Akshay S

@matthew_elliott Income tax now exists almost entirely to fund welfare. Every GP surgery, every pothole, every defence pound — borrowed. The working population is running a hamster wheel to maintain a system that's consuming itself. This is what managed decline looks like.

The Government will collect £331bn in income tax this year, and spend £333bn on welfare. In other words, we now spend more on people not working than we raise from those who do. And the cost? Debt per person has risen from £11.5k in 2000 (inflation adjusted) to over £41k today.

The tu quoque only works if the situations are symmetrical. If a crowd chanted "Christ is Lord and all other faiths are error" in Trafalgar Square, Timothy would presumably object to that too. The issue isn't public worship — it's public declaration of religious supremacy in a shared civic space.

@NJ_Timothy @Iromg Would you say the same about a mass act of Christian worship? If not, why not?

Too many are too polite to say this. But mass ritual prayer in public places is an act of domination. The adhan - which declares there is no god but allah and Muhammad is his messenger - is, when called in a public place, a declaration of domination. Perform these rituals in mosques if you wish. But they are not welcome in our public places and shared institutions. And given their explicit repudiation of Christianity they certainly do not belong in our churches and cathedrals. I am not suggesting everybody at Trafalgar Square last night is an Islamist. But the domination of public places is straight from the Islamist playbook. Trafalgar Square belongs to all of us. It is a national memorial to our independence and our salvation. Last night was not like a televised football match or a St Patrick’s Day celebration. It was an act of domination and therefore division. It shouldn’t happen again.

The thesis is right but the chart only shows half the story. Share of spending shifting toward the top doesn't prove the bottom is spending less in real terms — it could just mean the top grew faster. The actual fragility argument is subtler and stronger: a consumer economy concentrated in the top 10% becomes structurally dependent on asset prices, bonus cycles, and equity wealth effects. That's not a wide base absorbing shocks. It's a narrow one amplifying them. The problem isn't that the mass market is starving now. It's that the buffer is gone. Broad-based consumption used to be the floor — the part of the economy that kept turning over even when confidence at the top broke. When wealthy households pulled back, the mass market didn't. Now that floor has been thinned out by a decade of squeezed real wages and depleted savings. So if top-tier confidence cracks — a market correction, a bonus drought, a wealth-effect reversal — there's no offsetting base of spending to cushion the fall. The shock doesn't get absorbed. It's amplified.

⚡️America is being held up by a spending aristocracy while the mass market underneath it starves. That is the real truth. When the top 10 percent drives nearly half of consumer spending, the economy stops being a shared organism and starts becoming a top-heavy display. The numbers can still look healthy because the wealthy keep buying flights, homes, restaurants, services, luxury, and financial assets. Earnings survive. GDP survives. The market survives. The social body underneath that display keeps getting weaker. That is why the country feels crazy. The official economy is describing the people who still have room. The lived economy is describing the people who lost it. One class still has asset inflation, balance sheet cushion, and discretionary life. The other has rent, food, insurance, debt service, and permanent compression. The first class keeps the machine looking alive. The second class feels the machine eating them. This is more dangerous than ordinary inequality because it changes the source of national stability. A broad consumer economy is hard to kill because millions of households can still absorb shocks and keep demand moving. A concentrated consumer economy depends on fewer people carrying more weight. That makes the whole structure more dependent on upper-tier confidence, asset prices, bonus pools, and market liquidity. The surface gets richer. The system gets weaker. And once that happens, the meaning of strength starts to rot. A full airport no longer means prosperity is broad. A strong earnings print no longer means households are healthy. A resilient stock market no longer means the country is durable. It means the top of the distribution still has enough fuel to keep the theater running. The aggregate stays alive by becoming less representative of the nation producing it. That is where legitimacy starts to die. People can endure hardship. What they do not endure forever is being told they live in strength while their own life keeps narrowing. Once the gap between headline health and lived decline gets too wide, every official claim of resilience starts sounding like insult. Then politics gets uglier. Class resentment hardens. Institutions lose moral authority. Growth keeps happening and trust keeps dying. The deepest truth is simple. This economy is no longer broad enough to call healthy. It is being financed from the top while more and more of the country falls out of the spending class and into managed decline.

Hannan is right that this is not trivial, and the Jesus/Caesar point is the strongest version of the argument. There is another historical observation underneath it. Every regime change in antiquity was announced on the coinage. New emperor, new face. The coin was not just a symbol of power — it was the fastest way to communicate who held power to every person in the empire, including those who could not read. Changing whose face appears is not a cultural statement. It is the oldest political signal in the Western tradition. That is what makes the "only racists care" framing so telling. It is designed to make you feel embarrassed about noticing something our cultural ancestors would have understood immediately.

The removal of Churchill from our banknotes is presented as the kind of trivial change that only racists get worked up about. It is an old trick: you take away something that people like, and then accuse them of starting a culture war when they complain. In fact, what our money looks like is far from a trivial issue. When Jesus drew the border between spiritual and temporal authority, he did so by pointing to Caesar’s face on a coin and asking the Pharisees: “Whose is this image and superscription?” There was no more resounding symbol of state power than the coinage. Paywall down. telegraph.co.uk/gift/3745856fd…

Exactly this 👆 BUT Scarcity alone does not make something a store of value — gold has been scarce for all of human history and its purchasing power has still been erratic across different monetary regimes. What Bitcoin actually has in an AI world is neutrality: no CEO to replace with an AI, no IP to clone, no jurisdiction to route around, no workforce to automate away. The asset itself is not disruptable because it has no human dependencies to disrupt.

@chamath If AI compresses terminal value and makes every moat temporary, capital will rotate to assets with no disruption risk. Bitcoin is Digital Capital - scarce, neutral, and impervious to AI disruption. $BTC should be the primary beneficiary of this shift.

Taleb's point about skin in the game was made for exactly this. A CEO who destroys shareholder value loses their job, their reputation, sometimes their fortune — the feedback loop is direct and brutal. Von der Leyen designed an energy transition that made Europe structurally dependent on Russian gas, presided over the price shock that hit ordinary Europeans hardest, then received a second term as her consequence. This is the core dysfunction of modern technocratic governance: the people who design the policy don't pay the bills. The incentive is to appear visionary, collect the institutional prestige, and be long gone — or promoted — before the costs land. It's not corruption in the traditional sense. It's something subtler: a system that has completely severed the link between decision and consequence. The answer isn't just holding individuals accountable after the fact. It's rebuilding institutions where the designers have something real at stake. Until then, expect more nuclear epiphanies — always just after the damage is done.

Ursula von der Leyen's admission of the abject failure of her energy policy should trigger her resignation, but it won't, says Ben Pile in the Climate Skeptic. climateskeptic.org/p/ursulas-nucl…

The banner does one job: launder Khamenei's reputation through Mandela's moral authority. The quote, if authentic, comes from 1990s Cold War solidarity — the ANC took support from anyone opposing apartheid while Western governments were still shaking hands with Pretoria. Mandela called Gaddafi "my brother" too. That's gratitude for solidarity against a common enemy, not an endorsement of how those allies governed their own people. Mandela fought for one precise principle: no self-appointed elite overrides the democratic will of the people. Khamenei stole the 2009 election and crushed the Woman, Life, Freedom movement with lethal force. Strip the ideology and the structural parallel is closer to apartheid than to liberation. The banner collapses the difference between "this man opposed our enemy" and "this man shares our values." It works because most people won't stop to ask. The Iranian women marching against the regime in London today would.

The frame is right but the history is older than the internet. Every federal system is an attempt at this. The question was never whether consensual cooperation is possible — medieval merchant republics proved it was. The question is what happens when one jurisdiction grows large enough to stop competing and start coercing. The smart contract solves the entry problem. It does not solve the exit problem when exit becomes prohibitively costly.

This is American Anarchy vs Chinese Control. American Anarchy is the superposition of left- and right-libertarianism, taken to their extremes. We are all equal and you ain't the boss of me. So no one is in charge, and everything is in chaos. America is all about consent, and also no one consents. Chinese Control is the opposite. It's the total integration of nation, state, and network into one collectivist whole. Roughly 96% of people of Han Chinese descent are now governed by the communist one party-state and organized by apps within the Chinese network. China is all about cooperation, and also everyone better cooperate. A useful goal is to carve out an Internet Intermediate, which is about consensual cooperation. Combine the voluntarism of the West with the cooperation of the East. If we had many different jurisdictions, you could sign a social smart contract prior to entering a jurisdiction that limited the power of both digital and physical government. You then abide by it so long as you're within that jurisdiction, or exit it by leaving. This balances consent with cooperation. You opt in to constraints.

The memo tone is the tell. Administrative language without administrative power is always a bid for legitimacy, not a description of it. Pahlavi is doing what every claimant without an army has done throughout history — writing the constitution before the war ends and hoping the document becomes the fact. It rarely does. The vacuum fills with whoever has the guns on the day the centre breaks.

⚡️Pahlavi is trying to seize the story before he can seize the state. Here is what I really see: That is the real move. He does not control the guns, the ministries, the prisons, the money, or the coercive chain inside Iran. He knows that. So he is trying to front-run collapse politically. He wants elites, bureaucrats, foreign governments, and anti-regime Iranians to start seeing him as the answer before the real fight for power begins. That is why the language sounds so administrative. Committees, transition systems, named managers, governing frameworks. That tone is compensation for the absence of control. He is trying to manufacture inevitability early because he knows that if the regime cracks and he still looks like an exile with slogans, he loses. The deeper truth is harder. This means they do not believe a clean spontaneous people’s revolution is coming. They believe the state has to be cracked from above and then claimed fast before somebody else fills the vacuum. That is why the whole thing reads like a government memo written by people who do not yet have a government. So what is the real read? He is scared that if the regime starts breaking, the IRGC, regime remnants, rival opposition forces, ethnic power centers, or pure chaos will get there first. This statement is an attempt to plant his flag in the vacuum before the vacuum exists. That is the signal. He is trying to hypnotize the field into treating him like the heir before the succession war starts.

@elonmusk You realise England is also a country, right? It's not just an ethnicity... Confusing, but not that confusing

True

Mr. Hannan, this is New Imperial History 101. It’s a tidy ledger, but it ignores the "plumbing" of the system. You argue the British taxpayer bore the cost, but you overlook who owned the tap. "Taxes were lower in the colonies"? Perhaps. But those taxes were extracted from local populations to subsidize an administration that prioritized British exports. A "low tax" on a starving peasant to pay for a British railway isn't a bargain; it’s an extraction. You mention "free trade." Yet market forces are rarely free when backed by a gunboat. From the dismantling of the Indian textile industry to the Opium Wars, colonial policy was used systematically to break foreign markets to ensure British dominance. Britain didn’t just "become" rich through property rights and independent courts; it exported the costs of that stability to the colonies while hoarding the capital. It's easy to champion the rule of law when you're the one writing the laws.

Hi @MartinSLewis, thank you. I really appreciate that, and honestly, don’t worry. I do love a feisty debate! It helps people understand what the real issues are. You and I agree on the principle: student loans have become a scam. It took me eight years to pay mine off. I made my last payment in 2011, and I remember how happy I was, and my debt was only £14,000. I can’t imagine what it’s like to be a young person with £40,000 debt today. Whatever the Coalition government brought in back in 2012, it’s clearly not working for the world of 2026. So I’d genuinely love to come on your show and debate my plan vs yours. I’m putting student loans on the political agenda because we’ve got to do more for young people. It’s just one part of our New Deal For Young People. As the opposition, Conservatives may not be able to change the law right now, certainly not without cross-party support, but we can set the agenda especially while the government seems distracted by all sorts of other things. In the meantime, I’ll keep doing my job: setting out practical solutions and showing how we can make life in this country better, especially for young people. Looking forward to seeing you soon.

Kemi Badenoch was able to handle herself but this three-to-one pile on should never have been allowed by @GMB. The presenters should have intervened. And just who the hell does Martin Lewis think he is?

Very few public figures higher on their own supply than Martin Lewis

Truly incredible. The evasion is so blatant. Never seen anything so disgraceful from a minister.

@PeterMcCormack @Keir_Starmer If he goes, it's the Labour hard left in the driving seat... a case of be careful what you wish for

Lol, it is over lad, you're the worst prime minister in the worst government this country has seen. Know when you're cooked @Keir_Starmer.

Without social media we would never have found out that a lab leak almost certainly caused the pandemic and the deaths of 20 million+ people was an avoidable error.

The Harry Potter series is a masterclass in why we shouldn’t bow to "easy, polite lies." Rowling didn’t just write about magic; she wrote about the grit required to tell the truth when the Ministry and the media are trying to gaslight you into silence. It’s the ultimate irony. The same people who cheered for Harry standing up to Umbridge are now the ones acting like the High Inquisitor—demanding we ignore our own eyes and ears to keep the peace. They want us to believe that biological reality is a "hateful" inconvenience rather than a fundamental truth. Bravery isn't found in Hollywood actors following a script to stay in the good books of the liberal elite. It’s found in a woman willing to risk her reputation to say that sex is real and it matters.

Bitcoin is probably the best idea of the 21st century You would think that “New Scientist” would appreciate its amazing revolution with respect to human rights, financial inclusion, and transformation of energy systems But no, these people are living in the dark ages

Actually, @KemiBadenoch has been pretty awesome in rebuilding the party. Polls show a real bounce: Tories up to ~19-21% in averages, Badenoch now tied with Starmer on 'best PM' (28-28% in latest YouGov), and even leading Farage in head-to-heads. Left-field prediction: Conservatives will outperform expectations next time – far from dead, they're recovering. Labour's mess is real (Nigel is right there), but the right isn't just Reform.

Nigel is right. The Conservatives are all but dead as a party now. Jenrick will announce his defection to Reform shortly. All other Conservative MPs will face a similar choice, but the party is pretty much done for now. CCHQ will be a lovely mess today, but deserve everything they are getting, it is a total shit show. Labour is also finished as a party. We are now entering a new world of Reform v whatever butchered Green + Lib Dem left-wing alliance is formed.