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JUST IN: Iran reportedly charging $1 per barrel of oil passing through the Strait of Hormuz, to be paid in crypto.

Funnily enough, it's a question I'm writing an article about at the moment, because it's an argument that keeps getting raised. It's a very good question. The short answer is painful. A £20k state pension for all 12.8 million recipients would cost roughly £250 billion a year. Quarter of a trillion quid. More than the entire NHS budget. Where does that money come from when productivity has been flat for eighteen years? Those countries can afford it because they built productive economies and saved for the future. We didn't. We spent. COVID response: £370 billion. Energy crisis subsidies: £78 billion. Bank bailouts: £137 billion committed at peak. Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan: at least £50 billion, all borrowed. Help to Buy equity loans: £29 billion, mostly going to people who didn't need it. Right to Buy discounts: an estimated £200 billion since the 1980s. PFI contracts: hundreds of billions in future commitments for buildings already falling apart. QE losses: over £100 billion. Well over a trillion quid in crisis management, bailouts, subsidies, and propping up a housing market that was already overvalued. Not a penny saved for the future. And it's not just how much we spend. It's how badly we spend it. HS2 is now the most expensive railway ever built. £66 billion and counting for 140 miles of track that doesn't reach central London and no longer goes north of Birmingham. Spain built over 2,500 miles of high speed rail for around $70 billion. The entire second-largest high speed network in the world for roughly what we're paying for 140 miles. We're paying £396 million per mile. France built Paris to Strasbourg for £31 million per mile. We pay 8.5 times the European average to build railways. Fewer than 1 in 5 major government projects are now judged likely to succeed, down from nearly half a decade ago. A Telegraph investigation found £14 billion wasted in a single two-year period on projects that were changed, delayed, or failed entirely. Now compare this to Norway. They discovered North Sea oil at roughly the same time we did. Same resource. Same opportunity. Different choices. They created a sovereign wealth fund. It's now worth $2 trillion. That's $340,000 per Norwegian citizen. It made $247 billion in profit last year alone. Their pensioner poverty rate is 4.3%. Ours is 14.5%. We had the same oil. We spent ours on wars, bank bailouts, housing subsidies, and infrastructure projects that cost ten times what they should. Norway invested theirs for future generations. Many of the countries paying higher pensions run trade surpluses. We run a deficit. They have sovereign wealth funds. We have sovereign debt. They invested in productive capacity. We invested in house prices. It's not that £20k pensions are impossible. It's that they require decisions made decades ago that we didn't make. And a level of competence in public spending that we've never demonstrated. We had the resources. We had the opportunity. We chose differently. And now the bill is coming due.

The reason you can’t buy a house is because of money printing. Not because of greedy landlords.