The end of an era - or an epoch? Guardiola, Manchester City and the irrefutable body of evidence

2026 is certainly the end of something in English football. But are we seeing the end of an era or an epoch?

Which is longer, I wondered? In geology and science it's clear: an era spans hundreds of millions of years and is divided into smaller chunks called periods which are subdivided into epochs. But in everyday history it's the other way round: an epoch is used to describe a massive span of history defined by a foundational turning point or a sweeping cultural or technological movement. In contrast, an era refers to a shorter, more specific stretch of time and maybe localised history, such as the Victorian era.

So I would say that Pep Guardiola's departure from Manchester City was definitely the end of an era. An epoch? Time will tell but probably not. His arrival in Manchester seemed to mark the start of a footballing epoch, as it was certainly material to a sweeping cultural change in British football which affected how teams play up and down the entire English football pyramid, not just the Premier League.

His achievements were remarkable even if the asterisk many of us were mentally putting against them has now seemingly proved to be correct, if subject to appeal, with the Premier League panel's verdict on the 115 charges. Or is it 114, or 130? Whatever it's a lot compared with Everton's one, as is the amount of of the financial breach, some £900M or so compared with Everton's £25M ish*

That verdict probably also marks the end of an era, or epoch, or both. That certainly looks likely as I expect the findings of the independent commission appointed by the Premier League are highly likely to be confirmed after appeal and I can't see legal action overturning it however much Manchester City's owners are prepared to pay their lawyers to attempt to do so. The processes may well take a long time but hopefully not an epoch as a kind of ice age feel has set over the Premier League in the meantime.

This is quite a turn round in my opinion as I had long felt that City were guilty of financial chicanery but that it would be impossible to prove. The suspicions many fans felt were, for me, demonstrated to be well founded by Miguel Delaney's award winning 2024 book States Of Play (How sportswashing took over football)** which included excerpts from the hacked emails, including the revealing reply by a City director "we can do what we want" when asked by an employee whether he could actually do as instructed and backdate sponsorship invoices to ensure compliance with the league's financial regulations. But is that proof?

However, it turns out that the independent commission was thoroughly convinced and it also looks to be as if Manchester City's "irrefutable body of evidence" is a dead on arrival corpse, a dead parrot if you like. I say that because their case is crumbling in front of our eyes and their protestations have, for me become evidence of guilt. 

Having long said that all of the Etihad sponsorship money came from the company and was not substantially funded by their owners, they now say that most of it came from the Abu Dhabi government. That is something they (and we) thought wasn't allowed at the time but, having won some elements of their claim about associated party transactions last year, they've changed their case. However, their defence might prove problematic for their sponsors as Etihad made a sworn statement to the US Congress in 2015 saying that they had paid all of the City sponsorship monies and none of it had come from the Abu Dhabi government. They couldn't say otherwise really as that would have got them into difficulty with the US over state subsidy of their airline, a no-no for the USA. It would be rather delicious if Etihad is now hauled back to be quizzed by the US authorities.

Then there is the oddity of the smaller sponsorship from Etisalat, a UAE telecomms company. This money was paid via a broker with a somewhat dodgy reputation. Why was that necessary unless it was to disguise where the money actually came from? 

Also there is the disguised pay to Roberto Mancini, City manager from 2009 to 2013. I had long thought that, if City's owners were keeping extra money for Mancini off City's books by paying it directly from an account in the gulf to his Swiss bank account that would be untraceable. But they didn't do it that way, for some bizarre reason they tried to do it via a proper contract. But in a transparently sham arrangement they paid Mancini £1.75 million a year to do 4 days coaching in Abu Dhabi when his published City pay, for let's say around 200 - 240 days work a year, was only around £1.5 million.

So it seems they weren't just crooked they were inept. This leaves the Premier League with some huge issues, in particular how to levy an appropriate punishment which is in some way proportionate to the scale of the offence and other punishments previously made (Everton, Leicester City, Nottingham Forest) without prejudicing the standing of the League and its revenues or condemning the club to extinction.

It also raises potentially political issues. That's tough for the politicians but nothing to do with football. In my notes on Delaney's book, which I read over 18 months ago, I jotted "do the PL have the balls?" (UEFA didn't really see it through in their earlier case according to Delaney) and "PLEASE nail the bastards, use minimal legal resources (if the case is indeed that black and white") and tell the politicians the regulator they've just appointed is independent and they can't intervene".

Hopefully it's all coming to pass, albeit slowly and probably messily.

Turning back to the football, where does all that leave the Manchester City and Guardiola legacies? 

I do have a lot of time for Pep Guardiola, while not always having enjoyed City's football. There is no doubt that he respects the English game enormously, up & down the pyramid. He relished City's battles with teams like Tony Pulis's Stoke City and admired what managers like that could achieve with limited resources. I read that, not long before he retired from City, he was surprised to realise a game he'd just caught part of on the TV was from the National League. "What with all those people there? Crazy" he said. 

His achievements were phenomenal but not unprecedented. The records of Guardiola and Bob Paisley as managers of English clubs are hard to separate, both with 6 top division titles, Paisley's over 9 years, Guardiola's over 10. Paisley won 3 European Cups and a UEFA Cup to Guardiola's one Champions League. Paisley didn't win the FA Cup - Guardiola had 3, plus 5 EFL Cups to Paisley's 4 wins. One can debate how hard it is to win the Champions League against the European Cup but Paisley led the first true hegemony in English football, at least since the 1930s and he broke new ground for a British team in winning in Europe multiple times. They both took over teams that had won a couple of trophies in recent times but weren't dominant. There was no culture of, or precedent for, winning so much over a protracted period of time previously. Just look at the number of winners of the English top flight in the 60s and 70s before Paisley. In a 16 years period 10 different teams (Burnley, Spurs, Ipswich, Everton, Liverpool, Manchester United, Manchester City, Leeds, Arsenal and Derby County) won the league. Then Paisley's Liverpool won it 6 times in 8. We saw nothing like it before or since, at least until Alex Ferguson's Manchester United won it 3 times in a row twice, the second time going on to win it 5 times in 7. But Guardiola did have that precedent and also unprecedented resources, limited only by how close City decided they had to stay to the rules (or otherwise). Paisley did not have anything like that. Paisley took over from a charismatic and highly popular manager (not easy) but then, from that platform, outperformed him and everybody else in the history of the English game to that point.

Impossible to separate but, if I had to give it to either of them for me, even as an Evertonian, I'd give the nod to Paisley.

Oh, but there's the style thing. A whole new way of playing football. Well yes, a significant shift. But please don't try to tell me that he invented the false 9. Don Revie played that role - at Manchester City - in the 1950s and it probably wasn't new then. Yes he was very innovative, but also prepared to change and adapt. That included going back to a more conventional centre forward (Haaland), a back 4 populated with centre backs rather than having overlapping fullbacks (like Ake and Gvardiol) and a goalkeeper who was primarily a goalie rather than an anciliary outfield player, while some other managers tried to "out-Pep Pep" and play too much football near to their own goal with players who aren't good enough to manage that degree of risk.

I have a lot of respect for his tactical nous, not so much for his overthinking things in team selection for some big matches, choosing to go into the Champions League final against Chelsea leaving out both his holding midfield players Fernandinho and Rodri in favour of a midfield with de Bruyne, Silva and Gundogan. City lost 1-0 and some say that game made Pep decide he needed a conventional striker. 

They were also not always the joy to watch that some make out. Oh, it's how I loved to play the game as a teenage winger converted to midfielder then fullback and then, for the bulk of my time in men's football a centre back who modelled himself on Alan Hansen (yes, really). But players of limited ability only ever get fleeting experiences of playing in a team that knocks the ball round for 30 consecutive passes unless they're playing the stereotypical "blind school" (i doubt you're meant to say that these days but it's a figure of speech). 

But to watch? Pass sideways, pass backwards, pass, pass and pass again while just once in a long while some nice little passes into the box and a side foot finish. The sort of goal that makes you nod in  approval, maybe clap and say "oh, what a good goal". But without an exclamation mark. Not the kind of football that makes you jump out of your seat and roar with excitement, even if you don't have a dog in that particular fight (i.e. are neutral). So many teams have bought into the Guardiola approach, even Everton under Roberto Martinez in 2013.  Initially it looked good and got us back up to 5th in the League, nearly equalling David Moyes's best finish in his first spell at Everton. But in the long run it proved boring and easy to thwart, which is what happens if you don't have the very best players. City were able to obtain the best of players.

I'll end with thoughts prompted by David Walsh and Martin Samuel of the Times. Walsh wrote

"After the game against Everton [this was the 3-3 draw that turned the tide towards Arsenal in the 2026 title race] he spoke and laughed with Jack Grealish and seemed like a man without a care. In his press conference he spoke graciously about how well Everton had defended, how aggressive their pressing was, and how he thought his team had played well in the first half.  I watched that game and in the first half I felt City's tempo and sideways passing was so pedestrian, it was like they were trying to simulate over-sixties walking football."

Samuel wrote that, despite the monumental scale of City's cheating, they only won the league in a canter once (by 19 points from Man United in 2018) and also very clearly (by 12 points from United in 2021), but by only 5 points from a shrinking Arsenal in 2023, by only a point from Liverpool (2019 and 2022) and on goal difference from United (2012, the Aguero moment that started it all). All that money and success achieved so narrowly! When the margins are that tight it's very easy to believe that the odd extra top quality player, or being able to retain one such as Kompany or Yaya Toure by bunging them a bit extra in their back pocket (possibly, it seems) made the difference as City became the powerhouse that Guardiola inherited then developed further.

Maybe Pep wasn't that good after all...

Of course, Guardiola was outstanding and we may not see anything quite his like in management in England again. Unless of course he refreshes his batteries and takes on the England manager's job after  the moronic Teutonic, aka ThomasTuchel proves to not really be an upgrade on Gareth Southgate, the jury being well and truly out after England caved in to Argentina at the world cup, going into their shell just as they have when leading against that type of team so many times before.

Even if Everton didn't beat City on that occasion in May I'll accept thanks from neutrals and Arsenal fans for changing the momentum so 5 titles in a row wasn't there for the taking. 

Nevertheless I do think he was good for the English game, even if the jury is (literally) still out on Manchester City's impact on the game.

And simulating over-sixties walking football? Wish I'd though of that.

* Everton's breaches were decided, after a lot of to-ing and fro-ing on arcane accountancy principles, including the treatment of interest on loans (allowed for building the new stadium to some extent), to be £19.5M over the 4 year period ending 2021-2 (4 because of covid) and a further £16.6M in the 3 year period ending 2022-23. They were deducted 6 points for the first breach and 2 points for the second. The apparently lighter sentence for the second breach is because two of those three years had already been sanctioned under the first breach. So if I take a third of £16.6 M and add it to £19.5M I get an effective total breach of £25M. If City's breach is £900M that is 36 times as much. 36 times 8 is 288 points. So anything less than 250, maybe levied in stages over several seasons, would appear to be a light penalty.

** Delaney is a journalist with the Independent newspaper who has reported extensively on the City case over a number of years. His recent columns on the crisis engulfing the club and the Premier League are well worth reading. But his thoughtful and well researched book covers sportswashing through state ownership of major clubs much more broadly than City, including Newcastle and, of course, PSG. It seems clear that UEFA (under Infantino) bottled taking on PSG and City, pandering to PSG's excesses which were then taken to extremes, spending record sums signing Neymar and Messi to go with Mbappe. It's ironic that PSG only became really successful when it started trying to be a football rather than a vanity project. Noting the way PSG's Qatari owners sought to inflate the effective size and importance of what had never been France's biggest club, Delaney noted that anyone srutinising the club could only conclude that it was actually about the same financial size as  a mid-ranking Premier League club rather than an elite European operation. The club he chose to illustrate that? He said PSG was very similar in size to Everton

P.S. when the Premier League verdict on City was announced I tried several times over a number of days to access the commission's report but couldn't get on the website. Hackers I wondered? Probably just the pressure on the website from all of City's huge legal team doing the same (only joking, the world's media I expect). But great joy, I've now downloaded the 40 page redacted report which refers to at least 37 as yet unpublished apprendices. I'll get round to reading it later, didn't want to spoil my preconceived prejudices above.... 

The gaslighting is starting

Net migration fell to 177,000 in 2025, a long way down from the peak of over 900,000 in 2023. And already the whispering has started. The problem's solved, gone away, no need to worry. Supporters of Andy Burnham, for one, are known to back a less strict approach than Shabana Mahmood's.

They're gaslighting us. They don't want us to inquire into just how and why it was decided to allow somewhere between 3.2 million and 3.8 million people to arrive in the UK between January 2021 and June 2024.  This is about half the number of arrivals over the previous 20 years and 4 times the average rate of arrivals over that time (nearly 7 million say they arrived between 2001 and 2021). It's around the population of the 6 largest English cities after London: Birmingham, Leeds, Liverpool, Sheffield, Manchester and Bristol.  And it's more than the entire population of Greater Manchester including the boroughs of Bolton, Bury, Oldham, Rochdale, Salford, Stockport, Tameside, Trafford, Wigan and the city of Manchester.

This was the so-called "Boriswave" that we didn't really know about at the time. There was a net migration figure in just two and a half years of 2.6 million to 2.9 million. It wasn't so much a wave as a tsunami:

The Boriswave has been described as the single most important demographic event in modern British history. It was equivalent to a population growth of nearly 4%. To put it another way, at least 1 in every 25 people walking the streets of Britain today arrived in the last 5 years. 

Indeed, reputable sources think we don't really have a clear picture and say that, despite efforts by the ONS to improve migration data, we still only have a relatively hazy picture of this extraordinary demographic phenomenon. The degree of cultural change is larger than implied in the net migration figure as there was a surge in emigration of British nationals. Some experts in the field believe that we'll only get a clearer picture with another census. Indeed academics floated the idea of an emergency 2026 census at the time of the 2021 census which had to adopt different methodology because of covid.

I know some people don't think that the extraordinary scale of this huge social experiment is of any significance whatsoever. They see immigration as an untrammelled good thing.

The Tories don't want you to enquire too much because they can't explain why they lost so much control of everything, including their senses. Labour don't want you to enquire too much because they don't want to have their hands tied and were complicit in previous surges in immigration. And many of its MPs and supporters don't see the problem anyway which is why they say the Home Secretary's plans to limit migration are "un-British". Wes Streeting, who might or might not be a candidate for the Labour leadership when he decides if he's got any balls, has branded people who question immigration to this country as "reactionaries". Better than the more normal term of "racist" I suppose. Most of us don't question immigration, Wes, we question who, how many, over what time, for what purpose and what pressures will it put on housing and services. Branding that reactionary is actually pathetically trying to avoid the debate. And I thought there might be more to him.

Reform bang on about the subject but other than sound bites about limiting numbers they don't engage in any actual debate about what the country needs and how to plan for it. Like all of their pronouncements they have the feel of a random array of sticking plasters with no coherent overarching analysis or strategy.

I listened to Chris Warburton interviewing a Home Office spokesman on Radio 5 Live recently. Warburton repeatedly pressed for what numerical targets the Home Office had for migration getting the slightly odd answer that they don't have any. "What, not even any informal, internal targets?" "No". I was hoping Warburton would ask a follow up question about the well known Treasury model's assumptions for migration, which tend to show more people = more growth. If the Treasury has a target, or at least a number in mind, won't the Home Office come under pressure to make sure economic growth isn't constrained by having too few people? If not, shouldn't they?

Of course the original spike in migration came under Blair, when the long term net migration total of 68,000 over the previous 25 years became 5.9 million in the following 25 years. But at least Blair and Brown were pretty open about what they were up to when they opened up for EU free movement in one go without any phasing which they could have done. They smirked that the arrival of useful people like Polish plumbers would be predominantly Labour voters. Cameron told us he'd get it back to a net annual figure of tens of thousands without justifying whether that sort of number would be optimal or apparently doing anything to deliver it.

The Boriswave was disporotionately made up of people arriving on health and care visas but, possibly in order to attract enough of them, they were allowed to bring in an extraordinary number of dependents. No-one has ever sought, to my knowledge, to show that those visas were actually necessary to maintain essential services or that the number of dependents arriving made any long term economic sense. It might do if they were mainly children, but not if they were of advanced years. The data would probably be very difficult to get. The lack of curiosity of civil servants and ministers of the time on these issues is perplexing. Or is it?

This area is crying out for dispassionate analysis and debate. Instead we just get move along now, nothing to see here. If anything happened it's stopped now. Sleep easy, leave it with us. Yes, sure.

While the net migration figure has fallen, Camilla Long noted that it wasn't even that good. Arrivals last year were still 813,00: almost the population of Greater Leeds. Down from 2023, sure, when it was as a bit bigger than Birmingham.

The politicians who are against immigration won't hear of the benefits. Those in favour seem unwilling to discuss the quantitative implications. Or bewilderingly think if you don't have open borders you're not being "kind" or "British". No other country I know of has politicians that talk that way.

Wouldn't it feel better to be treated like grown ups than condescended to by a bunch of cowards?

Or as Camilla Long said isn't the most patriotic thing you could do now - what is true love of one's country - is to reject people who trash it and pretend it's you who's the problem.

I assure you, you're not. They are.

P.S.

Concern about large numbers of incomers is of course far from new. Our innate concern about the unfamiliar, in particular people, isn't as I understand it, built into our DNA. Rather it's linked to one of the oldest parts of the hunan brain, the amydala and our fight or flight reflex. Though clearly it then becomes more than that longer term: we come to terms with it, sometimes finding logical reasons to reject it or perhaps finding information, arguments or excuses to support it.

I read a review of a book on the history of early modern period Britain recently and hostility to immigrants featured significantly. On May Day 1517 London apprentices rioted against "strangers and aliens", looting their homes and shops and breaking into Newgate prison to free a group of youths who had been arrested for assaulting foreigners.

In those times many believed that "aliens and strangers eate the bread from the poore fatherless children". Others feared that foreigners brought their pregnant wives over so that their offspring would "win...the liberty that other Englishmen do enjoy" while arguing that such children "retain an inclination and kind affection to the countries of their parents". 

Although many felt solidarity with the numerous protestant refugees who arrived in the decades after the Reformation, they came in such vast numbers that, by the 1570s, nearly 40% of Norwich's population was foreign-born. When the Flemish hatmaker Clais van Weveken arrived there in the mid 1560s he reassured his wife that "the English [are] quite loving to our nation". But attitudes hardened in difficult times and by 1593 worshippers at London's Dutch Church were receiving death threats.

Religious prejudice was a growing problem for English Catholics, so this may not all have been about where people came from.

Nevertheless, I'd say it all goes to show that if you preside over a sudden and major demographic shift you can't just assume that people will accept it. Especially if you try to tell them that they are imagining the problem, it isn't there or has gone away.

The above is extracted from Katherine Harvey's review of the book This Little World - a new history of Tudor and Stuart England by Nadini Das, published by Bloomsbury which appeared in the Sunday Times Culture section on 24 May 2026.

_________________________________________________________

Sources for main post: 

Camilla Long. Politicians insist we share their values even if they're the only ones that still believe in them. Sunday Times 24 May 2026

The Guardian. What do the immigration figures for the UK really show? 15 Sept 2025

A migration revolution. Migration  Observatory briefing document covering the scale of immigration and net migration in the UK since the early 2000s and under the post-Brexit immigration system. December 2025

Centre for Policy Studies. A Migration Revolution. Nov 2025

Population of English cities and Greater Manchester from Wikipedia. 

Some sources quote higher numbers than I've used here: rather than 3.8 million total arrivals in 2021 to mid 2024 I've seen 4.8 million reported for the total inflow in the full 3 years of 2021-24. The lack of good and timely data doesn't help.

A pedant decides whether he should cavil or nitpick

I am a self confessed, indeed proud, pedant (did I hear "you don't say?")

I was reminded of this tendency reading the whimsical Back Pages section of New Scientist a while back. In an earlier edition of the mag there had been an aside noting that "botany is a rose garden filled with thorns", a combination of words that would apparently mean something to Taylor Swift fans*. In an admirable bit of pedantry a reader had written in to point out:

"Sorry, but botany is not a rose garden filled with thorns, unless you've got shrubs like blackthorn. Roses do not have thorns but prickles which are superficial epidermal outgrowth whereas thorns are modified stems."

The sharp bits on roses aren't attached very firmly to the stems - you can easily snap them off from the stem sideways. So, while one might give you a nasty scratch the sharp bits on blackthorn or pyracantha are a very different matter, being firmly part of the stem of the plant. They don't snap off and so are capable of sticking much further into your soft tissue if you take liberties.

So roses have prickles, not thorns. Who knew? And who's going to tell Will Shakespeare, who says in sonnet 35:

No more be griev'd at that which thou hast done

Roses have thorns, and silver fountains mud.

I have a strong suspicion that the prickle/thorn botanic terminology post dates the Bard, however. And translation would also come into play when Roman historian Ammianus Marcellinus is quoted as saying "a rose among thorns" in the 4th century BC, although his rose plant could have been between thorny plants, rather than the rose flower being between spiky parts of the same plant. This saying is reputedly the origin of the phrase "a rose between two thorns", typically used by a third party when a lady is sitting with two men as a flattering compliment to her beauty. I have repurposed that phrase many times when I've been with two ladies, outrageously hinting that I'm the prettiest. But in the future should I say "a rose between two prickles"?

If I do I'll have to be very careful as it could easily come out all wrong...

Mrs H is not always - indeed it would be fair to say is rarely - fond of my instinct to cavil and nitpick at almost anything. One of my very favourite nitpicks dates back the best part of 35 years. We were watching Die Hard 2, the action thriller set at a snowbound airport which is the site of a dastardly plot by a bunch of baddies. Bruce Willis, playing off duty policeman John McClane, has - as in the first Die Hard film set in a skyscraper - again spent most of the film rolling around in his increasingly grubby vest fighting people after his concerns are ignored by the local on duty cops. In the denouement the baddies are escaping in a jumbo jet accelerating down the runway on take off. McClane, having been involved in a fight on the wing trying to prevent the plane taking off, has managed to open a fuel valve. Lying in the snow on the runway he uses his cigarette lighter to ignite the fuel trail. The flame catches the plane up and it explodes in a huge fireball.

As the titles rolled the conversation went something like:

Mrs H "well that was exciting - what did you think?" 

Me: "Give me a minute, I'm doing some mental arithmetic". 

Mrs H "eh?"

After which I pointed out that it wouldn't be possible to light kerosene with a lighter, it's just not volatile enough. If McClane had used a wick, just maybe, though probably not in the snow. When I'd done my maths I also pointed out that the flame speed of a hydrocarbon in air is at least an order of magnitude below that of a jumbo jet's take off speed.

So sorry Bruce/John, but the baddies got away.

I expect Mrs H told me that it was just a story, it was supposed to be entertainment and I should suspend belief when watching a film or reading a book. 

Which is why I mainly read non-fiction. I'm just far too literal. And pleased with a top class nitpick!

But do I cavil, or nitpick? I may need to check if they really are synonyms...

Nerdy notes:

The flash point of a liquid is the lowest temperature at which it can form an ignitable vapour in air. For kerosene it's 38C, whereas for petrol it's minus 40C. Which is one of the reasons kerosene is used for jet fuel, it's very much safer. So McClane would have struggled to light a trail of liquid kerosene leaking from the plane in a sub zero ambient temperature. The flame speed of a hydrocarbon in air is typically around 4 metres per second (sadly I still remember this from working in safety and risk assessment). I was converting metres a second to miles an hour, so the sum I was doing would have been: 4 times 60 times 60 equals 14400 metres an hour; 1500 metres is a "metric" mile at the Olympics but a real mile is a bit longer (actually a bit over 1600). 14400 divided by 1600 is about 10. (The actual answer is closer to 9 but I would have been approximating). Clearly a jumbo jet take off speed is a lot more than 10mph (it's actually about 180mph). So sorry John, your flame couldn't catch up with the jet as it was just getting airborne, even if you'd been able to light it in the first place.

Expert nitpickers among you might counter that the flame speed I have quoted is for a laminar flame. Turbulent flow can significantly increase the flame speed, potentially up to hundreds of metres a second, which could certainly do the trick. However that requires confining structures to generate turbulence by interacting with the expanding combustion products. This is basically what happened at Flixborough in 1974 when a huge cloud of cyclohexane vapour mixed with air and didn't just catch fire but exploded with the force of a bomb. It was the largest ever chemical industry accident in the UK and it killed 28 people. The open air explosion created a supersonic blast wave, similar to high explosive in a rare and then little understood phenomenon called an unconfined vapour cloud explosion. On most occasions ignition of a flammable gas cloud results in what is known as a deflagration with the flame front travelling at less than the speed of sound. Deflagrations are extremely dangerous but they don't cause the type of damage typical of an explosion. 

Subsequently it became understood that, for a vapour cloud to explode in this manner, the expanding gases have to be accelerated by interaction with structures - and the type of structures found on a chemical plant are capable of causing that as well as providing the ignition source for the the flammable mixture. The accelerating flame can then set off the bulk of the gas cloud in a hugely powerful explosion, not just a big fireball. But John McClane didn't have a large vapour cloud for the flame to accelerate through, nor any way of generating that kind of turbulence. The film just showed the flame catching up with the plane just after take off, resulting in it exploding in a fireball.

Unless the plane was taking off on a very hot day so a vapour cloud had formed and he ejected methane forcefully from his body, lit it with his lighter and used that to somehow set off a turbulent explosion. No, I'm not buying that bum story either but it wouldn't have been any taller.

Feeling prickly was the item that told me roses don't have thorns and it appeared in the New Scientist edition of 11 October 2025

"A rose garden filled with thorns" is a lyric is Taylor Swift's song Blank Space, apparently

The Germans have a word for it

 Of course the Germans have a word for it, they have lots of useful words. Like schadenfreude, who doesn't revel in a bit of that?

However, I'm not looking forward to taking pleasure in Ed Miliband's discomfort if (when?) we have very high energy prices, or even disruption, because of our vulnerability to world gas prices and supply. After all, the discomfort suffered by the population will be so much greater than thick-skinned Ed's. And, to be fair, the state of our energy systems owes more to 15 years of Conservative led governments and their Labour and Tory predecessors.

The problem is one of transition. The UK is half way along a journey to generate nearly all its electricity from renewables and nuclear. 

Wind power was seen as the most cost effective of the renewables in a major study of energy technologies published in 1986*.  Since then the UK has become a kind of world leader in wind power. Oh, not in making the turbines or anything like that of course, but in deploying technology and equipment from other countries. 

Solar power, viewed back then as having potential despite our climate but at that time very expensive, has made huge progress, as photovoltaics have benefited from the immense progress in silicon chip technology. 

The main issue with renewables is their intermittency, varying from over abundance to zilch. So we experience conditions when the wind is blowing but the wind power generating companies are paid to turn their machines off because there is nowhere for the power to be used. This is partly because the electricity grid is nowhere near completing the transformation necessary to funnel electricity in towards the centre of the country from offshore wind farms when it was set up for the flow to be in the other direction, out from the central spine of big coal fired plants at locations such as Drax, Ratcliffe-on-Soar, Ferrybridge and Didcot.

But we also have to contend with dunkelflauten, the useful German word for those periods in winter when it's cold, cloudy and still. The word literally translates as "dark doldrums".

When dunkelflauten reigns we have to have other ways of generating our electricity. And as we progressively electrify to reduce reliance on fossil fuels that need becomes even greater: electricity use has started to go up after many years of decline. Achieving net zero, or anything like it, will require a lot more electricity.

Greater capacity to store electricity will help, through batteries or long duration energy storage methods (e.g. using surplus electricity to pump water up hill to a reservoir, running it back down again when the power is needed, or using it to make a clean fuel such as hydrogen). But these processes are inefficient: you can't buck the second law of thermodynamics, so you never get back what you've put in.

We have made great progress at deploying renewables, with around half of our electricity generated from renewables and nuclear. But we are still a long way from weaning ourselves off fossil fuels. Indeed our use of gas for generating electricity went up in 2025. The government's target is for 95% to come from renewables and nuclear by 2030. That's an interesting date as four of our remaining 5 nuclear power stations are due to close by then, having already operated for many years more than their original design lives. 2030 is also the date by which the first of the two units at Hinkley Point C is due to come on line, our first new nuclear power station since Sizewell B in 1995, nuclear power having been allowed to age and then wither after John Major's government foolishly put a moratorium on new nuclear in 1994. I would put a little more store in that 2030 commissioning date than the latest estimate for HS2 trains running, but not much.

The government's targets require us to go from 30 gigawatts (GW) of wind power capacity in 2023 to 50GW in 2030, for solar to increase from 14GW to 45GW, for battery capacity to be around 25GW in addition to the current 7GW and with another 5GW or so of long duration energy storage.  Only the last of these seems remotely likely to me to happen on that timescale.

So we are still some way from ending our deep reliance on imported fossil fuels and dealing with dunkelflauten.

Successive governments have allowed our generating system to become to dependent on imported fuels where the price is set by world markets. This was a risk easily foreseen in the wake of the 1970s oil crises but it had already been forgotten by the late 1980s. I can still hear Department of Energy officials, at what might be called the time of "peak Thatcher", saying "we can just buy it in" whether "it" was oil and gas as the North Sea resources became depleted or new nuclear power stations after we let our indigenous capability wither away. They were utterly confident in world markets and completely unmoved by the strategic risk of being reliant on imports.

Winston Churchill knew all this back in 1913 when, as First Lord of the Admiralty, he switched the Royal Navy from relying on coal to oil. He noted the danger of relying too much on any one source, observing "safety and certainty lie in variety and variety alone". 

I am reasonably confident that there is an end point where we reach the sunlit upland nirvana of having an electricity generating system which is substantially free from imports with the associated risk of supply interruptions and price volatility. But I think we are a lot more than 5 years away from it.

Until then I worry about the supply pinch points like the Straits of Hormuz and the new word I've learned, dunkelflauten.

* Department of Energy, Energy technologies for the United Kingdom: 1986 appraisal of research, development and demonstration, Energy Paper Number 54 (London: HMSO, February 1987). I remember this doorstep size publication well as I made a very minor contribution towards it. The "paper" covered all the credible energy technologies including every conceivable type of renewable (hydro, wind - on and offshore, tidal, different wave energy technologies, various forms of solar), nuclear (fusion and fission - thermal and fast reactors) and fossil (including supposedly "clean" technologies) and made estimates of possible future electricity generating costs and the research, development and demonstration costs for bringing them to commercial deployment. Even then there was a lot of interest in what was known as the "greenhouse effect". The study has probably stood the test of time in many ways, in particular the viability of renewables: wind was seen as highly promising, wave pretty much a waste of time and tidal potentially attractive but limited in opportunity in the UK. Where it didn't stand any significant test of time was the failure to anticipate that governments would dash to gas to displace coal and oil, the nuclear platform we had established would be thrown away by John Major's government's nuclear moratorium in 1994 and we would not progress the opportunity of fast breeder reactors, which were seen as essential to avoid constraints in uranium supply if the world went strongly towards nuclear fission power after the oil price shocks of the 1970s. I contributed to the section on fast reactors which were expected to be increasingly deployed from 2000 onwards. Indeed, we did a lot of modelling to convince ourselves enough plutonium would be available given that fast breeder reactors work using fast neutrons but actually breed putonium quite slowly. By the end of the 80s it was already clear that there would be no shortage of plutonium and our stocks might be best deployed using mixed uranium/plutonium fuel in our thermal reactors. Until we decided not to bother building any more of them for the next 25 years. I always thought the idea that the UK would run short of plutonium before now seemed utterly fanciful, which probably marked me as a bit of an oddball in the economics and research teams and Harwell and Risley when I said so. But my colleagues in the Energy Technology Support Unit at Harwell pretty much nailed the outlook for renewables in the UK.

Clean power by 2030: UK's bold plan for renewables, jobs and energy security. Tim Mooney, Green Economy, 16 Dec 2024. https://www.greeneconomy.co.uk/news-and-resources/news/clean-power-by-2030-uk-s-bold-plan-for-renewables-jobs-and-energy-security/#:~:text=Expanding%20renewables,heart%20of%20renewable%20energy%20generation.

Does Sir Keir Starmer play chess? And is Trump actually a despotic king?

I don't know whether Keir Starmer plays chess but I have a very strong hunch that he doesn't. My reason? There is absolutely no evidence whatsoever that he can see more than one move ahead. Which is why he's had to make so many U-turns.

The latest debacle, which I count as a U-turn, is the smouldering ruins of his carefully cultivated personal relationship with Donald Trump. Now Trump says one thing one day, another the next and sometimes back to his original view sometime after that so, while I see this particular train wreck as detrimental to the UK's well being, I don't for a moment see it as being very harmful to the relationship we have with the USA, whether you regard that as "special" or not. The bigger danger to that relationship is that the UK's capabilities have become so weak and feeble that what the Americans get back for what they put in is ever more limited. I would hope that our contribution on intelligence is still valuable, GCHQ having a high reputation. On nuclear weapons technology we probably still generate some valuable knowledge and experience we can share from our atomic weapons establishments and capabilities. On civil nuclear power we still had useful things to share up to about 30 years ago, now zilch apart from decommissioning and waste managemement. Though that probably isn't regarded as important any more it used to enable us to have very strong relationships with the US National Laboratories. Just as we haven't invested in defence, we haven't invested in the associated technologies. The American programmes were always very much bigger but the UK traditionally punched above its weight technically and so was able to bring things to the party. I suspect that situation is rather different now. 

So, notwithstanding the Commander in Chief's hissy fit, I'm sure intelligence sharing and military collaboration between the UK and USA is continuing pretty much as normal. The longer term problem is that is that "normal" now means the UK continues to slide steadily into irrelevance as a partner for the USA. Now that the UK public has realised that we didn't even have a small naval vessel available to go at short notice to protect our interests in the relatively near-field (i.e. Akrotiri at Cypus in the Med) will the government now grasp the real and imminent threats we face and start to build up our defence capability, both in terms of the services and our manufacturing base? Sadly, I wouldn't bet on it.

But back to Starmer and his inability to see much into the future. The prospect of an American attack on Iran had been bubbling in plain sight for several weeks. In that case Israel was always going to join in. What did Starmer think was then going to happen? Surely his red box briefings must have included likely Iranian retaliation at a range of targets around and beyond the Gulf. Just because the Starmer had used the UK's singular interpretation of international law not just to sit on his hands but also to deny the USA the option of using its bases on British territory in Cyprus and Diego Garcia, did he think the Iranians would leave those locations off their target list? Was it assumed that the Iranians wouldn't lash out at the Emirates, where lots of Brits would be present?

So as night follows day the UK had to change tack and allow the US to use those bases for "defensive" operations, an angels on a pinhead bit of hair splitting with no great material difference, at least as far as the Iranians are concerned.

I was nervous when the bombing of Iran started. I thought it a gamble on Trump's part, moving us into a time of risk and unpredictability. But my main concern was Trump's special military expedition works. The jury is very much out on that point.

Iran has been the source of many problems in the world over the last 5 decades. It has sponsored terrorism on a huge and growing scale. It's easy to think that it doesn't affect us directly but it clearly does as there are reports of up to 50 Iranian terrorist plots being foiled in the UK. All this could appear trifling if Iran were to acquire nuclear weapons. A world with an Iranian nuke would be immeasurably less safe. If you need any persuading on this point, consider the words of Ayatollah Mohammad Mehdi Mirbagheri, who was one of the candidates to take over as spiritual leader, spoken on Iranian TV:

"to reach the goal of divine proximity, even if half the world's people are killed, it is worth it. Therefore, the killing of 42,000 people in Gaza does not matter compared to that great goal."

Iran armed Hamas and encouraged the 7 October 2023 on Israel, knowing that the scale of that attack would inevitably lead to Israel attempting to neutralise Hamas. It had no qualms whatsoever about the impact on the Palestinian people who were mere pawns in their determination to prevent the progressive normalisation of relations between Israel and its Arab neighbours, Saudi Arabia in particular. 

Nuclear weapons have helped to avoid conflicts between the major powers throughout my lifetime. But that is because the principle of deterrence works when the leaders of the nuclear weapon states have even a scintilla of humanity. From Kennedy and Kruschev, through Nixon and Brezhnev, Reagan and Gorbachev to Trump and Putin we could take comfort from the fact that MAD (mutual assured destruction) would stay the hand from first use of nuclear weapons. Yes, even Putin with his predilection for feeding his troops into the meat grinder in Ukraine (though historically that's pretty normal for Russian leaders).

The Iranian leadership are different. Utterly idealogically driven and with little apparent concern for their own people's well being.

The Americans learned a  lesson with Kim Jong Un. Once you let a rogue state obtain a nuclear weapon the game changes and you can't just bully them. Fortunately North Korea so far seems to want to just be allowed to plough its own furrow. However the success of Rocket Man in building a nuke was also a big lesson for the Iranians. Get a nuke and you can't be bullied. But I don't expect the Iranians would be happy to plough their own furrow, we know they want to change the world.

The hand wringers have been out in force since the Amercans hit Iran, saying that negotiations were making progress (how do they know?) and that diplomacy was the way forward. I tend to the view that the Iranians were playing for time. They have never co-operated fully with international inspections. If the intelligence of USA and, particularly, Israel was that the Iranians were getting very close, that's enough for me.

So the world with an Iranian nuke would be a much more dangerous place. But does that give the USA and Israel the right to make a pre-emptive strike? What about that advice to Sir Keir about international law?

The reason I called the UK interpretation of international law "singular" a few paragraphs back was that it fits the definition: "exceptionally good or great" - some would think that; "remarkable" - a flexible word as it could imply good, bad or just notable; or referring to just one person or thing. I'm coming from the last of these because that's the way the UK government gets its advice: from one person, the Attorney General. It's my understanding that the Attorney General's status in this regard dates from the 1950s when the then occupier of the post, in a debate of some substance about what the law said, pronounced that, in the context of parliamentary debate, it said what he said it said. (Or something like that).

This has proved useful for prime ministers ever since. They can't be accused of deliberately or knowingly breaking the law if they've asked the Attorney General for his advice. The advice may or may not be right but that doesn't matter, the PM can't be blamed.

What puzzles me about this is that while a hundred lawyers would agree what the law says in a simple case, in a complex case they most certainly would not. Hard cases go through appeals and to supreme courts where, both in the UK and the USA, a panel of judges delivers a majority verdict. So if you ask the (singular) Attorney General on an issue of any compexity, how do you know he's right?

Well, you don't. But if, like our lawyer PM with his background in human rights you appoint your buddy Lord Hermer with his background in human rights to the post of Attorney General, while he may or may not be right you can be pretty sure about what advice you will get on quite a few subjects.

Starmer took advice from Hermer and followed it straight into a blind alley. Hermer's interpretation of international law was very restrictive, effectively ruling out a pre-emptive strike in pretty much any circumstances. Yet the imminent risk of a hostile, fundamentalist regime obtaining a nuclear weapon could clearly justify a pre-emptive strike. 

As a result Starmer offended our main ally. It's quite a bizarre thing for the UK to have fretted since Trump's re-election about the USA's reliability as an ally, only to prove ourselves to be the unreliable ally at the first real test. I appreciate one could argue the point about Trump's treatment of the UK over tariffs but that isn't really relevant to a military alliance.

I'm with Tony Blair who is reported to have said "we should have backed America from the very beginning" and that Labour "had better show up for Washington". If the USA and Israel thought the threat from Iran was imminent (and let's face it, if they got a nuke, it becomes imminent) the only precarication should have been to ask about the intelligence. After that, are we an ally, or not an ally? I'm not suggesting here that we needed to actually join in the bombing of Iran. All we needed to do was say yes to the use of America's British bases. Bases that the USA does not now know if it can rely on using - unless it does what Trump said in the case of Spain (i.e that they'd just use them anyway).

This was a simple test which Starmer fluffed. Oh sure, he'd have had his left wing jumping up and down but the problem there is that he gave up any semblance of control over his party a long time ago.

Now we have steadily got drawn in, as was inevitable. So Starmer's lefties are jumoing up and down anyway and we upset the USA and allies in the middle east needlessly. It'll take more than a handshake from the King to repair.

I said earler that I thought the most important thing, given that Trump did decide to hit Iran, is that it works. There we run into problems because, as usual, there's little sign that Trump or anyone in his team thought this one through. There is very little - or no - precedent for bombing a population into submission using conventional weapons. We've seen in Syria and indeed Gaza that populations are remarkably resilient to enormous destruction and that quashing a faction - be it Isis, Hamas or in this case the IRGC, can't be done by that means alone. 

Trump seemed to think that Iranian liberals would rise up but that always looked unlikely. This is not like the fall of communism. Opinion in Iran seems very divided between supporters and opponents of the regime. But the opponents don't have weapons. Trump seems to be flirting with supporting minority ethnic elements opposed to the regime - but they are just that, minorities. So that wouldn't be quick.

There is every sign that the regime will hold and that it will use whatever means at its disposal to cause the US problems. In the era of drone warfare there is plenty of opportunity for that. One wonders if Trump was aware of the importance of trade through the Strait of Hormuz. Could it be a bit like Dominic Raab who admitted that the cabinet hadn't realised just how much food came in through Dover when queues of lorries built up in the days after Brexit?

Part of the problem is that Trump doesn't take advice like any previous president and has very much surrounded hiself with yes men. He's a very monarchical president. And guess what - he is a bit like a monarch.

A few days after things kicked off, I listened to a BBC radio reporter interviewing an expert on the American legal and consitutional position. I was suprised that the interviewer was surprised (indeed, sounded utterly shocked) at the interviewee's response to a question on the USA being bound by international law. The response was that the American president is only bound by the constitution of the United States. Moreover the president can commence hostilities without reference to Congress and can continue for at least 30 days before needing to do so. I thought the BBC man was going to have a seizure for a moment. But that is the position from an American perspective.

The curious point about the American system is that it was set up in response to what the patriots perceived as a tyrannical monarch, George III, who they saw as being determined to impose his absolute authority on a people seeking a representative system of government. Never mind that George was defending the will of the British parliament and personally backed repeal of the Stamp Act, the legislation that sparked the rebellion against the Crown. So what did the patriots do? There was a significant debate at the time of independence about whether to create a republic or a monarchy, with many pushing for George Washington to be a king. The creation of the constitution took more than a decade. According to historical accounts a lady called Elizabeth Powell asked Benjamin Franklin, as he left the  final day of the Constitutional Convention in 1787 "well doctor, what have we got? A republic or a monarchy?" Franklin's response was " a republic, if you can keep it".

Franklin's didn't think the draft constitution was perfect, far from it. But he thought it was good enough and that it was time to move on and adopt it. His greater concern, reflected in his comment ("if you can keep it") was that there was little precedent at that time for long lived republics and that, unless the public maintained the virtues necessary for self-governance, the American version would eventually devolve into a despotic government.

In that context it's interesting to reflect that, according to historian Sir David Cannadine, the founding fathers gave to the American presidency those powers they erroneously believed King George III still possessed - to appoint and dismiss his cabinet, to make war and peace and to veto bills sent up by the legislature. From the outset the presidency was vested with what might be termed monarchical authority, which meant it was really a form of elective kingship. Trump is far from the first president to make extensive use of executive orders, he's just gone large on that. But in doing so he is only exploiting to the full the powers vested in him by the US constitution.

It's why some say the US is a monarchy disguised as a republic while the UK is a republic that thinks it's a monarchy, an aphorism that contains more than a nugget of truth.

So, for now, all we can do is hope that King Trump's gamble works: Iran is neutered and hopefully (a longer shot this) falls under the control of a less rather than more despotic regime, that the disruption to energy supplies is brief and so does not lead to an inflationary spike, that things calm down and the Americans aren't too sore with the UK. We are currently a long way from that rosy scenario.

We can also hope that the midterms rein Trump in and that the American public regain the virtues Franklin thought necessary to maintain a healthy republic and start to elect better leaders. I'm not holding my breath on the latter part of that.

As for Starmer, one of the few successes he could point to was the relationship he had forged with Trump. All in ruins. The road to Labour being re-elected just got even harder.

Oh dear, Keir. Maybe go and practice chess?

Who might replace Iran's supreme leader? CNN 1 March 2026 

Blair sparks row with Starmer by saying we should have backed America from the very beginning in Iran. The Independent (independent.co.uk) 8 March 2026

September 17,1787: A republic - if you can keep it. Independence National Historical Park, National Parks Service. https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/constitutionalconvention-september17.htm

When Charles goes west he'll see real imperialism. Dominic Lawson, Sunday Times 1 March 2026. This article included the quotation from historian Sir David Cannadine

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.