Stockholm Syndrome provides a useful metaphor for the world’s infuriating relationship with Trump. It’s almost a relief to arrive at that moment when the abuser behaves so outrageously that even the victim has to concede he’s a bastard, that they’ve been manipulated all along with false flattery, comforting familiarity (the special relationship) and coercion (tariff threats), whilst coasting on the ‘good chaps’ delusion that ‘he just wouldn’t do that (would he?)’

But he just has. Trump has just clarified that his true affinity lies, not with protecting Western democracy, but with Putin, the world’s leading criminal strongman thug. ‘Melodramatists’ who, along with Mary Trump, spotted this years ago, feel grimly vindicated.

Hearing Zelensky quietly acknowledging Trump’s alignment with Putin is heartbreaking. It’s also a historic moment in which we are finally cut loose from ‘the big deception’.

Flouting the Graham Act, Trump has relaxed sanctions on Russia and forged a diesel deal. He has also authorised delays to Ukraine’s supplies of patriot missiles, and is planning joint nuclear powered data centres with Russia. He has defined Zelensky as the aggressor and punished Ukraine by playing with the Starshield surveillance flip-switch. When it’s off, the Ukrainian military fly blind, with devastating consequences for Ukraine’s citizens.

Russia’s mission to undermine Europe is long-standing. But it now looks clear that the White House plans to join the venture to replace the European liberal, rules-based order with ethno-nationalist, Christo-fascist, white supremacism.

The mid-terms

In this context, the USs mid-term election is a 2-act play (3 Nov and 3 Jan) representing the battle over liberal democracy. Trump has fallen from grace but still has numerous levers (including delaying election court cases and calling a state of emergency) to prevent a just result. And, since he has stuffed the Supreme Court with Republicans, we cannot be certain how the court will respond.

If Trump succeeds in barring Democrats on 3 Jan, his mission alignment with Putin will place Europe and other middle powers under new pressure and send a deep, corrosive chill through the Western rules-based order. Europe will want to hasten its independence from the US, and strengthen military and economic cooperation, internally, and with sympathetic nations like Canada. But military self-sufficiency alone is predicted to take 25 years and cost $1 trillion.

Meanwhile, Russia could become a US proxy - an attack weapon against Europe which allows the US to maintain distance and continue fudging its NATO commitments. With US sanctions lifted, Russia is in a stronger position to attack countries beyond Ukraine. This aggression would unify Europe but also generate division around the crippling costs of defence in deeply cash-strapped countries.

Europe is already embattled. Far-right parties are poised to take France, Spain and key parts of Germany. The mission to undermine Europe is already under way. If Trump steals the mid-terms, European pro-Russia countries, factions and parties wanting protection are likely to step up their collusion with Russia in challenging ‘the corrupt West’. So, Europe could become even more vulnerable to internal extreme right, fascist take-overs.

We hope, but can’t assume, that Europe will remain united against an emboldened Russia that’s bolstered by backdoor US funding and propaganda assistance. Nor is Trump’s Russia alignment a fanboy quirk. If in doubt, listen to presidential wannabies, Vance and Rubio, delivering menacing “civilizational erasure” attacks on Europe in recent speeches.

Trump stealing the midterms then may quicken the spread of fascism in Europe and impede the wider existential fight to preserve democracy.

The perfect moment

Trump may have chosen this moment to abandon his thin veneer of loyalty to the rules-based order because his mid-term polling is terrible. What better time to wrap oneself vicariously in the strength of mafia strongman?

But it’s also a moment of unrest fomenting across Europe, that’s ripe for exploitation. Citizens of France, Spain, Albania, Italy and Portugal are pushing back against neo-liberalism’s broken promises (on housing, public services, living costs and education). Feelings of anger and betrayal over neo-liberalism’s failure to deliver is spreading like summer wildfires, breeding riots and receptivity to the strongman solutions of fascism in equal measure.

The neo-liberal ethos appears to be creaking under the weight of its own avarice, with the pernicious role of the super-wealthy becoming increasingly clear. Oligarchs, notably tech giants, are buying ideologies, governments and elections in order to block regulation and protect their assets against the fairer distributions of wealth. By aligning with fascist strongmen they seek to prevent democratic values from obstructing their financial interests. In this regard, Trump is just a predictable consequence, a sad puppet, of wider ideological forces.

Fascist noise and voting from experience

We cannot know how US events will unfold between 3 Nov and 3 Jan, 2027. But this week’s remarkable election results from Serbia and Brazil give pause for thought. Against the odds, they followed Hungary’s earlier achievement and voted in progressive democratic leaders. Brazil’s election, for one, echoes America’s struggles – Lula’s win may have been considerably larger had his Trumpesque opponent, Flavio Bolsonaro, not meddled with the progressive vote (by for example, halting buses to polling stations).

But there’s one pattern here that seems clear. On the one hand, European countries such Germany, Italy, France and Spain are courting extreme right parties because many of their citizens, especially the younger demographic, have no first-hand experience of fascism in living memory. They direct their hostilities instead to their incumbent leaders, the neo-liberal ‘centrists’ (Macron, Merz, Sanchez, and the increasingly centrist Meloni) whose low growth, high public debt economies have crippled public trust.

By contrast, the citizens of Brazil, Serbia and Hungary have had recent experience of corrupt right-wing populist governments and extreme right dictatorships. They understand the painful consequences of falling for the remedies of these spin doctors. The US is on the same trajectory with recognition gradually dawning over the midterms.

And yet citizens seem to have difficulty extrapolating from the experience of other countries to their own. The US is an insular nation. So, perhaps we wouldn’t expect it to look beyond to the uncomfortable parity between its own Republican administration and the governance of other countries? But why aren’t those European countries currently toying with fascism learning from the ruinous experiences of Hungary and Brazil?

The loud noise of propaganda and social discontent is difficult to escape. Also, fascism, as Melanie Klein notes, isn’t static; it’s a dynamic spiral which evolves to match the societies in which it occurs. Its latest iteration arrived by stealth because, contra the 1930s, modern societies disguise it better. We have algorithms instead of marching boots, bot propaganda farms instead of Nazi rallies, and predominantly right-wing press classified as ‘impartial’. Escaping the cunning of modern fascism is not straightforward.

A modern monster

Yet, each fascist phase, despite its changing historical face, has a shared feature. It is an expression of our ‘worst version of ourselves’. Matt D’Ancona

“We are a demon-haunted species, striving to embrace the better angels of our nature” (Matt D’Ancona).

Trump, as a ‘demonic worst version of ourselves’ may be US fascism’s undoing.

His recent abominations have tested even MAGA loyalty. Half empty Trump rallies are testimony to the red lines being drawn against a leader who supports the live streaming an execution, who shares videos, against the parents’ express wishes, of their mentally ill son being killed by a tiger, then mocks the event with his own AI version. America is finally stalling over a man who has violated the ‘America first’ ideal with flagrant expansionism and aggression (Venezuela, Greenland, Iran), who advocates bombing Iran into oblivion, who has betrayed Ukraine, and who has littered the US with data centres and concentration camps.

To be candid, these actions may have appalled US voters less if the price of oil was lower. Let’s just be grateful for the co-incidence between high oil prices and Trump’s moral travesties.

But Trump’s demonic extremism ultimately makes him a progressive asset. He has inadvertently fast-tracked the corruption and hollowness of neo-liberalism and its failures. Symbolically, he’s an incarnation of ‘the thing in the raw’ – stripped of the good chaps niceties, the pretend deference to the rules and cod moral thinking which together masked the system’s real incentives and successfully conned citizens into viewing it as the only and best way forward.

Now the world is seeing the bare-faced monster in all its glory. Trump has done us the favour of comprehensively removing the gloss - accelerating the truth by standing as a true (naked, ugly) symbol of where unfettered neo-liberalism ultimately leads - to world domination by an army of glitzy, shallow, dangerous, insane, uncontrolled menaces.

Like Francis Bacon’s ‘Pope’, he is screaming at us that change is now unavoidable if we want to survive.

Cliff-edge

America has repeated Klein’s nightmare spiral of fascism with ‘evil chaps’ now mocking their ‘good chaps’ theory of governance. Yet, despite the grip and creep of fascism, we have reasons for optimism – citizens can learn from experience, fascism can overreach and expose itself.

As we barrel towards the mid-terms, we are by-standers waiting to see if the outcome will strengthen or undermine Europe and the international rules-based order. We are also observing a momentous symbolic power struggle between progressive liberal values and its opponents.

If the Republicans fail to win the House and even the Senate, then in the run up to the new legislative session on 3 Jan, 2027, Trump’s backers will do their utmost to manoeuvre the Supreme Court towards a swamp of legal grey areas. At this point, the fate of US and European democracy will be down to the wire, potentially hanging on whether Republican Justices of the Court listen to the better angels of their nature, stand their ground, and resist huge pressure to make partisan verdicts.

The world’s eyes will be on them.

They have gone from their high watermark last year, in which every poll was proclaiming them to be the next government and Nigel Farage actively measuring curtains for No. 10 to where we find ourselves today - being overtaken by the Conservatives, falling well behind Labour and for the most part, looking more and more like the dodgy outfit that we have all known them to be for rather a long time.

It started in April this year when the Guardian published the story that Farage had received that rather inconvenient, undisclosed £5m gift from his Sugar Daddy, Christopher Harborne, which was, according to Farage variously for his security, a “well done you” for delivering Brexit and, in one rather tetchy exchange, none of our damned business.

That is the point at which I would say the floodgates opened.

In rapid succession after this, we learned from The Sunday Times about the cosy financial relationship that Nigel Farage has been enjoying with convicted fraudster George Cottrell, the September and Verbatim investigation that exposed Reform UK secretly commissioning polls, paid for with foreign money, to blow smoke up everyone’s arses and looking like they’d happily accept illegal donations from abroad and now, most recently, just how incredibly racist, misogynistic and intensely grubby many Reform candidates and councillors can be with the ITV documentary and year long undercover investigation.

While I would definitely describe these as the most significant investigations, they were far from the only ones, with in no particular order, other excellent journalism found that:

• Organisations in the network around Reform had been bankrolled by Viktor Orbán’s Hungarian government, according to an investigation by Byline Times.

• Multiple suspicious activity reports were raised to the NCA in connection to money that went to Reform and some of its senior members.

• Peter Thiel had quietly routed a donation to Cambridge through James Orr, now Reform’s head of policy, who has openly talked about recruiting Reform talent there.

• A September exposé by Sky News found that Durham County Council, Reform’s flagship council, was not so much being governed as being a little playground for Reform councillors with allegations of bullying, infighting, factionalism and administrative dysfunction.

There has been a lot of scrutiny on Reform - and rightly so. If you’re placing yourself as a future government of this country, you have to expect you will be placed under the proverbial microscope and scrutinised within an inch of your life.

Farage and co, however, did not like this. Not one bit - and their responses have been nothing short of a masterclass in DARVO (deny, attack and reverse victim and offender). Every report has been variously described as political hit jobs, stitch ups, the establishment coming after them, and each time we’ve been treated to a terribly aggrieved Farage looking like someone had just pissed all over his batteries.

And I get it. For years Farage and those around him have been treated by the media like they were plucky anti-heroes. The people who are making waves, who are upending the establishment, who are, above all, entertaining.

This, however, is rapidly coming to an end, because Reform has finally overplayed its hand in its most recent reaction to the ITV investigation.

Yesterday Zia Yusuf took to Twitter to announce that the party has reported ITV, its journalists and even its board of directors to the police, with a promise to pursue them relentlessly through the courts.

Reform, in this case, has made a spectacular miscalculation - because there is a fundamental difference between attacking a newspaper’s reporting (something which has been done by politicians of all colours since the invention of newspapers) and attempting to use the police and threats of litigation against journalists whose investigations have found you out to be a bit fucking dodgy.

Investigative journalism, good investigative journalism, isn’t supposed to be comfortable, and it’s certainly not supposed to make powerful people feel good about themselves - and it’s almost certainly not going to stop just because a political party has thrown its toys out of the pram after being exposed as a safe haven for racists.

The rather uncomfortable truth for Reform is that ITV didn’t manufacture the racism it recorded - none of the journalists involved coerced or forced the people in the documentary to tell them exactly what they thought of ethnic minorities, Muslims and in some cases the female councillors that work with them. They said all of those things themselves.

It’s also worth adding to this post that investigative reporting, including undercover reporting, isn’t some grubby new trick that was made up with the specific purpose of embarrassing Farage - it’s one of the oldest and probably most important tools in British journalism. It exists precisely because some things only ever get said when people think that no one is watching.

It’s how the public found out about the grooming gangs scandals after the intrepid reporting by Andrew Norfolk, it’s how the abuse of people with learning disabilities was exposed at Winterbourne View, about detainees being mistreated at Brook House and about sitting MPs happily taking money to table parliamentary questions.

None of those stories would have been possible without investigative journalism.

Reform is also hardly the first institution to respond to being caught by going after the messenger - in 2003, after Mark Daly went undercover for the BBC and filmed police recruits being openly racist, it was Daly himself who was arrested before the investigation was even broadcast, not the recruits themselves.

The Home Secretary at the time, David Blunkett, called it a stunt - but the officers resigned, Daly was never charged and Blunkett was forced to admit that using the word “stunt” had been a mistake.

Twenty-three years on from that, if you mention The Secret Policeman, it’s not remembered as a scandal about journalism - it’s remembered as a scandal about racism in the police, and I would put good money on the ITV investigation being remembered in exactly the same way.

Reform can argue and feel aggrieved about the methods used until the cows come home, and if there is genuine criminality, that deserves investigation - but none of that is mitigation to the footage that was aired.

A bit more importantly than that though, Reform have just handed journalists an entirely new story to cover - a story of how a party that’s supposedly set on being the next government of this country responds when the press holds it accountable.

This last point is the one which I suspect Farage and his cronies will most regret, and has the potential to ramp up the scrutiny right up to 11.

Journalists are, by their very nature, a curious bunch. Threatening them with police investigations and lawsuits is almost certainly not going to make them less interested in what it is you’re up to - if anything, it raises the rather obvious question of just how many other skeletons you have in your closet and what else you might be desperate to keep away from the eyes of the public.

Reform has spent years presenting itself as the great defender of free speech, the enemy of censorship and the fearless challenger of powerful institutions.

Now, faced with scrutiny of its own, it is threatening the people doing the scrutinising.

And if this is how Reform responds to being investigated as a minor opposition party, the public has every reason to ask how it would respond to being investigated in government.

The journalists aren’t the ones making Reform look like Reform.

Reform is managing that perfectly well all by itself.

If you’re thinking that the lead up to the time change at the end of October, or even that spookiest day of the year, Hallowe’en, is to blame - you’d be quite wrong.

My sense of imbalance comes from a comp…

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This is not a politics post today, but more of an adminny one and it’s something I’m quite keen to do just once a year or so - and considering the last one was in September last year, I am a bit overdue.

The purpose of me asking the below ten questions is really just to make sure that when I’m angrily tapping away and flooding your inbox wi…

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Introduced under the Cameron government, it guara…

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This past Sunday morning, I woke up to a BBC News Notification - as I’m sure many of you did as well. Now, with the BBC Notifications news prioritisation algorithm veering wildly between “HALF OF LONDON IS ON FIRE!!!” and “PEOPLE UPSET ABOUT EU FLAGS AT PROMS FOR 10TH YEAR IN A ROW!”, it really is like opening that proverbi…

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I will be the first to say that I do not envy his position. Between an economy that has been sluggish to say the least, the continued impact of lower productivity on the back of Brexit, Mango Mussolini’s “Operation” in Iran, …

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I suppose I should start this off with an apology for the late publishing. Usually on a Sunday I do try to get it out for you in the morning. However, having done a rather longish walk for charity yesterday, I decided that I was going to sleep a little bit today, and even the fur daemon let me do so, for which I’m incredibly gratefu…

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A year ago this week, I told Twitter to go fuck itself. That’s probably the simplest way I can put it.

For those of you who joined after I left, and there are probably about 2,000 of you, here’s how it started. I opened an account, I think it was July 2023, with the express purpose of shouting “crotch goblin” at Jaco…

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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 cheese…

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What I would like to look at today rather is a particular …

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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…

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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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