Rhodri Jones

It is much, much worse than you think… The UK added 11.1 million people and built 4.8 million homes (@GreatBritishTT article) Broad money quadrupled from £700bn to £3.2tn while real GDP grew 55%. Four pounds now do the job one used to do. That is the entire mechanism. Your house didn’t get more valuable. Your pound got less valuable. The house just kept score. Prime London down 25% from 2014. BTL yields below gilts. Fertility at 1.44. First-time buyer age up from 29 to 33. Home ownership down from 71% to 63%. Net income ratio between minimum wage and a top 5% salary: 3:1. The USSR never went below 5:1. They sold the energy. They sold the water. They sold the housing stock. They loaded the graduates with debt. They crushed the savers. They printed to cover the deficit. They froze the tax bands. They let the courts collapse. They let a car leasing monopoly sit on £4bn in reserves. They funded Persimmon’s CEO bonus with public money. They taxed family farms at death. They promised 300,000 homes a year and never once delivered. Then they told you it was your fault for not saving harder. Energy is the master input. Britain is an island made of coal surrounded by a sea full of gas and the political class won’t drill it. Norway took the same geology, built a $1.7tn sovereign wealth fund, and is now courting OpenAI. We built consultancy reports. The next industrial revolution will not happen here. Not because we lack the talent. Because thirty years of policy made the cost of powering anything too high for the industries of the future to justify locating in this country. This is not just a housing crisis. It is a monetary crisis expressed through housing, compounded by energy failure, planning paralysis, institutional decay and three decades of fiscal incontinence. Full piece: open.substack.com/pub/anglofutur…

On February 9, the US Navy intercepted a Suezmax tanker in the Indian Ocean carrying 700,000 barrels of crude bound for China. It was the sixth seizure in eight weeks. This is not sanctions enforcement. This is 19th-century gunboat diplomacy conducted with a carrier strike group, and it has a name most people have never heard: Operation Southern Spear. Since December 2025, the USS Gerald R. Ford strike group has physically seized tankers hauling sanctioned crude across the Western Hemisphere and beyond. The M/T Skipper. The Marinera, reflagged to Russia mid-pursuit — the Russian flag didn't save it. The M Sophia, running dark for months. The Veronica, taken in a pre-dawn raid. The oil is being confiscated and sold on the open market under the "GREAT Energy Deal." The United States Navy has become a direct participant in the crude oil market. What this reveals is something far larger than tanker seizures. The global oil market has fractured into two incompatible systems: one operating inside Western compliance architecture, one operating entirely outside it through a shadow fleet of 978-3,300 vessels with forged papers, killed transponders, and shell company ownership dissolved and rebuilt in days. The Brent price on your screen is the average of two markets that are pulling apart at accelerating speed. One is transparent, militarized, expensive. The other is opaque, hazardous, and now being hunted. Full 12,000-word deep dive investigation with the 20 fault lines, the fiscal clocks, and what comes next — link below. open.substack.com/pub/shanakaans…

French supertax on wealthy raises only a quarter of planned revenue ft.trib.al/IWA9ysJ

The World’s biggest and most secretive bureaucracy is about to come head-to-head with an adversary that is arguably even more unfathomable - England’s planning system Sir Keir Starmer will formally approve China’s plans for a new mega-embassy in London but faces years of legal challenges over the decision that could require the disclosure of messages, emails and minutes of meetings Residents living near the embassy are preparing to launch a judicial review, arguing that the government’s decision was “pre-determined” They will ask the government to disclose all information about meetings and calls between the prime minister and President Xi of China in the run-up to the decision They will also demand that the ministers and officials hand over WhatsApp messages, emails and minutes from any meetings or calls relating to the embassy. They are likely to target Starmer, Angela Rayner, the former housing secretary, and her successor, Steve Reed, along with David Lammy, the former foreign secretary, and his successor, Yvette Cooper The residents will be represented by Lord Banner KC, a Tory peer and one of the country’s top planning barristers. He recently led a government review on overcoming obstacles to nationally significant infrastructure. The review will be supported by MPs and peers who believe that the new embassy represents a threat to national security thetimes.com/article/c08e34…