Maxi

For the last year I've been helming the development of Progress, a new British political movement beyond left and right, for whom I have been acting as founder and leader. Today we are publicly releasing our policy testament, and with it, introducing our party and organisation for the first time. If you've been reading this feed over the past fortnight you'll have some idea of what we think is wrong with Britain. The tweets were not an exercise in commentary. They were the opening argument of a case we intend to prosecute through the coming years, made by a group of highly able everyday citizens who have spent years looking at the parlous state of the country in which they live and feel summoned to duty. Progress' philosophy is a best-of-both-worlds approach to the mixture of political spectrum positions. We believe in industrial development, real wage increases for the worker, skills and training, healthy public services (including and especially the NHS), and giving everyone in Britain a fair stake in their society; we will do more for working people on these issues than Labour have in living memory. We will do more to secure Britain's streets from crime than the Tories have in a century. We are committed to answering the public's repeat and clear wishes on immigration in a way that is both uncompromised and robust, as well as utterly civilised. We are in step, and side-by-side, with the median voter on these issues because Progress was founded by the median voter, for the median voter. We are the proud and natural home for the politically homeless. You may ask, "Why not Reform or Restore or the Greens?" In short, we at Progress understand implicitly the scale of the problems that face our country. We know that only organisations capable of the highest performance have a chance of wresting those problems to the ground. We look at Reform and Restore and the Greens and, like you, are left in no doubt that they are incapable of the level of performance required. They are conventional political organisations capable only of conventional things. Britain needs something far greater than that. The policy testament we are sharing with you today is the richest, longest, and most comprehensive integrated vision for the future of Britain written yet this century, a document that will continue to evolve as our understanding of how to best serve our people grows. We invite you to read it. It was written by people who take you and your needs extremely seriously. And yet, for all that, half a million words of policy is the easy part. The real challenge comes now, in building a political machine up and down the country not merely capable, in time, of contesting elections, but capable in the immediate term of providing value to the communities in which they are embedded. This is the essence of our aim: not to beg trust but to win it through service, without being asked and without asking anything in return. At Progress, we call this 'CIV', or 'Community Investment'. Our work may elapse over a generation before it bears fruit. Fate may intervene to bring it to resolution, good or bad, long before that. In the chaos of our world there's no way to know. But what is in our control is our drive and ability to build, and "build" is what we're doing and what we’re going to do. We require community leaders, active and would-be, to help support our existing CIVs up and down the country and build more. We require experts and technicians of every stripe. Outsized and unusually shaped talent is the alpha and the omega of our organisation. We require, above all else, any and everyone who has looked at what Britain has become and concluded that responsibility for fixing it must lay with the people, not with a professional failure class. Never doubt that, as dark as things seem in this land of ours, there are those fighting, hard and earnest, to right the course. If you’re stirred by duty, if you wish to work with a British political organisation that can do things others can't, then come and give us your hand. It Can Be Done. progressforbritain.org

Wayne Broadhurst went out to walk his dog on an ordinary street in Uxbridge, and he did not come home. Dawood Safi, a man he had never met and never wronged, stabbed him to death where he stood - the neck, the chest, the side - and turned the knife that same day on two more people, a landlord and a boy of fourteen. Safi is an Afghan national. He reached Britain by lorry in 2020, and in 2022 this country granted him asylum - which is to say we heard his case, accepted his account, and took him formally into our protection, on the old understanding that a nation which shelters a stranger does it to keep him from harm, and to keep harm from itself. The man Britain took in under that promise then killed one of the people it was meant to protect. This week, at Southwark Crown Court, the charge for what he did to Wayne Broadhurst was moved from murder to manslaughter. The prosecution accepted a plea of diminished responsibility on the evidence of four psychiatrists that Safi was in a psychotic state when he killed, that he had, in the phrase, lost contact with reality. He denies the attempted murder of the two he attacked afterwards and will be tried for it. He has not been sentenced. None of this is finished. The medical question I leave to the doctors; four of them agree, and the law has held for centuries that a man severed from reality does not kill with a murderer's mind. But take the psychiatry out and a plainer fact stands behind it, one no expert was asked to weigh: Wayne Broadhurst is dead because the British state took a man into its keeping and that man killed him. That was not a medical event. It was the downstream cost of a decision - to grant the asylum, and then, across a whole system, never to look at the grant again. An asylum system is a promise a country makes, and every promise has two sides. We hear without end about the side owed to the claimant. The side owed to the public - that the people already here, who asked for none of this, will be kept safe from what is admitted in their name - has been treated for twenty years as something faintly shameful, a concern decent people are meant not to raise. Wayne Broadhurst was on the wrong side of that silence. So was the boy of fourteen. A country that meant to go on surviving would grant asylum with extreme sparing, watch closely what it had granted, and make the safety of its own people the first charge on the whole arrangement, before any other claim upon it. Britain does none of these things, and a man out walking his dog has paid for the omission with his life. That will not be set right by grief, and it will not be set right in a comment thread - only by people willing to take the power to change it and then use it. If Wayne Broadhurst's name is more to you than a bad afternoon on the timeline, come and help us take it.

It is the third heatwave of the summer, the reservoirs are down, and across the South there is a hosepipe ban. If you are the sort who gets up in the morning, goes to work, and pays for your own water, the ban lands on you with full force. You let your lawn go brown. You fill a can at the kitchen tap for the tomatoes. You take it on the chin, because that is what a rule is, and because some part of you still believes rules in this country are things that fall on everyone alike. They are not, and a hosepipe is a small, almost comic proof of it. Southern Water and Affinity have handed a blanket exemption from the ban to every household on the WaterSure tariff - the scheme that already caps the water bills of benefit claimants at a fixed rate, with the shortfall spread quietly across everyone else's charges. So the household that pays the reduced bill, subsidised out of yours, is also the household left free to run its hosepipe through August while you ration from a watering can. A smaller bill, and then, stacked on top, unlimited use of the water you are helping to pay for. The medical cases on that tariff are real, and a decent country waters them without a second thought. That is not the decision two water companies made this week. Faced with a choice, they reached by pure institutional reflex for the setting every British institution now reaches for by default: relieve the recipient, bill the contributor, and never once ask what four decades of governing this way does to the people on the paying end. Because this is the master-rule of British public life now, and a hosepipe only shrinks it down small enough to see whole. Everywhere you look the obligations run uphill to the man who works and the exemptions run down to the man who does not. He pays the taper that claws back 55 pence of every extra pound he earns. He funds the tariff, the exemption, the tribunal, the hotel, the entire apparatus of relief - and then watches that apparatus wave through, at his cost, small comforts he is himself refused. He is not the citizen the machine is built to serve. He is its residual claimant: he gets whatever is left once everyone with a grievance or a subsidy has been seen to. A country can run like this for a while, on the patience and the decency of the people carrying it. It cannot run like this forever, because those people are not fools, and every year a few more of them do the arithmetic and conclude that the mug's game is not worth the candle. They stop straining. They go part-time, or to Dubai, or into the queue they used to fund. And you would struggle to blame a single one of them. This does not want another regulator or another review. It wants the incentive turned back the right way up, so that carrying your share is the rewarded thing again, the way it is in every country that still works. That is what Progress is being built to do. In the meantime, fill your watering can, keep your own private tally of what your compliance actually buys you, and understand that the tally is where politics begins. Then come and help us change the sum.

On July 4th 2026, in the village hall at Piddington, the people of a small Oxfordshire parish put up their hands and voted, 175 to seven, to leave the United Kingdom. Yeah you read that right. A village smaller than some Papua New Guinean moities means to draw up a declaration of independence, hand it to the American ambassador in London, and have it carried from there to Trump. It's a masterwork of English humour, a brilliant work of theatrical civics; and under it all is a sentiment rapidly becoming endemic through our towns and shires everywhere the London-Metropolitan consensus seeks to have its way. Why? Because Piddington has something like 180 adults in it. On the old Ministry of Defence site up the road the Government intends to house 1,250 single men, asylum seekers, adult and unvetted - the better part of seven strangers for every man, woman and child already living there. Nobody in the village was asked. Nobody's consent was sought, because everybody knows the consent would never be granted, and because the fixed habit of the British state is now to treat the withholding of consent as an obstacle to be violated. A state that never stops going on about the abusive habitudes of certain kinds of men is determined to act, at every turn, just like those men unto their constituents. So a parish of a few hundred people reached back 250 years and picked up the one idea the modern British state can no longer answer, because it has abandoned it in all but name: that government draws its just powers from the consent of the governed. Piddington has withdrawn its consent. It cannot enforce the withdrawal and it knows this. What it can do is make the withholding visible, theatrical, impossible to file and forget - to say, in the only language left to people with no power and no say, that a thing is being done to us that we did not agree to, by men who did not ask and were careful never to find out. There is the whole of the country in one Oxfordshire field. A state grown so deaf to its own people that they must dress their objection up as a foreign revolution and post it to Washington, having correctly concluded there is no one at home who will read it. You need not think Piddington will ever fly its own flag to see that it is right, and that its quarrel is your quarrel; or it will be your quarrel if it isn't yet. The camp near Bicester is one of dozens; the disregard behind it is total, and it will reach a field near you on the very terms it reached theirs - announced, never proposed. The village has done the only thing a village can. The rest of it - the organising, the money, the building of a force that can make Westminster ask before it imposes - is work for people who can still be troubled to do it.

You always have to be very careful when dealing with people who insist upon themselves*. When someone is at great pains to convince you that, in dealing with them, you're dealing with "champions of democracy", or "the best fucking trader in the world", or "the number one curry house in all Hounslow", you have to attend the statement with a vat load of salt. Handily, people with skilful gobs tell on themselves, in the end and as is the case for everyone, through their actions. The only way to tell if someone really is a defender of democracy, or a trustworthy voice on matters of economics, or a proponent of progress - or if they are instead enemies of democracy; shysters; or people who'd much rather we regress to an odd form of Amish communism than actually progress - is to take them a case at a time, and judge them by a record of their actions. We can see, for instance, by record of the actions of the European Union this week that, precisely as their organisational structuring and history of conduct would suggest, they are an anti-democratic institution. The most anti-democratic the continent has seen, I'd think, since the Politburo. This week in Strasbourg, the European Parliament was finally made to vote on whether to throw Chat Control out - Chat Control which is the scheme to have the private messages on your phone read by machine. 314 members voted to reject it. 276 voted to keep it. More of them wanted it dead than alive, proof that even in large federal parliaments sane morals can survive. But the bill is going to be passed anyway. How? Well, every time the bill was voted down, another vote was held. This occurred FIVE TIMES. The advice of the EU's own lawyers, that the bill to snoop on private citizens is against EU law, was ignored. Because the 'correct' result could be procured through the vote, just a few days before the whole Parliament emptied out for the summer, the majority ran the vote through an emergency second-reading procedure. Under this procedure, to reject the law you no longer need more votes than the other side; you need an absolute majority of every member who holds a seat, 361 of them, whether they are in the room or on a beach. Fall a single vote short of 361 and the law stands, "deemed adopted" regardless. Because many members of the parliament had already left on summer holiday, the absolute majority could never be attained, so the bill voted out five times, the bill almost no one wanted or wants, would have to be upheld. Chat Control has been put to Europe again and again, and again and again it has lost. Member states buried it in Council. In March this same Parliament rejected it by a single vote. The Council's own lawyers warned, in writing, that it would mean the permanent surveillance of every private conversation on the continent, and Europe's human rights court in Strasbourg has said that breaking encryption cannot be justified in a democratic society. But the EU is a revival of old pre-Metternichian European aristocratic conventions, just with worse aesthetics; it is the convention to which the continent perennially default. Thus, when the voting kept producing the wrong result, they changed the voting. They hate votes. They hate you and your views, presuming you are a European in the majority on this issue. They'll rerun the count, move the threshold, and pick the week, until the machine - that is, a small and powerful coterie of unelected men and women - gets the result it wants. It keeps every outward form of democracy - the parliament, the votes, the procedure - and hollows the meaning out of them from the inside. No tanks required. Your functional autocracy is ready. Leave aside money and trade and borders for a moment. This, on its own, argues in full the case for Britain having left the EU. We have our own tinpot Stalins in our own government trying to force the same shit down our gullets - unsurprisingly, every single one of them a vast proponent of the EU, who deeply regrets our having left it. But our laws remain in our power to wrest back by democratic means. Labour will be annihilated at the next GE and whatever they impose can be reversed given political will and popular assent. But, had we been a member of the EU still, Britain would have had to take this law like everyone else, the scanning of our messages included, handed down by a chamber where your side can win the vote and still be run over by your lordly betters. We can't settle things in our own Parliament presently because our state is a criminal Metropolitan vetocracy waging soft war against the national interest; but there is no external force otherwise with levy on us. Once our internal affairs are corrected and put in order, which they will be far sooner, more peacefully, and more permanently than anyone thinks, we will be clear to skirt this disastrous turn into pure authoritarianism-by-bureaucratic-decree that the EU has always licked its lips in pleasured anticipation of. We will be once again the beacon of freedoms we always were, and that made the best of Frenchmen, Germans, and all other Europeans dream of what might be in their homelands. So the next time they tell you, as they will until whole bloodlines die out on the vines of merciless time, that leaving the EU was a parlous tantrum and the adults all live in Brussels, remember this week. Remember that 314 beat 276 - for the sixth time - and it counted for nothing, because the outcome had been settled before a vote was cast. That is the club we walked out of. Bright move, it turns out. *...as you evidently do when pasting drafts of Tweets in out of your notes...

The oldest promise ever made by a state to the governed is that if you are robbed, or beaten, or terrorised in your own home, you pick up the phone, and you call the law. And the law will come and see to it that restitution is done you. Everything else - courts, prisons, markets, property, economies, the whole kit and kaboodle - hangs off that one beige-plain transaction. When you call, they shall come. This week His Majesty's Inspectorate graded the Staffordshire police force on how well it keeps that promise, and - to precisely no one at-all's surprise - the grade was 'Inadequate'. The force might be Staffordshire, but it could be three dozen others. Across nine areas the inspectors found nothing to call good, let alone outstanding; the best on offer was "adequate", and the single worst - inadequate, the lowest grade there is - was responding to the public. What that means in functional terms is this. Last year nearly one in five calls to the non-emergency 101 line were abandoned, left ringing until the caller gave up. Fewer than 60% of incidents urgent enough to demand an officer within two hours actually got one. And when the two hours looked like being missed, the force took to regrading the emergency downward on paper, so the failure need never show up as one. None of this crept up on anyone. The same inspectors warned Staffordshire two years ago that its response to the public was not good enough. It was given two years to put it right, and at the end of those two years, it was still a load of shit. The force heard the warning that they were failures in the eyes of their public, and carried on regardless. And Staffordshire is the ordinary case, totally unexceptional, which is the almost frightening part. Greater Manchester Police, covering one of the great cities of this country, sits in special measures for failings in how it records crime and protects the public. Nationally the figures describe a retreat. Close to three in four home burglaries now end with no suspect ever identified. Theft runs much the same, on a charge rate of around 7%, which means that better than nine times in ten, when someone takes what is yours, nobody is caught and nobody answers for it. The police have, without ever putting out a statement to say so, largely withdrawn from the everyday crime that decides how safe a person feels on their own street. They will plead resources. Bollocks. There always seem to be officers to spare the moment a citizen posts the wrong thing online. As we've seen these past weeks, if you look a certain way in this country, and are beaten on the street by people who might look a certain other way, there will always be enough police about to assault you, the victim, while they see your assailants off the scene. Doesn't matter if you're bleeding to death, even. So when a minister next holds forth on crime, put the only question that counts: whether, when you call, anybody comes. Answer's no, lads. Get on with it yourself. When it really cost something, as it did in the summers of 2020 and 2021 as breeds of various insanity attacked the world in stunning coordination, I used to defend the boys on the beat. I used to tell dipshit Mets who wanted to abolish them that it would be they, first, who would end up losing everything - life, limb, and property - if what our sweet cousin Yanks call the 'thin blue line' were wiped off of our social ground. Few rotters, sure, hard to avert that edge case; but I respected the police and defended the police. I wonder how many police now ever themselves wonder how many people who used to feel as I used to feel about the police now hate, despise, and fundamentally distrust the police in Britain? See them as the instrument of a regime hostile to its own people? They'd do well to wonder thus. They'd do well to turn in the badge and start making lots of noise about what their powers are put in use of. hmicfrs.justiceinspectorates.gov.uk/publications/p…

Another month, another piece of Britain was sold. This time the company's called Intertek. You have likely never heard of it. It was founded in London in 1885 by a marine surveyor named Caleb Brett, to serve the business of telling merchants the truth - whether the cargo was sound, whether the goods were what the seller swore they were. Impartial assurance, they called it. It grew into one of the great unsung champions of this country: a FTSE 100 firm, 45,000 people, a thousand laboratories in more than a hundred countries, whose entire trade is vouching for whether a thing is safe and real. That is the firm that has just been taken off the London market for £9.3 billion by a Swedish private equity house fronting money from the sovereign wealth funds of Abu Dhabi. The biggest buyout of a British company since they carried off Boots in 2007. And here's the sting. Intertek is a healthy, world-beating company. It is being sold anyway, because Britain itself has become the cheap thing on the shelf - the marked-down asset the rest of the world is loading into its trolley while the price is low. Foreign bids for British companies have passed £170 billion this year, a record, the fastest sale of a nation's own family silver in living memory. Ten separate times in a single year, ministers have had to "call in" a foreign bid for one of our defence firms - the one kind of company on earth you cannot afford to have owned abroad - and they treat each one as a surprise, a nightwatchman shining his torch about while the removal vans are already loaded and running. Sit with the irony of this particular sale, and savour its neatness. A firm Britain built to certify that things are sound, sold off precisely because the market has decided Britain itself is not, is no longer. All of this is the direct result of a state that has made this country a dear place to keep a company and a bargain place to buy one. The costliest energy, a tax system that bills you for breathing, a stock market bled of confidence by people who have never once been made to answer for bleeding it. The London Exchange, where the world once came to raise its money, is being wound down into a car-boot sale, one champion at a time. So the next time a minister stands up and calls this "inward investment", hear the words properly. It is the sound a nation makes when it has run out of things to do except sell itself. The going-out-of-business sign is already up in the window. The only thing left to settle is whether we are the generation that takes it down, or the one that stands about and watches the last of it go.

The coming of Andy Burnham, and his inexorable march to No.10, has been replete with images of the skyline of Manchester. The cluster of glass towers off Deansgate, the cranes still working, the trams sauntering through a city centre that does look rather reborn. It photographs beautifully, as it was built to. That skyline is the entire case, argument, and justification for the thing the star of the matinée behind it - or, to be more precise, the man constantly seen out in front of it - has taken to calling Manchesterism. Manchester is the model Burnham means to carry into Downing Street and lay over the rest of the country. And Manchester's a worthy example. Manchester wove the world's cotton, split the atom, and built the first working computer. Not always prepossessing, but it is nonetheless one of the great cities of the world. Next to such a legacy the Andy Burnham Show looks rather lacking in its real significance. Especially given it is a show and not very much more. It's not done very much for the people living in Manchester. Between 2021 and 2023 the real spending power of the people of Greater Manchester fell by 7%, the steepest drop of any major city in England, against a national average of 4.7%. By 2023 the typical resident had less in real terms than on the day Burnham first walked into office in 2017. Six years of him, and his people were poorer at the finish than the start. Not a figure you'd want to run in your brochure. Remember, too, the one concrete promise he staked himself on. On his first day he swore to end rough sleeping across Greater Manchester by 2020, and handed 15% of his salary to a fund to show he meant it. A decent pledge, and the need behind it was real; rough sleeping in the city had climbed more than tenfold in a decade. But by January 2019 his flagship 24-hour shelter had closed after less than three months open, and 2020 arrived with the pledge laying in tatters. Manchesterism is Burnhamism, and Burnhamism is a machine for turning a city-centre skyline into an exploitable national reputation. It's not about building, it's not about prosperity, and it's not about economies and regional capabilities. Labour neither know anything about these things, nor do they care. Barely three miles separate the richest parts of Greater Manchester from the poorest. The investment and the cranes and the ministerial photo-calls collect in the glass core, while Rochdale and Oldham and the mill towns that built the place - all of them places with severe, national-destiny-making sociocultural issues as well as economic ones - remain in-decline. So over the coming fortnight, when the knobs assure you that Manchesterism is the bright new answer for a worn-out country, look past the skyline and into the ledger. It's a model that leaves its own people poorer than it found them, and sells that on as a triumph fit for export, is a personal marketing operation with a mayor at the head of it. There's your new national norm.

The news does not reach us the way it once did. For most of the country it now comes up the face of a phone. A thumb moving over clips, posts and the odd blazing row between strangers; and what appears there is decided by the person holding it and the accounts they have chosen to trust. And that screen is where the argument over this country now happens. That's why last month, in a Whitehall document almost nobody has read, the government set out how it means to blacken that screen. I wrote here yesterday about one half of that project: their move to throttle Xitter, the one place on the web where an ordinary person still catches the state doing what it would rather you never saw. I told you then that the Right to Know is not the government's to ration - that under Progress it gets widened, not walled, and that the British public shall know everything - and that any government that has moved to obstruct this right has forfeited its claim on legitimacy. Then there's the other half. The document comes from the Culture Department, and they have called it "Watch this Space", which is the first tell: they find this funny. What it proposes is to compel YouTube and the other platforms to hoist public-service news, the BBC at the head of it, to the top of your feed by law, whether or not a single person would have put it there. It would stand as the first thing your children meet when they go looking for what has happened in Britain that day. Of course, the BBC is, in organisational shape and in what it creates, culturally derelict nonsense. Fervid shit motivated in its every product and issue by a seething hatred of what Britain is, what it has always been, and what it means. But set those two moves side by side and the shape stops being deniable. One hand goes to the throat of the channel that exposes the state; the other pumps the state's own broadcaster straight into the nation's pocket. Choke the witness, install the narrator. It is the oldest manoeuvre in the book, run here through a grey consultation paper with a breezy title, so that something which in a less polite country would take soldiers can pass for a spot of tidying-up done for your benefit. Here is what the people behind it will never say aloud, though every last one of them understands it perfectly, and that understanding is what makes them dangerous. People don't trust conventional media anymore. They know it hates them and despises their interests. Their news comes from gonzo and rough-edged third-hand sources, much of it indie; eccentrics on the ground with GoPros, streamers, neighbourhood news passed person-to-person in Whatsapp chains like the twilight bark. What Youtube presently is, beyond being a venue for this content, is an amplifier for this information stream that the state cannot stop, taper off, or interfere with. So these efforts are mounted to do exactly that. To blind you to your own eyes, and to stop you spreading the news of what you see happening around you. Who would believe the extent of the stuff happening around asylum hotels, or to our girls in city centres, if we hadn't all seen it with our own two eyes. You should take yesterday's promise and today's warning as the one thing they are. Keeping Twitter switched on is the smallest part of the Right to Know; and the state is doing this in broad daylight because they have wagered you will moan, share your moan, and then meekly callow back and let them do what they want to you and what you've got. Is that the truth? Is that what's going to happen? The public shall soon be obliged to give their answer.

Yesterday was the 21st anniversary of the 7/7 bombings. Did you notice? Did you remember? If you had a particularly busy Tuesday, you could (almost) be forgiven for neither noticing nor remembering. It's not as though there was any effort whatsoever from our state to mark the remembrance. Not to mark remembrance of what began as an unremarkable day, to which the country had woken up happy having won the 2012 Olympic bid the day before, before swigging the last of the tea, pulling shut the front door, and heading into town as usual. Not to mark remembrance of that day on which, at ten-to-nine, three bombs set by four Islamic terrorists then went off within fifty seconds of each other, in the black of the Underground tunnels at Aldgate, at Edgware Road, and deep on the line below Russell Square. Not to mark remembrance of when, just before 10am, a fourth tore the roof off the number 30 bus in Tavistock Square, right in front of the morning crowds. Fifty-two people who had set out for work or home were murdered where they sat and stood. More than 700 were wounded, some carried up out of the smoke on the backs of strangers, some maimed such that they would never made whole again. Cleaners and civil servants, a gardener, students, a mother of two, a menagerie of innocent Londoners. It was the worst single slaughter on our streets since the war. An act of genocidal terrorism motivated by the purest racial, theocratic, and cultural hatreds, it is our 9/11, and as-perpetrated it was intended in precisely the same way as the Twin Tower bombings were: to punish this country for being what it is, and what it always was, and to frighten it out of being that a day longer. Twenty-one years on, ask yourself who among the people who govern us marked it. Try to call a speech to mind. Can't? Well, there weren't many worth the name. No standard lowered that anyone noticed, no words from the despatch box with any blood flowing in them, none of the round-the-clock solemnity these same figures can conjure in an afternoon for a cause that happens to flatter them. I think Khan laid a wreath, with the most minimal ceremony, certainly with none of the pomp and majesty which he is willing to expense for other occasions which he prefers. He couldn't have done less. Labour and the Mets don't want to commemorate this tragedy fulsomely. They won't even admit who did it. Look at this official report. Look at the words missing from it. btp.police.uk/police-forces/… I suspect such studied indifference is a way of marking the very victory in whose hopeful cause the attacks were carried out. To make us afraid of being British. That is your government's policy, philosophical aim, and pursued agenda unto you. They, ultimately, want you to feel the same way about your nation and yourselves that the men who masterminded 7/7 did. These people forget nothing that serves them; the mislaying of this occasion is a decision. This particular wound embarrasses them. It sits athwart every comfortable thing they believe, and is one of the great stains on the eiderdown of one of their great client groups (the only ones still voting for them) so they would sooner it dimmed, sooner the whole country agreed to pretend it never happened and walk on. A ruling class that cannot mourn its own murdered without shuffling its feet is telling you, as plainly as it dares, what it holds for the nation those dead belonged to. Which is nothing. Or something colder than nothing. But they do not own the memory of that morning, and they never did. We do. Every family sat around an empty chair; every Londoner who stood on a platform that week and went to work anyway, and would not be made to fear; every ordinary soul in this country who still knows the weight of what was done and what was lost. We are its keepers now.

Kent has been banned from using a hosepipe since July 3rd. Yorkshire's five million follow on the 11th; Hampshire and the Isle of Wight on the 21st. Reservoir levels are down, the summer is dry, and the instruction to the public is the one it always is: go without. So here is the number that ought to end the argument. This island, the one the rest of the world pictures under permanent drizzle, has not completed a major new water reservoir since the early 1990s. Carsington, in Derbyshire, was the last. In the years since, the population has grown by more than 10 million, a whole extra London and change, and we have finished nowhere new to keep the rain. The rain still comes off the Pennines the way it always has. What we stopped doing was building anywhere to hold it, because no minister's name was ever carved on a reservoir that filled two decades after he had left the department. So the reserves we do have run low, and a man gets a warning for pointing a hosepipe at his own tomatoes. The government now promises nine new ones, the first in a generation. Good, but thirty years late, and it will not put a drop in this year's empty reserves. A country that means to have a future digs the holes and pours the concrete before the third hosepipe summer of the decade, not after. Storing your own rainfall is close to the humblest task a state can set itself, and we have not managed it since the year the Soviet Union fell.

There is a furnace in St Helens that has been alight, in one form or another, since before your great-grandparents were born. Glassmaking is one of the oldest things this country does well; they were blowing it on Wearside in the seventh century, and it was a St Helens firm that gave the world the float-glass process every modern window depends on. Now the government has found a way to tax it toward the exit. The mechanism is the packaging levy, Extended Producer Responsibility if you want the civil-service name for it, and it charges a manufacturer by the weight of the packaging it puts on the market. Glass is heavy. Plastic is light. So a material made from sand, soda ash and a little limestone, one that can be melted down and remade without end and never stops being recyclable, is billed as though it were the enemy of the planet, while the throwaway plastic beside it on the shelf gets off lighter for being flimsier. The numbers give the game away. Glass is around 5% of the packaging market and carries some 27% of the entire EPR charge. The GMB puts 4,752 glassmaking jobs in the firing line. The brewers reckon it is costing their trade £124 million a year and adding about 6p to every half-litre bottle, which you settle at the bar without ever being told why. There was, we were promised, a reset in June to bring the glass charge down; Whitehall's own working moves the figure by around 1%. A rounding error, handed over as a rescue. It takes a peculiar kind of talent to assemble a thing like this. A tax raised in the name of the environment, falling hardest on the one everyday material that is endlessly reusable and harmless in the ground, and lightest on the stuff that chokes the rivers we are also instructed to mourn. A British glassworks already pays some of the dearest industrial energy in the developed world to hold its furnaces at 1,500 degrees; now it is sent a bill for the crime of making something built to last. A competent government would do the obvious thing and price packaging by the harm it does once it is thrown away, not by what it weighs on the scales, and a glassmaker in Yorkshire or on Merseyside would wake to find the state was on the side of the thing it makes. Progress has written that programme out in full, because knowing what to do was never the hard part. So if you make things for a living, or you have watched an industry you were proud of taxed and lectured into the ground and felt the anger that earns, do something heavier than feel it. The furnaces will not keep themselves open, and the formula will not un-write itself because you were annoyed online. Time to help build something that's going to change the picture.

Over the past couple of years, almost every story in Britain that has genuinely alarmed the people who run this country reached the public by the same road. The footage someone was never meant to see. The full sentence, read out, on a case the papers had gone strangely quiet about. The real daily cost of a hotel. A rule change slipped out on a Friday afternoon in the hope nobody would look. You did not learn these things from a government press release or the evening news. You learned them from a clip, a screenshot, a thread on this very site, handed from one ordinary person to the next, faster than anyone in Whitehall could tidy it away or cover-up their corrupt dealings, seedy little Banana Republic-ans that they are. Naturally, government now wants to shut off the tap, concrete up the well that you drink from, and its primary expression is in the move already underway to take Twitter off the internet in Britain. It is being built the way these things always are: never announced as a ban, only assembled, piece by piece, in plain sight. Ofcom, the regulator, has an investigation running. The NGO steamship at full, blackest-black-smoke belch. The government has said, out loud, that it will support Ofcom if it moves to block the site. Week by week the ground is prepared with the reasons a wary public is meant to swallow. This is the manufacture of consent underway. You don't have to ask why this platform, and why now. The stated reasons, protecting kids, are bullshit - no one in this Labour government gives a single shit about children, are more akin to acolytes of moloch, whose only use for kids is when they can be fed in sacrifice to the goat-god of their putrid ideals. But look at what Xitter actually is to the people in power. It is the one information gate they cannot control, the place where the story escapes before it can be killed, where a government failing the public continuously and in full view watches that failure and the underlying treason and betrayal-of-nation travel further and faster than any rebuttal it can muster. Having lost the argument, they have every reason to want the room where they keep losing it closed. The most fundamental right a free people holds is the right to know: to see what is being done in your name, with your money, to your country, and to judge it for yourself. It is worth more than anything else you possess, more even than the vote, because the vote is worthless without it. Every other liberty runs through its sublime hourglass-narrow. A public kept from knowing what its rulers do can hold them to nothing, and a government that gets to decide what its public may see has made itself the public's keeper. The people reaching for the off-switch understand this perfectly. It is exactly why they are reaching for it. The people behind this should hear one thing clearly. Any attempt by the government or any associated body to separate the British public from its Right to Know will be met - opposed at once, and in organised fashion - by people who are much brighter, more capable and far better resourced than they are. People who build the tools, know the networks, and have spent their lives keeping information free while you were only just beginning to learn to fear it. Our Right to Know shall not be separated from us, nor we separated from it; not for one moment. And, in fact, that right will be widened. Whatever they try to close, we will prise further open. The British public will not be made to know less. They will be allowed to know everything. And hear this, you who number among the Fellow-Concerned. This is your fight. A contest that decides whether Britain stays a free country or settles into a new life as a much-displaced Central American republic, and it is a fight we mean to win. Can you write, build, code, organise, fund? Will you refuse to look away? Then come and work an oar with us. They want us all in the dark. We are going to turn on every light in the house.

In a plain, over-lit room in a building near Heathrow - Hatton Cross, to be exact - and in a dozen like it around the country, the same scene runs several times a day. On one side sits a lawyer for the Home Office, there to argue that a foreign national convicted of a crime in this country should be sent home. On the other sits the criminal and their barrister, arguing that they should stay. Between them sits an immigration judge, whose task is to weigh the safety of the British public against the tenderness of the criminal's domestic arrangements. We all know that, like the England team itself, the argument-in-line-with-the-national-interest rarely wins here, not when it should (though God-willing 2026 will be an exception). Of the foreign criminals who fought their deportation on human-rights grounds, nearly half - 149 out of 340 - won, and stayed. Not a handful of hard cases. Nearly one in two. The key that opens that door, again and again, is Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights: the right to respect for private and family life. To see what "family life" can be stretched to cover, take the man the courts call MD. He arrived in Britain in 2008. He went on to sexually assault three young girls in his own family, one of them his stepdaughter. A judge found he had no claim to refugee status and that he continued to pose a risk. His deportation was blocked anyway, on the ground that removing him would damage the family life he had built here, and so today he lives freely in Glasgow, and fully permitted to see his own children. The clause that keeps him here was written, after the Second World War, to stop totalitarian states tearing families apart and deporting people at will. It was built to protect you from the government. It now, routinely, protects the government's prisoners from you, and is a fundamental instrument by which the state wages the very war upon the nation which it has waged, in building arms, for the better part of 30 years now. Ministers know all of this. They know it so well that this very year they announced yet another crackdown, another solemn promise that "all foreign criminals" will be removed, the latest in a decade of identical promises, each one undone months later in the same tribunals by the same clause. They will not do the one thing that works, because the one thing that works means a direct fight with Strasbourg and with an entire legal industry, and they would rather keep announcing than actually win. So we must build a vehicle that can win it. A foreign national convicted of a serious offence here must be deported at the end of his sentence, and no appeal to family life, private life, or some other absurd special allowance can be allowed to stop it. Parliament, not Strasbourg and not a judge at Hatton Cross, will decide who may live in Britain; and where our own human-rights law obstructs the plain safety of the public, we will rewrite our own human-rights law. Every time an ordinary person says the obvious out loud, that the man from aboard who abused three little girls belongs on a plane right the hell out of here, and not free in the streets of Glasgow, he is told they do not understand the law. But the public understands it perfectly.

This month Lloyds Bank closed the accounts of a news outlet called The Canary and gave no reason for it. You need not like The Canary, a small, combative, left-wing site plenty of people have no time for, to feel the cold wind wrapped in that sentence. A bank switched off a media organisation's ability to hold money, and legally owed it no explanation whatsoever. It is not a rare event. In 2025, banks and building societies in this country closed 453,230 accounts, roughly ten times the number they were closing a decade ago, and more than 140,000 of them belonged to businesses. Where a reason is offered at all, it tends to be "financial crime," or a phrase that can be stretched to cover almost anything, "reputational risk." No court, no charge, no hearing. Someone in a compliance department decides you are more trouble than you are worth, and the account is gone. And it is about to get worse. The banks are building a shared list. Through their own trade body, lenders including Lloyds, Barclays and Revolut are pooling data on the customers they flag, so that a person shut out by one can be automatically refused by the next, and the one after that. Lose your account, and you may lose your ability to hold any account anywhere. The government's much-trumpeted fix, forcing banks to give 90 days' notice and a real reason, applies only to accounts opened after the April 28th this year. The machine is, notionally, indifferent to where you stand (Farage was also debanked), though it's very hard to imagine that this technique will not be primarily weaponised against the 'far-right', whether the persons in question are far-right or not. In any case, all it registers is that someone unaccountable, somewhere, has ruled you a risk. Without your account you now cannot be paid, pay rent, run a business or buy food. A private system that can switch all of that off, with no reason and no appeal, and is now assembling a register to ensure no rival switches it back on, holds a power over the individual that no Lord Chancellor and no secret policeman in our history ever held. The most perfect censorship ever devised, and the most deniable, because it never has to ban a word. It simply closes the account of whoever becomes inconvenient, and lets the fear of that do the rest. Progress would end it. Access to basic banking would become a legal right, not a favour a compliance officer may withdraw on a hunch. No account could be closed without a clear, stated reason and a genuine route of appeal. And the shared blacklist, a machine for erasing people from the economy without trial, would be outlawed outright. No free society should let unelected institutions exile its citizens from ordinary life on a whisper of "reputational risk." If a bank can delete a person for the wrong opinions, or merely for being awkward, then few of your other freedoms are safe, because every one of them now runs through an account somebody else controls. It is something ought to trouble you whichever way you vote.

This month a deep-water port on the Cromarty Firth, in the north of Scotland, was sold to the Japanese conglomerate Mitsui for a sum nobody involved will disclose. It is not just any port. It is meant to be one of the anchors of Britain's offshore-energy future, the heart of a new freeport promising thousands of jobs, and it had already swallowed more than £30 million of public money, including a grant handed over by a government agency a few months ago, by people who now admit they never thought to ask whether the place was about to be sold. One port, you might say, is one port. But it is a single line in a very long ledger. The water out of English taps is billed by companies owned in Canada, Hong Kong and the Gulf. Slices of the electricity grid, the gas storage, the airports, the football clubs and a long parade of our best engineering firms have gone the same way, sold off one after another, often to the very foreign states we are officially told to worry about, and often after British taxpayers paid to build or rescue them. We are living through the largest handover of a nation's assets into foreign hands in our peacetime history, and the remarkable thing is how few of the people in charge treat it as a problem at all. Each sale is waved through as a vote of confidence, proof that Britain is "open for business," as though there were something worldly about selling the roof over your head and renting it back - or rather, the people who never laid a brick in their lives selling it out from under you. The instinct forgets something basic. Sovereignty lives in deed; not in a flag or an anthem or a line in a speech, but in who actually owns the ports and the power and the water. Own them, and you can decide things for yourself. Sell them, and at the decisive moment the decision sits in a boardroom in Tokyo or a sovereign fund in Abu Dhabi whose loyalty is, quite properly, to its own shareholders and its own government, not to yours. Every one of these sales trims, by a little, the range of things Britain is still able to choose, and they are cheered on by a governing class that will spend the next election talking passionately about "taking back control" while it signs the actual controls away, one asset at a time. We must start again from the opposite instinct. We must treat our ports, our energy, our water and our strategically vital companies as what they are, the load-bearing walls of national independence, and guard them as such: a hard public-interest test on the sale of any critical asset to a foreign owner, an outright block where the buyer is a hostile state or its proxies, and a Treasury that fights to keep what British ingenuity and British taxpayers built, the way France and America and Japan already do. We cheered England this week for refusing to be beaten on someone else's ground. Ask yourself why we keep giving the ground away. And ask what you're doing to make sure that ground is properly stood.

Today, England won a football match in Mexico City that people will still be talking about in fifty years. They beat Mexico in the Azteca, a ground where the home side has been all but unbeatable for as long as anyone can remember. It was the purest form of the entertainment which only football, at its best, can provide, the kind of match that leaves you hoarse and slightly astonished at what you have witnessed. And it - or, not the match, but a lot of the talk that preceded it and which has dogged England throughout the tournament, as it always does - got me thinking about one of Britain's most characteristic exports, one of the handful of things we've never stopped producing reliably throughout our industrial wane. I'm talking about the self-hating English wally. The one who spent the group stage certain we would go out, was (whether they knew it or not) positively willing their team to fail, who has combed every England performance for the flaw that proves it was and is all a fluke, who was serenely sure, right up to the final whistle, that we would lose in the Azteca because 'we always lose the big ones'. You've seen them, they're on every message board and on every fifth table in every second pub. He talks his own country down and enjoys himself while he's doing it, and he cheers whoever stands against it, and he has been doing it, in one form or another, for a very long time. George Orwell first and most famously catalogued the type. He wrote in 1941 about fifty years of English intelligentsia that had willed themselves so estranged from their own country that their patriotism ran inside-out: ashamed of English cooking and English weather and English success, happier to be caught admiring almost anyone else, even when 'anyone else' were God-forsaken terrorist-collectivists bent on the death of European civilisation. He knew them well because he was one of them, though his misanthropy was considerably more complete and wide-ranging to be restricted only to his countrymen (and I say this not in ironical salute; I find Orwell's lack of any feeling for humanity very unsettling). Whatever, the instinct of which he wrote did not die with his generation. It rather went viral. It is now the reflexive posture of a certain educated Englishman, that Britain is more than faintly embarrassing, that our best days are safely behind us and besides-they-never-really-existed-anyway, that hope is for the naive and the flag-wave is for the racist, and that the sophisticated response to any national achievement is to hunt for the asterisk. The strangeness of it is that no people on Earth has less reason for the pose. There is no legacy like Britain's, none prouder, none that changed the world more, nor more for the better. And out of those very glory years among the many great exports numbers the wally, talking down his own and hailing whoever opposes them. A rainy mentality. It is, I think, the only thing in the whole British character we have any real cause to be ashamed of. Such a person's deepest error is a failure of imagination, and it comes from never having done anything remarkable himself. People who have pulled off the improbable, built the firm nobody believed in, won the race they were meant to lose, come back from a position everyone had written off, know a thing the naysayer cannot reach: that the improbable is done all the time, sometimes it's even easily, and that history is riven from end to end with victories of exception. The England team knows it! And they didn't learn it in the Azteca, either. They have spent eight years steadily breaking a curse that hung over English football for half a century, reaching finals and semi-finals, winning in places England were not meant to win, against foes we would not have beaten in generations gone by even frequently given the means to do so. And today they beat Mexico by being better than those men's imagination, and by refusing to carry their certainty onto the pitch. The naysayer's idiom is barren, his ethic purely negative, and his only product, stripped back, is bollocks-talked. He will tell you Britain cannot be rebuilt, cannot be cheap to power or safe to walk or a shining beacon of civilisation, in exactly the voice and for exactly the reasons he used to tell you we would lose in Mexico. He will be exactly as wrong. So watch what that team did, and then go and do it with the whole country: refuse the flinch, decline the asterisk, and prove the barren little men wrong on a scale that makes a football match look small. The work is real, it is open, and it is waiting for your hands. Come and be one of the people who did the improbable thing.

In a building in Sheffield there is a sealed chamber, and inside it a bath of molten salt held at 950 degrees. Drop in a handful of ground-up Moon rock, pass a current through it, and something remarkable happens: the oxygen locked inside the rock is pulled loose, ferried across the liquid, and collected, while what settles at the bottom is a heap of usable metal powder. Moon dust in at one end; breathable air and building material out the other. The firm is the awesomely named and -branded Metalysis, and the process was built, first of all, for an earthbound job: extracting metals more cleanly than the old industrial methods allow. The European Space Agency looked at it and saw something more. Nearly half the weight of the lunar surface is oxygen, bound chemically into the rock, and a machine that can free it means astronauts on the Moon need not haul every lungful of air a quarter of a million miles from home. They could make it where they stand. ESA has chosen the Metalysis method to produce the first oxygen ever made on the surface of another world; a single one of its machines, by their reckoning, could yield around 400 kilograms of oxygen a year, and 400 of metal beside it. It is easy, in a country that has spent so long narrating its own decline, to lose sight of what is still going on inside it. While Westminster rehearses the choreography of retreat, a company in one of the less fashionable cities in England has worked out how human beings will breathe on the Moon. The ingenuity that raised the mills, laid the railways, and split the atom did not evaporate. It is still here, in workshops and labs in the places the metropolitan imagination rarely visits, doing astonishing things mostly unremarked. And then comes the question we so reliably answer wrong. This is what I've been talking about! Metalysis, the kind of firm this country has made a habit of losing: a world-leader in a strategic technology, built here, that the moment it becomes truly valuable will draw a foreign buyer, or an investor who wants it moved nearer his own shore. We have watched it happen to our chip designers, our AI labs, our finest engineering, again and again. We have never been short of talent. We have been short of the will to keep what the talent makes. Progress exists, in large part, to break that habit: to make Britain the easiest place on earth to start something world-changing and the hardest place from which to carry it away. Metalysis should be making Moon oxygen from Sheffield in twenty years' time, its founders should be among the most celebrated people in the country, and the whole of it should still be ours, and circulating back into more, new, young world-beating props in a seething, thriving, brimming-over startup economy. If that is the Britain you want, then help us build it. The invention is already here, in Sheffield and a hundred places like it. What it needs now is a country with the nerve to hold on to it.

In May of this year, at Southampton Crown Court, three teenage boys stood convicted between them of ten counts of rape. Their victims were girls of fourteen and fifteen. The judge, Nicholas Rowland, sent not one of those boys to prison. He handed them rehabilitation orders, told the court he wished to "avoid criminalising these children unnecessarily," and told the boys to their faces that "none of you need to go to prison today." The case did not end there. The Attorney General referred the sentences to the Court of Appeal as unduly lenient, and this month the court did what Rowland would not: it raised the terms of the two main offenders to four years' detention. The Lady Chief Justice, Baroness Carr, said the court had been left no choice, and rebuked Rowland by name for underestimating the gravity of what the boys had done. Look at everything that had to happen for a child rapist to see the inside of a cell. It took the Attorney General to intervene, the Court of Appeal to convene, and the most senior judge in England and Wales to state aloud that the rape of a fourteen-year-old is serious, all of this very much backed by an undercurrent of public rage. All that machinery, all that seniority, spent to reach a conclusion every parent in the country arrived at instantly and for nothing. Nicholas Rowland is no stray. He is a fully formed product of a judicial culture that has taught itself to see the criminal, and above all the young criminal, as the party most deserving of the court's service; their tenderness, in this revolting incident. That line, "avoid criminalising these children," was no slip, but a doctrine, one taught, shared, and sincerely held, a worldview in which the boy who commits the rape is the child to be shielded, and the girl who suffers it is left out of the sentence altogether. The Court of Appeal caught this one because the incipient fury, which grows by degrees with every passing month that the people of this country suffer, grew too loud to ignore. For every case that reaches such a fever pitch, dozens pass unremarked, sentenced by men who think exactly as Rowland thinks and are only quieter about it. It's time we end this, without apology. Sexual violence against a child is among the gravest crimes a person can commit, and it will be sentenced as such: long custodial terms served in full, in austere conditions, with no automatic release to shave the years away once the cameras have gone. We must build the prison places to hold these men, because the answer to a full prison is a bigger prison, not an open door. And we will put the victim back at the centre of the courtroom, ahead of the comfort of the man in the dock. You do not need a law degree to know that rapes should end in a prison sentence. The people who run our justice system have acquired, at great expense and across many years, the sophistication required to forget it. That gap, between what the public plainly knows and what the courtroom has trained itself not to see, is one of the deepest reasons this country feels ungoverned. And closing it will take more than fury in Twitter replies.

There is a yellow digger on building sites in a hundred countries, and the name on the side of it is British: JCB. They have been built in Rocester, in the Staffordshire countryside, since 1945, by a company still owned outright by the family that founded it, the Bamfords. It has never floated on a stock exchange and it has never sold itself to a foreign buyer. And this year the Americans handed it, in open competition, its third contract in a row to supply the United States Marine Corps: $205 million for 535 armoured loaders, designed and built in Staffordshire, chosen over every home-grown rival the United States could put up. A massive triumph. Now think of the ones we lost. DeepMind, the finest artificial-intelligence lab in Europe, sold to Google. Arm, the crown jewel of British chip design, bought by SoftBank and floated in New York, not London. Graphcore gone to Tokyo, Alphawave to California. We have become famous for building world-beaters and then handing them to someone else at the first decent offer. JCB is one that escaped that fate, and it escaped for a reason worth understanding. Because it stayed private, and stayed in a single family's hands, JCB could do the thing almost no British public company is allowed to do: think in decades and adopt generational timespans. It could pour profits back into engineering year after year with no quarterly earnings call to punish it for patience. It could turn the buy-out down and keep building. That long horizon is exactly what it takes to make machinery good enough that the United States Marine Corps, free to buy from anyone on Earth, keeps coming back to a firm in the English Midlands. The freedom to build for the long term is the whole game, and our financial system is arranged to strip British companies of it at the first opportunity. This is the centre of what Progress means to change. We would make Britain the easiest country on earth to start a company, and the best-capitalised place to grow one, with as lesser an incentive as possible to then sell one out from under the nation that built it. That means unlocking the pension money that ought to be backing British firms and today sits everywhere but. It means a tax system that rewards the founder who spends decades building an empire, not the one who flips the company the moment it is worth a premium. And it means the state becoming a serious first customer for our best engineering, the way the Pentagon and the State Department has always been for America's. JCB proved it can be done by doing it. The work is to make JCB the rule, no longer the exception. The talent that built that company is scattered across this country in ten thousand firms that will never get the run at greatness JCB seized, because the moment they become valuable the system teaches them to sell. That is a choice we have made, and it is one we can unmake. If you build things, or back the people who do, or simply want to live in a country that keeps its winners, come and help us change the rules that keep teaching our best companies to leave, so the next great firm we breed does what JCB did: stays, and wins.

On this July 4th, I'm thinking about July 3rd. Specifically, July 3rd 1997. The day Honk Kong declared itself independent. How extraordinary is that promontory named "red torrent", after the colour of soil over which a waterfall on the island flowed. A hundred and eighty years ago it was a scattering of fishing villages on a gross rock the Qing emperor was glad to be rid of. British hands, British law, and British trade turned it into one of the greatest cities on the Earth, so productive that at the handover in 1997 a territory the size of a London borough was worth a startling share of the whole mainland economy it was being folded back into, by some measures close to 1/5. It's hard, in the scope of that meteoric rise, not to think of how far and how fast Britain itself once climbed. Between 1700 and the 1870s this one small country turned itself into one among several contenders for primacy among Western European nations into the largest single economy on the planet, the hub of a quarter of all the trade crossing the world's oceans. A nation you could walk across in a few days out-built, out-made, and out-traded empires many times its size and age. And then I remember how quickly it can go. China itself is the sharpest lesson going. In 1820 the Chinese economy was perhaps a third of the entire world's; within a lifetime or two it had been reduced, by bad government and worse fortune, to famine, weakness, and a century of humiliation. Greatness is as greatness is performed and attained. It is not a possession; dynamic, the furthest thing imaginable from inert. What is not kept up will slip, and no country, however old or proud, is spared the fall. In 1997, Britain's economy was bigger than China's and India's combined; but we've spent much of the last half-century proving the point from the other direction, managing our own descent, talking ourselves out of our ambition, mutilating our national psychology, and then adopting our own national clinical depression as a form of perverted maturity. And China, having fallen further than we ever have, hauled itself in forty years from famine to its own superpower status, simply by deciding, ruthlessly, that it would. We can decide the same. Britain has more grounds for self-redemption than any beleaguered nation ever has: the institutions, the language, the inventiveness, the rule of law, a people who have done it before and whose grandchildren carry the same stuff in them. The capacity is inert, not lost. How fast things change for the worse, a free Hong Kong reminds us, and how fast they can change for the better. Nations fall in a generation and rise in one too, and which way ours goes over the next twenty years is written nowhere yet. It waits on whether enough of us decide, as others have decided before, that the descent is a thing we no longer accept. Far too few of you have made that decision, while tempting yourself - in your brilliant social circling, your intellectual work, your ultimately self-directed and circuitous productions dedicated to the image of Britain-risen-again that we all share - that you have. The best time to gain in reality on the subject was yesterday. The next best, today.