Over the next two days I have one goal - to eat more pasta. All the pasta, in fact

We arrived in Rome yesterday, we’re here for a visit for the weekend, and since then, I’ve been single minded in my pursuit of eating the four classical Roman pastas.

Cacio e Pepe

La Gricia

Amatriciana

Carbonara

A Quattro of different cheeses, delivered with what, so far, has been some haste - that haste being on the back of Gatwick shitting the bed again over the past week and us arriving a full day late.

No matter though, because upon landing yesterday in an absolutely sweltering Rome, and after an obligatory one hour cool down in the hotel and to wash off the grime of travelling between airports and train stations, we were off.

For my husband, it was to go see the Spanish steps. For me it was to find Caccio e Pepe - and my god, once I did, I was converted. It blows my mind completely just how good a dish made out of three ingredients can be.

Pasta. Black pepper. Pecorino.

It was stunning - and everything I could have hoped for. The cheese itself, so punchy it actually made my mouth itch. The creaminess. The sharpness of the pepper.

Magnifique.

Pasta obsessions aside - Rome is something different. A 2,700 odd year old city with history literally pouring out of every crevice and crook and cranny. It honestly does feel like you can’t turn your arse sideways without landing straight into a thousand year old forum.

The marble glistens in the bright summer sunlight, and even the crowds of thousands of influencers all making one of the three variations of duck face (bored, bemused, baffled), couldn’t detract from the grandeur of it all.

Which obviously made me think of fascism.

Not the influencers, of course - but that grandeur. A grandeur and history that was appropriated and co-opted by Benito Mussolini in the early 20th century. And you can totally understand why it would work - bedeck something like the Piazza Venezia in enough paternalistic, nationalistic imagery, and you’re going to have even the most ardent proponents say “holy shit, this guy is serious.”

The touches of fascism are still dotted throughout the city - from the more subtle reminders like the fasces motifs still dotted here and there, the fascist era dates still written according to the regimes then calendar to the eagles that are spotted occasionally lurking above these modern streets.

There is a lot of history here, begging to be further explored, and you can bet that I’ll be doing so over the next few days we’re here. It’s also a history that I can’t help feel is happening closer to home.

Over the past week, we’ve seen rather a lot of Danny “Thommo” Thomas, mate to Tiny Tommy Ten Names, aka Stephen Yaxley Lennon, aka Tommy Robinson and his black shorts, the so-called Paypal Patriots.

I mean Patriot Platform.

From their first foray onto the national stage with their disruptive wander around Dover to intimidate… checks notes… families coming back from their holiday in France, to their shocking intrusion into Portsmouth 36 hours later to harass RNLI volunteers for literally just doing their unpaid jobs, things turned dark. The level of organisation, as I mentioned in a post earlier this week was worrying, and their subsequent doxing of two RNLI volunteers was disgusting.

But as ever, if you leave the British Far-Right to their devices for long enough, they’re going to veer straight into the utterly batshit side of doing things.

By Wednesday, the dark cloud over this group of blackshorts very suddenly dissipated for me personally when Mr Thomas took a cadre of his balaclava’d mates for a demonstration outside of the Daily Mail’s offices in London.

Now, this caused a little bit of a crisis for me - I abhor the Mail. That rag is responsible for so many of the ills we face in society, and I couldn’t help but feel that there was a beautiful irony in them being stared down by a group of men that I imagine old Mosley himself would have been proud to associate with. Had the Mail finally had its comeuppance nearly a hundred years on when they had, themselves, celebrated black shirts?

Sadly, no - because Mr Thomas then finally made his demand clear:

He would like the Daily Mail, who he had accused of doxing his dear mum’s address (of a house she had spent weeks - nay, months!) decorating. This is, of course, not what happened. The Daily Mail had written an article in which they described Thomas’s mum as living in a neat house in Chichester, and later in the same article, made reference to Thomas’s business. Which he had, for reasons only known to himself, registered to her address.

Now, I will be the first to say, I think that doxing anyone is abhorrent. There is no good reason to do so, and considering the climate we are currently living through, it is genuinely dangerous. I’m not going to touch on the sheer weapons grade hypocrisy of Thomas and his mates doing the exact same thing to RNLI volunteers, but the point remains - it’s a huge no-no in my mind.

The Daily Mail, for all its many, many faults, in this case did not explicitly dox anyone. And they knew this. So the demand for his mum to get a new house was, I presumed, laughed manically straight out the building.

But fear not - for there was that often trod avenue for the far-right still available to Thomas:

A fund raiser.

Very shortly after Thomas and his bungling band of blackshorts departed the offices of the Daily Mail, that Give-Send-Go beacon was brightly lit up. Within no more than 48 hours, the £10k appeal was met and surpassed, and by the last time I checked, it had raised more than £65k.

Nice job if you can get it, hey?

Now, for anyone who is concerned that this is just yet another fundraising scam perpetrated by an opportunistic grifter - I am very happy to reassure you that Thomas has made it clear that his mum would only be using what’s needed to relocate, and the rest would be used for “to instruct a top legal team to deal with what has happened and take the appropriate legal action against the Daily Mail.”

I, for one, am not 100% convinced, but that might just be me.

This whole weeklong saga has done one big thing - it’s just made the far-right look even grubbier than it already was. No less dangerous, believe you me, but certainly just that much more… gauche.

The ethnonationalism espoused by Thomas and his group is just so tacky. So basic. From the cheap Poundland flags littering vast swathes of Kent, to that opportunistic sprint to any excuse to create a Give-Send-Go page, it’s all pedestrian.

Being in the birthplace of fascism, I can’t help but feel that even Mussolini would have judged these guys. While their goals will eventually fully align, their way of getting there is going to almost certainly be filled with less grandeur and more cheap merch, monetised outrage and digital begging bowls.

To be abundantly clear: I have no affection whatsoever for Mussolini, fascism, or the murderous authoritarianism they represent not do I think that the grubbiness surrounding this new age of rising fascism makes it any less dangerous. My contempt for this new iteration is just that much deeper precisely because it wraps the same rotten impulses that came to light in the early 20th century in something so cringeworthy, transactional and embarrassingly online.

Same poison. Less marble. More PayPal.

Anyway, that is quite enough fascism for one weekend. I have three more Roman pastas to eat, several thousand years of history to gawp at, and absolutely no intention of wasting Rome on Danny fucking Thomas.

Have a lovely weekend, excuse me while I go hunt down a Gricia.

What I would like to look at today rather is a particular piece of fallout from these protests that, while happening largely online, could result in serious danger to life for a group of people.

That group of people are the volunteers who work with the RNLI, the Royal National Lifeboat Institute.

Now, the RNLI has been a longstanding issue of great consternation to the far-right, and we’ve seen many times over the years various different movements against them. There have been calls for them to abandon boats in trouble and let the occupants drown. There have been aspersions cast that they work on behalf of the home office and are now a de facto smuggling ring. George Soros has, apparently, at times also been involved.

My usual tactic when this crops up is simple - I donate to them. Last year, I donated over £100 to the RNLI when they came under criticism again. I was very lucky to be able to afford to do so a the time.

This time around though, there is a new, insidious angle to the online rows that happen.

On X, over the past 24 hours, photographs of two volunteers have been circulated with calls for these two men to “face justice.” To be “prosecuted” under a Restore government. Wishes of serious harm to them and their families. These men have, apparently, now been identified by name, and their details are currently spreading like wildfire to a group of people that have just this weekend shown that they are very willing to take their Twitter fights from the online realm into the real world.

This is, to put it mildly, fucking disgusting.

It is dangerous, it is malicious, and there are very, very real risks to these two people now.

In addition to this, there is also the steady hum of blatant misinformation that’s being spread around - all with the intent to make content-consumers tumescent with rage. To make them seethe at the injustice.

I want to take a moment to address some of these misunderstandings.

They are funded by British Taxpayers

This delightful misunderstanding comes as a response under a post on X by today, where she pointed out quite sensibly that:

Nev, and many others, have pushed back with the idea that the RNLI, as a taxpayer funded organisation, should be bowing to demands that they stop any sort of rescue operation involving migrant crossings.

The rather large issue, of course, is that the RNLI is not funded by the taxpayer.

In total, about 90% of the total income that the RNLI receives is from donations. About 10% comes from things like trading and investment. Government support? Negligible if at all.

This particular argument, that Nev and people like her put forward, seeks to personalise and connect their readers. They want you to think that at least a portion of the PAYE that gets listed on your payslip each month goes towards what they consider to be aiding and abetting migrants - despite the fact that it is patently untrue.

The RNLI is a Taxi Service

Benonwine, an account run by ex-Waitrose wine-man Ben Woods, pitched in with another good old trope - the RNLI being a “taxi service for invading migrants”.

Except, that’s an utterly moronic stance to take if you had even a vague idea of what the RNLI actually does, and how they operate.

Because contrary to popular belief, the RNLI crews don’t get to decide who gets rescued or where they end up. Every launch by the RNLI is tasked and coordinated by HM Coastguard, and it’s Border Force and the Home Office that do the processing once ashore.

Looking at the laws that govern how the RNLI functions, under UNCLOS Article 98 and the SOLAS convention, any vessel or crew that becomes aware of people in distress has a binding legal duty to help them. It starts and ends there.

Any refusal done on the basis of nationality, skin-colour or immigration status would be a direct breach of maritime law.

I think it’s also worth just touching on the proportion of rescues the RNLI were involved with - a mere 5.7% in 2025. The other 94.3% of rescues were largely done by Border Force and other agencies.

The RNLI is Funded by George Soros

This particular gem of a brain-fart is a response that was left under a post by Dan Hodges, in which he pointed out that:

Now this one is pretty easy to check - because as a UK charity, all of the RNLI’s accounts are public and independently audited, being filed annualy with the Charity Commission for England and Wales and the OSCR in Scotland.

As already mentioned, over 90% of funding comes from donations with 10% coming from trading and investment. There is no Soros finger in the pie here. There very rarely is.

You are very welcome to review the RNLI’s own published accounts if you were inclined to do so.

The RNLI is a pull factor, encouraging more crossings

This post, from Mr Paul Dale-Smith, is one that I was genuinely hoping to find - because it’s been so thoroughly and completely debunked.

Research published by Sanchez et al in Nature in 2023, as well as separate research from the Global Public Policy Institute and the European Council on Refugees and Exile have shown that there is no statistical relationship between the presence (or absence) of rescue services and crossing numbers.

What they found to a very large extent is that conditions in origin and transit countries and smuggling-gang logistics and pricing play a far greater role.

It’s also worth adding here that the RNLI has no sort of discretionary choice to “not encourage” crossings through declining rescues as that would, as already mentioned, be not only a moral failure, but under international law, a criminal one.

The increasing levels of misinformation we’ve seen online have gone beyond fever pitch and are reaching their tendrils straight into the real world now. Two volunteers, who are doing good, honest work, have been put at risk.

The facts I’ve chosen to discuss here won’t, unfortunately, do very much to lessen that risk to these men - however, I do hope that it provides at least one or two people with the actual information they need to combat the misinformation being spread that leads to incidents like these.

If you are so inclined, you can also donate to the RNLI to support the amazing work they do in the waters around our country at the link below:

Donate to the RNLI

Generally speaking I would be talking about the policies that have been blurted at people and just how absurd they are - and to be fair, this year was the same. There was the announcement that the Royal Navy would be deployed to stop boats, with a very fancy signing of an accord with Jordan Bardella making a cameo for this pact (it being very important to note that neither Bardella nor Farage are currently leading their respective countries, so the whole thing was about as useful as a crochet condom).

There was the announcement from Richard Tice that he would be cutting energy bills by £250 and a plan by Robert Jenrick to raise the personal allowance from the current £12,570 to £15,0001. Both of them published lovely letters on Twitter offering to resign if either of their plans don’t come to fruition within 100 days.

How quaint.

I would have also been looking for the general batshittery that Reform UK has become so well known for - like Dame Andrea Jenkyns cringeworthily belting out songs, or Anti-Vaxxers being invited on stage to tell us how the King’s cancer is, in fact on the back of COVID vaccines.

This year, interestingly, the batshittery was dialed down to an extent - of course with the exception of a bunch of Rabid-Boomers assaulting a young female protestor, to which Robert Jenrick responded to on LBC with what sounded suspiciously close to “she was asking for it” in rhetoric.

What I want to write about instead though is a disavowal we saw from Farage himself. And no, I’m not talking about the downgrade of James Orr and Dan Jukes from long-standing allies to now apparently being “contractors” like they’ve been hired to do a quick project and overstepped their mark.

I’m talking about the disavowal by Farage of the masked protestors who stormed Dover on Saturday to disrupt ferry operations. If you have a look at the cesspit previously known as Twitter, you will have seen that that disavowal went down like a cup of cold sick.

Granted, many of the commentators are, without a doubt robots pretending to be human, but there are enough big names that are mighty worked up at the fact that Farage didn’t do his usual “people are angry, what did you expect” schpiel while nodding knowingly at the camera.

We have, rightly, been worried about the rise of Reform - but with Reform now looking seriously like they’re losing support from especially moderate and centre right voters, we should focus on what’s happening even further right of them.

And that is, largely, centred around two things:

• Restore, led by the Angriest Grampa in the world, Rupert Lowe.

• The growing online radicalisation led by the likes of Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (aka. Tommy Robinson).

The former is important, but is worth writing about in isolation - it’s the latter part that I want to get into a bit today, because to my mind, it is the most presently dangerous of the two.

The issue I largely have with the protest goes beyond that it was a disgusting show of intimidation. It even goes beyond the make up of the protest.

No, my issue is just how organised it was.

Hundreds of men travelled from all over in rented vans, all dressed up in black and in balaclavas, with a discipline that we haven’t seen in these movements in quite a while. Most of the flashpoint protests from the far-right we’ve seen so far have been chaotic, drunken messes. Southport felt like it was an outpouring of grievance through the medium of chucking stones at police and in general being utter bellends publicly.

This felt very different.

I will, of course add, that there is history here - we have in the past seen significant organisation within the far-right.

There was the now infamous Mosley Blackshirts who were explicitly uniformed, disciplined and organised for street politics. There was the National Front in the 1970s who had around 14,000 paid members at its height. There was also the English Defence League between 2009 and 2013, at the time led by none-other than Stephen Yaxley-Lennon himself.

The difference now is that after well over a decade of the modern far right becoming fragmented, online and usually just chaotic, we may now be seeing those organisational instincts returning.

The imagery that was shared on social media, with the black clad balaclava wearing men rushing around the streets of Dover sent chills down my spine. The road blocking was intentional and strategic. While the objectives in the Southport riot felt like it boiled down to “shout at that brown person”, this felt far more focused:

Disrupt. Intimidate. Push right up against the very boundaries of what is legal.

And that last point is pretty important - because what we saw in the Southport riots tended hard towards being fully illegal, widescale destruction and vandalism. Dover, on the other hand, was incredibly focused, intentional and, above all, disciplined.

And the fact that it was followed, not 36 hours later, by another coordinated intimidation attempt in Portsmouth is what has serious alarm bells ringing in my mind.

Because while Dover felt like the proof of concept, Portsmouth felt like it was the official launch. That there is the capability, willingness and resource for these demonstrations to be launched in very short periods of times.

They have gone from “We can organise a protest” right up to “We can react to an event and put bodies on the ground in a very short period of time.”

This level of organisation should immediately go to the top of the security services’ agenda, because we are no longer dealing with a few hundred pissed, angry men turning up somewhere to have a shout.

We are now watching the nascent actions of a movement that has learned how to organise, mobilise and, very crucially, test the boundaries of what they can and can’t get away with.

That seriously worries me.

People have been told on social media and by a certain subsection of politicians for years now that the UK is being actively invaded. They’ve now been convinced that politicians have betrayed them. The yarn has been spun that police protect immigrants over British people, and that courts, lawyers, charities and the media have all been conspiring against them.

Eventually people were going to start taking that literally - and it feels like we’re now at the point at which X rhetoric has started spilling into the south coast of this country. We are at the point where we have hundreds of men who firmly believe that their crusade is justified, that the invasion is real and they are now taking action into their own hands.

This is the point at which this moves from being just yet another ugly episode in the UK’s interminable argument about immigration - because the real hazard here isn’t that a few hundred men believe something extreme. The UK has a long history of extremists that believe very questionable things.

The hazard is that they are beginning to believe that they are entitled to act on those beliefs collectively, physically and outside of the democractic process.

This is a very different proposition than what we’ve seen to date.

A democracy is perfeclty capable of surviving people that are angry. It can survive protests, it can survive people believing stupid things. It can survive marches and even public disorder.

What it will struggle to survive is a political culture in which groups start deciding for themselves which laws, institutions and authorities are still legitimate, and starting to take things into their own hands.

Both events over this weekend don’t mean we are at risk of being taken over by some blokes in balaclavas. Far from it. But Dover showed largescale organisation, and Portsmouth showed rapid mobilisation. Put together, they show a capability we haven’t seen in the modern far-right - and that capability, rather than just the number of people involved, is what we should be paying serious attention to.

The Southport riots shook the nation to its very core, largely because a cohort of people lost control. Dover and Portsmouth should be frightening because someone appears to be learning how to control them.

I put this in place earlier this year, just as a bit of a backstop for not spending so much time on my phone. Now, I have failed on multiple fronts with the not-being-on-my-phone thing, because Instagram is an actual app on my phone, and also if I need to know something I am always going to pick it up a…

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I want to start this post off with a small warning - the subject matter we’ll be discussing today is, to be very honest about it, boring. It is not sexy, entertaining or in any way something that will get you tumescent with excitement.

But. It is important - as so many, many deeply unsexy but vital things in life are.

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I hope everyone’s Sunday has started really rather brilliantly, especially considering that we no longer feel like we live in Satan’s arsehole the whole time. Everyone, along with me, will have noticed that the weather has gone to a delightfully cool, normal temperature.

I am particularly grateful for that because this has, so far, been…

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NEETs, the million plus young Brits not in education, employment or training, are scrabbling to find work in a Hunger Games style rat-race, seemingly designed to punish. Reliance on benefits is increasing, and many find themselves unemployed for years on end.

A NEET-eye view:

“To say that my adult life didn’t shape up how I thought it would is an understatement. I have been out of work for just over a year and it’s tough. It has been the single most soul crushing experience of my life so far.

Sites that I was told are good and reliable places to look, such as LinkedIn and Indeed, are now riddled with scam postings. [There’s] listing after listing where you spend hours perfecting the cover letter, rewriting the CV, giving them a picture off you, the blood of your first-born child and a lock of your hair, and they never get back to you.

It no longer feels like getting a job is possible, even one that’s not perfect or just something to pay the bills. It’s like being employed is something that happens to other people. Meanwhile, one has to go onto benefits just to survive while you send application after application after application.

It feels like there’s no longer anything I can do to fix the situation I’m in.”

The toll on young people’s lives from these struggles, and from our aggravating culture of mindless carping, is enormous.

The game terrain

UK unemployment is at a 5-year high of 5.2%. Job applications are heavily oversubscribed, with 2.4 jobseekers for every vacancy and graduate jobs typically receiving up to 140 responses per advert.

Young job seekers are caught in a catch 22. Employers now seek an average of 2.5 years’ experience for many entry level jobs. As a result, 33% of applicants are rejected because they lack sufficient experience.

Graduates hit the job market also saddled with £50,000+ of debt. Being a UK graduate NEET:

“Exposes a common lie about our education system which we … hear from parents and teachers - that a degree in the right subject, or from the right institution, or with the right grade is a recipe for success.”

The employment Hunger Games have also shifted fully online. As our first NEET above observes, days are filled with endless applications in an anonymous screen-world, devoid of face-to-face human interaction. The interminable rejections are conveyed through silence.

Businesses won’t touch real paper CVs now and buildings that say ‘Job Centre’ are not actually job-finding centres.

Additionally, large language AI has triggered a fall in demand for human input, with the UK service sector concentration leaving us particularly exposed to large-scale job displacement.

AI constitutes a double insult to NEETs. It not only ruthlessly adjudicates their online applications but is also soaking up swathes of NEET employment opportunities.

Limbo

The challenge of finding employment currently looks overwhelming. Instead of reaching the traditional milestones of adulthood, NEETs find themselves in an unstable limbo, endlessly repeating the “humiliation ritual” of chasing work that has the seeming rareness of hens’ teeth.

Aspiration is deeply strained - only 48% of young people believe anyone can succeed in Britain if they work hard enough.

Alan Milburn’s recent NEETs report distinguishes between NEETs actively looking for work, (39%) and inactive NEETs (61%). A proportion of ‘inactives’ have never worked, but it’s worth noting that others in this cohort may have been active but eventually gave up precisely because there’s a limit to human endurance.

Try harder

As NEETs wake to face another round of application checking, the continuing online silence is broken only by the steady thrum of government and society urging them to try harder - ‘You just need to get more savvy at working the system’; ‘your problem was that you didn’t put enough freelance projects and student society leadership positions on your CV’; ‘try doing (yet) more volunteer work to stand out’ (assuming you can find it). ‘Tell AI what’s special about you’ (even if you don’t feel special after months of relentless failure).

This thoroughly undermining ‘advice’ tells NEETs they aren’t doing quite the right thing, as if the right thing can somehow even be done - anymore. It’s a grotesque pantomime testing the endurance of even the wiliest.

Getting work, rewarding or otherwise, is now random, rare, and has very little to do with how hard you try.

Stop slacking

When society isn’t delivering ‘advice’, it’s busy caricaturing these Hunger Gamers as snowflake scroungers. Since their brains, it’s presumed, have been melted by social media and ‘me’ culture, they lack the ‘gumption and fortitude of their forefathers and allow themselves to fall lazily into the pernicious habit of exploiting our hard-pressed benefits system’.

Here, NEETS, again fall under society’s mindless sledgehammer: ‘If that kid is fiddling the system, you must all be’. But it’s the critic’s reasoning here, not ‘youth’, which is lazy where it slithers, as it’s so often inclined to do, from ‘one / a few’ to ‘most / all’ without reflection or hesitation.

Waking up on day x of your dogged ‘job seeker’ marathon to hear that you’re a ‘feckless loafer robbing the state’ is just the ticket for compounding pre-existing mental health issues, or, frankly, even creating them.

PIP

The growing number of youngsters claiming PIP (Personal Independence Payments) for neurodevelopmental or mental health disorders has only amplified society’s grievances. But is their use of PIP surprising? After failing repeatedly to find employment, plenty begin to feel they don’t fit into society, that there might be something wrong with them. ‘Neurodivergence’, if nothing else, floats an explanation to NEETs themselves and their judges for ‘feeling dysfunctional’ and for a predicament they feel helpless to change.

Of course, PIP is exploited by the work-shy. But, again, we should pause before making assumptions since reasons for PIP applications are nuanced.

Some NEETs use PIP to protect themselves from the despotism they often experience in the world of Universal Credit (UC). In the easily abused power relationship with their ‘work coach’, receivers can get sanctioned with little provocation. Perhaps they missed a UC meeting as their bus was cancelled; perhaps they couldn’t face attending a job interview for nightshift work cleaning toilets a 1.5 hr train-ride away. Sometimes reasons for sanctions are too buried in red tape to discern.

Harried by the government’s shrill promise to ‘make life (even) harder for UC receivers’, young people live under the constant threat of waking up skint. And, in our atomised society, they don’t invariably have a ‘bank of mum and dad’ as last resort. So, who can blame them for using a PIP safety net that protects them from capricious UC decisions, and provides certainty about their next meal in a world where ‘if you work your socks off, you’ll gain security’ is a promise that simply never materialised?

The future

Andy Burnham plans to reduce NEETs by revolutionising education in ways that help engage young people with work. But this is only a solution if there’s work to be had.

There is a fundamental contradiction in our NEETs narratives – we firmly believe people’s lives should be orientated around work and that young people should be encouraged with carrots and sticks to find it. But we are simultaneously moving towards a world when employment opportunities are disappearing.

There’s a school of thought according to which, as per past tech revolutions, the AI revolution will ultimately give rise to sufficient alternative forms of human employment. But this optimism is hotly contested. The National Foundation for Educational Research, together with Mustafa Suleyman, the head of Microsoft’s AI division, Geoffrey Hinton (Nobel Prize-winning computer scientist) and prominent economist, Daniel Susskind, all argue that we’re moving, at the very least, towards a world of dramatically reduced human labour, with AI “creating massive unemployment”.

Plumbers and electricians look safe. But Susskind predicts that “task encroachment will displace workers” from a wide range of jobs across most blue- and white-collar sectors. Economics and employment are de-coupling, creating the novel spectre of “jobless growth”.

Beyond the work gospel

We aren’t preparing young people for this fast-approaching new world of significantly reduced work. Instead, we’re foisting on them an old model that they can see withering before their own eyes.

There’s a parallel here between NEETS and Thatcherite deindustrialisation. In neither case was the promise of life-long, regular work and security honoured, or preparation made for the consequences of trashing those promises. Then and now, the neo-liberal assumption was that market forces will kick in, driving people to find other work, by relocating, if necessary. This ‘try harder’ diktat no more fitted reality then than it does now. Are Thatcher’s lost northern towns, still stuck in poverty and disillusionment, a metaphor for our future youth?

So much is premised on the value of work as life’s provider of structure, meaning and security. Yet young people are facing a future where this prop is shrinking. Faced with precarious, unfulfilling jobs and the prospect of their Hunger Games only getting harder, NEETs are losing faith in the “gospel of work”, disengaging wholesale from the point of it. Depression, suicide, crime and drug use will all increase unless we give young people aspirations for worthwhile lives that are no longer noosed to employment.

To this end, education will need to build the kind of value, purpose and meaning into young people’s lives that enables them to cope in a ‘work-lite’ world. We may need universal basic income; but education must also cultivate stronger moral and societal responsibility, together with other specifically human endeavours such as creativity, physical life, and the rewards of human interaction.

Instead of looking backwards to an obsolescent model of work, making empty promises to young people, and feeding the NEET mental health epidemic, we must equip them with the skills, confidence and imagination to flesh out this potentially exciting and culturally advanced new world for themselves as adults.

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Good morning, all.

Yesterday, the 31st of July, marked the three-year anniversary of me starting to shout into the internet.

Now, all of you will have noticed that I have been particularly quiet over the past two weeks, and there are some very good reasons for that, which I’ll discuss properly in a minute. One of the…

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You may have noticed that I’ve been a little bit more quiet.

It is unfortunately not because I’ve been too busy getting my sleeve tattoo for my 40th birthday/chosen midlife crisis (I can’t at this stage, have you seen how expensive they are?!), but rather because I have a slipped disc actively trying to destroy my will to live.

A different kind o…

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If you did feel the need to listen to a very nearly 40 year old South African speak at his laptop, you can do so at the link below:

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It started with Farage losing his rag at the airport on his way back from the States when approached by Sky News, led to his bombshell, somewhat pompous grievance-fest dressed as a press release, and then to that bombshell turning right around and blowing up directly in his face.

The political atmosphere in the country, rather nicel…

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Well, sort of.

Not resigned in the traditional sense of leaving public life, spending more time with his family, or finally being sealed in amber inside a golf club bar. No, Farage has resigned in order to force a by-election, one he intends to contest himself, over the growing scrutiny of all …

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I don’t know if it’s just me, but it feels like there’s something in the air.

And no, I’m not talking about the immense levels of pollen currently suffusing absolutely everything right now and leaving me looking like I’m a fountain frog, dripping from every visible crevasse in my face.

I’m rather talking about the political…

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