ALEX BRUMMER: Treasury is a hurdle for growth

Britain has an overload of budgetary data. As the IMF noted in its recent annual inspection, too frequent fiscal events mean constant policy changes to meet targets.
Chancellor Rachel Reeves is victim of her own rules in her determination not to be Liz Truss, who ruined the UK's reputation for probity.
The rush to get on top of borrowing and debt was responsible for the ill-fated attack on winter fuel payments which is being reversed. Similarly, the Government is now under pressure from the backbenches to pull back on welfare reforms, introduced in the spring statement.
The latest public sector borrowing data shows that in the first two months of the current financial year borrowing is not far off target. At £37.7billion it was less than the Office for Budget Responsibility predicted. It would be terrific if one could say this is down to growing GDP. Reality is that Reeves swingeing increase to employers' national insurance contributions brought in 22 per cent more to the Government coffers in May than a year earlier.
Early months of the year often give a misleading reading. Tax receipts are boosted by the timing of capital gains payments. Spending by government departments has yet to ramp up. The full impact of the Government's interest rate bill is not felt. It is too soon for anyone in Whitehall to predict victory. The corollary of the stabilised public finances is May retail sales. The slump is a result of higher shop prices and rising uncertainty about jobs. The real worry for a government backing a growth agenda is that it is not happening.
The just-published public spending review and infrastructure plans show that capital spending will climb to a peak of 3.9 per cent of output by 2027-28 but then fall back. It is unlikely to produce the transformation that Labour wants before the next election.
The Treasury is spellbound by the public finances. That reflects a history of crisis management dating back to the 1976 sterling collapse and refreshed by the 2008 great financial crisis and the Truss episode. I recall during the banking crisis being called by a senior Treasury official who cautioned against big bailouts because it might trigger a run on the pound.
The growth agenda doesn't sit easily at the Treasury. The Department for Business ought to be an expansion engine. It is hampered by a reputation as a parking space for sub-octane Cabinet ministers. Incumbent Jonathan Reynolds is no more than a cypher for Downing Street where real polices are set. The long delays in launching an industrial-tech strategy are a case in point.
One must reach back to the Harold Wilson government of the 1960s to find a model for industrial innovation with the Department of Economic Affairs headed by George Brown. It eventually collapsed in a heap like its heavy drinking founder.
A growth agenda, building on science, tech and AI excellence, needs a powerhouse department of growth and secretary of state capable of resisting Treasury orthodoxy. That person may not exist in a Labour government bereft of commercial experience and top-notch economic thinkers.
Andy Burnham, in exile in Manchester, shows signs of the kind of bravery required. That's probably why political rivals would prefer he were not empowered.

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The Independent

30 minutes ago

• The Independent

Why allegations of BBC bias on Israel are becoming hard to reconcile

In April 2006 I was visited in my office by Gerald Ronson, a businessman perhaps best known at the time for spending a stretch in jail on assorted charges of conspiracy, false accounting and theft. He did not pause to take his overcoat off before launching into a diatribe: 'I've always said opinions are like arseholes, everyone's got one,' he pronounced, before adding: 'I am in favour of free speech but there is a line which can't be crossed and, as far as I am concerned, you've crossed it, and you must stop this!' Ronson was not protesting about our analysis of his chequered business career, but about our coverage of Israel. With him was the then-president of the Board of Deputies, which is sometimes presented as representing the view of British Jews. It is not clear why anyone thought that Ronson would be a persuasive advocate. Over time attempts to influence British media became more sophisticated. A number of 'media monitoring groups' with bland-sounding names were established with the explicit purpose of microscopically examining every word, every picture, every inch of footage – and duly pronouncing much coverage to be biased against Israel. In parallel, selected journalists would be invited on all-expenses-paid trips to Israel to be 'briefed.' Not so long ago I myself was asked by a popular columnist if I'd like to go on such a trip – and gradually became aware that a number of distinguished journalists appeared to have seized a similar opportunity without declaring the source of funding or acknowledging the arrangements behind the briefings. The BBC has been a particular target. It is close to an article of faith for some – maybe even many – that the BBC is biased. Biased against the right, biased against Brexit, biased against ordinary working people. And biased against Israel. But not only the BBC. Sky TV is, according to one David Collier, 'a pro-terrorist propaganda channel.' But then Mr Collier has a dystopian view of the future of British Jews, tweeting recently: 'Relax. We will all be gone soon. British Jews, Israeli business. chased out by an increasingly hostile UK. And when you all sit here in a 3rd world country with an Islamic flag over Downing St. you can let us know whether it was a good idea or not.' Now Mr Collier is a dogged researcher, recently shedding light on serious flaws in a BBC documentary on Gaza. For many years he worked in hospitality and tourism, but is now an investigative journalist. He told the Times of Israel recently: 'What [The BBC] have is an engine room full of activist journalists all desperately falling over each other trying to outdo each other in finding new ways to demonise Israel.' Another prominent critic of the BBC is an English / Israeli lawyer called Trevor Asserson, who recently garnered headlines in the UK press after commissioning a report, compiled by Israeli lawyers which claimed to identify a total of 1,553 breaches of the BBC's editorial guidelines in its coverage of Israel. The report was seized on by former BBC executive Danny Cohen, as demonstrating an 'institutional crisis' at the corporation. Cohen himself has founded, and chairs, the blandly-titled UK Media Research Counc il [UKMRC}, which employs a number of former Mail on Sunday and Telegraph journalists. According to Private Eye, which has been unable to establish who funds the body, it admits to 'focusing particularly on antisemitism and what they consider to be an anti-Israel narrative in the media.' Cohen himself collaborated with yet another blandly-named media monitoring outfit, Camera UK, to produce yet one more report highlighting alleged BBC bias against Israel. All this stuff is lapped up by those news organisations which instinctively rally to the Israeli cause or (an overlapping group) despise the BBC. So it was a little uncomfortable for some journalists this week when a 188-page report was published claiming to show that, far from being biased against Israel, the BBC was, in fact, biased towards Israel. The report, published on Monday, was endorsed by a number of prominent figures, including the admirable Baroness Sayeeda Warsi, former chair of the Conservative Party and the first Muslim woman to serve in a British Cabinet. She wrote: 'This is no cherry-picked critique. It is a comprehensive, evidence-based indictment that cannot be ignored.' But, of course, it was ignored. The findings included claims that the BBC humanises Israeli casualties and dehumanises Palestinian ones; that Palestinian deaths make fewer headlines; that there is an extreme imbalance in reporting fatalities; that the BBC doesn't treat Palestinian sympathisers fairly; and that the context and history of the conflict is underplayed. It argues that the BBC suppresses or minimises allegations of genocide and underreports attacks on press freedom. And so on. You may agree, or disagree, with any of the above. But it's unlikely you will be aware of it. As far as I can tell no mainstream news organisation thought it was worth so much as an inch of coverage. It sank without trace. The report was praised by the former Mail and Telegraph political columnist and now award-winning blogger, Peter Oborne, as 'an outstanding and thorough examination off BBC coverage.' This cut no ice with David Collier, who tweeted: 'It is, at best, a piece of risible, inaccurate junk.' In another post, he noted that the bland-sounding organisation which had published it , The Centre for Media Monitoring, was funded by the Muslim Council for Britain (MCB). 'What a pile of absolute garbage,' he scoffed. Some critiqued that the authors had used large language models [LLMs] to help their research. They were less bothered by Trevor Asserson's use of ChatGPT to help produce his own report. Now, it would be surprising if the MCB were to sponsor a report showing the BBC was anti-Israel. Equally, hell might have to freeze over before Messrs Collier, Asserson or Cohen would come to the conclusion that the BBC was institutionally biased towards Israel. But there is some worrying asymmetry involved here. The bland-sounding pro-Israel groups are simply more numerous and better-resourced than any bland-sounding pro-Palestinian group. They have more willing amplifiers in the mainstream media. Over the years narratives are constructed and take root. And when someone comes along with a counter-narrative they are ignored. It would be unkind to call it GroupThink but there is, at the very least, a lack of balance. Which, of course, is the accusation thrown at the BBC. It all makes one rather nostalgic for Gerald Ronson and his homilies about arseholes. You knew where you were.

BBC News

35 minutes ago

• BBC News

The legacy of the A14 Cambridge to Huntingdon upgrade

For decades, a dual carriageway in Cambridgeshire was synonymous with slow-moving traffic, jack-knifed lorries and long, long changed in May 2020, when the new A14 opened ahead of schedule, a12-mile (19km) Cambridge to Huntingdon three-lane carriageway. More than five years after the £1.5bn road improvement scheme was completed, what do locals think - and what is its legacy?The BBC has been finding out. "Driving to Stansted Airport could potentially be a two-hour trip, just to get there for a pick-up or drop off - now it's a 45-minute journey," said Stuart co-founder of Le Mark, a Huntingdon-based company, is a huge fan of the improvements."We are a business that is rural, we're in a nice part of the county, but we need to get up and down the motorways when we need to," he said. The company produces tapes, custom-printed labels, professional dance floors and crew-wear for the entertainment industry, including TV, touring bans, theatre, stage and buys and sells internationally, which is why getting to Stansted Airport is so Mr Gibbons can also confidently tell customers in north London that Le Mark can drop off items within an hour and a half."The difference is we can make an appointment we are fairly certain we can meet," he said. Heidi Brown has been working for Le Mark for three years - and commuting along the A14 for much longer than that. The upgraded road has transformed her journey to work. "Historically, it was quite a lot of congestion, it wasn't the easiest of journeys - I'd often have to find alternative routes to work," the purchasing assistant said."Now I can confidently leave knowing I can get to work and I don't have to allow more time in advance." Her colleague, social media content creator Charlotte Brooks, agreed, adding: "I'd hear [the old A14} a lot near our house, but it's a lot better now, much more quiet." "It's a hugely important bridge, the level of vehicles using this bridge is massive - from villages like Oakington, Cottenham, Longstanton and Willingham," said Luis newly elected Liberal Democrat county councillor has found himself negotiating with National Highways over settling embankments on land around the Bar Hill bridge at junction new layout there was part of the A14 project, but now locals are saying they feel a bump when they drive over it and Mr Navarro is "concerned it could become a hazard"."The technical term is the bridge is 'settling' and National Highways have now attached monitoring devices to it, to provide data on how fast or if the bridge is still settling," he said."It's important we are on top of this issue... it's a major artery and the idea is we try to get a permanent solution to reassure drivers that it's safe."A National Highways spokesperson said it had been monitoring the bridge for more than a year, initially with inspections by engineers."This has now been enhanced to include digital monitoring," they said. "This is part of a phased assessment process as we continue our work with Cambridgeshire County Council to determine the root cause and put an appropriate solution in place." About 270 hectares (670 acres) of habitat, including 40 native tree and shrub species, was created for wildlife along the new section of the A14, which realigned the dual carriageway south of say the tree screen will be vital to mitigate against noise from the road. However, National Highways said in 2022 about 20 to 30% of the trees had died, although all have been has since planted another 165,000 trees and shrubs, 90% of which have Russell, who founded the rewilding group Creating Nature's Corridors and with her family, lives close to the A14 in took matters into their own hands by planting their own trees."What we're really lacking is the mulching and the watering and the nurturing and that wasn't done by National Highways," she said. Paul Salmon has been working on the latest National Highways infrastructure project in Cambridgeshire, from Caxton Gibbet to the Black Cat roundabout in Bedfordshire, for more than three £1bn A428 project includes a new 10-mile (16km) dual carriageway, as well as bridges and junctions connecting to the existing road. "Everyone locally knows about the Black Cat junction, it's infamous for multiple reasons and has been a pinch point - including the last single carriageway on this east-west corridor between Milton Keynes and Felixstowe," he said. "And we will move that traffic off the local road."Currently it's about 35,000 vehicles on the A428 a day, and by the time the new road opens, it'll be down to about 3,000 a day."The agency and its partner Skanska have spent time working out "the good, the bad and the indifferent" of the A14 project, the senior project manager added. "For this project, we're top-soiling early, so it'll be green by the time the scheme opens," he said. Follow Cambridgeshire news on BBC Sounds, Facebook, Instagram and X.

Telegraph

an hour ago

• Telegraph

The week that showed why voters are so angry with Britain's politicians

If you were to try and sum up the British state this week, you would be spoiled for choice. After a few days in which failure after failure came to light – from the damning review into the official response to grooming gangs to the slow-motion crash of the High Speed 2 project to the ability of pro-Palestine activists to damage RAF planes on an airfield unhindered – you might charitably opt for 'incompetent'. A better phrase would be 'head in the sand'. The failures in these cases, as with the inability of the Westminster system to respond to public demands on migration, rein in the out-of-control spending of the benefits system or perform its most fundamental function of providing security from criminals, all have different underlying causes. But at the core of each is a strange lassitude, a body politic that no longer responds to crises that seem startlingly obvious to voters, remaining instead locked in a spiral of internal obsessions, agonising over the idea that to confront gangs might trigger episodes of racism and continuing with projects that long ago failed any sane cost-benefit analysis. The result is a state that is less 'managed decline' than 'unmanaged collapse', with no obvious pressure valve in sight prior to the next election. One way or another, something will happen to force the British state to pull its head from the sand. The question is whether it happens in time to prevent an explosion. Or not. A week of failures In recent years it became popular to discuss the 'volatility' of the British electorate. People who had previously voted loyally for one party were suddenly up for grabs; votes swung wildly between parties, giving first one, then the other a crushing majority or unexpected defeat at the ballot box. It's true that one way of reading this pattern is to simply say that voters are less loyal to an ideal than they were in the past. Another interpretation, however, would be to view these as attempts by voters to find some way – any way – of shocking Westminster out of its default pathway. If there were any doubt remaining, the failures laid bare over the last week illustrate just how badly a course correction is needed. First, we had Baroness Casey's review into the grooming gangs scandal. This made for tough reading. It laid out how police officers had responded to children pleading for their help: 'sometimes turning a blind eye but often actively enabling abuse', and accused some of being 'incompetent at best' and 'corrupt at worst'. It showed how officials had attempted to dismiss the issue of ethnicity out of hand, uncomfortable with the implications for Britain's multicultural success story, terrified of 'community tensions'. It all but accused the Home Office of fabricating data to maintain there was no particular problem with men from Pakistani backgrounds. Worse still, in doing so it told us very little we didn't already know. We knew that officials were tacitly or actively complicit in what unfolded. We knew that they had effectively deemed it better for society if children were raped and government covered it up, than to risk 'tensions' by intervening. We knew that they had arrested parents who had tried to save their children. News reports and official reviews had laid this story bare for over a decade. Yet even with the failures visible to all, Westminster has proved utterly unwilling to look closely at the extent of offending across Britain, to learn the lessons necessary to fight ongoing abuse, and to deliver justice to those who were wronged. It was more important to protect what was left of the narrative of a diverse nation united than to look honestly at the consequences of previous waves of migration. This is still going on. Casey's review highlighted that 'a significant proportion' of the live police cases she examined involved foreign nationals and asylum seekers. Examining the extent of criminal activity by these groups is hard, given that the Government refuses regularly to publish data on the subject. But data from Freedom of Information requests has shown that a quarter of all sex assaults on women successfully prosecuted in Britain are carried out by foreign nationals, with another 8 per cent by offenders of 'unknown' nationalities. One response to this would be to publish this evidence, alongside data on fiscal contributions and benefits withdrawals, and use it to inform policy on migration. Yet for a political class that sees immigration less as a tool to reshape the country for the better and more as a necessity, the economic and cultural lifeblood of the nation, these are figures to be hidden away. Indeed, for those who see it as an axiomatic good with no need for supporting evidence, there is a moral imperative to crush opposition to it. Virtue comes not in addressing associated problems – the province of populists – but in being blind to them. High speed to nowhere And this scandal is only one manifestation of a deeper disease: Britain appears to be effectively incapable of changing course, locked into assumptions and decisions made decades ago. The unravelling of the High Speed 2 project is another prime example from the last week. The economic case for the project collapsed almost as soon as it was published. A project linking London, Birmingham, Manchester and Leeds, originally set to cost £53 billion in today's money, grew out of all control, with costs spiralling past £120 billion before the sheer scale of the failure triggered the Conservative government's decision to slash the project down to a far less ambitious link between London and Birmingham. Even this, however, is set to cost £67 billion. A project that has been slashed in scope has still somehow risen in price. In the process, the cost-benefit ratio has crumbled. We can attribute some mistakes to naivety at the outset; beliefs about greater efficiencies, or the correct way to allocate risk between the government and contractors. But over the course of the project, even as costs rose, the value of the line somehow kept pace – until suddenly it didn't. The project is now delayed again, with inquiries underway into how the cost of infrastructure has grown so rapidly and the Cabinet Office facing accusations of ignoring concerns over fraud and financial mismanagement. The grooming of children and failed infrastructure projects are about as far away as it is possible to be in policy terms. The manner of the failures, though, is instructive: signals that something is going awry are getting scrambled, incentives for individuals to act are lacking. No-one capable is across the details and willing to speak out about failures. A failed state The list of policy failures in Britain is long. Some symptoms are directly visible in the state's activities. Take the sheer size of NHS waiting lists in a system that translated a 27 per cent cash increase in the budget from 2019 to 2022 into an absolute reduction in the number of people it treated. A 16 per cent rise in the number of full-time equivalent junior doctors alongside an 11 per cent increase in the number of nurses, has led to productivity levels 8 per cent below the 2019 baseline. We could also talk about the spiralling levels of debt, and the fiscal plans that have caused the Office for Budget Responsibility to warn that we are on an unsustainable course, or the benefits system which appears utterly unable to distinguish between the disabled and the workshy. Into this category, also, goes the shoplifting epidemic, the release of prisoners to make room in overcrowded jails, the inability of the state to combat actual crime paired with its obsession with policing speech in case stray thoughts ignite the riots politicians fear are permanently just around the corner. Other signs of failure are in the private sector, in inflation-adjusted wages that are still below their 2008 peak, in housing that remains stubbornly out of reach of those without substantial assistance from the bank of mum and dad. People in Western countries know what failed states look like. They look like Somalia, or South Sudan. The government's grip disintegrates, power fragments and society fragments with it. Basic services collapse and with it the safety of the population. But as the American economist Mancur Olson has pointed out, developed states have a different failure mode. They become too stable, insulated from political upheaval, bound up by interest groups that use their grasp on the institutions to strangle anything which might disrupt their position. Britain's failure mode looks a lot more like the second than the first. We might not be matching the fall of Rome for debauchery, but we are certainly doing our best with a particular form of decadent self-indulgence: from social capital to physical capital, our leaders are eating the seed-corn, running the country down without replacing what they take out. 'There's a bunch of obvious, relatively surface phenomena, like the NHS, or the stupid boats, that are the visible manifestations of things not working,' says Dominic Cummings, the former adviser to Boris Johnson, in an interview with The Telegraph that you can read in full on Sunday. 'But I think what's happening at a deeper level is we are living through the same cycle that you see repeatedly in history play out, which is that over a few generations, the institutions and ideas of the elites start to come out of whack with reality. 'The ideas don't match, the institutions can't cope. And what you see repeatedly is this cycle of elite blindness, the institutions crumbling – and then suddenly crisis kicks in and then institutions collapse.' The Blob For a useful short-hand, we can borrow the description of these elites which is often attributed to Cummings: 'the Blob' – an emergent phenomenon with no governing intelligence and no clear leaders, instead resulting from people from the same classes, with the same beliefs and the same incentives, taking the same decisions across public life. Where do the civil servants on the prestigious Fast Stream (a program to accelerate the careers of graduates coming into Whitehall) come from? From families who overwhelmingly had university-educated parents working in 'higher managerial, administrative and professional occupations', arriving in government after education at Oxbridge or other Russell Group universities where the consensus is stifling: one in five academics feel unable to teach controversial views. Given that one in five academics vote for Right-wing parties, and three quarters for the Left, it's not terribly hard to work out which views might count as controversial in this milieu. We might equally ask where Cabinet ministers, senior judges – and, yes, newspaper columnists – come from. The resulting gaps between the political classes and the public can be vast. Shortly after the 2019 election, one study concluded that Conservative MPs were not only more socially liberal than Conservative voters, but of the median for all voters, adopting positions not that far away from Labour's base. The result is that even when signals of voter discontent do cut through the noise surrounding Westminster, they are sometimes simply ignored. In 2010, 2015, 2016, 2017 and 2019 the party or cause offering reductions in migration won. The electorate's reward for this was Boris Johnson's systematic dismantling of our borders, a quadrupling in net migration over its 2019 level to 906,000 per year. There's nothing wrong with having some merit in your meritocracy, but when people are drawn from the same backgrounds, they will tend to think in the same ways. In the political system, this manifests as a blindness to the idea that the values of politicians can drift from those held by voters, an unwillingness to deliver what the population want; self-centred governance by an establishment class propped up by its hold on the traditional party duopoly and the major institutional organs of British life. One manifestation of this group's beliefs is a form of pathological compassion driven by insulation from its effects: an unwillingness to jail prisoners, turn away illegal migrants or crack down on benefits cheats because to do so would be cruel. The end result of this 'kindness' is often to kill the system that provided for those who were genuinely in need. In toxic combination with these beliefs is a political structure that works actively to evade accountability, with decision-makers rarely facing serious consequences for their failures; so long as they follow process, scrutiny is generally evaded. The crisis of competence Alongside the problem of willingness is the problem of ability. Public fury with politicians is not helped at all by their willingness to make grandiose claims that they fail to live up to. In the words of political strategist James Frayne, 'politicians of all parties have created a toxic climate by assuring voters they can solve practically any problem regardless of size and complexity, while permanently under-delivering'. This has 'fuelled immense public cynicism because voters assume failure derives from incompetence and corruption – always moral corruption, sometimes even financial corruption. This cynicism has become one of the most defining and corrosive aspects of modern electoral politics. Voters increasingly think the worst of politicians and what drives them. They are prone to think they're mostly interested in lining their own pockets or clinging on to power.' 'On HS2, people will be asking whether politicians found themselves under the influence of big businesses, rather than delivering jobs for the North. On the grooming gangs, others will be asking whether politicians sacrificed vulnerable kids to make sure they didn't lose friends and votes. Such feelings absolutely aren't levelled at any party in particular. While Labour will get more short-term anger on grooming gangs, that's only because they were forthright in suggesting calls for proper investigations were politically-motivated. There is a widespread sense that all politicians are the same.' This leaves open a fundamental question: is there a fundamental limit on the British state's ability to deliver things that it seemed able to do just two decades ago? Or, is the disconnect between reality and the signals reaching politicians (through the ideological predisposition of their civil servants) so great that many MPs and ministers are no longer capable of reaching sane evaluations? Reforming the state In Nigel Farage's view, 'everything the British state touches collapses, regardless of colour'. With his party surging in the polls – the beneficiary of two decades of failed red and blue governance – he has every right to pin the blame for these failures on the selection into government of a certain cadre of establishment true believer. 'There are two types of people in politics; those who want to be something, and those who want to do something', Farage says. 'And the be-something's have dominated for decades: Oxbridge kids who want to be PM, cabinet minister, MP – not driven by thoughts about how to make the country better.' The resulting consensus is stifling. 'Everyone wants to be nice. If you're nice, you're liked and socially acceptable. And anyone with a different opinion is unacceptable'. But this doesn't work when the state is failing: 'When Starmer u-turns on rhetoric, don't believe it will lead to reality because it won't. He's saying it to fend off Reform. He has no intention of acting on it.' Competence, too comes in for a blast. 'As a result, we get cabinets full of people lacking in real life experience. They haven't run businesses. They haven't achieved anything. It's mediocrity – we're governed by people who are unqualified to be a middle manager in an Asda in Birmingham'. For Farage, there is only one way left out. 'This country needs political surgery through every single sector of public life. We need a very gentle, British, political revolution. I'm the moderate. If I don't succeed, watch what comes after me.' The canonisation of Saint Luigi The appearance of a new piece of graffiti under a paint-spattered archway in east London would normally draw no more attention than the tagged scrawl it overwrote. In February, however, a new painting briefly drew attention from segments of the world's press. The artwork shows Luigi Mangione, in his green hoodie, framed by the yellow painted bricks of the arch – a halo against a black background. In December 2024, Mangione was arrested on suspicion of the murder of Brian Thompson, the chief executive of UnitedHealthcare who was gunned down in the street. And almost overnight, he became a cult hero for an extraordinary number of disaffected Americans, who described him as 'Saint Luigi' – a description that images of Mangione bearing a red sacred heart, right hand raised in blessing, make almost literal. Whatever else we might think about Mangione, on this specific and narrow point, it is probably not a good signal of the health of society when its elite class is widely despised. In Britain, this has thankfully achieved expression primarily through political means, although last year's Southport riots were a warning sign about what might come if failures continue. King's College Professor David Betz made headlines with his prediction that Britain could fall into civil war without a change of course. Yet his concerns are shared by some of those on the ground. In the words of one former police officer, in the aftermath of recent public disorder police forces set about working out what to do in response, handling 'resourcing, moving people around the country, calling in the Armed Forces if needed. What they've never really thought about is what they would do if officers decided the risk was too great, and simply didn't come to work. Policing might be able to fill gaps by cancelling days off and extending shifts, but that tempo can't be maintained for long.' More ominously still, 'they've never really considered what would happen in a conflict where officers identified with one side enough to join it. Police officers are vetted, but not with that in mind. And police equipment already goes missing at rather an alarming rate. It's not unlikely that if serious violence started officers might start disappearing to defend their homes and families with their issued weapons – including firearms – if they lose faith in the state's ability to do so.' One more roll for the ballot box Adam Smith's remark that there is 'a great deal of ruin in a nation' was not meant to be an invitation to politicians to attempt to quantify the exact degree. Regrettably, generations of British leaders seem to have acted as if things will probably be fine whether they succeed or fail. The last year of British politics has given every indication of a system under intolerable strain. With the establishment facade beginning to crack, Westminster has a short window in which to change course voluntarily. If that passes, revolution – whether in the form of Prime Minister Nigel Farage, or something more dramatic – could be the result.