David Chadwick MP 🔶

Kemi Badenoch backed Trump's illegal war from day one. The Middle East is in chaos and your bills are going up.

THE GREAT BRITISH CRISIS by John Bew We are in the midst of the Fourth Great Disruption of the modern British state. Our politics, across every part of the political spectrum, is lagging perilously behind the realities we face. The fidelity of our political and official classes to the current order comes from an assumption, deeply ingrained in the generation who are coming close to retirement, that liberal or social-market economies were the only possible future and that the rest of the world was destined to become more like us. It is partly why austerity – like appeasement – had far more political support than we care to remember. It is why we spent 0.7 per cent of GDP on development assistance at the start of the last decade and barely 2 per cent on defence. It is why, after 1989, we added even more international and human rights law on top of the international legal order crafted out of 1945. It is why Brexit was such a psychological shock to this world-view. It is why we sometimes look like the last man at the bar at Davos, nursing a cocktail as the lights go off and facing a treacherous and icy route to an unclear destination. So as one world collapses around us, what is the shape of things to come? Here are some hard truths. The current social contract – particularly around welfare, health and pensions – is unsustainable on current levels of growth. A domestic and international legal system that does not allow us to control our borders has lost legitimacy at home. We have the highest energy prices in the Western world, just at the moment when energy is vital to our ability to take advantage of relative national strengths in technology. And there is currently no route to higher defence spending – which is inevitable unless the nation is content to continue on a path towards greater insecurity and irrelevance – without major cuts elsewhere in the public spending stack. At moments of relative political equilibrium these are problems of policy for specialists in each of those areas. At moments of great structural upheaval, these are grand strategic problems that can only be confronted as a coherent whole. Cover art by Alex Williamson

🚨 WATCH: Labour MP Charlotte Nichols reveals she was raped as an MP as she opposes the jury trial reforms "I waited 1,088 days to go to court. We've been told [by the Government] that if we have concerns about this Bill, it's because we've not been raped"