial culture of politics — of tweaks, referenda and adjustments of course — lends itself neatly to such an end. The country is, in this era, no longer a collective of citizens working towards some great civic purpose, nor a people united by a shared sense of culture or endeavour, but a somewhat gangly class of minimum-wage office workers. We have targets, not aspirations. Deliverables, not purpose.

Britain, and its politics, is on a perpetual PIP (personal improvement plan). And everyone knows that, by the time you are on one of those, it is really just a polite notice period.

The worship of narrowly chosen metrics in politics — from the price of petrol at the pump to the mythic five-year land supply — may gesture towards progress, but they are insufficient to give us any real sense of meaning or direction as a society. They are not an arc of history we might wish to bring about. They are, bluntly, a magic line.

Government by KPI has an obvious problem: it selects for what is easily measurable, rather than what is meaningful. Once you begin governing through metrics, the world quietly reorganises itself around them. What cannot be counted recedes from view. Policy becomes a vector of KPIs. What can be counted becomes reality. And slowly, the map replaces the territory.

The magic line goes up — all is well. The magic line goes down — catastrophe. KPIs have been elevated beyond their proper function (to measure a particular element of society from a particular vantage point) to something quasi-mythic. They now sit at the centre of our post-modern search for meaning.

Spreadsheet Politicians Against the Cult of Measurement

People who know me might find my frustration with magic KPI culture surprising. Why would I, a creature of Gantt charts, spreadsheets, and the risk register, have a bone to pick with KPIs?

The officers and colleagues who have known me best will confirm there is nothing I love more than a “big spreadsheet”. If there’s a risk register to review, sign me up. I’m a governance geek. A believer in state capacity and how we make things happen, which is, more often than not, with spreadsheets and cold hard cash. Whatever level of detail you think a Member wants when they ask to see the spreadsheet — just give her the full dataset. That is, as far as I am concerned, a perfectly serviceable operating manual for working with me as a councillor.

I do not resent the data. The datapoint. The KPI. I love nothing more.

What I do resent is the cult of the magic KPI, and what it has done to our collective ability to articulate a meaningful vision of progress — one against which compromise and trade-offs can be made.

This is not an argument against measurement itself. The mistake is not that we use numbers, but that we forget what they are for. A KPI is not a judgement; it is a fragment of information designed to assist judgement. When it is treated as a substitute for judgement, it ceases to clarify reality and begins to replace it.

Modern politics has not become data-driven; it has become data-ruled. Metrics designed to inform judgement now replace it. In the absence of a shared sense of what the state is for, we cling to “magic KPIs”: numbers that promise clarity and certainty, but in practice reduce politics to ritual.

The result is a system that can optimise endlessly, but no longer knows what it is optimising towards. There is no civic future in the era of the magic KPI.2

A Measure of the Measure

Anyone who has ever set KPIs also knows the more insidious problem — or, for those less public-spirited, the great convenience: if you choose the right measure, it will measure what you want.

The Liberal Democrats make this point in their latest sewage campaign. If one measures the amount of sewage entering rivers by the hour, one can pump as much or as little as needed within that timeframe and still hit the target. Volume, as Tim Farron demonstrates with his neckable pint, is the KPI that actually captures the problem.

“Hours” was not chosen by accident. It was the rational choice in the era of the magic KPI. If you are a water company, you are laughing. You can pump more sewage in less time and report that the magic line — hours of sewage discharge — has gone down.

Hum hallelujah, the magic line has fallen. The country is on the mend. The river is still full of shit, as are the water company executives, but by the metric we have chosen to measure progress, we are a better country for it!

It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that we may be worshipping the wrong god.

This is where the comfort of the KPI becomes dangerous. It offers the illusion of legibility in systems that are inherently complex, contested, and multi-causal.

And once that narrowing takes hold, it becomes difficult to argue for anything else: the sanctity of our waterways as a good in itself; the habitats that sewage discharges are disrupting; the wild swimming, or children’s trips to the beach, that can no longer happen. These things can be measured by a KPI, but they cannot be fully captured by KPI alone. And if you try to articulate the issue within such frames, they quickly become subservient to the KPI itself. The problem must, we are told, be measurable. Anything else appears, by definition, unmeasurable—and therefore unserious.

The Venerated Five-Year Land Supply

Few exercises in the British political psyche demonstrate the religious fervour of the magic KPI better than the 5-year land supply.

For those who didn’t spend their misspent youth in and around local government, the 5-year land supply is a metric against which councils in England are perpetually judged. In theory, it’s simple: councils must always have enough deliverable sites to build five years’ worth of housing.

Sensible enough — a way of ensuring we don’t simply run out of land and stop building homes altogether. As someone whose preferred number of new houses is, as I often tell my officers, “more”, you might think I would be instinctively in favour. After all, we do need more homes.

Any optimism that the 5-year land supply, as a KPI, actually delivers those homes tends to dissolve on contact with the quasi-spiritual process of agreeing one.

How many houses is a 5-year land supply? You may ask. It depends, it seems, on the government of the day, the weather, and a series of odd ratios and formulae magicked up in a Whitehall office, bearing little resemblance to any actual population data. One can go from having a 5-year supply to not having one in an afternoon, I’ve seen it happen, without the amount of land set aside for housing changing by one square inch.

Does your landlocked council area actually have enough land to deliver that many homes? Does the government’s approach to taxation and credits incentivise developers to build them? Can anyone afford any of these mythical, unbuildable homes?

What silly questions to ask, councillor. Heretical thoughts.

The number eventually arrived at serves as an omen for every council. Drop below the dreaded five-year threshold and God is the least of your worries. You face the greatest threat the government can levy against any British council: a presumption in favour of development, planning appeals harder to resist, control loosened — the kryptonite of any semi-rural local authority. Such dark tidings cannot be allowed to come to pass.

And so the ritual begins.

Across the country, countless hours of officer time — which might otherwise be spent making homes easier to build, or improving their quality — are devoted to sustaining this mystic number. Meetings are convened. Evidence is marshalled. Sites are debated, re-debated, and debated again. Residents arrive, year after year, to oppose developments that, more often than not, will never actually be built. Like migratory birds, they return to the same chambers, rehearsing familiar arguments — this time with a different set of badgers or newts in support.

It is hard not to feel, at times, that one is witnessing something closer to ritual than policy. The 5-year land supply is the closest I have come to understanding how earlier societies must have felt performing sacrificial rites for rain, or for victory in war: the careful recitation of formulae, the invocation of obscure authorities, the shared sense that if the process is followed correctly, the desired outcome will eventually arrive. The fact that it didn’t work last time, nor the time before that, will not dissuade us.

It is, ultimately, a performative act of worship — everyone knows, at some level, that it is pointless. Setting our five-year land supply has not, in practice, ever delivered that many homes; claims that it has delivered any additional homes — beyond those the market would otherwise have provided uninterrupted — are spurious at best. And yet we do it again. And again. And again. And still, nothing gets built.

The measure itself bears almost no resemblance to how homes are actually delivered. But if we all gather together, say the magic incantations, commune with the wise village elders — in the form of a JSP, a JCS, or whatever acronym currently holds the ring — host the spiritual meetings (where the forces of green space defence are once again invoked to protect the park marked in the five-year supply, which everyone knows will never be built on), and perform the sacred rites, we reassure ourselves that, one day soon, we will build enough homes.

God willing, we have performed the rites. The houses must surely follow?

And then we still don’t build enough homes.

The difficulty is that once a metric becomes politically central, it begins to absorb the space in which judgement would otherwise operate. Decisions that ought to be made in the open — about trade-offs, priorities, and competing goods — are instead displaced into optimisation of the measure itself. What looks like technical governance is often simply concealed political choice.

The choice, here, being: “We, central government, don’t have the mettle to take delivering housing at scale seriously, so we’re going to make it your fault by setting undeliverable targets on things you have limited to no control over, and then punish you for not meeting them, so we look like we’re doing something, really!”

Ritual conditions

Some will call my last character assassination of Westminster a bit unfair and chalk this up to the demographic realities of British councils. They are not, on the whole, young or especially lively places. This is, in part — and I say this with due apology to those it may offend — the young people’s fault.

Yes, the money is poor, the hours are long, and it is difficult to find well-paid work that accommodates this form of public service. But that is the nature of the thing. If you think we need more young councillors, it is, regrettably, incumbent upon you to become one - or at the very least to make a respectable donation, in cash or in kind, to the campaign of someone who will.

It is a difficult time to serve as a local authority councillor, but in public life one is occasionally reminded to ask not what one’s country can do for them, but what they can do for their country. The death threats are, if nothing else, very motivating.

But while this may be a contributing factor — I’m willing to take that hit — treating it as the decisive one lets the culture of the magic KPI off the hook.

Within councils, there are countless paid staff officers who genuinely want to build homes. The reality of housing waiting lists is a brutal one. Even where a council has the in-house capacity — something of a rarity — it cannot afford to build homes fast enough to meet demand. There are clear moral, logistical, and fiscal reasons for councils to want to build more housing, and to do so at scale.

Not long ago, while I was lamenting the quasi-spiritual nature of the five-year land supply to a group of officers — complaining about the time spent arguing over sites that will never, in practice, be built on — one of them replied, sotto voce, and under what I will generously describe as Chatham House rules, with: “Not if I have anything to do with it.”

There is no shortage of demand for housing from councils. So what has happened to the supply?

If we want the line to go up, we have to incentivise making it go up. Councillors operate, quite rationally, within a system where new housing is experienced locally as a pure externality. There is no new GP surgery, no library, no meaningful expansion of public services that anyone seriously expects to materialise as a result of development. The homes themselves will, in all likelihood, be of indifferent quality, at best. The “offset” for the loss of green space rarely bears any spatial relationship to the place where that loss is felt.

In those circumstances, councillors behave exactly as one would expect: as rational actors, subject to the preferences of the electorate. If one wants to see councillors — particularly those who might build up the experience over successive terms needed to deliver meaningful housebuilding — support new development, then the public must have a reason to want it too. Without that, you are simply feeding cats to coyotes. Those who support building will, sooner or later, lose their seats to those who do not.

To bring about ends

While I am not, as a rule, in favour of bribery — too much hassle — if one wishes to create the political conditions under which houses are built, one actually has to… do it?

It is not enough to elevate a magic KPI — like the five-year land supply — to some ephemeral height and simply expect it to generate the conditions for its own delivery.

At the harder edge, ministers like Ed Miliband earn a certain begrudging admiration for simply pushing solar schemes and other infrastructure through. But this is, at best, a form of temporal poker: do it often enough, forcefully enough, and sooner or later you lose the political capital required to keep doing it.

Better approaches abound.

Create more local investment vehicles whereby the delivery of new homes actively generates additional funding for local public services. This is particularly promising in the context of social housing, which — alongside its many civic virtues — is a remarkably stable asset class, against which funds can hedge and borrow in order to finance further delivery.

Reform Section 106 wholesale. In its current form, it is a car-crash model of redistributive taxation. Ensure that a greater share of the funds extracted from developers is actually spent locally — rather than disappearing into distant infrastructure budgets — and, crucially, communicate that fact clearly and visibly.

Establish more master planned zones around key transport infrastructure — rail stations, for instance — where a coherent scheme of development can be agreed (painfully, as it always is) to a consistent set of aesthetic and delivery standards. These can then be auctioned piece by piece to developers with the capital and capacity to deliver at scale. The result: cleaner, more legible schemes, with infrastructure provided upfront, rather than in higgledy-piggledy fragments that make comprehensive funding of new infrastructure all but impossible.

Loosen planning restrictions on gentle intensification: additional floors, mansard roofs, annexes, basement conversions. Allow the existing housing stock to adapt, incrementally and rationally, to changing need. And make it easier to sensitively retrofit the heritage buildings people rightly cherish. Clear supplementary planning documents and assumed-permission frameworks would allow more of these properties to be adapted for modern living — enabling higher occupancy, lower costs, and continued stewardship — without endless rounds of negotiation.

The long term future of… what, exactly?

The problem with such grandiose ideals is that they have nothing to hang on. The culture of the magic KPI — the number must go up, and it must go up now — does not incentivise long-term planning.

It does not know what a well-designed master planned zone might look like. It does not know what a local investment vehicle might sensibly invest in. It does not know what a properly retrofitted home should look like. It knows nothing of our wants, our desires, our hopes, our aspirations. It has no aesthetic taste, no sense of national heritage, no sense of grand civilisational aspiration…

The line just goes up, or down. There is no vision of what we want the world to look like to structure such long-term ambitions. Nothing stable; no shared picture that might last beyond the next election against which capital — political or financial — can be safely committed.

Voters understand this too. One of the great casualties of the death of the civic future is the public’s waning willingness to make individual sacrifices in the name of the common good. In an era of managerialism and tweak-politics, of magic KPIs and ever-shifting goalposts, this is hardly surprising. What, after all, is the public good? What does my sacrifice meaningfully contribute to? What is it worth? And can I trust those asking it of me to deliver?

In the current landscape, it begins to resemble Pascal’s Wager at best. Why should I, as a rational actor, sacrifice something I value — a piece of green space, ease of travel, the ability to secure a GP appointment — on the altar of the magic KPI?

You wouldn’t. And voters are not stupid; they won’t either.

You have to give them something worth believing in. And those visions are, regrettably, rather out of stock these days. Which is why perhaps the most striking and underrated consequence of our era of magic KPIs is what it does to political argument itself.

The Loss of Ends

A healthy politics allows for disagreement about ends. One vision of the future competes with another — not simply over competence, but over what is worth wanting in the first place. It asks citizens to weigh different goods, different risks, different conceptions of the good life.

It is a space of often painful compromise, where each measure of success — green fields, affordable homes, environmental protection — is placed on the scales and balanced against the others in pursuit of a mixed settlement of goods. A vision of the “end point”. But once the metric becomes the mission, that space begins to close.

Debate flattens into a question of speed and efficiency. Not which future should we choose?, but who can make the line move faster? The disagreement is no longer philosophical, but technical. And yet one has to ask when we began weighing politicians primarily on technical competence?

While there is certainly a case for more politicians with experience of doing, quite literally, anything at all, that is not necessarily the skillset required to be an effective one. The work requires an understanding of processes, levers, trade-offs, and knock-on effects.

At its best, political judgement is the ability to convene those who understand how things are actually made to happen; to learn from them critically; and to develop a theory of delivery that balances political capital, fiscal constraint, and legislative capacity. Then to test it at limited scale. If it works, keep going. If it doesn’t, have the humility to pull the plug and return with a better solution — before subjecting the country to a mad-science experiment out of social embarrassment.

A good politician need not be a bricklayer, but they do need to be able to assemble the moving parts required to build a house. To work out how to reduce friction sufficiently to create the conditions in which building becomes possible. The work of politics, at its best, is not delivery itself. Delivery is what makes the line go up or down. The political task is creating the conditions under which delivery can occur. Yet politicians are increasingly assessed as though they were direct delivery agents — a role they, of course, do not have.

We do not, thankfully, live in a planned economy. The gap between what politicians can do, what they believe they can do, and what the public has been socialised to expect them to do is a chasm — dark, damp, and breeding some rather worrying forms of political rot.

The Tyranny of the Measurable

It is in this gap that a certain style of pseudo-economics thrives: modern monetary theory, planetary boundaries, degrowth, rent caps, sugar taxes…

The appeal is obvious. Direct, explicit intervention into tightly defined outcomes becomes the dominant mode of thinking. Every problem appears solvable through a targeted levy or corrective measure. If we will not sin-tax it, the implication goes, we simply do not want to stop it badly enough. We can make the line move, if only we possess the taxable will.

But any serious economist will point out that it is never that simple. One cannot credibly claim to have “fixed” a problem via a single tax instrument while ignoring the broader system of effects it produces.

Taxation is one lever among many — for those fortunate enough to possess it — but it is a fine instrument, not a blunt delivery mechanism. More refined tools exist: tax credits, grants, low-cost financing, procurement strategies, regulatory duties.

But it is here that the language of “30-second policy” and clickbait governance finds such fertile ground. If politics is reduced to moving a handful of lines, it can be explained — or performed — in a handful of seconds. Depth becomes a liability. Trade-offs become evasions. The slow work of articulating a shared future begins to look like indulgence.

Because surely, we are told, we can just fix it now.

You would be hard pressed, in this country, to be blamed for believing that all of our problems are ultimately temporary and chosen. If only we taxed the billionaires, or meat-eaters, or “big business”, we would be living in utopia tomorrow. It is framed not as a question of capacity, but of will — a simple refusal to tax the “bad guys”.

People are told this, over and over again, by politicians in thrall to the magic KPI: that there exist classes of people who, if only we had the will, could be sacrificed on its altar, and the line would go up.

But, frankly, the idea that we can tax our way to heaven is about as plausible as a camel passing through the eye of a needle.

Populism and permanent brokenness

If all that matters is whether the line goes up, then disagreement can no longer be about what the line represents — what it means for the line, and lines like it, to move in some coordinated fashion. It becomes a dispute about competence: who can make it rise faster, who can deliver more efficiently, who can “get things done”.

And when politics is reframed in those terms, it stops being a debate about values and becomes a referendum on frustration. Populism steps neatly into that gap. It offers not an alternative vision, but a simplification: the claim that the line is not merely slow, but sabotaged — that someone (elites, bureaucrats, experts, foreigners, the “deep state”, regulators, “the system”) is deliberately preventing it from rising.

It is a well-known problem for democratic parties in Europe facing a rising far right. A friend of mine was telling me the other day about some fascinating, yet unpublished, work by Zackary Dickson at LSE, which has recently been putting the panic into Westminster’s Labour Party. His upcoming paper explores “green backlash”, and how sharp and uneven household energy price shocks create fertile ground for the far right to frame the transition to renewable energy as unfairly costly.

The same magic line can be mobilised by different classes within a political market to very different ends. You may be able to choose the “line”, but when the line becomes the purpose of politics in and of itself, one cannot provide the contextual case — the trade-offs, the why behind prioritising x over y, any convincing sense that short-term pain may be for long-term gain. Nothing is long term anymore. If the line is not moving in the right direction, it must be a conspiracy. Someone’s fault.

It is, in other words, KPI politics inverted: the same obsession with the line, now narrated as betrayal rather than management failure. When politics ceases to articulate competing futures, it leaves only competing explanations for why the present feels broken.

A sense of brokenness in the current climate is understandable — one only has to look around. But KPI culture compounds this crisis further still. Because when politics becomes about the line going up or down, it can never truly arrive anywhere.

We can never succeed. Hospital waiting times must always fall; they are always too high. The number of homes is never enough; we will always be in want of more. The action we take on the climate will never satisfy the hungry, Ehrlichian gods of the omnicause lobby that masquerades as a climate class.

You cannot truly succeed at anything. You cannot definitively deliver. You cannot finally “fix” anything. So how is anyone meant to believe that things are anything other than perpetually broken?

Beyond the Magic Line

In a more serious model of what the state is for — one grounded in a clear sense of destination, a civic future, if you will — magic lines would rise and fall all the time and no one would panic!

Because once you know where you are going, you can tolerate movement in the wrong direction along the way. You can make trade-offs, consciously and deliberately. A good line may go down because a better one is going up. A short-term deterioration may be the necessary precondition of a long-term gain. Sometimes the outcome will confound you entirely. Sometimes the line itself will turn out to have been the wrong one all along. None of this is failure. It is simply what governing in a complex system looks like.

What distinguishes a serious politics from KPI management is not the absence of metrics, but their subordination. Metrics inform judgement; they do not replace it. They sit within a wider account of what the state is trying to do, what trade-offs it is willing to make, and what kind of society it is attempting to bring into being.

That requires something our current politics struggles to supply: a description of the destination. Not a slogan. Not a target. A picture.

What should a well-functioning town feel like to live in? What should a good home look like, materially and aesthetically? What is the balance between growth and preservation we are actually aiming for? What level of inequality are we willing to tolerate, and in exchange for what goods? What does success, in the round, look like?

These are not questions that collapse into a single line. They are matters of judgement, taste, and political philosophy. They require articulation, argument, and — most unfashionably of all — patience.

Vision, then, is not a replacement for measurement. One cannot govern without instruments. But instruments do not explain what they are for. A map is not a destination, and a series of readings is not a direction of travel.

The task, therefore, is not to abandon KPIs, but to restore their place. Multiple measures must be allowed to coexist, and sometimes to contradict one another. Some will improve while others worsen. Some will prove misleading. Some will need to be discarded altogether. That is not a system failing; it is a system thinking.

Because a politics that knows its destination can absorb complexity without collapsing into panic. It can tolerate ambiguity without reaching for simplification. It can accept that improvement is uneven, and that progress rarely arrives in a straight line.

But a politics that cannot describe its destination will, in time, be governed by its instruments. And instruments, left unchecked, become instructions. KPIs, for all their uses, make very poor masters.

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Orwell said it best, and better than I will, when he said; …They take their cookery from Paris and their opinions from Moscow… England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality. In left-wing circles it is always felt that there is something slightly disgraceful in being an Englishman and that it is a duty to snigger at every English institution, from horse racing to suet puddings. It is a strange fact, but it is unquestionably true that almost any English intellectual would feel more ashamed of standing to attention during ‘God Save the King’ than of stealing from a poor box.

Even as a nation faced the imminent threat of being subsumed by a fascist menace, we could not, for the life of us, agree on a left-wing model of British civic patriotism. The left has no new problems under the sun.

Yet people often find my defence of, and calls for the resurgence of, civic patriotism a little surprising. After all, I am a card-carrying Liberal Democrat, a general social libertine, and a former employee of the European Parliament. None of this, I concede, necessarily qualifies me to offer a more compelling vision of British civic patriotism than anyone else.

But neither do they disqualify me. I am also a (still burgundy) passport-carrying British citizen, and I have devoted almost all of my decade-long adult life to public service for this country. If anyone is more qualified to speak on civic loyalty, I rather doubt it is that Предатель Nigel Farage. So here I am, ready to make a probably inconsequential contribution to a conversation that has long been ceded to those less qualified than myself.

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For all of David Cameron’s sins and porkies, one of the few things I admire him for is the National Citizens Service. Horrendously under resourced, overworked, and perpetually in an identity crisis, it was the last serious attempt to answer the question, “How does any child become a good citizen?” in British politics - and for that, it retains first-mover privilege.

I’m a double tour veteran of the scheme, having led two very bright - and often very grumpy - groups of teenagers through the programme during my undergraduate degree. Making less than minimum wage, surviving hours the Stanford Prison Experiment would consider inhumane, I have never felt prouder of my work since.

For anyone who missed it, the National Citizens Service (NCS) took groups of teenagers, on the cheap - or free for those who needed it - through a few weeks of citizenship skill-building boot camps. Week one: canoeing and high ropes. By the end: fundraising and hands-on community projects. They were given a crash course in what it meant to be a citizen. The pre-prepared teaching resources were often awful, and on more than one occasion I sat up late, late here meaning the early hours of the morning, because my shift ended at midnight, rewriting the ‘lesson plans’. But when it worked, it worked brilliantly. They learned to shop on a budget, write CVs, perform mock interviews, understand local and national government, what a mortgage is, and what was happening in the world around them.

I ran debating classes, while others taught rounders. Mostly, it was a group of teenagers stuck in a field with a bunch of bleeding-heart civic patriots, learning the things their education should have taught them long before. I assumed my patented role as ‘most cringe person there’ so that the teenagers could feel safe looking a bit ridiculous in pursuit of learning something new - something that, at school, is often impossibly hard. And through it all, I had a front-row seat to something I’d been arguing for my whole life: that civic engagement is learned, not inherited, and that even small interventions can shape the citizens a nation will have.

I also learned how to get a child out of a window. He’d got himself stuck trying to sneak out, so yes - these were skills for life.

Much maligned - someone further to the left than me once discovered my enthusiasm for it at a party and unimaginatively called it the National Hitler Youth Service - it attracted all the usual criticisms a civic education project naturally draws, from lavishness to jingoism. It was also prohibitively expensive for a country that funds youth services like water in the Sahara. And yet I still mourn its slow death. Nobody has seriously tried to replace it, and we are all the poorer for that absence.

It is also, I would argue, in urgent need of revival. Populists and their media enablers have monopolised the language of national devotion, but they have done so by reducing it to spectacle, grievance, and exclusion. Their version of patriotism is not the quiet, sustaining kind: the church fete organiser, the litter pickers, the Brownie Guide leader, the neighbour who always lends a ladder. It is the patriotism of division, of exclusivity, of taking your all-too-human hopes for a liveable country for a profitable ride. Because where a healthy, confident patriotism recedes, something else takes its place: a thinner, more antagonistic version of national identity, more interested in drawing lines than sustaining a shared story.

To understand what I mean by civic patriotism, it helps to look backward. To borrow from Alexis de Tocqueville, whom all Americans have read, ‘the health of a polity is measured less by the power of its leaders than by the capacity of its citizens to associate, deliberate, and act together in pursuit of shared ends.’

Civic patriotism, in this sense, is neither sentimental nor tribal. It is not about who yells loudest at a football match, or which flag adorns a lamppost. It is, rather, about responsibility: to a nation conceived as a project of which you are a participant, not a mere possessor. It demands constant, often unglamorous labour: attending local council meetings, volunteering in schools, reading the policies that shape our towns and cities, engaging in debates that are awkward, slow, and complicated. It requires curiosity, patience, and the courage to be wrong in public.

It insists on tolerance - for change, for discomfort, for sharing this country, and your own corner of it, with others - so long as they, too, shoulder the obligations of citizenship. And, crucially, it is available to all, regardless of social background, education, political affiliation, or taste in internet memes.

It contrasts strongly with the cheap nationalism we’ve increasingly been sold as ‘patriotism’: the performative flags-on-Facebook, the grievance-led rallies, the theatre of outrage over which footballer kissed which flag. Civic patriotism asks nothing of spectacle. It asks for your time, relative to how much you have to give, to make your national group project better - not just better than the French.

It can also be quietly, even raucously, celebratory: reclaiming having a few too many pints in a pub garden on St George’s Day from those who’ve made it seem gauche is, to me, an entirely legitimate political exercise. It makes space to explore your national and local history - without the dog-whistles such exercises sometimes carry for those on the left - so that you can understand your place in a very long, very complicated story.

A non-zero factor in the success of the right’s patriotic project - and in the wider retreat of any healthy patriotism - is that we have lost the sense that it matters at all. That it ought to be taught, practised, and passed on. The left’s historical scepticism has led us to cede the language of devotion entirely to those whose version is exclusionary, performative, and divisive. If we cannot recover it, we leave a moral vacuum - one that others will not hesitate to fill.

As a Liberal Democrat, I often find myself having to answer for Ed Davey - something I try to do as little as possible, because really, there was no excuse for that Rizz Dems TikTok. But one thing you do, in fact, have to hand it to him for is his attempt to fill the moral vacuum. To position the Liberal Democrats - through ‘cringe’ flag-waving at conference, fighting the sewage scandal, or rightly objecting to the cheapening of our currency with animals as a replacement for Great Britons - as a left-of-centre party of civic patriotism.

As Kemi Badenoch says Lib Dems are people who fix church roofs. For the past few years, I think we lost sight of that role: that our militant pavement politics, our quiet, hands-on civic work, ought to have a place in the national story. Ed, to his credit, has brought it back.

And God, have people given him fire and brimstone for it! The mere performance of patriotism seems to bring out a very nasty side of some on the left, and I resent it - immensely. We’ve decided, collectively, that patriotism is bad, and that nobody on the left is ever allowed to make any good go at making it less so. Then we bitch and whine and complain that Nigel Farage and Tommy Robinson ‘own’ patriotism, dragging our national image through the mud. Failing to learn a lesson most of us take from a rough fall out in primary school: you cannot win a game you refuse to play.

The Yanks, celebrating their 250th divorce anniversary this year, regrettably have us cornered on this one. While American patriotism is going through one of its rough patches, the left and the right alike manage to foster very rich, very strong, very opinionated models of it. The idea of abandoning American patriotism to MAGA would, rightly, be unforgivable in American circles of any real seriousness. You wouldn’t catch any US presidential candidate in recent memory - short of that old Clinton boy and his disgraceful stance on American troops - trying to run for high office from a place of patriotic squeamishness.

They have a culture of civic ritual, education, and national mythology that both sides take seriously: school curricula that stress the Constitution and the Revolutionary War, Fourth of July parades that blend community service with spectacle, and grassroots campaigns to preserve local historical sites, for reasons other than to stop someone building a block of flats for the riff-raff on it. Political engagement, volunteerism, and debate about what it means to be an American are woven into daily life in ways that feel unavoidable, formative, and generational. They’ve somehow managed to be a country where flags are everywhere - yes, everywhere; if you’ve ever visited, you’d think flags were their second-largest industry after war - without it being dismissed, on the whole, as jingoistic claptrap or intimidation tactics.

A gun-toting, red-capped, guns-and-ammo enthusiast with a deeply rooted suspicion of the ATF can discuss a messy - but shared - model of American patriotism with a blue-haired bisexual psychedelic Californian. Not terribly politely, mind you, but it’s conceivable that they’d be equally defensive of it. And we’ve lost that.

Ed Davey stands as the least-worst attempt at British left-wing patriotism. Mostly because he’s the only one actually trying. Polanski talks a big game, but can’t help regarding it as a little bit weird and I think a little bit imported from America.

His limited attempts at reclaiming patriotism mostly amount to slapping the word onto cheap leftist buzzwords and billionaire-bashing, in much the same way Poundland calls the same cheap plastic tat “Christmas tinsel” one week and “Easter tinsel” the next. It’s no great surprise that the party that thinks slapping a fun, edgy TikTok transition onto the altar of Ehrlich will make its inevitable conclusions more palatable this time around cannot meaningfully engage with patriotism. One cannot love one’s fellow man if one cannot love mankind.

Getting my burning hatred of Zack Polanski out of the way, it’s more worrying still that even Keir Starmer can’t manage it. Rallying the nation in celebration of its great works is, after all, part of the job. It’s no wonder we cannot rouse an army, a navy, or an air force in service of Starmer’s damp patriotism. I’m not even sure it could get a Parkrun started at this point.

A new acquaintance and I - an American in the defence sector - were discussing Palantir and the involvement of US defence companies in the UK market. It was a lively debate at the time. He responded with a line I’ll never forget:

“I don’t think you have to worry too much. We haven’t got enough lawyers for our own love of lawsuits to spare for Mr Starmer’s idea of war. That’s the only kind of defence you guys do these days, right?”

Cheeky, obviously meant to wind me up - but not wrong. There’s precious little defending of the realm in Mr Starmer’s blood, at home or abroad.

I don’t measure a Prime Minister by his taste for war - that’s very Yank - but the larger question remains: what does Starmer actually consider worth defending in the nation he has the privilege to lead? I couldn’t tell you. At a moment of heightened sovereignty tensions, a new technological cold war, energy insecurity, and the post-Brexit question of where Britain stands in the world, one might hope he knows what he’s defending - and might even let us in on it!

At least he seems to have fired the comms team behind those cringe hostage videos in front of the Union Jack or St George’s flag. He’s probably fine down the pub.

But, by invoking the word Brexit, I have to speak on it. The Brexit referendum was the single greatest and most monumental multi-decade failure of the British left in living history. So far, anyways. Anyone who has ever discussed Brexit with me knows where the blame lies: it’s ours. Not theirs, not some external actor’s - ours.

How we, the collective left, managed to lose a vote on Britain’s place in a globalising world just four years after hosting the bloody Olympics is a monumental fuck-up, the likes of which I hope never to witness again - though, realistically, I expect to at the next general election.

We let the red-top papers, the cheap “docu-mental” daytime TV market, and any old right-wing grifter off the street own the national image. Carte blanche. We became, without ever truly being, a nation of benefit scroungers, dodgy-looking immigrants, lefty human rights lawyers, and a vassal state to the European Union.

The European Union! How did anyone persuade anyone that the EU could do anything, let alone enslave Britain? They’d still be having a trilogue about it today had they started considering such an enterprise under Thatcher.

By 2016, the national story had been so shockingly skewed that almost any nonsense made sense to the British people. £350m a week to Europe? A ban on tea? Sounds about right. We had so recklessly, so culpably, rejected - not merely neglected, but openly rejected - our role in building, shaping, and stewarding the national story that we deserved to lose. Even during the campaign, we couldn’t present half a compelling vision for Britain’s place in a new, globalised world.

We let the right cut our country’s nose off for sport, and we have no excuse - not the Russians, not the billionaires, not the Facebook algorithm - that can absolve us of that sin in the eyes of our children. So how do we not do this again? We bring back civic patriotism, as you’d imagine my argument follows.

Which must, unfortunately for some, start with being less squeamish about it.

One cannot, on the left, discuss civic patriotism without confronting the elephant in the room: the British story is very, very, very messy. For every remarkable contribution to science, culture, governance, or social progress, there are episodes - colonial massacres, the slave trade, the ruthless pursuit of empire - that would turn any stable stomach. So how can anyone claim patriotism to such a nation without implicitly endorsing horrors? For me, it is far more clear-cut than the endless moral wrangling suggests:

You, as a citizen - however you arrived here, and however much you like it or not - are the net beneficiary of countless people before you. They gifted you a historically inconceivable position of privilege: access to art, culture, science, engineering, medicine, social progress. And even if you’re not particularly keen on how they achieved it, the obligation that comes with living in such conditions is unavoidable. At the very least, you owe it to them to leave it as good as you found it; ideally, you contribute to it in such a way that it is improved for having had you in it.

You have every right - I am, after all, a free speech enthusiast - to disagree with every single person who came before you, including countless historical figures whose actions you find morally objectionable, whether that is for their role in the East India Company or for legalising same-sex marriage. But in so doing, you cannot abdicate the responsibility to make things better. If anything, you assume it.

If you think you can do better, square up and show them.

For my sins, I was raised in a household that insisted: don’t complain if you’re not willing to put it right. That principle has, unavoidably, shaped the entirety of my public service career.

For too many, on both left and right, British patriotism is treated as optional - take what you like, leave the rest. Our national identity crisis is worsened by the combined effect of self-appointed patriots and those who see patriotism as gauche, both treating Britain’s history like a Woollies pick-and-mix: only the good bits, only the bad bits, only the bits that suit their taste. And then we wonder why our sense of national identity is so confused, so conflicted, and so fragile.

Patriotism need not require admiration for every act, nor affection for every chapter. It is, rather, a commitment to the project, to the possibility that what comes next might be better, and to the conviction that participation - steady, responsible, sometimes painfully slow - is the only way to ensure it is. One can hold horror and hope in the same hand. One can mourn and build at once. This is the lens through which the messy story becomes something not merely tolerable, but something worth engaging with.

I’ve been getting increasingly fascinated by the idea of the civic future - as anyone unfortunate enough to have spoken to me during my long convalescence will attest. The notion of an arc of the future for a state, with clear moral, political, social, and technological aspirations, feels almost heretical in our era of managerialism, incrementalism, sloganeering, and magic KPIs masquerading as real missions.

The absence of such an arc is not merely a bureaucratic failing; it is a moral one. And without something patriotic - some shared image, story, or civic identity - to hang these ambitions on, we are, quite literally, up the creek without a paddle.

Which is why the broadly left-wing celebration of replacing great Britons on our currency with animals - the preformative, “thank goodness, let us be rid of such jingoistic claptrap and embrace the furry, saccharine, milquetoast, uncontroversial nation-state” is so revolting.

It is, quite obviously, a pointed attempt to distance oneself from anyone who might be upset and happens to have the word “patriot” in their bio. BUT: If we cannot, even among ourselves, agree on a list of relatively uncontroversial Britons to honour on our own currency, then what is the point of us, exactly? I mean that seriously. If we cannot agree on a positive national story, we are certain not to agree on a coherent national direction.

One of my friends, who will forgive my quoting them, dismissed the Lib Dem stance against such nonsense as “pandering to Nigel Farage.” But who died and made Nigel Farage the ultimate arbiter of British culture? This is not about Nigel Farage. It is about whether we, the so-called liberal, enlightened part of the political spectrum, are capable of actually caring for the story of our own country, or whether we have decided that any attachment to it is necessarily shameful, performative, or quaint.

I don’t believe that who is on the currency will fix all of our national ills, but I do believe in the importance of symbolism to the national story. I am, for my sins, a great enthusiast for portraiture, plaques, and all forms of civic pomp and ceremony. I never miss a King’s Speech, and one of my great joys as a Councillor in local government is all of the incredibly cool, painfully British, pomp and circumstance I get to participate in.

From attending events as the Mayor’s consort, wearing a medallion twice as old as me - though far newer than our civic chain, granted by Queen Victoria - to the somber, meticulously observed affair of Remembrance Sunday, an act of reverence for those who died for our very lives, which some of my more morally bankrupt left-wing ‘colleagues’ are all too happy to abdicate.

Attending Cambridge - had to get it in here, to get my money’s worth - was like a Santa’s grotto for me. Every corridor, every breakfast hall, every reading room whispered history, achievement, and the sense that you were a very lucky temporary guest in a space that had - and would continue to - host a remarkable chain of brilliant minds. They let me in, despite a dreadful reference from one of my undergraduate lecturers and no real intellectual contributions to speak of. Yet, everywhere you looked, inspiring constant debate and controversy, you were reminded, for better or for worse: this is what a Great British institution feels like.

From the Port to the private library, from Latin chamber inscriptions to portraits of those who’d shaped science and thought, you were immersed in a tangible sense of place in British history. Elitist? Absolutely. But what does it say about us now that our few remaining bastions of British culture are available only to the elite? Graduating in the same hall as Sir Isaac Newton and Stephen Hawking, according to roughly the same, completely unintelligible Latin, was one of the great privileges of my life. Wouldn’t we all be better off for a bit more reverence in our days?

The slow erosion of national reverence is precisely what makes “Operation Raise the Colours” - the janky lamp-post flag-hanging exercise by the right - so effective. We’ve lost touch with any healthy sense of patriotism to such an extent that seeing our own flag makes people clutch their pearls. In this country, flags have become tools of intimidation rather than symbols of shared belonging. If they were a common feature in every park, school, hospital, and workplace, the lamp-post flags would just look a bit naff.

Isn’t it about time we re-nationalised nationalism? Reclaimed the means of civic production. Not a nationalism of caricature - the plumber with a gang of greyhounds wheeled out as a museum piece for whatever the latest left-wing working-class representation project happens to be - but one in which one might actually recognise oneself. One in which we all might.

What would it look like to take it back? Not as kitsch, not as cosplay, not as a sneer in either direction - but as a serious, shared inheritance.

Because if we don’t tell our own story, someone else will - and we have already seen what they choose to do with it!

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This may sound dramatic, but the hollowing out of belief in what we owe one another as citizens—and in any long term civic arc—underpins much of what ails the country: from planning reform and immigration to the £100k tax cliff and flatlining growth. It is, however reluctantly, the question to which everything else returns.

A civic future is more than the slogans and policy morsels we’ve been fed.

It is a shared, or at least aspirationally shared, vision of what a society ought to become: a horizon against which the obligations, liberties, and responsibilities of citizens and leaders can be measured. The state is not merely a manager of services but a moral and political project: a structure to maintain, a culture to nurture, a direction to pursue. Where civic futures are believed in, political debate is anchored in first principles, and disagreement is intelligible because it occurs within a shared framework of what society is for, and might yet be able to deliver.

Today, that framework is collapsing. Politics has become a series of adjustments, slogans, and managerial gestures. It offers the sensation of direction without substance—a future that can mean everything to anyone, and therefore, nothing. The stakes we talk about are borrowed from a moral imagination we no longer cultivate ourselves—“Make Britain Great Again,” “Secure the Border,” “Energy independence now!”—gestures toward a civic future that exists more as prop than as project.

Much like that oft recycled Twitter meme about cathedrals, “We can’t, we don’t know how to do it.”

The Farage Effect

In the United Kingdom, we live under the increasingly plausible prospect of a Prime Minister Nigel Farage. A sentence that would have been completely politically unserious only a few years ago, and now functions as an organising fact of the present. The next general election, if the polling tells us anything worth listening to, will be a for/against referendum on Reform.

Farage is the personification of the hollowing of the civic future. One may agree with him, entirely, on stopping the boats or introducing political appointees into the civil service, and yet still be haunted by the fact that he is a man for whom principle yields to expedience. Whose cultivation of personal brand eclipses any genuine engagement with the electorate he nominally represents: deprived, struggling, and in dire need of a conscientious constituency MP.

He drifts from cause to cause, home and abroad. Performing authority and even gesturing toward ideals of service to country, while such actions remain conspicuously absent from his repertoire. Much as he is absent from Clacton.

What is striking is not simply that Farage lacks a coherent civic future, at least one he’s willing to articulate, but that he performs the language of one without assuming its obligations. The slogans—restoration, greatness, control—function as emotive placeholders rather than descriptions of a state to be built. Like American MAGA counterparts, they offer the sensation of direction without substance: a future that means everything, to anyone, by design — and therefore nothing. Not a circus of values, but a policy pick-and-mix.

Farage is not an aberration but the most legible, and likely, product of this condition: a politics that performs vision without sustaining it. He is, in some unfortunate ways, exactly the Prime Minister Britain is socio-culturally asking for.

Even more revealing is the electorate’s indifference. There is no real demand that the vision cohere, only that pressures ease—immigration fall, services function, life become marginally more navigable. The question of what Britain is for, or might yet become, barely arises in any serious sense. The civic future is not rejected so much as abandoned, replaced by a politics of ambient reassurance. What remains is managerialism—a politics of mitigation, optimisation, and decline—rather than any competing visions of what the polity ought to become.

The failure is not only political but reciprocal: without a demand for coherence, none is supplied.

A Lost Era of Debate

In an earlier political culture, this would have been almost unintelligible. Even figures as opposed as G. Gordon Liddy, a former Watergate operative and moralizing right-wing talk show host, and Timothy Leary, a psychedelic evangelist and countercultural provocateur, managed to contest the future at the level of first principles—the structure of the state, the nature of freedom, and the direction of civilisation itself. And while neither offered a particularly palatable answer, at least they possessed the intellectual wherewithal and moral substance to try.

Today, politics is diminished in comparison. Our conflicts operate several orders of magnitude below that threshold—technical, immediate, loud, fractious, and oddly inconsequential. We concern ourselves less with ends than with adjustments. Conflict exists, certainly—but over matters so reduced in scope that the larger question of what any of it is ultimately in service of barely surfaces. We argue intensely, yet over things that, in the end, amount to very little.

Things have gotten so bad in the public arena of the civic future that I find myself hankering for a series of debates between two convicted felons, decades before I was born, merely to scrape up the substance of a high from the stage that still hits.

This thinning of civic debate is inseparable from the architecture of the modern public sphere, which has become profoundly polyphonic: authority is dispersed across platforms, algorithms, and endless feeds, where any claim to truth can be amplified irrespective of expertise. Attention economics—clicks, likes, shares—privilege brevity, offence, controversy, and simplicity over nuance.

Even traditional media, once a self-confessed repository of measured debate, now chases the same imperatives; hence the curious dual prominence of Farage and Polanski, endlessly on television despite neither possessing—or, in Polanski’s case, I fear, grasping—a coherent vision of the civic future.

Politics by Adolescence

But the blame cannot be laid at the feet of technology alone. We all know I deplore politics by Adolescence. Politicians, understandably, respond to the environment they inherit. Attention is scarce, and soundbites are currency. If anyone can complain about this, it isn’t me—after a decade spent as a professional arms dealer in the digital war for attention. Yet here’s the rub: nobody really expects a politician to condense the arc of their moral universe into thirty second clips. The problem is that the metrics of visibility — virality, media presence, shareability — have become so irreconcilably privileged over the question of substance.

As a result, one could sit down with the manifestos of just about any major party and still fail to reconstruct a coherent, aggregated civic vision. The test we are failing, to be explicit, is not the impossible one: ‘Can you compress the entire arc of your civic worldview into thirty seconds?’. That’s a task no one could achieve, and a cruel demand imposed by our algorithmic landscape.

The more damning failure is simpler: can anyone articulate one at all?

The soundbites hang on nothing, and the public square has become a polyphonic cacophony without a horizon. Yet if the stakes we’re carelessly borrowing today remind you of anything, it’s probably America in the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s. When competing visions of the civic and moral future were real, urgent, and capable of moving mountains. Watergate, the counterculture, psychedelia, and the intense ideological struggles of the period created a public arena in which authority over the long arc of the future was genuinely contested, and the stakes for the future felt existential.1

Few episodes capture the raw stakes of late-70s America like the Liddy–Leary speaking tour. Across a dozen sell-out halls, college auditoriums, and civic centers, a former Watergate operative and a psychedelic evangelist took the stage together, each asserting a radically different vision of the nation’s moral and political future.

Audiences, often too young to remember the scandals or the counterculture that had made them infamous, found themselves caught between the blunt moralism of one and the frenetic liberation of the other. Each tested, in real time, just how far it was morally permissible to go to advance a vision of society: a tour that was part spectacle, part ethical stress test, and of a moment when civic argument still had teeth.

That two even-then rather washed-up would-be public intellectuals, speaking to audiences too young to remember them, amid the ruins of the world they had tried to shape in their image, could tell us anything interesting about the future might seem unlikely. Yet I think they reveal more now to us than they ever could to their audiences in the 1980s.2

G. Gordon Liddy: Discipline, Death, and Dining on Rodents

G. Gordon Liddy is best known, if at all, for his starring role in the Watergate hotel break-in. Not his first break-in, not even his first at the Watergate—but, alas, it’s always that one failure that sticks in the public imagination.

Creator: Ron Edmonds | Credit: AP Copyright: AP1997

At the time, Liddy was an operative within the Committee to Re-Elect the President, officially appointed to the role of general counsel, ostensibly to provide legal guidance. “Don’t break into the DNC headquarters,” using operatives funded by the Republican Party? That, apparently, was advice beyond his legal ken.

Liddy was a fierce loyalist and committed patriot, fresh from several years in the Nixon White House. He had driven the War on Drugs and courted trouble—most notably by outmaneuvering Nixon’s aides to win over the NRA. Watergate, ironically, was the least outrageous of his proposals. His alternative ideas ranged wildly: planting fake prostitutes at high-profile Democratic events, sabotaging air-conditioning at their summer conferences, and even offering—unsolicited—to assassinate perceived threats to the American state, including his friend and fellow Watergate conspirator Howard Hunt.

The second time they tried it—after bungling the initial bug planting, allegedly to recover a sensitive dossier—they were caught. The ensuing trial gripped the nation. Liddy, unyielding in principle, refused to divulge anything beyond what he absolutely had to. He was convicted, and sentenced to 20 years for his flagrant refusal to cooperate. He served just under five years total, spread across nine different prisons—a fact only explicable by the sheer litany of psychological tortures and low-level criminal offences he inflicted on his jailors during his incarceration.

His sentence was reduced from its original lofty heights by President Carter, under pressure from sympathetic Democrats. Carter, however, earned no great affection from Liddy, who went on to critique him, and nearly every other president since, on his long-running regional radio show, The G. Gordon Liddy Show3, broadcast from WJFK‑FM in Fairfax, Virginia, and later widely syndicated across the United States, until he retired in 2012.

If you know Liddy from anywhere else, it’s probably from his NYT bestselling post-prison memoir, Will4. Time Magazine published some delightfully grotesque excerpts that transformed his public image from crooked Republican operative to bizarro extremist. Tales of eating a rat, his eugenic reasoning for choosing a spouse, and the occasional candle-induced hand burn as a “nerve test.” Less publicized were other classic Liddyisms contained within—including, but somehow not limited to, the few months he took to hunting local teenagers with a gun, organising a Leni Riefenstahl movie night for colleagues, and missing his chance to fight in a war over a manliness contest he simply couldn’t let lie.

Complex, remorseless, and intellectually formidable, Liddy’s stint on the college speaker circuit was nothing short of astonishing. Morbid curiosity and the magnetic pull of scandal packed halls of 4,000 to 6,000 seats, culminating in his being named College Speaker of the Year in 1982. His talks ranged from the future of American government to civic responsibility and gun control, cementing a fascinated yet horrified place for him in the public imagination.

G. Gordon Liddy could, quite realistically, have been one of the greatest right-wing public intellectuals of his era—if only he hadn’t been so spectacularly unhinged in his personal life. Even so, he leveraged his insider knowledge of Watergate as a lure to pursue what truly captivated him: the chance to articulate his disciplined vision for the future of America to thousands of students eager, if often horrified, to listen.

And so he found himself on one of the strangest road trips in American history—with former work acquaintance, Timothy Leary. If raiding someone’s house in a drugs bust makes you an acquaintance, anyway.

Timothy Leary: The Most Dangerous Man In America

If G. Gordon Liddy was forged in the stern architecture of the state, Timothy Leary seemed determined to dissolve it entirely.

A Harvard-trained psychologist of some repute, Leary first made his name within the academy before making the altogether less conventional decision to dedicate his career to the exploration—and enthusiastic promotion—of psychedelic drugs, most notably LSD.

Creator: MARK J. TERRILL| Credit: AP Copyright: 1992 AP

Dismissed from Harvard in 1963 under circumstances that remain politely described as “controversial,” Leary quickly re-emerged beyond the university as something closer to a public philosopher of consciousness. His exhortation to “turn on, tune in, drop out” was not merely slogan but invitation: a rejection of institutional authority in favour of personal experience, and a suggestion—radical at the time—that the boundaries of the mind might be as politically significant as those of the state.

The theory did not remain abstract for long. Arrested repeatedly throughout the 1960s on drug charges, Leary became as well known for his legal troubles as for his ideas.

The drugs bust I mentioned earlier occurred in March of 1966. By this stage, Leary had inexplicably set up camp in Dutchess County, NY—an odd choice, given the county’s deeply traditionalist Republican character at the time. Perhaps it was the thrill of striking at the heart of conservative America that drew him there, or perhaps because everywhere else he tried wouldn’t have him5. This put him squarely in the crosshairs of Liddy, who later admitted he would have regarded Leary as just another “sick problem of the ’60s,” to be handled by someone else, had he not turned up on his doorstep. But, alas, Dutchess County is where Liddy was serving as an agent for the District Attorney at the time.

The ‘No Knock Entry’ operation—basically kicking the door in—was planned for just before midnight, aiming to catch anyone in possession of the various substances Leary favoured, and to confine them in their rooms to establish association before questioning the suspects. The DA ran late, so the team didn’t actually enter until well after 1 a.m. They didn’t have to kick the door in in the end, it was already open. Once inside, the house was, by any account, a pigsty—literally, with live animals and their waste roaming the halls of what had once been a very wealthy ancestral seat. If ever there was an image to capture Leary’s fraught relationship with traditional institutions, this would be it.

Depending on who tells the story—Leary tells it as a ‘got one over on you’ story against Liddy, having allegedly convinced him that a jar of dried moss was a new illegal substance; Liddy tells it as a vipers’ nest clear-out of sin and subversion that was seeping out into the respectable neighbourhood—it was a clash of ideologies, as much as a law enforcement exercise. The fact that Leary seemingly lacked a pair of trousers, or anything one would wear under them, for the entire exchange makes it a somewhat less lofty intellectual battle than those which follow.

For mythology’s sake, it’s worth hedging that Liddy’s bust at Millbrook—high-profile and moralising as it was—played no insignificant part in the CV that elevated him to the lofty heights of working on the ‘War on Drugs’ for the Nixon White House, a presidency profoundly spooked by Leary, whom Nixon famously called “the most dangerous man in America.”6 Leary himself makes this joke on several occasions in recordings from the tour.

Following a conviction for marijuana possession, he escaped from prison with the assistance of the Weather Underground, beginning a period of exile that took him from Algeria to Switzerland before his eventual recapture. It was a life that seemed, at times, to operate according to the same principles he espoused: fluid, improvisational, and largely indifferent to constraint.

By the late 1970s, Leary had begun another reinvention. The utopian certainties of the previous decade had faded, replaced by a figure more attuned to media, performance, and the peculiar demands of public attention. He continued to write and lecture, but with a growing sense that message and medium were inseparable—that personality itself could function as argument.

His rhetoric also pivoted, prompted by the obvious realisation that he would not be the architect and saviour of his brave new world: turn on, tune in, drop out became turn on, tune in, take over. A new, more explicit target emerged: encouraging young people—those younger than him, anyway—to occupy the offices and levers of power that had denied him his utopia, in hopes that they might shimmy a window and let him in round the back.

On the American college circuit, he found an audience ready to engage, if not always to agree. To some, he was a relic of a discredited era; to others, a still-compelling advocate for intellectual and personal freedom—related to in the way some young Communists at British universities still unironically wear Che Guevara t-shirts. To most, he was something more ambiguous: a man who had tested the limits of both mind and system and returned with stories that refused easy categorisation—and, at times, conventional sentence structure.

Leary’s arguments often survive today only in their cheapest forms, reduced to the idea that his advocacy of LSD and dropping out was a license for hedonistic thrill-seeking and casual sex. Yet his philosophy is deeply rooted in discipline. It was never merely that one ought to do drugs to “turn on”; the deliberate, disciplined expansion of the mind was framed as both a moral and a civic responsibility—a necessary part of being an informed citizen. To “tune in” didn’t just mean to the radio; it meant engaging meaningfully with society and environment once awakened, so that one could “drop out” from an informed position: discarding the artificial structures that block authentic experience, while preserving those still capable of repair.

For all its excesses, Leary’s philosophy also operated at the level of totality—offering not fragments, but a reordering of the relationship between individual, society, and state.

His philosophy, like Liddy’s, served as a guidebook for the maintenance of the state—a map for the future of civic life. The two are actually remarkably similar, once one blows the suspicious-looking dust off the top of Leary’s psychedelic wanderings. And so, improbably but perhaps inevitably, he found himself sharing a stage—and then a tour bus—with the very embodiment of the order he had spent a lifetime resisting.

One naturally wonders what they must have talked about on the drive. You’d hope Liddy was the one driving.

The Liddy/Leary Tour: The Civic Theatre in Action

Liddy and Leary took to the American college circuit in a format that was part debate, part spectacle, and part travelling civic theatre.

Neil Selkirk - Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

Evenings typically opened with each man given time to set out his case—Liddy, austere and unyielding, arguing for discipline, order, and the primacy of the state and its constitution; Leary, expansive and improvisational, making the case for personal liberation, LSD, and the dissolution of constraint.

What followed was less a formal rebuttal than a prolonged exchange. Barbed, theatrical, occasionally philosophical, often drifting into provocation or performance, before opening out to audience questions that ranged from the earnest to the absurd. It was not always rigorous, nor always coherent, but it was unmistakably an argument about ideal civic futures—and what costs we ought to be permitted to pay for them—staged in public. I dwell on it not for its eccentricity, but because it captures, in unusually concentrated form, a culture still willing to stage its deepest disagreements in public, in a format closer to mass-consumption civic documentary television than the ivory-towered academic debates or edgy clip shows that we might regard as remnants of this culture today—and to do so with a degree of real rigour.

My suggestion, to be clear, is not that everyone who attended did so in the spirit of earnest intellectual debate. Watching any of the clips quickly exposes two ‘cheeky’ questioner camps: young conservatives, desperate to score a point against an ageing and tiring Leary, the architect of the permissive moral landscape they abhorred; and young people, often on the left, equally eager to catch Liddy out with odd questions about sex, drugs, and eating rats—unaware that he was, in fact, rather an open moral book on two of those issues, at least. I have a personal fondness for the time someone, clearly thinking they were being edgy, asked Liddy for his thoughts on group sex. His unsurprising reply, to anyone familiar with his sexual politics, was: “How many people did you have in mind?”

My point, instead, is that while not everyone in those audiences was drawn by pure intellectual curiosity, a substantial—perhaps even decisive—proportion were engaging, in at least some degree of good faith, with competing visions of a shared civic future: not merely policies, but coherent accounts of what society was for and what citizens owed one another. It is striking that such events could fill halls, generate sustained media attention, and command genuine cultural legitimacy.

What was being staged, however imperfectly, was not simply disagreement but a shared assumption that the civic future was something to be contested in full view.

The Lasting Footprints

While nobody truly “won” the Liddy/Leary debates, there is a clear victor in the civilisational stakes. Leary’s vision—psychedelia, personal liberation, and a challenge to authority—has proven far more durable than Liddy’s austere order. By the late 1970s, the utopian certainties had faded, but the culture he helped catalyse endured: through music, fashion, media, shifting attitudes toward drugs, and the sexual revolution. Tokenised and mediated, yes, but influential enough that moments like the Apple “Big Brother” ad feel like echoes of his ethos.

His advocacy of sexual liberation, framed as a moral and civic experiment challenging repressive norms, reshaped personal and social attitudes in ways that persist today. Not every street corner runs on LSD, but marijuana can be bought legally on more and more of them. The radicalism has softened, yet his moral and cultural footprint—through psychedelia and the enduring effects of the sexual revolution—has been absorbed into society, leaving a subtle but measurable triumph.

By the end of his life, Liddy appears less like a relic of a defeated order than a man stranded within a tradition that had outpaced him. The vocabulary endured—strength, order, patriotism—but the civic ethic that had once given it weight had thinned to a veneer of respectability, hastily plastered over tawdry spectacle. Used to sell trading cards, branded sneakers, and unpasteurized milk.

What had been, for Liddy, a demanding moral and political discipline—one he was willing to kill, and to die, for—was stripped for parts: now a language to be invoked rather than a standard to be met. Liddy could not give the speeches he once gave to the contemporary Republican establishment—not merely for lack of attention span, but because any meaningful engagement with the intellectual tradition they claim has itself collapsed. The audience, in any serious sense, is gone.

Another draft dodger sits in the White House. Liddy’s America is not embattled, nor eclipsed. It is dead—and what replaced it is something he would scarcely recognise as belonging to the same lineage. Pity the man who would have ultimately died for nothing, had Nixon wished it. Just not too much.

It is Liddy’s rather tragic fate—more so than Leary’s, though in no small part both—and the hollowing out of the tradition he once embodied that offers our clearest cautionary lens for the present: that everything you believe can be sold off, policy by policy, chunk by chunk, stripped of context and repackaged for consumption, with none of the gravitas or reverence your civic vision once lent it—leaving nothing to guarantee it will be treated with care.

And even Leary, who did win, did so only because victory no longer demands coherence. His ideas endured by shedding the structure that once made them a genuine challenge, dissolving into culture until they ceased to function as a vision at all—surviving instead as a mood, ambient and unquestioned, precisely because it is no longer asked to justify itself.

What endures, in both cases, is not the victory of one vision over another, but the fragmentation of vision itself.

Flirting with Extremes

What remains, then, is not a settled victory of one tradition over another, but the absence of any tradition capable of structuring political life. Even at their most contradictory—the Catholic schoolgirl with LSD in her blazer pocket—the 1960s and 70s remained anchored in traditions coherent enough to structure political life. Deviations existed, rebellions were celebrated, experimentation flourished, but these acts unfolded within a framework: a shared horizon of civic, moral, or cultural expectations that gave meaning to success, failure, and even outrage.

By contrast, the (I think, preemptive) death knell of the big two parties in the UK, the consolidation of the Trump-era Republican consensus, and the sudden rise of populist movements across the globe signal the dawn of an era defined by political and moral polyphony: of flirting with extremes, of trying anything rather than persisting with the familiar. What distinguishes the present is not mere contradiction, but the absence of any framework capable of disciplining belief: positions are adopted, discarded, and recombined without regard for coherence, producing a political polyphony in which victory and meaning are ever more ambiguous.

The great risk of such eras is that instability—the constant interchange of ideas, with no obvious authority or clear winner—drives one to grasp ever harder for certainty. It inflames the conviction that you must win the argument, because the alternative is unthinkable, that civilisation itself hangs in the balance, and that anyone—opponents included—could seize it if they pushed just a little further. The temptation to strike first, to win decisively, scratches at the inside of your skull. This was the stage on which Liddy and Leary performed—and the source of their greatest moral and political vices.

But whereas Liddy and Leary wrestled with stakes framed, at least, by coherent frameworks, today we confront decisions packaged in 30-second clips—stakes just as high, yet stripped of the structures that once gave them gravity. In the absence of any demand for a coherent civic vision—much like the death of the costed, balanced manifesto—we are left with a cheap diet of incrementalism: Vote Leave, Stop Brexit; Stop the Boats, Welcome Refugees. Step by step, we inch toward a world unrecognisable from where we began, incoherent against the faintly imagined visions we thought we were building with each knee-jerk decision.

Modern Monetary Theory, or stopping the boats, may sound grand in 30-second clips on the internet, but pursuing them requires swallowing a lot of unlabelled, uncomfortable truths and unholy compromises about the kind of world we’d have to live in to make them possible—facts they never put on the front of the box—and risks civilisational buyer’s remorse, long past the 30-day return window. Buyer beware: you are the one stuck with what’s inside, even if you claim you didn’t vote for it. There is no hard, soft, or Malthouse-compromise version of hell.

The danger is not simply extremity, but extremity without structure—positions unmoored from any coherent account of the whole.

Flat Pack Governance

We still have political parties, of course, and within them the familiar constellations of internal factions—Blue Labour, the various conservative traditions, the Liberal Democrats’ Radical Association, the endless minor heresies that give politics its texture. Alongside them sit the think tanks: numerous, industrious, and prolific. On paper, this looks like a healthy ecosystem of competing ideas about how society ought to be ordered.

But something quieter has shifted. These are not, in the main, projects that attempt to articulate a civic vision in the older sense—a view of the future toward which the state is oriented. They are fractious, often deliberately so, and increasingly oriented toward the immediate, the actionable, the legible within an electoral cycle. The ambition has narrowed.

Think tanks, in particular, are not at fault so much as they are faithful to their form. They are, by nature, policy shops: institutions designed to produce discrete, portable interventions—tax proposals, regulatory tweaks, briefing notes that can be lifted, more or less intact, into ministerial red boxes. Their output accumulates, but it rarely coheres.

What emerges is less a philosophy of civic life than a catalogue of parts: an IKEA showroom. Endless options, neatly arranged, each plausible in isolation. But once taken home, the illusion falters: the instructions are partial, the components do not quite align, and the burden of assembly falls to the user. It is little wonder that people say relationships go there to die. We have, in effect, arrived at a politics of flat-pack governance—assembling poorly labelled pieces that resist integration, and then expressing surprise when the structure will not hold, or when those tasked with building it begin to turn on one another.

Against this, the occasional exception appears almost unnerving. The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, for instance, is received as something close to sinister—not only because of its content, but because of its form. It reads as a master plan: an attempt to claim, in advance, the machinery of the state and to bend it toward a coherent, if controversial, vision of the civic future. That such an effort now feels anomalous, even alarming, is telling: thinking in totalities has become unfamiliar, even suspect. The ambition to design the whole is no longer treated as a necessary part of politics, but as evidence of something suspect in itself.

Yet, not so long ago, producing an all-encompassing roadmap for the civic future was the baseline of seriousness. Barry Goldwater’s Conscience of a Conservative7 laid out a full blueprint of principles, trade-offs, and policies—a coherent argument for how a nation might be ordered. Its comprehensiveness marked gravitas, expected of a man running for high office. Today, the same claim to totality reads as suspect—almost grotesque: what used to qualify you for the White House now makes you sound like you should be on trial.

An IKEA Delivery for 10 Downing Street

For some time, I—and many others—found the Labour Party’s current predicament genuinely perplexing. They had ample warning. The long decline of the Conservative Party was not a sudden shock collapse but a slow, visible unravelling; the prospect of government was not merely possible, but increasingly inevitable. And yet, once in office, they have appeared curiously unsure what to do with it. There is a manifesto, certainly—but it has proven about as useful as a set of IKEA instructions: present, nominally authoritative, and of limited practical guidance when confronted with the reality of assembly. The pieces are spread out across the floor, with little shared understanding of how they fit together.

The problem is not simply one of competence, but of coherence. They cannot establish priorities, still less sustain them. Fiscal choices appear reactive rather than ordered; political capital is spent at once freely and anxiously, without any clear sense of hierarchy or direction. Even the manifesto—the closest thing available to a governing blueprint—proves unusable in practice, supplemented or quietly abandoned in favour of a steady stream of ad hoc interventions, many of them conspicuously absent from the original programme. The effect is less of a government executing a plan than of one searching, in real time, for the missing piece that might yet hold the whole together.

This is what the absence of a vision for the civic future looks like in practice. Without an underlying account of what the state is for—of the future it is attempting to bring about—the ordinary disciplines of government—prioritisation, compromise, restraint—become almost impossible to sustain. Decisions cannot be ordered because there is no agreed principle by which to order them; compromises cannot be defended because there is no larger structure within which they make sense. Trade-offs, in turn, cannot meaningfully be presented as such—trading implies a purpose, a direction of travel. What remains is motion without orientation. The problem is not that there are too few ideas, but that we no longer produce ones designed to fit together.

The Stakes Today

It is precisely this quality—this insistence on the whole—that makes figures as ostensibly dissimilar as Leary and Liddy feel, in retrospect, oddly aligned.

Each, in his own register, offered not a menu of options but a schema: a way of ordering the relationship between individual and state, consciousness and system. Leary’s exhortation to “turn on, tune in, drop out” was not an invitation to drift, but a sequence, with a logic that was almost programmatic, through which the citizen might come to understand which structures demanded allegiance and which could be discarded. Liddy, by contrast, approached the same terrain from the opposite direction: discipline before liberation, order as the precondition of freedom. Yet both assumed something that now feels distant—that civic life could be grasped as a totality, and that the serious participant in it was obliged to engage at that level.

What separates them from the present is not simply temperament, but scale. Where contemporary politics offers components, they offered blueprints. And however eccentric, excessive, or uncomfortable those blueprints might now appear, they at least attempted to answer the question that our flat-pack politics so often avoids: not just what works, but what it is all for—and where it is meant to lead.

With no overarching civic vision, no coherent arc, you don’t know what you’re buying—or who you’re selling your future to. You don’t know your friends, your enemies, or who might even be on your side. You cannot collaborate under lower, less anxiety-inducing stakes than those Liddy and Leary believed themselves to face, because it’s increasingly impossible to reliably recognise your fellow travellers on the road to a better world—you don’t even know who is driving the bus.