Told You So

🚨🇪🇸 BREAKING: Spain's PM Pedro Sánchez just called for a common European army. Not in 10 years. Not in 2 years. Now. As soon as tomorrow. NATO is cracking. The US is pulling away. Europe is waking up to the fact that its security blanket is gone. A European army means no more waiting for Washington's permission. No more begging for US troops. No more wondering if Trump will answer the phone. The world just got more complicated. The US just got more isolated. And Europe just took its first real step toward strategic independence. This is not a headline. This is a turning point.

The Future Was Being Built in the North East. Then It Saw the Energy Bill. Keir Starmer does not have many cards left to play. Growth has not arrived. The fiscal position is worse than advertised. The public is paying more for energy than almost any comparable nation. Into that landscape, the Prime Minister placed one flagship bet: artificial intelligence. Britain would lead the AI revolution. Stargate UK, a £31 billion data centre investment announced during Donald Trump's state visit, was the proof. OpenAI was coming. The future was being built in the North East. Now, OpenAI has paused the project. The reasons are on the record. High energy costs. Regulatory uncertainty. Both are made in Britain. The energy cost problem has an author. Ed Miliband's Net Zero agenda has made Britain one of the most expensive places in the developed world to consume industrial electricity. Even before the Iran war sent prices rocketing, Britain ranked among the highest in Europe and across International Energy Agency members. Ofgem has warned that the data centres required for AI will need more energy than the entire country currently uses. Around 140 data centres have come forward for grid connections, requiring 50 gigawatts of capacity at peak. Peak electricity demand across the whole of Britain is 45 gigawatts. The grid cannot physically support the ambition Starmer is selling. The man responsible for fixing that is the same man whose policy made the energy too expensive to use in the first place. The regulatory uncertainty problem also has an author. Twenty months into office, this government has not created the conditions that serious long-term investors require. OpenAI did not cite a global downturn or a change in commercial strategy. It cited Britain specifically. That specificity matters. Investors are not avoiding AI infrastructure. They are avoiding Britain. The government's response was to note that the AI sector has attracted more than £100 billion in private investment since taking office. That figure deserves scrutiny before it is repeated. Announced investment and deployed investment are different things. A project paused before ground is broken is counted in the announcement. The jobs, the infrastructure, the economic activity: none of that has appeared. Britain Remade's chief executive put it plainly: you cannot deliver growth or become an AI superpower with some of the highest industrial electricity prices in the developed world. Investors will simply go elsewhere. They are going elsewhere. The internal contradiction in Labour's position is now structural. Miliband's energy policy and Starmer's growth strategy are pulling in opposite directions with considerable force. Cheap, reliable, abundant energy is the foundation of a modern industrial economy, and a data centre economy in particular. Net Zero, as currently designed and implemented, makes energy expensive and unreliable. A government cannot pursue both simultaneously without one destroying the other. On the evidence of the last twenty months, it is the growth strategy that is losing. Starmer stood next to Donald Trump and told the world that Britain was open for business. OpenAI has now told him the terms on which it would be prepared to agree. Lower energy costs. Clearer regulation. Conditions that exist elsewhere and do not yet exist here. OpenAI is not asking for the impossible. It is asking for the basics. A government serious about growth would treat that statement as an emergency. This one issued a press release. "Ed Miliband's Net Zero agenda has made Britain one of the most expensive places in the developed world to consume industrial electricity."

In 2004, the BBC warned the Maldives were "soon to be uninhabitable," claiming sea levels were rising 0.9 cm per year and that 80% of the islands could vanish within a century. More than two decades later though, reality says otherwise. The Maldives haven't sunk, they've exploded with growth: 12 new airports, expanded international terminals, record tourism of over 2 million visitors a year, and more than 170 resorts, with 7 added in 2024. Instead of disappearing under the waves, this so-called "paradise in peril" has shown no statistically significant sea level rise since the 1980s, according to satellite data. Here we have another 'climate catastrophe' headline completely undone by time.

The welfare state isn’t a safety net anymore, it’s a parallel system with better perks. When dependency is consistently cheaper than self-reliance, the system doesn’t support people - it locks them in.