So what would I have done?

My post on Reeves's budgets (Not such a bad hand but played poorly, 2 Jan) made the bold and foolhardy promise to outline what I would have done in her position as chancellor. Here goes.

• the absolute first priority should have been an increase defence spending in the budget year. Labour has said they will increase defence spending to 3.5% of gdp by 2035, which is not before the parliament after the parliament after this one. Does anybody think that Putin did anything other than smirk when briefed on the UK budget? This really should have been the first priority because i) it's necessary and ii) Reeves could have used this as a smokescreen for having to raise taxes: she could have claimed that the Ukraine situation and concomitant outlook clearly demands it. Of course Ukraine isn't new and Labour knew about it last year but I think she could have spun an argument that previous budgets, mainly those of the Conservatives, had been based on an assessment of the security situation that was now clearly optimistic. There's no need to spend a lot more immediately but planning should be taking place to increase our conventional defence forces, build up supplies of munitions, missiles and drones, ensure the nuclear submarine fleet is fully operational (apparently it's availablity is poor, though that is nothing new in my limited experience) and improve resilience to the many Russian hybrid war threats. A sensible plan would entail ramping up spending over this parliament, starting now. There is no higher priority. Some spending on resilience in other areas e.g. cyber security of infrastructure, could reasonably have been branded as "defence" in this scenario
• scrap stamp duty on shares. The government has consistently said it wants growth, while taking many steps that kill it. It says it wants a successful stock market in London and wants more of us to invest more of our savings there. But it charges stamp duty on shares bought in Britain: £3.2bn was taken from investors trading on the London exchange last year. It's a small amount on each trade, surely no-one really notices? But they do as they wouldn't have had to pay if the deals had been done in America, Germany or Japan. So, because there was also a threat of new dividend taxes, £7.3 bn was withdrawn from British funds and shares during the four months to the end of October.  Reeves responded to the declining number of London share flotations by introducing a three year stamp duty holiday for new IPOs (Initial Public Offerings on the market) but I don't expect that to help much. There is a danger that one of the unique advantages Britain has - being in between the American and Far East market time zones and so able to deal with both in a normal day - is being wasted. The London Stock Exchange is on a long term downward glide path in terms of number of companies quoted and the amount of liquidity available. Stamp duty on shares is a bad tax and it should have been scrapped.
• cut costs. This isn't easy when we can all see the potholes in the road and the "planned overloading" that occurs in the NHS every winter. (I say planned because the concern about NHS capacity in the mid winter has been annually recurring for a long time) but it is absolutely necessary. Tougher targets for spending departments are needed backed up by an expenditure ceiling whih, surprisingly, we don't have. David Smith points out that, while Reeves's fiscal rules are as good as any used by recent chancellors, Denmark, Sweden and Finland have expenditure ceilings their governments are expected to live within and, as a result, lower debt relative to GDP than the UK. He says Spain, Austria and "even Italy" have used expenditure rules to better control public spending and get a grip on debt. I must admit that's what I thought "cash limits" were meant to do, as introduced by Labour in the 1970s but it seems we aren't tight enough on actual, rather than planned, spend. Unless we do get tighter controlthings will continue to slide. Reeves's plans - which get tougher as the parliament progresses, what her back benchers will say when we get there is pretty obvious - would still only have us stabilising debt at 96% of gdp at the end of the decade. That would leave us with a debt to gdp ratio around twice the average for advanced economies and we'll still be devoting more of national income to paying debt interest than at almost any time in post war history
• The toughest target should probably be for the benefits system which is clearly being exploited when we read that 50,000 people a day are being approved for sickness benefit (it was 2,000 under the Tories).  We seem to have lost the plot entirely on what constitutes a significant disability, or at least one that merits PIP. A new version of the universal credit benefit reforms introduced by the coalition government based on concepts from the Centre for Social Justice think tank is urgently needed. As chancellor I'd set targets for future spend rather than picking up whatever tab lands. We can't go on like this.

I accept taxes had to rise this time, though I worry that they are at historically high levels in total. I do think Reeves should also have cut some taxes even if they had to go up in total. A fundamental overhaul is needed. Here's my plan:

• refresh and rationalise income tax by completely overhauling the thresholds and, if necessary, rates to remove the ridiculous marginal rates at specific points, in particular in the £100,000 to £125,000 range where marginal rates can be over 60%. This isn't for personal benefit: my income is very modest compared with that! You may think people who earn that much can afford it but this is exactly the sort of income a hospital consultant could earn. We want these people working harder but hit them with silly taxes on their income when many also got hit by punitive taxes on their pensions, some just by working too many extra hours. That specific issue got fixed but without fixing the general problem. I'm convinced if tax was genuinely progressive up the income scale, with no marginal cliff edges, productivity in the economy would improve and our brain drain of talent, including doctors, would be less severe. The tax system is hitting HENRYs (High Earning Not Rich Yet) not the really rich. It seems to be aimed with a laser beam at people with aspiration. David Smith wrote in October that the £100k-£125k cliff edge would be too expensive to fix but by the next month he just said it needed doing. I agree - it's doing a lot of damage
• look harder at taxing the very rich in ways they can't easily avoid, like income tax. A banker on £2 million a year wasn't affected by the higher rate tax threshold freeze being extended; a consultant on £125,000 was. Tax expert Dan Neidle says "the UK's experiment with almost-progressive taxation has run its course. The actually rich have been insulated enough. Time to choose". At the same time the scrapping of the non-dom arrangements is yet another u turn Reeves needs to make. We want these people to stay and pay tax on their UK earnings, not leave because we try to tax their earnings or wealth elsewhere.
• Rethink council tax. Reeves added a tax band (we already had one extra band in Wales) but the bands stop at £5 million so a £100 million house pays the same as a £5 million house. The increase didn't tax the very rich - it taxed the people who happen to live near the very rich, like those who happen to own a £2m family home in London

Pensions are a mess. Osborne in particular started a trend for tinkering which has made the whole system a dysfunctional nightmare. 

• Clearly the triple lock should be abolished. The freezing of personal allowances together with the triple lock increases in the old age pension meant that before long people in receipt of only the modest old age pension would be paying tax on it. As those folk aren't in PAYE and most of them wouldn't be familiar with self assessment it wasn't surprising that Reeves said those people wouldn't have to pay tax on their state pension. This is sensible as the amount collected from people on a very low income would be small and not worth the hassle. However the principle is terrible as it now means that people with even tiny private pensions (who therefore have a tax code) will have to pay tax on their state pension. It offends even basic principles of justice that some pay tax on their state pension and others don't. Good chancellors avoid creating too many losers and therefore too much dissent by clever balancing of giving and taking away. This particular tax problem could have been averted by giving people over state pension age a personal allowance equal to the standard state pension in return for abolishing the triple lock and returning to a just link between the state pension and average earnings. That is the only fair link as it is equitable for the old and the young. 
• Stop victimising private pensions. The government say they want people to save into pensions but then steadily do things to deter it, budget after budget, this time by tightening the rules on salary sacrifice. Meanwhile public sector pay bargaining should take full account of pay packages allowing for pensions which are, after all, just deferred income. A review of how the enormous public sector pension liability can be met in future is desperately overdue.

The government needs to look properly at a huge range of supply side issues which are holding the economy back. 

• One obvious area is the need for investment to genuinely fix key areas of public sector dysfunctionality, especially NHS resourcing. Rishi Sunak claims that the NHS had never had a plan to increase healthcare training places to meet rising demand until 2023. The result is that it either has to hire foreign staff or pay huge fees for agency workers to fill gaps. The Conservatives introduced a long-term workforce plan to ensure we trained enough doctors and nurses but he says the current government has abandoned it. Why would it do that? Matt Goodwin says there is a reason why Britain rejects thousands of its own talented, ambitious young people from becoming doctors every year, while simultaneously importing doctors from the poorest, most medically deprived countries on earth. While doing it they claim that the NHS would collapse without immigration. But this year nearly 26,000 young Brits applied to study medicine. 8,126 state-funded places were available. The numbers on the previous two years were almost identical. The system is designed to need immigrants. Over 40% of NHS doctors were trained overseas and we now import more doctors annually than we train. "WTF?" one might ask. I suspect the answer is simple. Providing extra training places costs money now and Reeves keeps finding black holes, so the Treasury won't allocate money for this purpose. But it would almost certainly save money in the long run and probably improve NHS productivity. Reeves says she is maintaining investment. But is she investing in the right things? She needed to allocate money to significantly increasing medical training places now.

• There are many other areas of spending and taxation that I'd want to look hard at, including energy (which needs a fundamental review of how prices are set), water, road taxes and, potentially, a higher rate of VAT for some items but the main drive needs to be simplification. I'd set a target to get the UK tax code. It's regarded as the largest and most complex in the world, all 22,000 pages of it. Halving it in the parliament would be a good target and then half again by 2035. Let's get individuals and businesses thinking about and hiring advisers to grow their business, not thinking about tax and paying tax advisers to find loopholes.

I've outlined here plenty of spending increases and tax cuts as well as potential spending cuts. I don't know how they balance out but I don't have a team of Treasury officials at my command and models at my fingertips. The numbers would need to be balanced to bring about a reduction in the deficit from the budget year. If that meant an increase in income tax rates I would advocate that, politically difficult as it is: the basic rate of income tax hasn't gone up since 1975. Reeves could have argued the case for it. Someone will have to one day. She set her stall out as the one to take tough decisions. But she's bottled it big time.

I suspect my budget would rattle a lot of cages and would not be popular. But golly something like it is as needed as was Geoffrey Howe's in 1981. 

Starmer and Reeves theoretically had a strong enough position to do something on the scale that Thatcher and Howe attempted then.

Instead Reeves's effort was a pusillanimous budget aimed at saving her skin and that of her boss, who are repenting at leisure for the hasty and deeply unwise promises they made in their manifesto.

But the incompetence of Reeves and Starmer is nothing new. Politicians have been held in low regard for a very long time: 

“I could not help reflecting in my way upon the singular ill-luck of this my dear country, which as long as I ever remember it, and as far back as I have read, has always been governed by the only two or three people, out of two or three millions, totally incapable of governing and unfit to be trusted.” 

This was Lord Chesterfield -  in 1756.

Our fiscal policy's a mess - now's the time to fix it. David Smith, Sunday Times 21 December 2025

Here's how to cure the NHS and break out of a £20bn doom loop. Rishi Sunak, Sunday Times 7 December 2025

The real problem isn't the higher levies - it's who we're taxing. Dan Neidle Sunday Times 30 November 2025

The hypocrisy of NHS progressives: what morally righteous progressives will never tell you. Matt Goodwin's Substack, 12 December 2025

The £100k tax hurdle holding back Britain. Alice Wright, Sunday Times 2 November 2025

What if we ripped up the tax system and started again? George Nixon, Sunday Times 28 September 2025

Not such a bad hand but definitely played poorly

I thought I'd let the dust settle on Rachel Reeves's budget before commenting. Then she started going back on things again, so I let it settle a bit more. Heavy fare for new year but I can't resist.

Some chancellors, notably George Osborne, have presented budgets which are greeted with plaudits but then fall apart rapidly and spectacularly. Reeves's second budget hasn't fallen apart yet but then her previous year's budget is still unravelling. Unfortunately it probably won't fall apart, but just add more insidious dead weight to hold back the economy and slowly strangle it.

Reeves had promised to take tough decisions and make growth her number one priority. She has done exactly the opposite and for a simple reason. She has played for time to save her skin and that of the PM. Only 18 months into the parliament, she knows that the electorate can't kick Labour out for another three years. So the budget wasn't aimed at the electorate, directly or by improving the economy, it was aimed at the one audience that could cause her early termination - Labour MPs.

There was an interminably long run up to the budget. Historically it has generally been in October so it was a bit of  surprise when the government set 26 November as the date this year. But then, as every accountant knows, bad numbers take longer to add up. 

Bizarrely, in the end the numbers weren't that bad, adding to the feeling that the chancellor doesn't really know which way is up. The delayed schedule gave her too much time to think and she appeared to change her mind on several important calls. I accept that pre-budget 'leaks' are often deliberate, as the Treasury flies a kite or two to either gauge reaction or manage expectation, usually by terrifying the life out of us so a tough budget ends up feeling as if it wasn't so bad. However, Rachel Reeves flew so many kites that they created an air traffic risk. The unprecedented and amateurish leak of the whole budget by the OBR before Reeves stood up to deliver her budget added to a general air of incompetence, indeed slapstick, even if that wasn't her fault.

What Reeves did with the extended timescale and kite flying was to compound the uncertainty she created in the run up to her first budget, when she persistently talked the economy down and threatened tough measures, though on a promise of 'once this parliament'. That uncertainty was only heightened by the government then partly backing down on some of its measures, most notably the pensioners' winter fuel allowance debacle. The dither was then exacerbated by the government announcing it would cut benefits but then backing down to squawks from its left wing, even though the 'cuts' were, as usual, reductions in future increases and the trajectory of the welfare bill is clearly unsustainable.

The uncertainty Reeves engendered before her first budget had already created a lot of problems. Businesses were hesitant in the four months period after the general election as they waited to see what Reeves's promise of a tough first budget brought. The increase in employer's NI didn't take effect for another 5 months until the start of the tax year in April but that meant that many businesses kept recruitment plans on hold. Many will already have been in self imposed limbo for most of a year before getting to this year's period of doubt. So the two Reeves budgets have caused a lot of damage just through uncertainty. 

The damage was exacerbated by the air of perma-crisis in the public finances over comparatively small sums. This followed directly from Reeves's poor decision to have an extremely low level of "fiscal headroom" (let's just call it contingency) in her first budget. The £10bn she provided was a ridiculous 0.8% of the £1279bn total public sector spend for 2024-25 as estimated by the OBR. The twice yearly updates of public finances by the OBR almost inevitably meant a "black hole" would open up within six months of the first Reeves budget, leaving a further 6 month period of  "will she raise taxes or cut spending?" before her second. With hindsight it's surprising previous chancellors haven't done what Labour has now and tasked the OBR with annual, not bi-annual, updates. It's almost comical that Reeves created a situation where talk of a black hole opening up was inevitable, having accused the previous government of leaving her with one (which they probably didn't, it's hard to tell through all the obfuscation).

I'm not sure which of her two budgets has been the most damaging. Farming got much of the attention first time round due to the inheritance tax change on passing on agricultural property. It seemed obvious to me that the government's assertion that only a small proportion of farms would be affected was transparent balderdash. On our walks around rural Wales we see many small farms which don't seem at all affluent but a top of the head estimate for the value of the livestock, consumables like feed and the book value of the machinery would add significantly to the value of the land and often take the value of small farm past the IHT threshold. Sure they can pay the bill over 10 years but if they are just about managing then that doesn't help. Then nearly 13 months after making the IHT change, Labour relented. They did it painfully slowly and in as ham-fisted a way as the original tax was introduced. There are good grounds for taxing farms and businesses in general, in particular the agricultural property relief scheme, which proved wide open to abuse (i.e. not really being used for agriculture). But the simplistic way it was originally done and then amended horrified tax expert Dan Neidle, who had been calling for the loophole to be closed. By one count this was the government's ninth U-turn.

The government won't admit that it got its numbers wrong for the number of farms affected but it clearly did. The change helps but it's still a poor tax, badly implemented. The average UK farm income is around £40,000 a year* - and I've read of very much lower regional figures. This is not a lot more than the number needed to support a family, let alone reinvest and one day pay IHT. So I still expect many marginal farms will gradually disappear. Others will be broken up with significant consolidation into mega-farms. The appearance of the countryside will undoubtedly change significantly.

However, farming is the smaller part of the problem. Many family owned businesses across the economy will now have to plan for an IHT bill in the future, which will mean stashing money away instead of investing it in the business. Others will just decide to sell up, even if the business has been in the family for generations. That consolidation will almost always be negative for growth - as a general rule big companies don't grow as quickly. We've never placed as much importance as we should on the small and medium sized enterprises in the economy, in contrast to the recognition given in Germany to the mittelstand, the businesses that are the backbone of that country's economy. In principle a tax on selling the asset, not passing it on as a going concern, would be the answer, though I'm sure there would be many problems in formulating such a tax. 

Reeves's absurd claims to have inherited a truly dire economic situation, which made many wonder what she knew that the rest of us didn't (btw the answer to that was 'not much') made businesses put plans for investment and recruitment on hold. So of course the economy has stayed stagnant. Uncertainty and tax rises cause business to take a breather, wait and assess - wow, who knew? (The answer to that, of course, is nearly everyone but Rachel).

The dampening effect on business was exacerbated by the increase in Employer's NI and the remarkable reduction in the starting point to a salary of only £5,000. Awful for the ostensible number one priority - growth -but required for the actual number one priority i.e. not breaking the manifesto pledge to raise income tax and VAT, which would have been fairer.

Together with promising (and now delivering) damaging and mainly unnecessary changes to employment rights the result is that Labour has done just about everything it possibly could to stifle what it had said was its top priority, growth. As the economy has actually bumped along rather limply but not disastrously it makes one want to weep for how much better things could have been.

So the first Reeves budget was bad enough but what about the second?

As the country is still borrowing large amounts of money it was essential she retained the confidence of the bond markets. Only people without a brain - or very far to the left - could possibly espouse the idea that it is possible to "get beyond this thing of being in hock to the bond market" as Andy Burnham fatuously pronounced back in September. Andy has traditionally been considered part of the soft left of the Labour party. I had always thought that this terminology distinguished moderates from the hard left but it seems it actually means soft in the head. The kind of people who think others have to lend them money and that they can dictate the rate they'll pay clearly live in a land populated by clouds and cuckoos.

The bond markets reacted positively to the budget so that's a kind of tick. This reaction was mainly because Reeves increased her contingency cushion second time around, but still only to a marginally more credible figure of around £20bn. We're paying far too much on tick - the UK gets charged a higher rate than Germany, France or the USA, on far too big a sum. The only way to reduce both the rate we pay and the total amount is to borrow less. To be fair that is Reeves's target over the parliament. But that's not really soon enough. Because that way it might never actually happen. To borrow less we have to either cut spending, raise taxes, or a mix of both. It's really that simple. 

Nearly all major western countries are borrowing far more (proportionately to their economies, not just in cash) than was the case until the last few decades. It has become a kind of addiction to what Arsene Wenger, in another context, called "financial doping". Like an opioid addict we keep wanting more. France, in an even worse position than us in terms of controlling social spending, has run 50 straight years of financial deficits. Europe has 10% of the world's population, 30% of its economy and 58% of its social spending. Each time things get tough the response of the large democracies is to throw ever more (of other people's) money at the problem. In the seven largest democracies the combined stimulus from governments and central banks rose from 1% of GDP in the recessions of the 1980s and 1990s to 3% in 2001, 12% in 2008 and 35% in 2020. The public, in the form of homeowners, stockholders and bondholders, have come to expect more help in each new crisis and to be insulated from any pain whatsoever. More borrowing, more benefits, more short term fixes (e.g. energy subsidies), more rights (shorter working weeks, work from home, ever greater job security), less responsiblity and no reform. Siren voices tell us it will be ok, growth will magically return, efficiencies will emerge, "waste" will be cut. If there is a bill others will pick it up (large companies, the wealthy) though of course it will mainly be consumers in prices and future taxpayers in the form of debt our children and grandchildren will have to cover. Like an addict we crave the fix, parties promise it to us and we reward them in elections. 

The bleak picture in the above paragraph is a precis and paraphrase of some excellent recent columns by Matthew Syed. (He's better at words than me, which is why he gets paid for it). Bleakly he told us where this trajectory is taking us. It's the pattern of civilisational cycles throughout history from ancien regime France to the Qing dynasty, the Ottoman empire and ancient Maya. Success built on discipline drifts first into enlightenment and then complacency. Syed notes that the historian Will Durant put it this way: "A nation, like a man, is born stoic and dies epicurean." Syed feels that the West relaxed after the collapse of the Soviet Union, thinking it had "won". Peak hubris was followed by unfunded tax cuts and spending and democracies began to falter. To that list I'd add the "peace dividend" that we foolishly cashed by cutting defence spending. To make it worse we've become susceptible to populism. Electorates believed the daft promises we were made and blame those who didn't deliver them but then seem ready to believe even dafter hyperbole.

Syed concludes we need to go cold turkey, understand that short term sacrifice is the price of long term resilience and stop voting for unaffordable promises. He's not sure we can take the withdrawal symptoms.

So: cut costs or raise taxes? Traditionally cutting costs has been the more guaranteed route as tax rates raised or new taxes implemented don't always raise as much money as expected because those pesky taxpayers out there change their behaviour. For example, increasing capital gains tax rates tends to mean that people defer selling assets and so the tax take, at least in the short term, goes down instead of up.

Rachel's problem is that she's already blown it on costs by implementing then partly reversing the cut in OAP's winter fuel allowance and bottling her planned trimming of the burgeoning benefits bill when the left of her party, soft or otherwise, rebelled. This climb down is a double whammy as it has not only emboldened the Labour back benchers to fight any further proposals for "cuts" or "austerity" but made them think they can force increases in expenditure. That's now happened with the lifting of the two child benefit cap which was definitely not in Labour's manifesto.

Labour was on the right track on getting control of the benefits bill, even if the cut they planned but had to withdraw was tiny, £3.4bn in a bill projected to go from £314.7bn in 2024-25 to £406.2bn in 2030-31.Instead they increased it. When a young person living in London and claiming the maximum in health and disability benefits can get the the post-tax equivalent of a £40,000 salary you may wonder why the alarming number of NEETS isn't even higher. This is a can kicked down the road and someone else will have to come back to this problem before too long as the trend is unsustainable.

This budget was a disaster for people who aren't on benefits or a pension. One could parody the old Labour campaign slogan about not being old, or needing the health service if the Tories got in - don't be an employee working hard to provide for your family under Labour: your student loan payments will go up, you'll get punished with high marginal tax cliff edges if you do well and your child benefit will get filched, even if your family income is lower than that of families who retain their child benefit because their individual incomes don't trigger the claw back. Even worse, you may have a lower income than a family living entirely on benefits - unless you earn over 40 grand. Labour should be a party committed to fairness. It clearly isn't.

Reeves has maintained capital investment, as she was quick to tell us "unlike George Osborne". That is indeed a good thing as public sector investment has usually suffered when chancellors needed to make savings. But that's literally only half the story. Public sector and private sector investment in the economy are both just shy of £140bn a year. The drag on private investment is just as damaging as if she'd made the cut herself to the Treasury spend.

So, while it was greeted with some relief by many, including business, because it was perceived to be not as bad as it could have been, nonethess the second Reeves effort was a poor and damaging budget. Rather than dust settling it has thrown a sticky blanket over the economy. 

It was a missed opportunity, a return to the playbook of Gordon Brown Labour: make more than half the country reliant on benefits and they'll resist "cuts" and side with us. Now an amazing two-thirds of households take more from the state than they pay into it. Households in the sixth income decile, earning £40,800 before tax, now receive £5,000 a year more from the state than they pay in. In 2002 a sixth decile household would have been contributing £3,100 a year. Tom Calver suggests that if the upper and middle classes turn to the private sector for healthcare and education while being asked to foot the bill for poorly run state services the principles of the welfare state could be under threat: a welfare state that leans more heavily on people who use it least goes against the principle of universal solidarity that the welfare state was founded on and could prove fragile.

It was an awful budget for young people, who see taxes going up, university loan repayments going up, rents going up, no houses to buy, poor public services and the goodies going to pensioners and those on benefits. "What's the point?" they must wonder. A budget to throttle ambition, drive and aspiration. A budget that did nothing for the growth that Reeves needs to make her numbers add up in the years beyond the budget year.

Some budgets unravel quickly. It seems that Reeves's unravel in slow motion. However, it took the Blair-Brown governments nearly a decade to completely run out of ideas and resort to a traditional Labour focus on tax and spend with the spend focussed on benefits. In contrast it took Rachel Reeves less than 16 months to do the same as it turns out she didn't have any ideas to start with.

Starmer and Reeves portrayed themselves as serious people, the growns ups in the room. Well they are definitely serious in that they're no fun, but they aren't serious in terms of having vision, resolve and courage.

"All well and good, smart arse, but what would you do?" you may say. Ah, that comes next...

*when I told Mrs H the stat today about what many farms earn in a year and, later, that Everton midfielder James Garner is negotiating hard over a new contract as he "only" earns £30,000 a week and presumably wants to earn more like 3 times that sum like his more experienced and more recently signed team mates, she killed the conversation dead, saying the the similarity of the numbers, one per year and one  per week, made her feel "sick"

The title of this post is a tweak of what Andy Haldane said - that Rachel Reeves has played a "bad hand ...pretty poorly". Reeves once claimed to have worked for the Bank of England for a decade, but it turned out she'd been there about half that time, some of that studying. Haldane was at the Bank for over 3 decades, eventually filling the roles of chief economist and executive director of monetary analysis and statistics.

A brief guide to the public finances. OBR 3 April 2025

Nobody wants a bond crisis but it may be the safest way to wake us up: the debt addicted West risks being trampled by Putin and Xi unless it can wean itself off its excesses. Matthew Syed, Sunday Times 14 September 2025

Numbed by borrowing, we can't see how badly we need to go cold turkey. The triumph of modern democracy looks short-lived: we are destroying it with our aversion to pain. Matthew Syed, Sunday Times 16 November 2025

Another budget that robs the young. No wonder half of them intend to vote Green. Robert Colville, Sunday Times 30 November 2025. This column included the stat about health and disability benefits being equivalent to a £40,000+ salary but I've also seen it elsewhere.

How many households give more than they take from the state? Tom Calver's Go Figure column, Sunday Times 30 November 2025. My concern is simpler than Calver's: it's just very inefficient to take tax off people and give it back to them in benefits and subsidies and so ends up costing more. Calver's figures take account of rail travel subsidies as well as health, education and other public services.

One batty mother

I would bet that most folk think moths are small, brown, dull and only fly at night. Well some are, but many aren't any of those.

However, we do know that bats are blind. Don't we? Why else would we use the phrase "as blind as a bat"? It turns out, as some of you knowlegeable people no doubt already know, that bats aren't blind. Some have excellent eyesight, even if their superpower is being able to use ultrasonic calls to echolocate and therefore fly blind. This enables them not only to avoid obstacles in pitch darkness but also to catch a moth on the wing. Or at least some moths...

How bats do this was a mystery until a Harvard student called Donald Griffin used a device that allowed him to pick up the ultrasonic calls and observe and describe echolocation. But do all bats echolocate? Actually no: all insectivorous bats do but fruit bats, broadly speaking don't. I suppose they didn't need to evolve that skill as they aren't trying to catch flying things in flight: they use their good eyesight and strong sense of smell to find their (stationary) food in the dark.

Echolocation isn't the only superpower that bats have. They are the only mammal that can fly using what are long-fingered hands with a membrane of skin webbed between them rather than wings. Despite generally weighing only a few grams they can migrate hundreds of miles. They can live for over forty years, which is highly unusual for a small mammal.

There are lots of different bat species - over 1,500 and counting. I was staggered to read that bats comprise 20 per cent of the world's mammal species. There's a white bat: the Honduran white which, unlike like Monty Pyhton's Norwegian Blue parrot really does exist. There's a Mexican fish-eating bat which lives under rocks and hunts out at sea in flocks. (No, I don't know if they catch flying fish). The horseshoe bat emits it's echolocation sugnals through its nostrils.

Mrs H thinks most flying things are creepy. She's not fond of moths buzzing her but a bat would be worse. I was eating in a hotel restaurant in Wasdale in the Lake District on a business trip many years ago when a bat flew into the dining room and did several circuits, some of them in tight loops around one diner's head before it escaped. Mrs H would have totally freaked out if she'd been with me. On her planet vampires weren't a creation of an author, he blagged the story from real life. So vampire bats? Well of course they are real and must drink around 15ml of blood a night - half their body weight - to keep going. While they generally get it from cows, pigs and horses they can target humans and are so gentle they can drink for half an hour without waking their victim. Missing a couple of nights can be fatal but vampire bats share with bats in their roost who fail to get a meal. They are altruistic and sociable - relationships between friendly bats in the same roost can be more important than family ties when it comes to who they'll share with. They remember which bats have shared food with them, even over long periods of time, and build up mutual trust. This is one of the best documented examples of sharing in non-human animals.

Bats are important pollinators and also eat pests that can otherwise decimate crops. The military has funded plenty of research on their sonar capabilities - and into moths' ability to jam their signals and throw them off track.

Ah, moths! Many of you may remember that, after reading a fascinating book called Much Ado About Mothing by James Lowen, I became a bit of a mother. That's moth-er, what the folk in the know call a moth lover. Oh sure, the specialised type of entomologists (insect scientists) who study lepidoptera are called lepidopterists but that includes butterflies, the gaudy summer show offs whose paltry 59 UK varieties flutter briefly around our flowers mainly in the summer. Folks who like mothing have around 2,500 UK species to go at. And unless you're really keen (and I'm not that keen) as Lowen says moths make for gloriously lazy wild life watching. No need to travel, rise early or seek out moths as they come to you at home. Keen amateurs get or make their own moth traps - one morning soon after he had started mothing Lowen found he'd captured 2,800 moths overnight, even if 2,500 of them were a single species. (No I don't know how he estimated those numbers, before releasing them - maybe by weight?) I don't have a trap - I just try to identify the moths we find in the house - there is dark woodland behind us so they do tend to fly in. I haven't counted but must be up to 50 or 60 varieties that I've identified out of the 900 varieties of UK macro-moth, the larger species. I can't be bothered trying to identify any of the larger number of micro-moths, life's too short.

I've debunked previously the idea that moths can't be colourful or that none of them fly by day. But there's no point in looking out for moths in December, is there? Well Mrs H got buzzed by quite a large one in our kitchen the other evening that had flown in through an open window. Confused by the light (because most moths do fly mainly at night) it did laps of the room before settling down somewhere out of sight and leaving her muttering to me about "your bloody moths. Find it, identify it and get rid of it!"

It must have been on top of a cupboard because it couldn't be found. The next morning she shouted me through to the living room as the moth was basking (or exhausted and disorientated) on the carpet in the bright sunshine. A large and grand fellow too, with fabulous markings:

It turns out that the moth species she found me for Christmas flies between October and December and so, not unreasonably, is called the December moth. He's big - a wingspan of about 30mm. And how do I know it's a him? Well, the females are even larger and can have a wingspan of over 40mm. At first I thought it was female as the males have feathery antennae but on the photo above they are tucked in. When I tried to help him out of the house he fluttered and revealed the feathery antennae you can see below:

I gathered him up and went to put him on my hedge but, before I could, he had swooped away at considerable speed.

Now what I can't tell you is whether the December moth has a bat ultrasonic jamming capability. Maybe we need to get a bat and and a December moth flying around our kitchen in the dark to find out. I can't see Mrs H having much enthusiasm for that experiment!

The Genius Bat by Yossi Yovel is published by Oneworld. Or, like me, you could just read the book review by Adam Weymouth in the Sunday Times of 23 November 2025 which I've extensively plagiarised here.

In Much Ado About Mothing James Lowen describes how, inspired by bird watchers who aim for a "big year" by spotting more than 300 species in 12 months, he designed a quest to add to the 700 or so species he had seen. Trying to get the remianing 1,800 in 12 months was impractical so he targeted over 100 non-garden dwelling species which did necessitate travel and inconvenience but was worth it when he found at least one species that hadn't been spotted for many years and was thought to probably be extinct. I think I'll keep letting them come to me....

How Does It Feel?

Back in June I registered the excitement in half of the Holden household that, not only was Roy Harper playing Glastonbury, but he was touring again after a gap of several years. (See Let's Go To Glasto Again,  27 June).

So how did 84 year old Roy do?

We caught the gig at Manchester's Bridgewater Hall in late September. It's a large venue but was sold out. There would be warm receptions at all his shows on the tour but, as a son of Manchester, none warmer than this, I'm sure. It must be said the audience seemed, on average, even more rickety than the performer, though there were a reasonable number of younger folk there as Roy has picked up followers all the way through his 60 year performing career.

It was at least the tenth time I'd seen Roy perform. He played and sang well and was superbly supported by his son Nick on a mix of support and lead guitar. 

He came on alone and started confidently with How Does It Feel, a song from his 1970 album Flat, Baroque and Berserk. If I've heard him play it before it would have been the first time I saw him, in early 1971. The song got a burst of publicity when it was used in an episode of the Netflix series The Handmaid's Tale in 2019 behind a powerful sequence in the story. The album includes several songs which are commonly mentioned as being among Roy's best, but this isn't normally regarded as one of them. It's a damned fine song, however and lyrics like these must have fitted the script very well:

How does it feel to be the master's right hand nose?

How does it feel to be lieutenant?

And how does it feel to be stood on someone's toes?

And how does it feel to be a voluntary heel?

When you say you want a bit more rank

You wanna be a big wheel

You can feel magnified if you hide in your pride

It's not real

As you can see the song is a bit of a 60s hippy rant against conventionality and the rat race, continuing:

And how does it feel with a white flag in your fist?

How does it feel to have two faces?

And how does it feel with your god strapped to your wrist?

And him leading you such a chase

These are all lyrics from the song but not necessarily in the right order here. I've edited and rearranged them to limit the complexity here since, while Roy has many musical influences including Lonnie Donovan and Miles Davis, his prime influence is Keats. So there are usually other layers of meanings in his songs, as there appear to be in the rest of this song, but they are beyond my ken to figure out. It occasionally makes me wish I'd paid more attention in English Lit lessons at school. Though, as I don't recall us studying romantic poets, it probably wouldn't have helped: the first world war 'protest' poems I do remember us studying all had a fairly clear, simple and singular meaning.  But the idea that it could take a chapter to explain the meanings and inferences of a few lines of verse would probably have bemused me...

Roy sang with quite a light voice in 1970, but he made a very good fist of the song and it got the set off to a flier. You can hear the song and see how it was used in The Handmaid's Tale on youtube here.

In the second half of the set Roy included East of the Sun, another song from Flat, Baroque which I also hadn't seen him play since the 70s, if ever. It's a short and hauntingly beautiful lament for his first lover. I knew from Roy's book The Passions of Great Fortune, his compendium of song lyrics with some hints and explanations, that she was called Gillian and that her parents ended the relationship. She was 15. Roy would have been 18, which would be far more problematic now we seem to think 15 and 364 days is somehow meaningfully different from 16 and a day. For context when I met Mrs H I was 19 and she was 16, so only a few months different in each case. 

Wonderfully Roy announced the song by saying that the now 81 year old lady it's about was in the audience. The song started well but unsurprisingly Roy struggled with the emotion of the occasion and stumbled over the lyrics. After the warm applause died down Roy told us that Nick had suggested he speak the words, which he did, effectively as a poem. There weren't many dry eyes in the house. You can hear the original studio version of the song here. On the night it was played with two guitars rather than guitar and harmonica which worked pretty well.

Naturally the show wasn't entirely smooth running - Harper shows just aren't. One fellow got chucked out for heckling too much. Engaging Roy in banter was de rigeur in the 70s but as he can't hear as well to respond and as venues now have curfews it's become irritating so most folk (Roy included) didn't have a problem with the ejection apart, of course, from the punter who remained noisy all the way out of the auditorium.

Roy did forget to move the capo between two songs. This is hardly unusual for Roy -  forgetting to move the capo or an early line in the song or change guitar and having to restart a song for those or other reasons are pretty much standard in one of his shows over the decades and all part of the entertainment. It had an amusing side effect this time. As Roy's voice got lower and lower from trying to sing the song in the wrong key his son Nick strummed along staring whimsically at his dad until they made eye contact. Nick stopped playing, got his keys out at waggled them. Roy stopped playing and looked at the keys with complete bemusement until the penny dropped. He smiled and said "ah, wrong key!"  He noted that he'd impressed himself by just how low he could sing now, but thought it better to have a go at performing his epic 60s I Hate The White Man, always requested at his gigs but generally not performed in recent years, in the right key.

I was going to call this one a rant to but it's much more powerful than that, more of a polemic. Of course Roy doesn't, as some Americans have claimed, hate his "own race", i.e. white people, though he recounted a story of a live interview he gave to a radio station in the southern part of the USA  over 50 years ago. A redneck had called in threatening to come down and put Roy "out of his misery". Roy was somewhat discomfited when the station immediately went off air and everyone exited the building and left, telling him to make himself scarce. His classic late 60s song isn't about skin colour. It's concerns the empty culture, hypocrisy and arrogance of western society and its violence, avarice and inherent racism. It's a rant against the establishment and its lust for power and wealth that enslaves us, takes away our freedoms, creates wars and destroys the planet in the process*.  It's a song born out of the civil rights movement era and it also appeared on Flat, Baroque and Berserk. It was recorded live at Les Cousins folk club as Roy didn't think he could ever get the feeling of the song right in the studio without an audience. In a spoken preamble to the song, which Roy included on the record because he knew that the title would be misunderstood, Roy noted the sort of white men he had a problem with: Ian Paisley for example. I'd suggest he would also have seen Richard Nixon, Ian Smith (prime minister of Rhodesia when it made its "universal declaration of independence") and - in the modern era - Trump and Xi Jinping as classic "white men" although in another live recording's preamble to the song he noted that there are plenty of black politicians who behave like "white men" saying "after all, they've had a lot of good teachers". I've often wondered if Roy deliberately turned around the now outmoded phrase "play the white man", which would be problematic now but was used back then to mean acting in a decent, fair and trustworthy manner, to mean the opposite. The song was as powerful  as ever - and still as meaningful unfortunately. These extracts from the lyrics will give you a feel:

And where the crazy whiteman

with his teargas happiness

Lies dead and long since buried 

By his own fantastic mess

For I hate the whiteman

and his plastic excuse

for I hate the whiteman

and the man who turned him loose...

and while the crazy whiteman

in the desert of his bones

lies as bleached as the paradise

he likes to think he owns...

For I hate the whiteman

in his doctrinaire abuse

oh I hate the whiteman

And the man who turned him loose

which Roy neatly turns around towards the end of the song, singing to the audience

and the man who turned you all loose.

But of course it would be much better to give the song a listen, for example here on youtube.

The other highlight of the evening - and definitely one of the main candidates for Roy's best song when Harper fans chew the cud - was The Same Old Rock, from his 1971 masterpiece album Stormcock. Another polemic, this time against organised religion, the recorded version features a stunning acoustic guitar solo by Jimmy Page. Nick Harper's rendition was superb and probably as least as good as Jimmy's own attempt when I saw him with Roy in 2011.

There were several other classics including Twelve Hours of Sunset, Another Day and When An Old Cricketer Leaves The Crease. There were also two 'new' songs,  Man in a Glass Cage and I've Loved My Life though we'd seen Roy perform both of them since his last album was released in 2013. He did promise a new album on one of those occasions. Will it happen? He said he needed to focus on it, blogging and gardening had got in the way. We can but hope.

Roy left the stage on an emotional high. Will there be a Final Tour part three? He said "Time is against me but I do hope to be back". Which Mrs H was not so thrilled to hear, given the price of gig tickets these days. Time, as Roy sang on his last album, is temporary but can also be final. Get that album done, Roy and I'll see you again by accident - or maybe I'll see you again. (Which Harper fans will recognise as lyric from I'll See You Again from the 1974 album Valentine).

Not a great picture below, but here are Roy and Nick on stage at the Bridgewater Hall:

* With acknowledgement to Roy's chronicler Opher Goodwin whose words I've blagged, with some editing and paraphrasing, from his excellent book called On Track... Roy Harper - every album, every song. A fairly self explanatory title! Sonic Bond publishing 2021.

Who gets out - and who comes in

 I doubt the liberal congoscenti will begin to comprehend the spittle flecked fury raging across the country about the erroneous release of Hadush Gerberslasie Kebatu, the Ethiopian migrant who arrived on a small boat and was convicted of sex offences on a 12 year old girl and a woman. When we heard this was the very dude whose original arrest was the trigger for the protests and disturbances at the Bell hotel, Epping it was a "you could not make that up" moment.

To my surprise the story wasn't even on the front page of most of the newspapers the next day which I found bizarre.

He's now been nabbed but the story epitomises the general air of incompetence around anything to do with the British government and the functions and services under its control. Many in authority will just sigh that this sort of thing is inevitable. I don't for a moment believe it is.

On the latest figures over 260 prisoners were incorrectly released in the 12 months to March 2025, a 128% increase on the previous year. So the number more than doubled. David 'Mastermind' Lammy said the government had "inherited a system that was collapsing" but he and Shabana Mahmood have overseen it getting much worse.  Something is clearly wrong in the system and I agree with the commentator who said this isn't really about an error by one person. If one officer did make an error I'm left wondering how the relevant process doesn't build in adequate checks.

Apparently the paperwork is awfully complicated. That sounds a very lame excuse. There will, I accept, be resource limitations and there is currently huge pressure on prison officers in our inadequate and overcrowded prison estate (another Tory failure, I must say. One would have thought building more prisons would have played well with their base).

But still none of that is an excuse. I don't know whether it is, but I would expect all paperwork on dangerous prisoners to be clearly marked. But I would also have expected that high political risk prisoners, like Kebatu, would be identified. There can't have been many higher political risk prisoners in the jail categories lower than A, the highest security. One can only assume they are not, which I find incredible.

Stats on the gov.uk website suggest that something like 90,000 prisoners a year are released, mainly on licence, and claims a "success rate" of 99.5%. I think that's a pretty abysmal performance for this particular activity. 1 in 200 is a fairly typical of a human error rate in a system without proper checking. A system that should be aspiring to very high reliability should be able to easily get to 1 in 1,000 to 1 in 10,000 and a high integrity system would expect to do much better than that. The government doesn't need to hold an expensive and time consuming public inquiry. It needs to marshall some of the expertise readily available to it and get a team of independent people with experience in prisons and in sectors like aviation, rail and nuclear and sort out a process that works. Releasing the wrong person shouldn't really happen more than a handful of times a year at the most, if ever.

Meanwhile the long run up to Rachel Reeves's budget continues and speculation grows. Why did she push the budget back to the latest possible date? The reason, as any accountant will tell you, is that bad numbers take much longer to add up.

I may return to what Reeves should do in her second budget but for now one can't help reflect that she didn't make particularly sound and robust decisions in her first, which was meant to be a "sort things out, once-off this parliament" budget. The general air of doom and despondency Reeves allowed to take hold in the run up to her last budget is being repeated. Talking down the economy and hiking taxes, with the ill judged NI increase made inevitable by Labour's rash manifesto promises, all pushed in the opposite direction to Labour's aspiration for growth. As Charles Colville pointed out in the Sunday Times if you talk down the economy and increase taxes on businesses then those businesses don't invest. Who knew? Well everyone, pretty much.

One straw in the wind I saw was an analysis by Chris Walker, of the independent economics consultancy Chamberlain Walker, which suggests that 1,800 former non-doms have left the country since April, twice the number expected, after Reeves abolished non-dom status which allowed people whose permanent homes are abroad to escape tax on their overseas income and wealth (note not their UK income). Most people would shrug their shoulders about that but it probably means that Reeves won't anything like get the extra £34 billion she predicted. Indeed I would expect the tax take to go down from the abolition of non-dom status. Which is why so many chancellors had left an arrangement that dated back over 200 years in place. Rachel clearly thought she knew better than two centuries of her predecessors.

The Treasury responded that the 1,800 estimate was based on "anecdotal evidence that we don't recognise". That is because the Treasury rely on data from HMRC, which collects information from people in employment. The wealthiest non-doms would be investors in and owners of businesses, not employees. Chris Walker concluded that the Treasury was "effectively flying blind" about the the behaviour of the most responsive group of non-doms, with no real idea of how many have decided to decamp to places like Dubai.

There is a less anecdotal piece of evidence which the Treasury didn't comment on. Ferrari limited its supplies of cars to Britain six months ago amid concerns that some people are getting out of the UK for tax reasons, as it's Chief Executive told the FT. OK, so we know who to believe then.

Reeves countered concerns that non-doms were leaving in an interview with the Guardian last week, in which she said "this is a brilliant country and people want to live here".

Sure Rachel, a lot of them do. The keenest seem to be folk like the guy who was removed under the one in one out deal with France and was back on a small boat within a month, d'oh...

I suppose that did show that we have some processes that work as at least that dude was immediately identified. Still, it's shame we can't swap out these two

Bonnie Blue and the swords of a thousand men

A couple of months ago there was a media tizzy over the Channel 4 "documentary" 1000 Men and Me: the Bonnie Blue story. Rather to my surprise, Mrs H agreed we should watch this to make our own minds up about the, ahem, journalistic merit of the story.

Bonnie Blue is the alter ego of Tia Billinger from Nottinghamshire, a girl with a middle class upbringing and a fascination with reality tv who turned a side hustle into a lucrative business based around exploiting her body utilising the OnlyFans "platform for creators".  Having become a "webcam model" and finding she could earn $5,000 a week she launched her OnlyFans page and established her USP in the porn market: having free sex with members of the public provided they consented to it being filmed and posted on line. The Sun showed her holding a poster saying "bonk me for free, let me film it".

The documentary charted her progress as she increased her monthly earnings into the hundreds of thousands of dollars, hiring a support team to help produce the videos and deal with all the paperwork. In order to grow her number of regular followers she decided she didn't just need to create content but to plan ever more eye popping stunts. She'd already run a series of videos about having sex with "barely legals" (which she noted wasn't her phrase) which put a whole new angle on university freshers' weeks. Her big wheeze was to set a world record by having sex with over 1,000 men in a day.

The documentary showed her planning and then posting the invitation, telling punters where they could report to take part while wondering aloud to the camera whether anyone would actually turn up. The film showed lines of men (waist down) queueing to take their turn. Bonnie had already told us they would get 40 seconds each to "do what they wanted", penetration counting as "having sex". This was some production line.

The stunt achieved its publicity objectives and her income soared to $500,000 dollars a month (some sources say over $2m a month). Where's there's muck, there's brass as they say.

However when she planned her next big stunt - being tied up naked in a glass box while members of the public did what they wanted to her - OnlyFans tired of her attention grabbing antics, or rather the credit card business that collects the cash from her punters decided it was harming their image and pressured OnlyFans to ditch her. The documentary showed a crisis meeting with her team as Bonnie realised her income had gone down from megabucks to zero in an instant.

She was more than put out - she had run every idea past the OnlyFans people before publishing her videos and got their ok. And, as she pointed out, while it might be a "platform for creators" the overwhelmimg majority of content posted is porn. She was more than miffed by the double standards.

She was only allowed to continue posting material if it used actors. So she returned to more conventional porn for a while but the need to maintain interest amongst her followers meant multiple men. Which she noted was exhausting because they were much fitter and stronger than members of the public.

Salvation was at hand in the form of another, less well known, site called Fansly. Bonnie fretted about how much the change would hit her income. Reports don't confirm her income on the new platform but it would be no sweat for her fans to migrate to Fansly so my guess is she's still putting it out there and coining it.

What did we think of the Channel 4 "documentary"? The content was tawdry, vulgar and undignified but the way it was portrayed, with some pixellation of Bonnie's anatomy and her punters only ever shown from the waist down and never actually doing anything could not be called obscene. 

Perhaps the grossest moment in the film was when Bonnie, having completed her epic feat of endurance cast her eyes over the floor of her ad hoc studio which was littered with discarded condoms and the odd bit of mislaid clothing (some of her punters must have arrived home with the odd sock missing). With a mischievous glint in her eye as an idea formed she lay down on the floor and did that snow angel thing with her arms an legs that people do in the snow, brushing the detritus aside. Yuck!

Surprisingly we warmed to some aspects of her personality. She seems close to her family and looks after them. While her parents had been shocked at their daughter's choice of "career" they are supportive, but then they've had their mortgage paid off. Her mum acts as Bonnie's PA and several of the family are Bonnie's payroll.

Her school mates have said they were shocked and surprised at how their friend's life has evolved. Tia married her privately educated boyfriend Olli, who had encouraged her when she had doubts about her webcam career, thinking she wasn't pretty enough and people wouldn't want to watch her. "No, you're beautiful, do it" the Sun reported. Olli's parents had subsidised the couple in the early days before her revenue earning took off and, at the start of the period covered by the documentary, they were still married. But by the end the weren't together.

There were a couple of take away messages from the Bonnie Blue documentary besides the obvious titillation. 

Firstly, Bonnie said she found what she did "empowering". I get that - it's certainly empowered her to accumulate a lot of money very quickly. It's her choice what she does with her body. But the obvious point to make is that what empowers her helps to disempower, intimidate and hurt large numbers of other women who aren't so assertive. The documentary didn't probe that issue, which left one feeling it was really just - er - light entertainment.

Secondly, there was some furore in the media over the ease with which young people could avoid age restrictions and view the documentary on Channel 4's streaming service. While it was tawdry it didn't show anything the majority of even "just teens" wouldn't already have been exposed to. Not that that's a good thing but that pass was sold a long time ago, unfortunately. But I wouldn't have wanted younger children to see it, with Bonnie (clothed) discussing with her producer whether the various bits of furniture were at a comfortable height for her purposes and trying out (on her own) some different positions. I'm very critical of the social media companies for not doing enough on age verification. But when the government can't seem to make sure that only people of an appropriate age watch services like Channel 4 catch up or BBC's iPlayer, how do they expect facebook, youtube and OnlyFans to do what they aren't doing with organisations under their control? For me that was perhaps as significant a point as any.

On a rather different note, after watching the programme I found myself humming a song from the early 80s I don't think I've heard in 40 years. After a while I identified it as punk influenced Tenpole Tudor's song "Swords of a Thousand Men". Ha, that's why I was humming it!

More on Tenpole Tudor below. And here is Bonnie Blue in a slightly more demure pose than some of them in the documentary:

1000 men and me: the Bonnie Blue story "documentary" is available on Channel 4's catch up service.

1000 Men and Me: the Bonnie Blue Story review - the troubling tale sex with 1,057 men in 12 hours. The Guardian, 29 July 2025

Bonnie Blue bedded hundreds of teens. But she also had a private school rugby husband and a VERY middle class upbringing. The Sun 11 November 2024 https://www.thesun.co.uk/fabulous/31632237/bonnie-blue-middle-class-upbringing-husband/

I remembered punk recording artist Tenpole Tudor from his role in Julian Temple's 1981 film The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle in which he played himself, being called "Tadpole" throughout by Irene Handl's character. Swords of a Thousand Men was his most successful recording, reaching number 6 in the UK singles chart in the same year with its singalong chorus of "Hoorah, hoorah, hoorah, yeah - over the hill with the swords of a thousand men" over a simple but catchy guitar riff. Tenpole performed under the name of Edward Tenpole, though his real name is Edward Felix Tudor-Pole. Yes, he's an actual aristocrat, a descendent of Owen Tudor, grandfather of King Henry VII, founder of the Tudor dynasty. Punk rockers, eh?

China Syndrome

I'm puzzled by the collapse of the case against House of Commons researcher Christopher Cash and his buddy Christopher Berry. Most of the media scrum concerns whether the government gave in to bullying from China. While that would be a big story my concern is rather different. The case collapsed because China was not officially categorsed as an enemy. But why does a country have to be classified as an "enemy" for unauthorised passing of information to be a criminal offence? 

It also made me wonder how many countries are classified as enemies of the UK and which ones are they?

Having signed the Official Secrets Act myself many years ago I was under the impression that passing official secrets to anyone unauthorised would be in breach of the Act. On the occasions when I was in possession of classified documents it wouldn't have seemed to me to be a defence to say the recipient didn't belong to an enemy country. After all the recipient might pass it on.

The Commons Defence Select Commitee seemed to struggle with this when considering the Integrated Review of Security and Defence, which was carried out in 2021 and updated in 2023. The current government would therefore say it's not their work and out of date, but as they haven't updated it, it is theirs.That report concentrated on Russia and China, noting that that the Integrated Review only categorises Russia as an enemy (or at least "the most acute direct threat"). This left me wondering about Iran and North Korea for starters. But surely it wouldn't be a good idea to pass nuclear secrets to, say, Pakistan? Is that country an enemy?

It seems far too simplistic to categorise countries as enemies or allies. I'm sure there are many countries who are both friendly and antagonistic, depending on the issue. But even without those shades of grey, there's a lot of information we wouldn't want allies to see, especially at particular points in time e.g. in the run up to a trade negotiation. And there could be plenty of embarrassment if frank assessments of our allies and their leaders were leaked, as happened with comments about Trump. Are these sort of documents official secrets? Having worked in the nuclear industry not the Foreign Office, I've no idea but I doubt it.

Did the information Cash and Berry passed to the Chinese contain official secrets? We don't know. One of them was detained at Heathrow returning from China and found to have £4,000 in cash in his briefcase. Suspicious sure, but it can't have been especially valuable information, unless that was a down payment. I could easily imagine that the two prunes had a little side hussle going passing reports of tittle tattle (what's on the menu in the House of Commons tea room maybe, alongside some snippets of overheard gossip perhaps) to what they saw as gullible Chinese contacts. 

If they were passing stuff which did not contain material marked as officially secret that doesn't mean it was harmless. If the law doesn't prohibit passing of harmful info even to supposedly friendly countries it should. But a prosecution under the Official Secrets Act might not have been appropriate or the best way to proceed. In the case of the Commons researcher an employment sanction could have been considered though there would be the risk, had he been sacked without prosecution, that would have seemed weak, so politically risky. And it's not clear that avenue was open for the teacher. 

The collapsed case has also led to some angst about how to manage our relationship with China. It was remarkable with hindsight that we got into a position where a Chinese company, Huawei, would have been at the heart of our 5G network, all because BT had made major commercial deals with that company in 2005. At the time there seemed no great security concern: going back to before 2012 it seemed commerce and trade were the main aims of China but no-one appeared to ask any "what if?" questions. The "what if" came to pass when Xi Jinping became secretary, chairman and president of everything in China between 2012 and 2013. China's clampdown on Hong Kong and the Uigurs and it's more aggressive military stance in the Pacific followed. Meanwhile the UK seemed on autopilot, with David Cameron quaffing pints with Xi in the Cotswolds and the USA (Trump in particular) having to pressure Boris Johnson about Hauwei, who we seemed to want to stick with purely because of the extra cost and timescale of ditching them. It seems to have taken us a decade to get our mind round the simple fact that China wants to trade but also wants to spy on us.

Josh Glancy argued in the Sunday Times that we should choose how to deal with China pragmatically on the specifics of each issue: buy chairs from Beijing but not your wifi he said. That sounds simple but there are still many awkward areas. For example, clothes ok but what about electric cars? The Chinese company BYD is rapidly expanding its market share in the UK. Many experts think it's a very bad idea to have lots of high tech electric Chinese vehicles on UK roads. I tend to agree. But they're very much cheaper. This is not the only specific area where security and net zero would appear to be in conflict.

However we try to manage our relations with China it seems to me that we've been carelessly slow in trying to develop appropriate policies.

Together with the mess over defining and protecting our "secrets" from states that might not be enemies but might not always have our interests at heart (i.e. every other country) it's all quite a Laurel and Hardy situation really.

Post publication note: while I've concentrated here on the oddity that the recipient of leaked information appears to have to come from an enemy state for a succssful prosecution - which I'm still not sure I believe - there is one "smoking gun" in the government's position that it did not collapse the case. Starmer's National Security Adviser, the slippery Jonathan Powell, belongs to the 48 Group Club, a UK based organisation with deep ties to China's ruling communist party that aims to foster UK-China business and political relationships. That would seem to be a clear conflict of interest and completely inappropriate for his role. I find it bizarre that he didn't leave that group on his appointment as NSA. There is also the point that his deputy, Matthew Collins, included in his witness statement passages lifted from the Labour party manifesto. Sources say he wouldn't have done that without ministerial direction and that he has admitted privately that the decision not to provide the evidence requested by the CPS had been "political", contradicting claims made by Starmer and his ministers in the Commons. I note that Boris Johnson's defenestration was partly because of "misleading" parliament. Hmmm.

 P.S. Talking of employment sanctions I once terminated the contract of a project manager who had been passing commercial information to a competitor. We had evidence in the form of emails but the individual went for the modern day playbook, accused his boss (a very careful and measured chap) of bullying and took us to an industrial tribunal. There was some satisfaction when the chair of the tribunal, seeing straight through all of the nonsense, declared there was only one bully in the case and it was the claimant. I still remember the buzz that went around the open plan building after a resource manager and member of the HR team escorted this chap out of the building having arrived at his desk and requested his pass and keys. We could have been more discreet and invited him to a meeting but we wanted to make a visible example. Was that bullying? I don't think so, but it didn't backfire on us. I wonder if someone decided to make an example of Berry and Cash - and found it did backfire?

P.P.S. The China Syndrome was a 1979 film thriller starring Jane Fonda with a storyline about reporters discovering safety cover ups at a nuclear power plant. Just twelve days after the film was released the partial meltdown of a reactor at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania made it seem prescient. The title is based on the figure of speech term for a nuclear reactor core melting down through the various containment structures and underlying earth all the way to China. While the story was fanciful I recall a key part of the plotline was the discovery of major corner cutting: all of the radiographs supposedly veryifying the different welds on a leaking component were identical. The organisation I worked for through the 1980s and 1990s pioneered the development of some non destructive testing techniques for nuclear components and was responsible for qualifying the inspectors of the Sizewell B reactor pressure vessel, basically exam testing the testers. I can't speak for the systems in place in the United States in the 1970s but reassuringly there were too many layers of verification for that particular ruse to have worked on Sizewell B, commissioned in 1995.  At Three Mile Island extensive monitoring of 30,000 people for 20 years showed no adverse health effects. I think I recall that, despite an awful lot going wrong leading to a fairly significant release of radioactivity, no member of the public received a radiation dose larger than a dental x ray.

* House of Commons publication Chapter 3: The UK in the world: allies and adversaries https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld5803/ldselect/ldintrel/124/12406.htm