Funding the Future

Israel is a rogue state. Its wars in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, and Iran have no justification in international law. More than 70,000 civilians have died in Gaza alone. Ambulances and crews are being deliberately targeted in Lebanon. These are war crimes — and the world has seen this before, in apartheid South Africa.
What a full boycott must include:
End all defence agreements and halt armed supplies immediately
Ban trade, block financial flows, restrict travel
Break sporting, artistic, and academic links
Begin war crimes investigations and prosecutions
Opposing these actions is not antisemitism. Allowing them to continue unchallenged would be a moral failure of historic proportions. Sanctions eventually ended apartheid in South Africa. Nothing less will do here — and the time is now.

The FTSE 100 and S&P 500 are near record highs. The real economy is deteriorating. And the Bank of England's Deputy Governor for Financial Stability, Sarah Breeden, has now said publicly what most politicians will not: a stock market crash is coming, and the financial system is not ready for it.
This crash could be worse than 2008 because of overvalued stock markets, the AI bubble, an overexpanded and at-risk shadow banking system and the Iran energy shock, which the International Energy Agency is calling the biggest energy shock in history.
If any of these risks crystallise simultaneously, and Sarah Breeden thinks they might, then the result will not be a market correction. It will be a financial crisis that will result in falling confidence, rising interest rates, frozen lending, job losses, and a domino effect through the real economy.
Governments must act now to plan for this eventuality and not after any crash happens.  Contingency plans must exist, and nothing appears to be being done as yet.
If ever there was a moment to worry, even the Bank of England is saying this is it. 

What would I do on my first day in office as Chancellor to create an economy in the UK based on the thinking that modern monetary theory makes possible?
In this video, I explain why MMT does not need to be “implemented” in Britain, because it already describes how government money works. The real task is to change policy. In that case, I set out six first-day reforms to:
Replace false fiscal rules
Launch a targeted public investment programme
Create a policy that delivers secure, long-term jobs
Reform the Treasury and Bank of England relationship
Redesign tax to tackle inflation, inequality and rent extraction
Redirect savings and pension subsidies into productive investment
This is not about fantasy economics. It is about ending neoliberal myths and managing the real economy in the public interest.
If you want to understand what an MMT-based economic strategy for the UK would actually look like, this video explains it.

Should the Bank of England control UK interest rates, or should that power return to elected government? In this video, I argue that the Bank of England's independence was never a neutral, technocratic decision. It was a deliberate political project, rooted in far-right Public Choice Theory, designed to strip democratic control away from ordinary people and hand it to unelected bankers.
Since 1997, the Bank of England has been given a single tool, control of the base interest rate, to chase a single target of a 2% inflation rate that no economist can convincingly justify. There are no targets for growth, employment, living standards or climate change. There is just a number pulled from thin air, enforced at enormous cost to people in this county.
The result is near 5% unemployment, 10% youth unemployment, soaring mortgage costs, and excessive rents. We have a Treasury with its foot on the accelerator while the Bank of England slams the brake, both pulling the economic steering wheel in opposite directions. No wonder the country is not performing. The rot starts in this dysfunctional relationship
This video explains why Bank of England independence was always a neoliberal political experiment that was designed to undermine democracy and the people of this country.
Now, the neoliberal era is over. The Bank of England's independence has delivered incoherence, crisis, and a democratic deficit that the UK can no longer afford. It is time to bring interest rate policy back to the Treasury, where elected politicians should be accountable for their decisions.
Whether you agree or disagree, this is one of the most important economic debates in British politics today. Watch, share your view in the poll below, and leave a comment.

In this podcast, I speak with William Thompson to explore one of the most important internal debates within Modern Monetary Theory.
We agree on the fundamentals: that governments with their own currency can fund full employment, and that the real constraints are resources, not money. But we disagree on how to achieve that goal.
William makes the case that the job guarantee is central to MMT as a price anchor, an automatic stabiliser, and a mechanism for delivering dignity in work.
I argue that while the diagnosis is correct, the proposed solution is not. The job guarantee, as currently conceived, is administratively unrealistic, underpaid, and risks undermining the very dignity it claims to support.
Instead, I set out an alternative: direct public employment, a living wage, and long-term investment in care, housing, the NHS, and climate transition that effectively delivers the job guarantee, as the UK state once did.
This is not a rupture, but it is a serious disagreement about how MMT policy should work in practice. And that is healthy.

What is next for the world? I think we may already know the answer — and it is deeply troubling.
In this video, I argue that the conflict driven by Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu is pushing the global economy towards a crisis on the scale of World War II. Not in terms of deaths, but in terms of systemic economic breakdown.
This is not a short-term shock. It is a structural rupture.
The warnings are already being issued. The International Monetary Fund, alongside firms such as Deloitte and EY, are signalling rising recession risk, including in the UK. But the impact will be global.
Supply chains are being disrupted across energy, raw materials and manufacturing. These are not marginal effects. They go to the core of how the modern economy works. Even if the conflict ended tomorrow, the consequences would last for years.
That means hardship. It means poverty. It may mean famine in the most exposed regions, and a refugee crisis on a scale we have not recently seen. In the UK and elsewhere, recession is increasingly likely, and if mishandled, it could become depression.
So what is required?
First, honesty about scarcity. Rationing may be necessary to ensure fair access to essential goods.
Second, protection. Stronger social security will be needed to support those most exposed to the shock.
Third, redistribution. Progressive taxation will be required to sustain that support.
And beyond that, something bigger: reform. The institutions created after World War II — from the World Bank to the World Trade Organization and NATO — were built for a different world. They are failing now.
The deeper issue is this: neoliberalism built a fragile, carbon-dependent global system. That system is now breaking.
If it has failed, what replaces it?

The UK pension system is built on a false idea: that savings and financial assets can guarantee security in old age. In this video, I argue that pensions do not ultimately depend on money saved in the past, but on the productive capacity of those still at work in the present. That is the real pension contract, and it is one the UK has steadily abandoned.
I explain how the state pension once reflected this collective responsibility, why Thatcher’s reforms changed the whole theory of pensions, and why the savings-based model now dominant in the UK is fundamentally detached from economic reality. I also explore why demographics, weak productive investment, and the financialisation of the economy mean that many pension promises may not be kept.
This is not just a technical problem. It is a political choice, and one that may leave millions exposed to insecurity in old age unless we confront it now.

In this podcast, I discuss with John Christensen how capitalism and democracy have come apart — and why this was not an accident.
Together, we explore the growing fracture between democratic accountability and economic power, and the role of James Buchanan in shaping the ideas behind it. Public choice theory, which he created, claims to defend freedom, but in practice, we argue that it works to constrain democracy and protect wealth from challenge.
As a result, we examine the idea of the “night-watchman state,” where government exists primarily to defend property rights, not people. We also look at how tax havens, created in this form, shift power away from nation-states, creating a race to the bottom on tax, regulation, and rights.
Along the way, we discuss how the language of government itself is being reshaped by far-right thinking of the sort promoted by Buchanan, with terms like “fiscal responsibility” being used to justify policies that are deliberately designed to harm the most vulnerable.
This is not abstract theory. These ideas influence governments, institutions, and everyday life.
If you want to understand why politics feels broken, and why inequality keeps rising, this conversation explains what is really going on — and why it matters.

Donald Trump is waging a war that will actively harm the poorest people on earth, and the world's political leaders are almost entirely silent in response.
 
The exception is the Chicago-born Pope, who has issued fearless, gospel-based criticism of Trump's actions, while the UK government plans a state visit to the USA for King Charles,  Labour's Deputy Prime Minister is meeting JD Vance, and the new Archbishop of Canterbury has said nothing worth noting.
This is not a failure of courage alone. It is the result of a structural failure in neoliberalism. When an ideology reduces all human decisions to those around wealth accumulation and treats morality as an economic externality, like climate change, and so as something to be ignored, it inevitably produces politicians who literally cannot make ethical judgments. Right and wrong become irrelevant categories. Ends justify the means. And the poor pay the price.
The Pope's message is of good news for the poor and freedom for the oppressed. Trump's agenda is the precise opposite. That one religious leader can see this clearly while secular governments cannot tells you everything about what neoliberalism has done to political life, and why reclaiming ethics as the foundation of politics is not a religious question. It is an urgent economic and social issue.

The core purpose of government is to provide freedom from fear. That means freedom from physical threat, Freedom from want, freedom from discrimination and freedom from the deliberate chaos that destroys the social fabric on which democracy depends. That is what government is for. And right now, in the UK and across the Western world, government is doing the precise opposite.
The far-right has a strategy. It is not chaos by accident. It is chaos by design. Disorder is their desire. Crisis creates their opportunity. Division, whether between communities, between religions, or between nations, is the mechanism by which an authoritarian minority dismantles the institutions that protect the majority. And it has been working, not because the far-right is powerful, but because too few are stopping it.
It is something called traditionalism that is driving this.  Steve Bannon promotes it. Liz Truss travelled to a US conference to sell it, using the phrase "Europestan" to describe the continent where she lives. Traditionalism rejects Enlightenment thinking. It rejects equality. It rejects democracy. It promotes hierarchy, privilege, and the restoration of a pre-democratic order. It is fascism with better branding. And it is now operating inside mainstream political parties.
In this context, the danger is that democracy in the UK is already weakened by an electoral system that can return governments rejected by the majority of voters, by institutions that were designed for a different century, and by a political culture that mistakes caution for neutrality. The far-right's chaos strategy is not meeting effective resistance as a result.
This video explains how that strategy works, why traditionalism is the intellectual cover for fascism, and what a genuine politics of freedom from fear would look like in contrast.