An essay on what goes when the generation above you does, read by me.

First published in September 2025. Read the written essay here.

I’ve noticed something recently. It may just be the algorithm, but I think it’s more than that. There is a desire to return to tradition, and not tradition for tradition’s sake. Many of our old traditions were grounded in meaning: sometimes in nature, sometimes in religion, and in some cases I think the nature came before the religion. There was more to them than the surface version we get now.

It’s Halloween on Saturday. But Halloween didn’t start out as Halloween. It goes much further back, to a festival called Samhain. I’ve written about it at length on the Wild Together site, so I’ll keep this brief. These customs come from different times and places. Some are old, some came later, and some have been revived or reshaped. I’m bringing them together here because of what they offer: ways to mark the season, gather together and remember the dead, to give meaning to life.

Samhain marked the turn from the light half of the year to the dark half. The cattle were driven down from the hills, the last of the harvest was brought in, and a festival marked the moment. I’m avoiding the word ‘celebrate’, because I don’t think celebration fits the spirit of it.

The first tradition that really speaks to me: every hearth fire in the village was put out, so the story goes, and relit from one huge communal bonfire. It marked a new beginning, but it also showed the power of community: every household carried a flame from the same fire to get it through the winter, so nobody went into the dark alone.

Second, there was divination: trying to see the future. In apple bobbing, whoever caught the apple first would be the next to marry. Or you peeled an apple in one long strip, threw it over your shoulder, and the shape it landed in gave the initial of the person you would marry. Simon or Sarah came up a lot.

Third, and to me the most interesting, people believed the veil between the spirit world and ours was thin that night. That let malevolent spirits through, but it also let your ancestors come back and sit with you. There are many versions of the Dumb Supper, but the one that appeals to me most is this: The family made the best meal they could, set an extra place at the table and left it empty. They ate in absolute silence, listening for a creak in the floorboards, watching for the candle flame to flicker and let them know their ancestors were there with them.

Why does this matter now? I’m seeing a lot of mentions of Samhain. Again, that could be the algorithm. But it isn’t only my feed: Google search interest for Samhain in the UK spikes every October, and since 2016 that October peak has risen by about two thirds, while interest throughout the rest of the year has more than doubled. I think interest in the older festivals really is coming back, the need for meaning, custom and ritual is coming back. These festivals can provide that. Halloween evolved from Samhain but somewhere along the way lost a lot of its meaning. Halloween went across the Atlantic, got packaged in plastic and sent back, but it’s up to us to choose which version we want.

I can see a desire to get back to the real thing: in communities and in families, people starting to push back on the commercialisation and revive the essence of these moments.

Maybe it is just the algorithm. But an algorithm only shows you more of what you stop scrolling for, and a lot of people seem to be stopping for this. I think perhaps enough people’s hearth fires have gone out that they’re looking for something to relight them from.

My daughter has a Toniebox. It’s a little music player for children: you put a figure on top, and it plays a story or a song. Four or five years ago, I recorded myself reading two stories for one of her figures: Where the Wild Things Are and Dogs Don’t Fly.

I heard her listening to the recording the other day and tried to remember the last time I’d read those books to her in person. I couldn’t. I realised I’d probably read them to her for the last time without knowing it. She’s nearly nine now and little picture books aren’t really her thing any more.

Then I wondered when I last read them to my son. They were books we loved when he was small, and then at some point he stopped wanting them. He turns fourteen next week.

I don’t think it’s just me. At the pace we live, with clubs to get to, work, friends to fit in and children to raise right, the tiny moments that make up the fabric of a life slip past unnoticed. I see cars with stickers that say, ‘One Life: Live It’, and as I speed past them, and they speed past me, I wonder whether their owners still notice them, or whether, like me most of the time, it’s become more of an aspiration than a way of living.

Even the less pleasant parts of parenting, getting them out of the house, trying to get them to do their homework, wiping a bottom, will each happen for the last time. One day you might even miss them.

There will always be a last time. There will be a last time you take a breath. There will be a last time someone you love takes a breath, and you may or may not be there to see it.

When my dad was dying, I knew, more or less, that the last time I saw him was approaching. What I could not have known was that, before his diagnosis, we had already had our last day together as a family without cancer casting its shadow over us. At the time, it was just an ordinary day. Nothing told us that the life we knew was about to change.

Epictetus, the Stoic philosopher, said that when you kiss your child you should silently remind yourself they may die tomorrow. I know that sounds horribly morbid. Looking at it through 2026’s eyes it is, but I think it’s the starkness of the thought that gives it its weight.

I look at my daughter now and realise there’s going to be a last time she wants me to hold her hand as a child. That doesn’t mean there won’t also be a first time she asks me to take her to a friend’s house, or to pick her up after a night out. Those are things I’m going to look forward to.

When I walked past her door and heard my voice on her Toniebox, I just went in and lay on her bed and listened with her.

For years I tried to learn in a linear way, with everything in my life. The way I was taught in school. We’re going to start at the start, open your textbooks to page one and we’ll begin. It sometimes worked, but other times it stopped me learning anything at all.

I had a revelation when I started to properly learn the guitar. I learned in a different way, then everything started to slot into place - and it wasn’t just guitar, it was lots and lots of other things as well.

Let’s rewind a bit. I remember being reasonably young, maybe 10 and trying to help my dad around the house, but I was terrible at it, he’d get angry, I’d get angry at him and I’d resigned myself to the fact that DIY wasn’t for me. Nothing really changed, after I got married I remember my father-in-law remarking that I was ‘not handy’ and again I just accepted that. Then when we moved into our first house I just started doing stuff, really small at first, putting up a shelf (wonky), trying to fix a leaky tap (still leaks, but not as much) then I started building a wood store, functional, but a mess (think Homer’s spice rack, but for wood).

Then I built another one, slightly better, then we moved again so I built a new one. This one looked half decent, I put a sloped roof on it, covered it in roofing felt, made some sections to split out seasoned from non-seasoned wood. I was still slow, measuring twice, cutting once (sometimes measuring and cutting again). Then we moved again and all of a sudden I’ve developed some serious ability, I don’t need to measure as much, I can eyeball an angle and I can calculate lengths in my head, I’ve made a little jig for my saw. All of a sudden I’m Handy Andy, but I did not notice.

In 2021 I decided I wanted to learn the guitar properly. I’d stopped and started for many years and never got anywhere, so I got in touch with and started lessons. I wanted to learn to play the blues, I knew a few chords already, but pretty basic stuff. I started printing out the tablature for everything and sitting down going note by note, getting very bored very quickly. So with Vic I’d start learning something, then a few weeks later we’d start learning something else, this was strange. Surely we have to learn the whole thing from start to finish, but no that did not seem to be the case. We’d learn a bit of the intro to Johnny B. Goode then a bit of Clapton or Peter Green. And quite a lot of the time we wouldn’t do a lot of guitar playing at all, we’d talk about music theory of course, but also philosophy, meditation or just about music in general; the genesis of how artists got their sound or the mistakes they made along the way. I’d go home and practice, frustratingly slowly, fingers all over the place, hitting the wrong strings, but over the course of the next year or so I’d developed the ability to solo over blues tracks or over Vic’s playing.

I didn’t learn this in any traditional or linear sense, my brain just started making links in the background. All of a sudden I had a new skill, and it didn’t stop there, I could tell which notes were right and which weren’t. That one sounds a little sour, that one works over that chord, but not that chord. I didn’t mean to learn this, I don’t actually know how I learnt it. I went back to a Peter Green song I’d been trying to learn, put the song on and tried to play along. Damn! I can do this, this sounds alright, I can hear what he’s doing there, that’s a little curl there or a slide there - this is witchcraft!

I resisted for so long, I was sure that learning was a linear process. When I learned that it’s not I stopped trying so hard and ended up learning a lot more and a lot more quickly.

I had been taught the method, first the 1 x table, then the 2 x table etc. or learning every box of the pentatonic scale before being able to play a song, but I had it backwards. Just do the damn thing, you’ll figure it out. Parents watch children do this, we all did it ourselves, we didn’t learn to talk by going through the alphabet over and over.

You don’t need to know everything before you start. I probably caused myself so many problems by trying to learn in a methodical way.

When I stopped thinking about it and started just doing it, all of a sudden a new world opened up. You have to practice, but that’s not the end of it, your brain doesn’t need a rigid system, you don’t need to memorise every fact, movement or chord shape. I could try a new solo or chord progression, get frustrated in the moment, then come back a day later and I was better at it. My brain was seemingly sorting this all out for me while I was sleeping or cooking dinner.

There’s another cool thing that happens, your brain will start making connections between things you didn’t think were related and this is where this all came together for me. It was sitting with Vic one day, telling him how I’d become competent at building things by accident, then I realised the DIY and guitar were connected, they were two different expressions of the same thing. I hadn’t registered it to begin with because I’d never considered DIY as creative exactly, but it is, and mastering it is the same process. Do it, fail, do it some more.

So what do I mean when I say ‘stop trying’?

I stopped putting arbitrary timescales on things. Sure, you can say you need to complete a piece of artwork by x date or learn a new scale or perfect Mary Berry’s Victoria sponge before Aunt Beryl comes over, but don’t give mastery a deadline. There will always be something new to learn, there is not going to be a time when you can say ‘completed it’ so let that go.

I did the things I wanted to do, not because I should. Learning something you hate is a terrible way to spend your time. I tried to get my son to learn guitar, he wasn’t interested, he loves football and mountain biking, he may come back to the guitar at some point, maybe he won’t.

I let myself be bad at it, for ages I was slightly embarrassed that I wasn’t already good at the thing I’d just started. Allow yourself to be bad at it. No one in the world who cares about you cares about how good you are except you, I used to beat myself up all the time because I couldn’t play like Clapton or sing like Stapleton, but I let that go and just enjoyed the process.

That’s it. I will never stop learning, but I did manage to stop getting in my own way by trying too hard.

A few weeks ago my wife got home from seeing some of her friends where they were discussing house renovations and my name came up, ‘Matt’s handy isn’t he’ - I’m still not quite sure how I got here.

A note on terms: This essay is about England and Englishness. I use “British” where the institution or legal category is British - the state, citizenship and the passport - and “English” for the cultural inheritance I am trying to describe.

The Question of England

George Orwell once described an England of old maids cycling through the mist. Roger Scruton wrote of schoolmasters and Anglican hymns. I recognised parts of both Englands, but neither was mine.

For years, that did not trouble me. My English identity felt secure. I had no need to prove it, still less define it. We were all here. Why would we need to explain it?

The question of Englishness and the English looms large in 2026. Something which should not be contentious is showing up deep divisions across the country. This essay is my attempt to give a shape and some meaning to what it is to be English and what England is.

Englishness is an inheritance. It’s a way of inhabiting this place through language, custom, memory, tradition, duty and judgement. It’s not sealed by blood, but it’s not just some magic words or a piece of paper. It is open, and should be, because it can be learned. It has survived through generations upon generations accepting it and the duty to pass it on.

So, where to begin?

The problem I kept coming up against was a definitional one. How does one prove that they are English? Can a lawyer prove he is a lawyer? Yes: a professional qualification and an official register. Can I prove I’m a West Ham fan? Yes: I have a season ticket; I am miserable a lot of the time. Can I prove I’m English? Well, yes, I can trace my ancestry back hundreds of years. I can show you that one of my ancestors was married in what is now Southwark Cathedral in 1747. Does that mean that Ian Wright is not English? Born in Woolwich to Jamaican parents in 1963, 33 caps, 9 goals for England1.

OK, do I have an English passport? Well, they don’t exist exactly, I have a British passport, but this is a legal document, it says nothing of participation or belonging.

England’s detractors will point to these difficulties and argue that this proves that either it is ethnic, intractable and closed, or that it is civic or administrative and anyone can join. It is neither.

The Doom Loop

The logic is this:

You cannot define what it means to be English. Therefore there is no such thing as the English. Therefore anyone has as much right as you to decide what happens here. And if you try to define it, we will contest the definition. So you cannot win.

There’s another claim that is used here:

England stole everything, its food, its music, its culture, from the rest of the world, and therefore has nothing of its own to protect.

I couldn’t get out of it, I could not make a good enough case until I realised that no definition was ever going to be good enough. That’s OK, the demand for a perfect definition is the problem.

As I was thinking this over during the recent (disappointing as ever) World Cup, a familiar refrain came back to me:

England ’til I die / I’m England ’til I die / I know I am, I’m sure I am / I’m England ’til I die

No one ever questioned it, we didn’t sit around discussing what it meant, we just knew and that’s a perfectly fine place to begin. It’s the English place to begin.

It’s how we’ve always worked best: not through large, radical changes (although we did chop a king’s head off that one time), but by working things through, figuring them out as we went and muddling along. Correct the course a little bit. Does that look about right? Yeah, that’ll do.

English common law gives us a good framework for this: we do not need to define Englishness exhaustively before we can judge particular cases.

Two quick thoughts I keep in my head when trying to wrestle my way out of the doom loop.

• Ask: is this applied to another culture or people? Has anyone tried this with the Japanese or Nigerians or even Americans? If it’s not applied universally, then it’s not a philosophical move; it’s political.

• Ask what other things have imprecise definitions but are still valid. Love—we all know what it is, but it’s too big and broad to have a finite definition. A woman’s love for her husband is not the same as her love for her children or her friends. They are all valid and all different. You know what I mean when I name each one.

This doom loop is not new, Orwell pointed out something similar in his 1941 essay The Lion and the Unicorn:

In left-wing circles it is always felt that there is something slightly disgraceful in being an Englishman and that it is a duty to snigger at every English institution.

Orwell identified this as a pathology rather than a philosophy 85 years ago.

So, to a framework of sorts. You’re welcome to say “yeah but” and “what about” — you should, and if you want to go for a pint and discuss it, great. The pushback doesn’t invalidate anything. It proves the point: this is genuinely complicated and difficult to define, and that’s fine. My aim is simply to be able to say, “Yeah, that looks about right.”

You know it when you see it.

So Common You Can’t Even See It

The English common law has been taken across the globe: Australia, Canada, India and the USA, but it’s one of those peculiarly English institutions that is so embedded in society that we don’t even notice it is there.2

English law grew from several places: custom, courts, judges, juries, royal authority and Parliament. It developed through decisions, argument and precedent, but it is not set in stone. Judgements can be challenged and mistakes corrected.3

Englishness, like common law, can be thought of in a similar way. It can be recognised and judged through examples we accumulate, customs we build on, without first having to have a complete definition.

A Deeper Level of Understanding

There is a level of knowledge that is not conscious. We could call it subconscious knowledge, gut instinct or reflex. For example, when I am driving a car, at no point do I think, “Push the accelerator a bit harder, foot on clutch, move hand to the right and up” — that would be weird. As I was learning to drive I had to think about these actions because they were new. Now I’ve learned them, I don’t need to think about them.

The philosopher Michael Oakeshott wrote about the differences between technical and practical knowledge4. Technical knowledge can be written down as rules, instructions or principles. Practical knowledge is acquired through experience, imitation and participation. We learn the “how” rather than the “what”. So, a recipe can list the steps, but it cannot make someone a good cook. A rulebook can explain football, but it cannot teach judgement on the pitch. In the same way, a list of “British values” cannot by itself transmit English manners, obligations or belonging. People learn these by living among others who practise them: taking turns, keeping promises and observing how breaches of these are judged.

These concepts help explain the truth inside “you know it when you see it”. Culture has written rules, but it is not exhausted by them. We pick up on cues and know we’re in the right place. Take the Great British Queue. It is not simply a line of people. It contains fairness, restraint, reciprocity, self-policing, respect for invisible order and mild collective shame when someone breaks the code - it is much more than the sum of its parts.

Now, this has two sides. It’s possible that something can feel wrong because it violates a custom, but it could just be unfamiliar to us. Take joining a new sports team or starting a new job where everyone knows each other and has their own rituals, grooves and slang. It’s not necessarily wrong; it’s just new.

The English answer to this is not a ministry with a checklist issuing definitions, but closer to common law: compare cases, give reasons, test judgements and then correct mistakes if necessary. This allows us to let a standard accumulate. Englishness doesn’t need to be perfectly defined, but if you tell me something isn’t English, or shouldn’t be, you’re going to have to tell me why. The instinct is a starting point, not a conclusion.

The Family and the Familiar

England is not the jewelled isle of Shakespeare’s much-quoted message, nor is it the inferno depicted by Dr Goebbels. More than either it resembles a family, a rather stuffy Victorian family, with not many black sheep in it but with all its cupboards bursting with skeletons. It has rich relations who have to be kow-towed to and poor relations who are horribly sat upon, and there is a deep conspiracy of silence about the source of the family income. It is a family in which the young are generally thwarted and most of the power is in the hands of irresponsible uncles and bedridden aunts. Still, it is a family. It has its private language and its common memories, and at the approach of an enemy it closes its ranks. A family with the wrong members in control—that, perhaps, is as near as one can come to describing England in a phrase.

― George Orwell, The Lion and the Unicorn5

There is something specific to this place that you feel when spring comes and you smell cut grass for the first time, or when the season changes from summer to autumn, the first day back at school in September, or the chill in the air on bonfire night. You do not get it in the same way anywhere else. You might get something adjacent in France or similar latitudes, but the particular quality of the English climate - the light, the rhythm of the seasons, something in what it does to you to be here. It’s part of what England is and part of what it means to belong to it, they are bonds that connect us, to each other and to the land.

England is a place consecrated by custom, passed down slowly over hundreds of years, the words of Shakespeare, Keats, Larkin, were shaped by their predecessors and continue to shape language even now. From the Norse language we have “sky”, “knife” and “they.” The Normans gave us “beef”, “justice” and “parliament.” From the Indian subcontinent we got “bungalow”, “pyjamas” and “thug.” Words came in, from conquest, from trade, from contact and necessity. They were taken into our language. The words didn’t remain French, or Old Norse or Indian, they became English. That is what England does (or did, but more on that later) with what arrives. It made our language and therefore discourse, writing, conversation the richer for it.

The richness this provides is another one of these features that is not obvious until you look from the outside, like the rituals and phrases your own family has, the English people have that at scale. My favourite is the alleyway, a walkway between two things, you wouldn’t think it needs more than one name, but you have the ginnel from Manchester, the snicket, from Bradford and the jitty from the Midlands, there are many more, I will let you investigate.

One last example is the swearing, I don’t think there is a World Championship for it, but I think we’d be in with a shout of winning if there were. The English, although certainly the Scots and Irish too, have turned profanity into somewhat of an art form. The depth and breadth of the swear words is magnificent on its own, but they can be used not only for insults, but in some cases, terms of endearment too, depending on the situation and the context - again, you’ll know which one is which when you hear it.

Orientation, Not Origin

“We do not merely study the past: we inherit it, and inheritance brings with it not only the rights of ownership, but the duties of trusteeship. Things fought for and died for should not be idly squandered. For they are the property of others, who are not yet born.”

— Roger Scruton, How to be a Conservative6

Patriotism has become a dirty word, associated with jingoism, nationalism and racism, but, once again this is a false premise, language co-opted for a particular purpose.

Orwell makes a distinction between patriotism and nationalism in Notes on Nationalism:

“By ‘patriotism’ I mean devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life, which one believes to be the best in the world but has no wish to force on other people. Patriotism is of its nature defensive, both militarily and culturally. Nationalism, on the other hand, is inseparable from the desire for power.”

— George Orwell, Notes on Nationalism7

And there’s a famous quote by Samuel Johnson, “Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.” often used to derogate the notion of patriotism, but this is a mistake. Johnson’s biographer Boswell assures us that Johnson was referring to someone who used patriotism “as a cloak for self-interest.” 8

In The Patriot (1774), he says this

“A patriot is he whose publick conduct is regulated by one single motive, the love of his country; who, as an agent in parliament, has, for himself, neither hope nor fear, neither kindness nor resentment, but refers every thing to the common interest.”9

That is almost the opposite of the anti-patriotic meaning commonly attached to his famous remark. Johnson was not condemning love of country. He was condemning scoundrels who used its language as cover, as I’m sure he would condemn those manipulating his meaning now.

How to be a patriot? Well, England should be open to anyone who participates in its life. Conversely, origin without belonging does not work. My little heuristic is this, although it reads like a sort of marriage vow:

Do this person’s words and deeds show a duty to England as an inheritance — to keep what is good, repair what is wrong and pass the whole thing on?

It doesn’t take long to find people with English ancestry going back hundreds of years whose words and deeds would indicate that they do not take this vow. It also does not take long to find people who do not have that ancestry yet love this place deeply. We have no exhaustive definition, no certificate of Englishness. Short of a court of souls, a person’s words and deeds show us enough.

So to the civic case, the legal documents that make you British. The passport gives you legal membership, but that is as far as it goes. It says nothing about your relationship to the country. Take football again. Supporting a team requires participation, you need to watch your team, that doesn’t mean going every week, it doesn’t mean watching every single game, but it requires more than just checking the scores. It requires duty and effort. When things aren’t going well, when you’re losing week in and week out you don’t give up, you’re there through the good and the bad.

The family is the same: it requires something of you, and you of it. In none of these cases can belonging coexist with passivity, nonchalance, detachment or hostility.

The key here is the appreciation and understanding of the inheritance, good and bad, about what has come before and what needs to be passed on.

I’ve used quotations throughout this essay from Orwell and Scruton, a democratic socialist and a conservative philosopher. The fact that they agreed on this, despite coming from different political traditions, is not a coincidence.

England Expects

On 21 October 1805, before the Battle of Trafalgar, Nelson ordered the signal: “England expects that every man will do his duty.”10 During the battle Nelson stood on deck wearing his usual admiral’s coat and decorations, his officers feared that this would make him conspicuous and draw the enemy’s fire. It’s impossible to know why Nelson did this, but from everything that’s known about his words and deeds, this seems like his duty, to stand alongside his men, not hiding out of the way of danger.11

Most duties England asks of its people are less dramatic. They are performed not on a quarterdeck but in jury rooms, parish halls, football clubs and lifeboat stations.

A person belongs not only by ancestry or sentiment, but by taking part in the obligations of the place. More football I’m afraid. Coaching a football team takes time, energy, dedication and a duty to the children you are coaching, you have to put effort in, but the rewards are more than worth it. It’s not (or should not be) about winning entirely. Watching them develop and grow, not just as footballers, but as people. Learning to communicate, to adapt, cope with disappointment and joy are crucial skills for a rich and rewarding life. Being a part of that development is truly a privilege.

This duty and belonging are not written, or codified in most of these institutions, they are learned, inhabited and practised by each successive custodian. This becomes tradition, it’s not exclusive to England, but these clubs and societies and their ways are particular to this place.

The Man With One Home

During the build-up to the England v Ghana match at the recent (again, disappointing) World Cup the rapper Stormzy was asked what result he wanted to see: “I’m a Ghana boy. I’m an English boy,” he said. “I’ll be honest, a nice 1–1 draw.”12 Two inheritances, honestly expressed - at the time I was a little disappointed: “But surely England is your favourite?”

Leaving aside the legalities of dual nationality a person can be English-Ghanaian, British-Indian, Jewish-English, Yorkshire-English or European-English (probably a dying breed). It’s OK to be more than one thing, we all are in many parts of our lives.

There should be a two-way agreement here, If I chose to settle in Spain, I would learn Spanish. I would not expect Spaniards to conduct their public life in English for my comfort. Spain would owe me equal standing; I would owe it the effort to participate - this is not complicated.

A serious country can explain this and is entitled to expect it, The British state has forgotten how to. It has assumed, often without asking, that every inheritance sits as comfortably as every other, but that is not always the case. Perversely it has shone its torch of suspicion on the man with only one home, treating affection for England with contempt.

The Englishman with no second home is entitled to say that this asymmetry matters, there is no other inheritance, no other place he could call home. This doesn’t give him any greater rights than any other citizen, but at the same time it does not give the country a reason to treat his attachment as a pathology while other inheritances are celebrated.

The problem here is not that newcomers and their children were encouraged to remember where their families came from. In its best form, it makes the country all the richer for it. It is that the white working-class Englishman was increasingly taught that remembering where he came from was something darker: nostalgia at best, prejudice at worst, a malign influence sowing division across the country.

Emily Thornberry’s 2014 tweet13 of a white van and a house covered in England flags - not far from me, in Rochester - became notorious because people recognised the disconnect between England’s citizens and the political class. Over a decade later, YouGov14 found that majorities of Labour, Lib Dem and Green voters believed the St George’s Cross had become a ‘racist symbol’. The identities of the Scots, the Welsh and the Irish are celebrated, but the Englishman needs to explain himself if he wants to celebrate his.

This imbalance has deepened division in England and Britain more widely and made people suspicious of the state’s motives. That suspicion may not be justified in every interaction a citizen has with the state, but it does show a loss of trust, and governments that permit such a loss have failed in a basic duty.

In case this was not already clear, let me state it plainly: do not make the mistake of blaming the immigrant, or the children of immigrants. Blame lies chiefly with the institutions which failed not only to provide the tools for integration, but to offer anything substantial to integrate into.

The Empty Vessel

The state did not just abandon national identity, it emptied it out, it poured it down the drain. Governments and public institutions will speak about Britishness, integration and shared values, but they are empty words. Any mention of language, history, custom, memory and duty might have excluded someone so they pretended they didn’t exist. The irony here is that some of the very things that migrants came to be included in, are being erased in the name of... inclusion.

Instead of saying, “This is what we have inherited; come and help us carry it,” they acted as though England was an empty vessel, a blank slate upon which anyone could project whatever they liked.

The clever managers in Whitehall produced four “values”. These were taken, not from a long discussion on what it meant to be British, but from a strategy to prevent terrorism15, not necessarily bad ideas, but a strange place to pick values from.

“What do we believe in?”
“Er... not blowing things up?”

It’s not that these “values” aren’t worth defending, they are. The problem is that France, Canada or the Netherlands could adopt the same ones without changing a word. They describe the minimum conduct expected in a liberal democracy, they don’t tell anyone what Britain or England is.

This is liberalism wrapped in the Union Jack: a national identity stripped of nation. It includes everyone, not by creating a home for them to belong in, but by asking them to inherit almost nothing.

Newcomers were told to integrate to a hollowed out shell, a room painted in magnolia, a doctor’s waiting room of a country. The native population, meanwhile, was taught to treat its own inheritance as an embarrassment, a history of shame. A common inheritance, boiled down to banal rules. Ordinary people were then blamed when the rules failed to create belonging. Everyone looking around surprised when a passport wasn’t enough to bind us together.

But Matt, we’re not saying the passport is the only thing, we have the Life in the UK test16.

Well, again, this is the empty vessel. A citizenship test can establish only that someone has revised a book and supplied enough right answers, I did this for my driving theory test, GCSEs and any other test I’ve ever taken, it shows you can study, nothing else.

This should be obvious by now, but I don’t want an exam of belonging. I want a country that can say, honestly and without embarrassment: this is the inheritance you are joining. Here is the language, memory, custom, landscape and duty that made us. You can bring your own inheritance too; no one’s going to ask you to erase it. But you must participate in this one, to help carry it and, in time, to pass it on.

The test is a stamp on a form, but a quiz can’t make a people. It can’t teach someone why a village hall matters or what Remembrance means.

That is the emptiness at the centre: not that Britain asks too much of newcomers, it doesn’t ask anything other than a test, an oath and a list of banal universal rules.

They tried to create equal standing, but got it confused with cultural emptiness, called it inclusion, and then left little common life to be included in. The next time someone in government talks about division, ask them: from what, and into what?

Pride and Shame

We are right to be proud of what we have collectively built - abolition, suffrage, the welfare state, the moments when we defended the weak. We are equally obliged to be honest about what we got wrong: the slave trade, the famines, what empire cost the people inside it. These are not competing claims. They are the same obligation, to be honest about what has come before. We cannot change it, but we can learn from it.

We inherit the knowledge of what was done in our name. This gives us our duty, as it has done for everyone who came before us. Keep what’s good, repair what can be repaired and hand it on, truthfully and without self-loathing.

Anyone who will only carry the pride, or will only carry the shame, has not come to engage with England. We win together and lose together, through good times and bad, ’til death do us part.

It’s hard to overstate the damage that has been done, not only to our potential new countrymen’s perception of the country they wanted to join, but also to more than a generation of people born in this country who know it only by the mistakes it has made, the wrongs it has committed. I was one of the lucky ones, I know about the mistakes, but I was also taught to ask questions and understand that there’s nuance, that human life and decisions are complicated and that if anyone tells you that there is only one answer, they’re almost certainly lying.

I was taught an England formed by Shakespeare, Keats and Tolkien; Darwin and Hawking; Bevan and Nightingale; Nelson, Wellington and Churchill; Handel, Clapton, Jagger, Harrison and Mercury.

Not every name in that list was English by birth. That is the point. Each of them, and countless others, helped shape the England I inherited. Their words, discoveries, service, courage and music became part of our inheritance - and part of what we now have to pass on.

Inheritance - Conscious Participation

England is still there. I see it every day in small ways: in grassroots football and gatherings on the local heath; in a nod and a smile on the morning school run; in the pride and wonder in Bellingham’s eyes as the crowd sings “Hey Jude” to him; in the old boy getting his papers on a Sunday morning in a suit and tie. It does not have to end.

I never even got to talk much about the landscape and wildlife. Our place can be seen as dull and damp, but in another way we are incredibly lucky. We don’t have hurricanes or earthquakes - well, not many. There are no funnel-web spiders, no rattlesnakes or tsetse flies. We have the beauty of the Cotswolds, the Yorkshire Dales, the Garden of England and the Cornish coast.

Any one of these things can be taken in isolation. The French swear. The Americans stand up for their country. The Japanese understand custom and form. Other peoples queue, joke, mourn, remember and muddle through. But they do not have this: not in this combination, in these proportions, in this landscape, with this climate, this language, this history, under this sky.

And yes, it changes. Of course it changes. But England changes best when it changes as England has usually changed, slowly, through consent, absorption, argument, precedent and use.

We must start to teach this inheritance honestly, the truth, not just the bits that suit a purpose. We need to hold on to the places where we share duties and build communities. We must create a home where newcomers can build a life as part of ours.

This is a precious inheritance. If we don’t remember it, no one will remember it for us. It will be lost. There is so much we owe to our ancestors and to those who are not yet born.

On Tuesday, after Prime Minister’s Questions, the Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson posted this.

Every number in it is true and that’s exactly why it is worth a look.

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about how to read the internet without being played, and put the method into a little tool anyone can run. The point of it was never to catch people lying. Lying is the easy case. The hard case, the one that does most of the work in public life, is the true statement arranged to leave a false impression. This post is a clean specimen. So let me run it through.

Strip it

Underneath the arrows, the claim is simple: since Labour took office, the teaching workforce has grown. Five upward arrows in a row are there to make you feel that the whole system is moving in one direction.

It isn’t, and she knows it isn’t, because the figures she’s quoting come from the same Department for Education release that says so.

The number she left out

The 3,008 and the 1,646 are real. They are secondary, special schools and colleges. The figure that doesn’t appear anywhere in the post is the total. On the same day, the same release showed the overall number of teachers in England falling, by around 0.4 per cent. Primary teachers fell by 1.3 per cent, roughly 2,900 of them. The total school workforce shrank for the first time since 2019.

So the post lists the slices that went up and omits the whole that went down. Nothing in it is false, but the impression it is built to create is the opposite of what the data says.

This is the oldest move there is. Give a number without its denominator (step 3). “More teachers” means nothing until you ask: more than what, where, out of what total. The arrows answer none of those questions, and they are arranged so you won’t think to ask.

The timing

The DfE’s count folds in around 1,400 secondary and 900 special school teachers who turned up at the start of the 2024-25 academic year. That is September 2024. Two months after the election. Anyone who knows how schools hire knows those people were recruited the previous spring, under the previous government, before this one had done a thing. That is roughly 2,300 of the 3,008 that may have nothing to do with current policy. It’s a contested point rather than a proven one, but it’s a fair one, and the post is happy for you not to raise it.

The pay figure

“Teacher pay up 9.5%” is the two awards added together, 5.5 per cent last September and 4 per cent this one. True as a cash figure. Whether teachers are actually 9.5 per cent better off depends on inflation over the same stretch, which the arrow politely declines to mention.

The verdict

Here is what the check spits out, and what I’d want any reader to keep:

Confidence the individual numbers are accurate: high. They trace straight to the official release. Nobody is making things up.

Confidence the post is honest: low. Every figure is a true slice of a picture whose headline finding, the falling total, has been removed on purpose.

The honest version of this post exists, and it’s defensible. The 6,500 pledge really was always about secondary, special and further education, because that is where pupil numbers are rising while primary rolls fall with the birth rate. A government could stand up and say: we are moving teachers to where the children now are, and primary is shrinking because there are fewer small children, not because we failed. That argument would survive scrutiny.

She didn’t make it, because making it means saying the word “primary” and admitting the total fell.

The tell

The thing that turns this from spin into something worse is the last line. “If standing up for state schools makes me a spiteful class warrior, I’ll wear it with pride.”

Look at what that does, before anyone has checked a single figure, scrutiny has been recast as an attack on state schools and on poor kids. If you question the numbers, you’re not really questioning numbers, you’re sneering at the children.

It is a shield bolted on in advance, and its only function is to make sure the arrows are never examined.

That is the part with no scruples in it. Politicians have always chosen their best statistics, that’s politics, unfortunately.

You can pick your numbers, or you can claim the moral high ground. Pick one. You can’t do both. In an ideal world, she’d do neither and be honest about the choices that she and the government have made.

This was posted with pride. Someone fit for the job would be embarrassed to be caught arranging the numbers like this. The part that should worry everyone isn't her, it's that this is completely normal. A whole system of people who do this and genuinely believe it's the right way to behave.

Why this is worth your five minutes

None of this requires you to have a view on Labour, on Phillipson, or on teacher pay. The same checklist run on a Conservative post claiming the opposite would have to ask the same questions, and a fair one would catch the same tricks. A version of this from the other side, listing only the figures that fell, would be doing the identical thing in reverse.

It’s so easy to scroll past that and think ‘nice one Bridget’, and I’m not saying that your default position should always be out and out scepticism, but when someone is telling you something that you can see all around you is not reality, it needs to be checked.

More than what. Out of what total. Since when. Who hired them.

---

This is a live run of the method from The Internet Is Probably Lying to You

I used Claude Sonnet 4.6 (Low) initially, then I reran it against Opus 4.8 (High effort) - I wouldn’t normally as Sonnet works fine, but for publication I want to double, double check.

The tool is on GitHub if you want to point it at the next thing that scrolls past you.

There’s a secret I need to let you in on. I’ve been sitting on this for a while, but things have got so bad out there that I feel I must share it. Are you ready?

There are a lot of lies on the internet.

I know. I was as shocked as you are.

It turns out that a lot of the incentives for publishing content online are perverse, and when I say online, I mean all of it. Social media, forums, tabloid newspapers, broadsheet newspapers, even the government. None of it is required to be true. Quite a lot of it isn’t.

This leaves us with a choice. Do we carry on scrolling, half-reading and getting angry at the billionaires or the immigrants, the wokerati or the far right, or do we try to figure out how to separate truth from lies, claims from framing, and work out what’s actually going on?

I won’t blame you if you choose the first option. The second isn’t easy, it takes practice, and it’s not as much fun as getting angry, because most of the time the real answer is complicated and doesn’t fit neatly onto a side.

But if you want to give it a go, the job is this: decide what kind of claim you’re looking at, how much confidence it deserves, and what would make you change your mind.

That’s the whole skill. Everything else is technique.

So. Here are ten steps. You won’t believe number seven.

Step one: separate the claim from the framing

Most online arguments mix three things together without labelling them.

The claim is what’s actually being asserted.

The evidence is what’s offered to support it.

The frame is the emotional or political meaning being attached to it.

Take: “Britain is being flooded with migrants.” The claim might be about numbers. The evidence might be asylum data, visa statistics, population change. The frame is the word “flooded”. Who wants to be flooded? When have you ever seen positive news about a flood? This works the other way too: a headline reading “strengthened by immigration” has a frame as well, everyone wants to be strengthened, right?

First move: what’s the plain factual claim underneath the rhetoric? Often it’s weaker, narrower, or less certain than the framing suggests.

In this example, it would be more accurate to say: migration to Britain is high by some relevant measure.

Step two: know what kind of claim you are looking at

Not all “is this true?” questions are the same. A major error is treating interpretive claims (explaining or interpreting the fact) or moral claims (this is good or bad) as if they were simple facts, and then arguing past each other. The goal here is to strip everything away and just leave the claim.

Simple factual claims - “An earthquake happened. The Prime Minister said this. Social media has been banned for under-16s.” - are often checkable. Go and check.

Statistical claims - “Crime is rising. Migration is a net fiscal benefit. Most artists are middle-class.” - require definitions, data sources, timeframes, and comparison points before they can be evaluated.

Causal claims - “Immigration caused this. Lockdowns caused that. Phones are making children anxious.” - are much harder. Correlation is not causation. These require argument, not just data.

Interpretive claims - “This shows groupthink. This proves institutional failure. This is hypocrisy.” - may be reasonable, may even be true, but they’re arguments, not facts.

Moral claims - “This is wrong. This is unjust. This is a betrayal.” - can’t be settled by evidence alone. They depend on your own morals, though evidence can strengthen or weaken them.

Step three: demand the missing denominator

If you remember maths at school, this one’s simple enough. What are we dividing by?

“Ten thousand people did X” means almost nothing without knowing: out of how many? Compared to what? Or when: last year? Ten years ago? Or where: this country? Another country?

Other questions that belong here: Is this per capita or total? Absolute or a rate? Nominal or inflation-adjusted? Gross or net? Budget allocated or actual spend?

Crime can rise in total while falling per person. Cash figures can rise while real value falls. GDP can grow while living standards fall.

One of the strongest epistemic habits you can build: never accept a number until you know its denominator, timeframe, and definition.

Step four: watch for the category shift

A lot of dishonest argument works by quietly changing the category midway through.

“Some migrants commit crimes” becomes “migrants are criminal.” “Some activists support extreme positions” becomes “everyone on the left supports this.” “A person questioned asylum policy” becomes “they hate asylum seekers.” “A person criticised Israel” becomes “they support Hamas.”

The trick is moving from a specific behaviour to a broad moral identity. Useful test: has the argument shifted from what someone did to what they are? If so, slow down.

Step five: use source information correctly

Source matters. A publication with a demonstrated track record of distorting evidence deserves more scrutiny. A statistician funded by the sugar industry deserves more scrutiny.

What source can’t do is settle whether the underlying claim is true.

The Daily Mail reader who believes systemic failure enabled organised child abuse in Rotherham is not wrong because the Mail ran it. The Mail may have given them a distorted picture of scale or causation, dressed it up in emotive language, selective emphasis, grievance-maximising framing.

Those are questions about the completeness of the evidence. They’re separate from whether the core claim is true. It is, official reports confirmed it.

The working principle: update on “I should verify this carefully” when the source is suspicious (or in your eyes untrustworthy based on its position relative to you). Don’t update on “this must be false.”

Primary sources - government datasets, court documents, official transcripts, full speeches, academic papers - are better than screenshots, summaries, headlines, and viral posts. But they still need interpretation. A government dataset may be real but selectively chosen. A quote may be accurate but stripped of context. Primary sources are the starting point, not the end of thought.

Posted screenshots are among the weakest forms of evidence online. They can be cropped, edited, misdated, taken from parody accounts, missing replies, missing the original source. A screenshot should trigger one question: can I find the original? If you can’t, lower your confidence. Not necessarily false, just lower.

Step six: track incentives

Ask why the person is showing you this. They may be trying to gain clicks, sell outrage, defend a tribe, protect an institution, raise money, win an election, preserve status, embarrass an enemy, or tell the truth. Incentives don’t make someone automatically wrong, but they help you judge the claim.

Mainstream institutions have incentives. So do alternative media, activists, governments, and experts. Everyone does.

Revenue generation on social media has distorted things further. Accounts with large follower counts may be earning from engagement, and therefore the more outrage, the more money. This doesn’t mean the claim is false, but it may be less powerful than stated.

The useful question isn’t “are they biased?” Everyone is, the better question is: what would this source be reluctant to admit? What information does this source want me to see?

Step seven: real is not the same as representative

Something can be real and still misleading. A video of one person behaving badly may be genuine. But does it show one person, a trend, a movement, a party, a class, a generation?

The internet constantly turns anecdotes into sociology. One event becomes proof of a pattern, one person becomes evidence of a type.

The question that neutralises most viral manipulation: even if this happened, how representative is it?

Step eight: apply the same standard to claims you like and claims you don’t

This is hard, properly hard, because a lot of the time you won’t even know you’re doing it.

People are usually forensic with claims they dislike and generous with claims they like. It’s bias, and it’s perfectly normal. They notice the missing denominator when the conclusion suits the other side. They call selective evidence “context” when it supports their own. They demand primary sources from their opponents and accept screenshots from their allies.

The test: would I accept this evidence if it came from the other side? Would I notice the missing denominator if the conclusion suited me?

The useful word for applying different standards of evidence to structurally identical cases is asymmetry. If you applied principle X in case A, you’re committed to applying it in case B - unless you can state the relevant difference. Not gesture at it. State it. When someone can’t state the relevant difference but maintains the asymmetry anyway, they’ve revealed something about their reasoning, not about the principle.

Step nine: notice what is missing

Good judgement often comes from noticing what’s absent. The strongest counterargument, the actual source, the base rate, the uncertainty, the trade-off.

A strong claim survives contact with inconvenient facts. A weak claim needs those facts removed.

Always look for receipts. The best claims are evidenced and sourced correctly.

Step ten: hold confidence levels, not binary verdicts

Instead of asking “is this true or false?” ask: how confident should I be?

This is a bit of mental maths, and the more you do it, the stronger that muscle gets. You start to see patterns of behaviour, or tells.

Very low confidence: screenshot, anonymous claim, no source, emotionally loaded.

Low confidence: single source, unclear context, plausible but unverified.

Moderate confidence: multiple credible sources, but details uncertain.

High confidence: primary source, clear definitions, independently confirmed.

Very high confidence: directly documented, uncontested basic fact, stable record.

A lot of mature judgement sounds like: “Something like this may be true, but this particular version is probably overstated.”

The checklist

• Strip the claim from its carrier. What’s actually being asserted?

• Name the type of claim. Fact, statistic, causation, interpretation, or moral judgement. These require different standards.

• Apply the denominator. Demand context for every number.

• Watch for shifts in category. Has the argument moved from what someone did to what they are?

• Use source discipline. Source tells you how carefully to check, not whether the conclusion is true.

• Track incentives. Ask what this source would be reluctant to admit, and what it wants you to see.

• Ask about representativeness. Real isn’t the same as representative.

• Apply symmetry. Would you accept this evidence from the other side? If not, state the relevant difference.

• Check what’s missing. The strongest counterargument, the base rate, the inconvenient case.

• Hold confidence levels, not verdicts. Something can be probably true, partly true, overstated, or uncertain. Most things are.

If you like acronyms, that’s SNAWUTAACH, which is not only very catchy, but I think is a waterfall in Snowdonia.

The position

The healthiest position is open-minded scepticism: not too much credulity, not too much cynicism.

Credulity says: I saw it, so it’s true.

Cynicism says: everyone lies, so nothing can be known.

Good judgement sits in the middle. It says: some things are true, some are false, many are partly true but badly framed, my job is to work out how confident to be.

It’s slower than getting angry, but you’ll understand the world a lot better.

I’ve packaged the ten steps as a free skill for Claude, published on GitHub:

https://github.com/matt-billing/epistemic-check/

Install it and Claude runs the checks for you - paste in text, send a screenshot, or point it at your own clippings.

By a strange twist of timing I am looking at three sides of a question the government has just decided for me. With Wild Together, two children in mainstream school and two years of training to become an AI and Machine Learning engineer ahead of me, I looked at the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Act, disappointed, but not surprised.

On the 29th April 2026 the act received Royal Assent. It changes how children in this country can be educated in several ways, two of them really matter. First, parents who educate their children at home will now have to register with their local authority, the responsibility was previously theirs and theirs alone, the state now wants oversight of it.

Second, academies, which had up until now been free to set their own curriculum, must teach the national curriculum like everyone else. In practice most of them did, because their teachers were trained on it and the exams demanded it, but the freedom to differ was there, not any more.

In both cases the relationship between parent and state has been redrawn, from a permissive assumption that parents know their children best, to a legislative one that the state does. Perhaps the government are right, but before we accept that, it is worth asking what problem this actually solves, and what it leaves untouched.

For over one hundred years the education system in the UK and most of the developed world was designed to produce competence in a stable society. Initially into agriculture or manual industry, then the late 20th century added professional and knowledge work. The pace of change was slow enough to adapt, adding subjects like economics, media and business studies. The rapid developments in the 21st century now make that system unfit for purpose.

In January 2025 the government published its AI Opportunities Action Plan, a commitment to £39bn in investment and a target to transform the UK economy through AI by 2030, getting 10 million workers upskilled. The 2026, One Year On report has just been published, 38 of 50 actions delivered, the ambition is real, and the pace is serious.

On the 27th April 2026, two days before the Children’s Wellbeing act received royal assent, the government released an announcement backing, through its sovereign AI fund a new British AI company called Ineffable Intelligence, building algorithms that can learn for themselves and uncover new knowledge - rather than simply copying what humans already know. The government are very proud of this UK company, the technology secretary, Liz Kendall said:

‘This investment in Ineffable will support a company at the very frontier of AI, with the potential to transform entire sectors, underlining our determination to ensure that the UK isn’t just an AI taker but an AI maker.’

So, which one is true? The government cannot both know what is better for children’s education and be driving change that will fundamentally alter the entire economy of the UK.

The fact that these two announcements were two days apart highlights the complete disconnect at the heart of this.

It’s not that the government isn’t thinking about AI in education, but it is looking in the wrong direction. It is planning scholarships in higher education and the Learning Levy for those already in work, but almost nothing to prepare today’s children for tomorrow’s world.

The companies that the UK government is investing in, or that they are hoping will invest in the UK, have long-term plans for investment and a strategy (as the future is so uncertain they will undoubtedly change as technology does) but the point is, they have a plan. Politics does not think in 10- or 20-year plans to any meaningful degree, it used to think in election cycles, but currently even 5 years seems like too long a horizon.

10 million UK workers are to be upskilled, but the 10 million children currently in education? Tighter adherence to a curriculum that has not fundamentally changed in 20 years.

The King’s Speech was delivered on the 13th May 2026, setting out the agenda for parliament, AI was mentioned once. There is an education bill, its stated aim is that ‘every child deserves the chance to succeed to the best of his or her ability.’ There is no indication on what ‘success’ looks like.

So to return to the question. What problem does this solve? It is not clear. The home ed register may catch some genuine harm at the margin, although the safeguarding case is not clear and the existing legal framework was already there. The academies provision tidies up administrative untidiness that mostly didn’t exist in practice. What does it leave untouched? Almost everything that matters.

It leaves untouched the question of what an education is supposed to do in a country whose government has openly committed to transforming the entire economy by 2030 along lines that even its own investments cannot predict. It leaves untouched the gap between what the state knows and what it is now requiring schools to teach. It leaves untouched the question of why, in a moment where uncertainty is the defining condition, the response is to centralise and constrain rather than to permit difference.

This is the part that ought to alarm anyone watching closely, the honest response to genuine uncertainty is not to tighten control, it is to widen the field. Let parents try things, let small schools try things, let home educators, Forest Schools, free schools, micro-academies, individual teachers try things.

When you do not know what will work, it does not make sense to cling tighter to rules and increase oversight. Much as in the technology world, we need innovation and the ability to think, to experiment, to produce children who can adapt, who can make sense of a world whose rules are being rewritten daily.

What we are getting instead is the opposite. A curriculum, now made compulsory across academies that previously had room to differ. A home education sector that ran on parental responsibility, now placed under state oversight. The space for divergence is closing at exactly the moment when divergence is the only sane response to what is coming.

I write this as someone helping my wife set up a business using folklore and nature to teach, as a parent of children currently in mainstream education, and as someone who is about to start an AI engineering apprenticeship in a few weeks. I am about to spend two years retraining myself for the world the government says is coming. I wrote previously about some of the things we can teach as parents, but I look at the curriculum my own children are being taught and I cannot find the world I am training into anywhere in it.

The people who might have done something different, the small operators, the home educators, the Forest School teachers, the parents who took their children out because they could see what the system was missing, are now being registered, constrained and brought into line.

Nobody knows what to teach a child whose working life will begin in 2035. That is the point. In that uncertainty, freedom is not a luxury or an ideological preference. It is the only honest answer. A state that cannot say what the future looks like has no business deciding what your children learn about it.

We moved to Shoreditch in 2007. It was buzzing with life: bars, clubs, music, food, but what really drew us was the grit, the dirt of it. The warehouses with their bare light fittings, the abandoned houses pumping out music all weekend, the vintage shops selling Carhartt and Dickies, flannel shirts and trucker hats.

The people living there were, for the most part, nice kids from comfortable homes, working in galleries, cafes, bars or aspiring to act, none of them, as far as I can remember, bricklayers or factory workers. This didn’t seem like a problem at the time, we were all of a like mind, the everyman (or woman). We always joked that the day a Starbucks appeared on Brick Lane we’d know it was over, the corporate takeover complete. We didn’t realise we were the early symptoms, the strange lump or the cough that wouldn’t go away.

What happened to British working-class culture is easiest to see in music, because music has always been where class made itself loudest.

In 1995, with Britpop on the rise, the music press manufactured a war between Oasis and Blur. On the face of it, it was a north/south thing, but underneath, and no one quite said it, was a class argument.

Oasis were the real thing, lads from a Burnage council estate, Liam and Noel with the swagger and attitude to match. Blur were art school, London, technically accomplished. Damon Albarn understood working-class culture the way an anthropologist understands humans, intimately well, but from the outside.

The music press, largely middle-class and mostly London, picked Blur. The public, mostly not those things, picked Oasis.

This tension wasn’t new. It had existed for years, but the de-industrialisation of the 70s and 80s, the miners’ strike, the collapse of the shipyards and steelworks, made the divide deeper. It didn’t just destroy jobs. It destroyed the communities that had been producing British working-class culture for decades.

The music from those places had force because it came from lives with consequence. Every decision had to be weighed, every penny accounted for, tough work and then no work. When those communities were dismantled, the culture that had grown out of them went too.

Things moved fast in the 90s. The BRIT School opened in 1991 and arts degrees multiplied through the decade and into the 2000s. The drive to get more kids into higher education worked if you’re just counting numbers, but the split between upwardly mobile middle-class kids and working-class ones was dramatic. By the 2000s, young people from professional and managerial families were around twice as likely to attend university as those from working-class backgrounds.

Fee-paying schools, which had always dominated politics and law, noticed that the best route into the music industry now required what they were good at: professional networks, performance confidence, industry visibility. When authenticity was still tied to class and charisma, Harrow and Eton were a bad fit for rock and roll. When you could just pretend, they were perfect.

As the graduates moved into media, journalism and the arts, entry-level work meant unpaid internships. London rents, or travelling in daily, were simply beyond most people’s means. There’s no conspiracy here, no one keeping kids from council estates out. It’s just economics and opportunity, but the numbers show what that produces.

Around 70% of the UK music industry now comes from higher socioeconomic backgrounds (A, B and C1 if you ever worked in telemarketing). Only about 1 in 5 of those working in music and the performing arts come from working-class homes. That figure covers the whole workforce: the A&R staff, the managers, the journalists, the label executives and, increasingly the artists themselves.

The music industry, always tuned to profit, had already asked the obvious question: does authenticity actually need to come from anywhere real? The answer was no. It could be performed, which meant there was no longer any requirement for the environment that had originally produced it. The BRIT School isn’t a finishing school for the wealthy, it draws from across London, and across class, but it does represent something: once professional training could replace lived experience, the industry no longer needed to go looking for it. The last reason to find your acts in council estates disappeared.

This new, packaged version sounds close enough to the real thing that most people don’t stop to question it. Sometimes you have to listen twice.

When I first heard Louis Dunford’s England ‘Til I Die, I had to go back and listen a few times to figure it out. Something wasn’t quite right. I pulled up the lyrics, and this leapt out:

“You say ‘these refugees should fuck off home,’

But your favourite footballer,

Who was born in Africa can stay,

But only if he brings it home.”

This line isn’t impossible. I’ve heard far worse in pubs and bars and Upton Park over the years. But England ‘Til I Die is intimately associated with England football culture, an anthem from the terraces through the pub to the living room. To put those words in the mouth of the man singing it isn’t malicious, it’s just what England fans look like from where Dunford is standing. He’s drawing on available material: headlines, social media, the version of working-class England that circulates in his world. The actual texture of what it means to support England from a town that’s had a rough twenty years just isn’t in his field of vision, so he fills the gap with the nearest thing to hand. It almost sounds real, but it’s slightly out of tune.

The Molotovs are a brother-and-sister punk band from London. Catchy riffs, killer basslines, a style that reaches straight back through Weller to the Pistols. Thirty years ago this music would have come from the kids of builders and taxi drivers, rebelling because they had something real to rebel against.

In an article for Asbo magazine they were described as emerging from “London’s street corners,” technically true but not in any recognisable sense. Both siblings left mainstream education, as the article puts it, by choice. When they talk about busking, it’s described as a decision to stand out. An aesthetic choice, not an economic one.

In the same interview, Matthew describes feeling confined by “the system,” school, university, career, and speaks about how lucky some people are to escape it. He’s speaking to something real, but for a great many working-class children that path isn’t a straitjacket at all. It’s something they are never offered, never expected to follow, and often simply cannot access.

Opting out of formal education and treating dissent as a form of self-expression are choices that require money and security. His experience of constraint is sincere. It’s just not universal, and it’s treated as though it is.

What working-class culture had was stakes. The physical weight of a job, the specific economics of a Friday night, belonging to a community you couldn’t opt out of even if you wanted to. That knowledge doesn’t automatically produce better art, there’s nothing inherently magic about working-class lives, but when it is filtered out entirely, that gap does not stay empty.

What we can’t point to is who isn’t there.

We can’t name the songwriter writing the 2025 equivalent of Eton Rifles, the punk band whose rebellion is economic rather than aesthetic, the voice that could correct Dunford from the inside. We don’t know who these people are because they never got a mic. Nobody planned it that way, but it’s what happens when a profession draws from the same environments, the same cities, the same universities: the same assumptions accumulate quietly over time.

Last September, the Grand Ole Opry celebrated its centenary with a show at the Royal Albert Hall. Luke Combs headlined; Marcus Mumford joined him on stage for a duet of Willie Nelson’s Always On My Mind. Country music grew from the lives of sharecroppers and coal miners. Mumford attended King’s College School Wimbledon, one of England’s oldest independent schools. In 2024, Springsteen, the voice of working-class America, played three nights at Hyde Park, Frank Turner was the support act. Turner attended Eton. Neither Mumford nor Turner is a fraud, but who else was there that could have played?

Working-class life arrives in the culture and gets translated: observed from the outside, filtered through frameworks assembled from headlines rather than experience. and there’s nobody left that can hear it’s wrong.

Jamie Webster and Sam Fender are there, and when they break through, the response is telling. Audiences react the way you react to something true rather than something merely well-made, but two exceptions don’t correct a system, and there are hundreds of other artists locked out, unable to compete against a tie and a crest.

A culture that can’t hear from large parts of itself can’t accurately describe them. So it doesn’t.

• Amended 12th June to remove the reference to Garden House School in Kensington.

Henry: Cry ‘God for Harry, England, and Saint George!
Exeter: “Ah, sorry, Henry, just a minute, did you know that Saint George wasn’t actually English”
Henry “What? It’s a battle man, what are you talking about? The enemy are over there and I need to get these heathens to fight”
Exeter “Yes, I know, but he never even came to England, I think he was Turkish “

He Wasn’t Even English

The ‘he wasn’t even English’ argument runs every April 23rd without fail. George was Cappadocian, born in modern-day Turkey, and as a saint is shared with Georgia, Ethiopia, Portugal and about a dozen others.

I wonder how many Ethiopians spend April 23rd shouting ‘he wasn’t even Ethiopian’ at each other? Well, the thing about Ethiopia is that they celebrate him every single month, and they use the Ge’ez calendar which has 13 of them, which, by any reckoning would be a miserable way to spend your time.

A quick look at the saints of the British Isles:

St George: Turkish
St Patrick: British, kidnapped and TAKEN to Ireland
St Andrew: Galilee - never went to Scotland
St David: Genuinely as Welsh as the Valleys

So, one out of four.

Hands up who’s up for a trip to Ireland next March 17th to tell them? Or Scotland? November 30th, we can all get a coach up and stand in a Loch and tell them how silly they are.

Symbols

The thing about saints though, is that they’re symbols, not to be taken literally. They take on aspects of the culture and its people. Every culture projects onto them what it needs to see, and it appears that what we need to see, currently, is deep division and arguing.

What we should see is the Dragon and how many times we, the English have slain it. However, if no one knows what has been achieved, what values drove this country, what George and the Dragon represent, it’s going to be tough to rally around once more, so here’s three.

Land

In 1649, Gerrard Winstanley led a group of men onto common ground in Surrey, turned it over, and planted vegetables, and made the first attempt at an allotment. It lasted a few months before the army dispersed them, although they lost that battle, the war went on.

The day after St George’s Day 2026 is the 94th anniversary of the Kinder Scout mass trespass. On the 24th April 1932, five hundred ramblers walked onto Peak District moorland and refused to walk off.

The land they were walking on, they were told, was not theirs to walk on, it was used for grouse shooting. Previously common land, closed off to them for generations by landowners after the Enclosure Acts of the late 18th and early 19th Centuries.

The trespass began from Bowden Bridge quarry, the leader of the group, Benny Rothman gave a speech beforehand, telling the assembled ramblers that the land belonged to the people and they had every right to walk on it.

By the end of the day, five people were arrested, then in the coming weeks convicted of riot and sentenced to time in prison. The convictions garnered sympathy in England and the trespass helped pave the way for ramblers and rights to the countryside, through the fights to preserve public footpaths, the National Parks Act and the Countryside and Rights of Way Act.

A quarter of England is still public or common land, but another quarter is owned by fewer than 1,200 people.

Plain Speech

Commonly associated with the north of England, the value of plain speech was once a pillar of the English code. Orwell’s essay on the English language, published in 1946, argues that obscure prose is a form of power: it conceals meaning from people who lack the vocabulary, and it lets its users avoid saying things directly.

The Quakers refusing honorifics in the 17th century, and the best journalism of the last hundred years, both demonstrate that saying what you mean is a form of respect for the person you’re saying it to.

The degradation of public language, the jargon, the long, rambling speeches with no content, the use of euphemism, half-truths and lies by omission is a political act. It happens because somebody benefits from the confusion.

Mutual Societies

In 1844, twenty-eight workers in Rochdale who couldn’t get food at fair prices built their own shop, ran it collectively, and distributed the surplus back to members. Within a decade there were hundreds of co-operative societies across the country.

Working men’s clubs, the friendly societies, the allotment associations: all examples of people getting together and organising what was needed when no one would give it to them. The NHS is formed in this vision, Bevan was brought up in Tredegar in Wales where the Tredegar Medical Aid Society was founded in 1890, there miners paid a small weekly contribution from their wages and got medical care in return.

Slaying the Dragons

These values: the claim that the land is a common treasury. The obligation to speak plainly. The preference for building something together over waiting to be given it. They were all held prisoner by dragons, hoarding land, hoarding meaning and hoarding surplus.

An English Honesty

How did we face these dragons? With a particularly English kind of honesty.

There has always been a melancholy to England, the rituals and stories, the songs and the poetry, the reverence for the dead and the sacrifices made, a quiet and sombre dignity.

At Samhain, families cleared the table and set a place for the dead, they welcomed them in to pay their respects and on Armistice Day we observe silence for those who fought and died for us - same thing, centuries apart.

From the long barrows to the colliery brass bands there is an underlying sadness, but it manifests itself in different ways, like the gallows humour that England turns to in dark times. Thomas More, climbing the steps to his execution in 1535, said to the Lieutenant of the Tower: “Help me up; I can shift for myself coming down.” and in a more light-hearted way it appears on the terraces and in pubs, refrains of “We’re shit and we know we are” ring out around the country.

Acknowledging the situation and its gravity is necessary in order to make these jokes.

Somewhere along the way we’ve replaced this honesty with the insistence that every ending contains a beginning, which sounds like wisdom, but it’s not.

When the factory closes, or the pub, or the youth club, and we bulldoze it and build flats and call it progress without acknowledging what's gone, that's a dragon we still need to slay.

Who and What Are We?

The question for April 23rd is not whether George had a bulldog tattoo or drank warm beer or cycled through the mists or played cricket, it is, what are England’s dragons now? Because if we can’t answer that it does not matter where George was born.

Image: A. Davey, St. George Slaying the Dragon, Church of Debre Sina, Lalibela, Ethiopia, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

I was reading a bedtime story to my daughter last night, we’re currently struggling through the prologue on The Fellowship of the Ring, I say struggling because, as much as I love the Hobbits, the 20 page history of them is not the book’s best parts, but she loves it, so we carry on.

At the end of each night’s instalment we have ‘2 minutes of talking’ which is for her get anything she wants off her mind before she goes to sleep, it’s never lasted less than about twenty minutes, but that’s 8 year olds. Last night she said “Daddy, I don’t like it when we have to do lockdowns at school in case a dog comes along. We have to lock the doors and our teacher reads a story to us until it’s safe to come back out again.” I replied that’s OK they’re just doing it to make sure they can keep you safe, she seemed a little unsure, but she fell asleep anyway.

As I left her room, I suddenly thought, hang on a minute, dogs can’t open doors, and I realised this isn’t about dogs at all.

Martyn’s Law came about after the 2017 Manchester Arena bombing, where a terrorist called Salman Abedi killed 22 and injured hundreds more in a suicide attack. The law requires public venues to have proper emergency preparedness plans in place. The schools are doing what they’re told, and the dog is what they’re told to say.

Having procedures in place to deal with threats is indeed a good thing to do, but as I thought about my daughter, with this drill as part of a normal school day I realised how many light-years from normal this is.

They were told to say it’s a dog because we can’t say what it actually is, and that inability is how we end up needing these drills in the first place. The teachers know, the DfE knows, the government knows, we all know, and yet we pretend all the same. Calling it a dog doesn’t fix anything, it just means we don’t have to say the word. There is nothing wrong with telling a child that dangerous people exist and that we want to keep them safe.

At the risk of slipping into nostalgia, the 80s were the peak of terrifying children about the real world. The railway safety videos were horrifying and we had public safety campaigns like ‘stranger danger’. It was appropriate and useful. At some point we seem to have stopped protecting children in order to protect the adults from having to face reality.

This distortion of reality creates further problems upstream: replacing the real threat with a dog is the same thing that’s happened in the name of ‘community cohesion’.

Children do not need to be protected from dangerous ideas, they need to be protected from danger. The world is dangerous and if we can name the danger we can understand it and face it.

While I was writing this, something peculiar happened. After the meningitis B outbreak in Kent I had at least one email a day from my daughter’s school updating on the situation - so far, so sensible. The advice from the government was clear and precise, specifically naming the problem and exactly what to do about it.

Why is it OK to name meningitis but not terrorism? Could we not substitute in ‘a bad smell’ to protect our children from the truth?

The difference is simple. Neither dogs nor Meningitis will punish you at the ballot box.

At bedtime tonight we discussed meningitis, its causes, how it spreads and what to do about it, she got into bed satisfied that the grown-ups knew what they were doing and she’d be alright. There doesn’t seem to be an antibiotic for terrorism but perhaps naming it might be a good start.

As we finally get into the story of the Fellowship of the Ring, the comparison between Tolkien’s Middle Earth and Britain is striking. Both have mortal danger. For the Hobbits, the Shire was paradise and, while they could, they ignored Mordor, but when the danger came, they faced it. We should be more Hobbit.

It’s time to pick GCSE options for my eldest, we get a form through from the school to make some initial choices. We spend some time looking at the videos explaining the subjects, the smiling teachers all making their pitch for their subject, explaining what the potential career options are. At this point my heart sinks a little. How can I help him make a decision on what subjects to spend the next 3 years studying when it’s not clear what jobs will be available at the end? We discuss the possibilities and the things he might be into, I keep my fears to myself for the time being, I don’t want a nihilistic 13 year old, they’re difficult enough as they are.

The curriculum

Before I get going, I realise that a curriculum, especially a national one takes time to write, consult on and implement. I’m not expecting any government to be able to meet the pace of change we are seeing at the moment or fully understand the implications. I’m not sure anyone can.

The problem

The problem is that most of the jobs for school leavers are being automated or replaced. The entry level jobs that you can start with little skill are going or gone. Junior data entry is disappearing. Basic accounting roles are increasingly automated. Marketing apprentices compete with software that never sleeps. First-line IT support is shrinking.

IT Support was where I started, helping an IT manager for a small company in my home town. From there I studied and got my first job in London working for a financial services company and worked my way up, as I learnt new skills I started taking on a bit more responsibility and took the next step. That initial step is now gone. That first rung on the career ladder is being removed by AI.

The missing rung

Without that path in, how do today’s school leavers get a start in IT when the helpdesk is now automated? What if you can’t do an unpaid internship in London because you’re from Wolverhampton and your parents can’t afford to fund it? What if you don’t have family friends at the firm? With that first rung gone, it will need money, connections, or both that most families don’t have. The stock responses - learn a skill, invest more in education - don’t answer the harder questions: what skill, for what future?

None of this means we should stop teaching, but the role of education is changing and it’s not just the state’s responsibility to educate our children, we parents have an even greater role to play. So, what can we teach in a world of such uncertainty?

Skills for life

How to learn – the skill that underpins all others. How do we break down complicated subjects? How do we know where to start or how to approach a new task?

Critical Thinking – with the volume of information available on the internet, and now with AI able to serve up the entire canon of human thought, it’s never been more important to be able to think critically, to ask questions, evaluate a claim or spot a fallacy.

AI literacy – anyone on the planet can get AI to write, code and think for them, and most people will. The skill is not prompt engineering, it is being able to use AI to help you think better, to test out ideas against almost every discovery we have made, to refine your thought - at anything, it doesn’t have to be intellectual, I have used LLMs to help me understand how engines work, how to make a Legolas costume (not for me) or what kind of exercise plan to adopt and then use it further to refine the plan or the knowledge.

Household finance – we will almost certainly not know what our children do for a living, but we know they’ll have a household to run. The basics - budgeting, understanding debt, knowing what tax is and how it works, having some idea of how to save for a future that feels increasingly hard to picture - are the same regardless of what the economy looks like. This is not financial advice. It’s literacy. And it’s scandalous that we don’t already teach it.

Basic economics – not theory, not textbooks, but the mechanisms that govern the world your child will live in. Why do prices go up? What is inflation actually doing to your money? Why does it matter what GDP per capita is, as opposed to GDP? What happens to wages when ten people are chasing one job? Understanding these things won’t protect you from them, but it means you can see what’s happening and why, rather than just feeling the effects and reaching for whoever’s offering the simplest explanation.

Tolerance for uncertainty – this is so important now, not only with the pace of change with AI, but climate change, politics, war, and a million other things outside our control. Understanding what you can and can’t control can help our children (and us) sit more calmly in a turbulent, ever-changing world.

The great wide world

The challenges and opportunities that nature presents have not changed in thousands of years. We have, we spend less time outside, the time we do spend is structured – clubs or organised activities. Time spent outside for children, unsupervised and unstructured will equip them with skills like patience and problem solving.

Nature is the original uncertainty. It doesn’t care what you planned, it doesn’t respond to your preferences, and it cannot be scrolled past. Children who spend time in it learn something no classroom can teach: that the world is indifferent, sometimes dangerous, learning to accept and embrace that is the point.

What does the future hold?

As we press send on the GCSE options, just before he drifts off thinking about something else, the feeling of uncertainty at what life holds hit us both. The world that those qualifications are designed to prepare him for may not exist, but what we will make sure is that whatever the future holds, he can adapt to it. That was not on the form.

The Land of Milk and Honey

Picture this. It’s 2035. You wake from a lovely sleep to a notification from your front door. Your Tesco shop has arrived, delivered by a robot. You don’t get out of bed, obviously. You press a button and the shopping is carried into your house, unpacked, sorted, and put away by your in-house robot, which then makes you a cup of tea.

Downstairs, breakfast is already being prepared by your Airfryer 3000. Frank Sinatra’s latest song, a cover of Eminem’s Stan is playing on the radio. You pause for a moment and wonder what to do with your day, do you lie outside and read some books? Carry on with the painting you are working on? Maybe attend the new android-led yoga class at the local gym, which everyone says is very calming. You opt for yoga then lunch with friends. You check your bank balance and see that your weekly AI dividend has landed, it always does.

A self-driving Tesla takes you to the restaurant. An AI butler greets you at the door and shows you to your table. With a flick of your eyes, you order your food, which arrives moments later, carried by a robot that looks uncannily similar to the one that brought your shopping earlier. After lunch you head home to find the house spotless. You lie on your bed and put on the Terminator 7 featuring a 25-year-old Arnold Schwarzenegger. You drift off into a peaceful sleep.

Now, a small question.

How did we get here?

The promise of AI is one of abundance and huge leaps in productivity, human labour will become largely unnecessary, enormous wealth will be created, society will adapt and the whole human race will benefit enormously.

Already we can see the huge amounts of wealth creation. The combined market capitalisation (combined value of equity) of the Magnificent Seven is $21 trillion, with NVIDIA, the chip maker over $5 trillion on its own. That means we already have around $2600 of wealth for every man, woman and child on the planet today - not cash in hand, but an illustration of the scale of wealth being created - and that’s just 7 companies.

The growth of AI is increasing at a massive rate, you can spin up an app just by talking to AI, it can help with personal finance, booking holidays and an ever expanding list of tasks.

The productivity gains don’t stop at home, the companies are making them too, according to Morgan Stanley research, the UK has recorded an 8% net job loss linked to AI over the past year (twice the global average). Job ads for software developers are down 37% since ChatGPT launched in 2022 and youth unemployment hit a five-year-high of 15.9%. These are worrying figures and this is happening now.

The Missing Piece

By what mechanism does AI productivity turn into shared prosperity? Well, there are a few ways

1) Redistribution of profits
After every billion of profits (clear, realised profit after all expenses) that goes into the Global Wealth Fund and gets distributed out to the population – either at national or global level.

2) Ownership broadened
Every citizen becomes a shareholder, dividends and equity are the backbone of our wealth.

3) Labour has compensating power
As productivity gains accelerate, workers are compensated as a share of the gains, this would need a strong trade union movement or social norms that enforce this.

4) The state needs to tax and transfer
90% tax on all profits over x$ and redistribute this via public spending or direct payments (think UBI)

None of these are happening. Global wealth funds require international cooperation that doesn’t exist and is unlikely to given regional tensions. Broadening ownership means diluting existing shareholders, which boards are legally obligated to resist (see next section). Labour’s compensating power has been declining for decades, with union membership at historic lows. And wealth taxes? As we’ve seen, the slightest mention of a wealth tax and companies start threatening to move their capital elsewhere (this could be solved by a global agreement, but see above)

How Companies Work

So, what does a company do? What is it for?

Firstly, a company is a legal and economic entity, it is not a moral agent. What do I mean by that? Well, a company exists for the good of the company, not of you or I or wider society, any benefit it has is a secondary consequence of the company’s activities, that’s not to say that companies don’t have remarkable benefit to society, but that is not their duty.

Their primary duty is to generate returns for its owners, as long as it is acting inside the law, then it can do that in any way it chooses. The directors of companies have fiduciary duties, these are legal obligations to ‘act in the best interests of the company’ which is generally taken to mean protecting profitability, preserving competitiveness and enhancing value. This can take many forms, but most usually increasing productivity and reducing costs.

There is no incentive or imperative for a company to share productivity gains, preserve jobs they no longer need, or distribute their profits outside of the company.

This is not evil, it has no morality at all, it’s the way the system works, in law and in practice, this is efficiency, this is a description of capitalism.

The Disconnect

Presently it is not clear how the age of AI abundance will come about. Although there is much talk about this wonderful utopia, no one has given any hint as to how this may be achieved. It’s possible that the disconnect is just one of communication, the tech CEOs assume the governments will come and sort it out and the governments are waiting for the CEOs, or it could be that the current situation suits them both.

Tech companies can talk about the future abundance while keeping all the present wealth. Governments are happy not only to keep taking what taxes there are, but are wary of trying to regulate something they barely understand which is led by billionaires who fund campaigns.

So Who Lives There?

If incentives don’t change, not you and not me. The same process that happens now, with wealth concentrated in few hands, and now it will be vast sums. That’s not to say that there won’t be some indirect benefits in technology, but everyone being able to quit work will not come about here.

We can already see what happens when productivity increases with AI: humans are let go; there are adverts asking ‘are you still hiring humans’. The likely outcome without intervention and agreement is more of the same, huge wealth, concentrated in few hands, everyone else hoping some of the milk and honey trickles down before it turns sour.

Ahh, the summer of 2005, as far as I can remember the sun never stopped shining and the sport went on forever. And then it stopped. Forever.

2005 was the last time the Ashes were on terrestrial TV. We’d already had over a decade of top flight football behind a paywall, since then F1, Darts and now cycling are subscription only.

The Tour De France was an outlier, ITV’s highlights show, every night at 7 during the Tour is gone with Discovery / TNT buying the rights from 2026.

Originally it was just one subscription service, but now it’s many, with single sports split across multiple providers. When I turned on Sky Sports for the first test of the 25/26 Ashes in Australia it wasn’t there, Sky lost the rights to TNT. The Premier League is on Sky and Amazon with the Champions League and Europa leagues on TNT - something like that anyway. It will probably have changed by the time this goes out.

The Cost

So, let’s see what sport costs in the UK in 2025:

Sky Sports from around £20 a month = £240

TNT Sports £18 a month = £216

Amazon Prime £10 depending on adverts = £120

And then if you want to watch any boxing or MMA – PPVs are £20 - £25 a time, let’s be conservative and say 3 boxing and 3 MMA – that’s £120 in PPV

= £696 a year

If you want to watch 3pm kick offs you need a season ticket to your club, for me and my son last year it was around £1300 (+ travel and food)

Over £2000 a year.

It’s not just the cost, the move to subscriptions has caused more problems, games are frequently moved so that they can be shown on TV often meaning late Saturday or Sunday travel for away fans. Lastly here, Boxing Day used to be a feast of football, no matter how bad the family had got on Christmas day, you knew you had the Boxing Day fixtures to look forward to. In 2025 – a single Premier League game.

What have we lost?

For most of the 20^th Century, sport was a shared cultural institution, it was there in the background, available to everyone, part of the fabric of society. I remember the FA Cup, right at the end of the season starting at about 10am live from Wembley, I used to sit there with my grandad back in the 80s all day watching the buildup, waiting for 3 o’clock. Now it’s moved to fit an ever more congested season, sometimes 3pm, other times 5pm, sometimes before the Premier League has even finished.

Frank Bruno vs Mike Tyson, live on ITV, the Ashes on Channel 4. F1 on the BBC, then ITV. All free to air, available to all of us, even if you didn’t watch it, sport cut across society, a common reference and shared cultural space.

The Squeeze

Over the past decade wages have stagnated, housing takes a greater share of income, energy and food costs have risen dramatically, squeezing disposable income. The cost of watching sport has increased with every bid and tender, Sky, Amazon, TNT, outdoing each other to secure the rights, each million pushing the price up for the consumer. I was going to write ‘fan’ but we are not treated like fans, we are consumers of products. The question isn’t whether we value sport, but whether the controllers of sport value us.

The Free Market?

The broadcasters will argue that the product they produce is superior to what would be available for free, and in some small ways they may be right, Hawkeye and Snicko are great technological additions, as is the in-car cameras and side by side views in F1, or stats and analysis in-game in the Premier League, but are they worth it? Not for the millions of kids who will never get into cricket or get to watch a Merseyside derby. This is not the free market – this is not freedom to choose, it’s coercion by exclusivity, its multinational corporations competing against each other.

Cycling is the perfect example, it requires ambient watching, the story has continuity from Tour to Tour, year to year and it converts casual viewers into riders, or did. Now you have to pay £18 a month for TNT (or £31.99 a month if you consume over the internet) on top of a Sky subscription and Amazon and everything else. This is a destructive model that prioritises short-term gain over long term sustainability.

Commonwealth in name only

The Commonwealth games is in Glasgow this year, and for the first time ever is not available on free to air TV. Already this seems like a bad deal for the UK, but consider this: the major funding for the Games comes from the UK government, through general taxation (so you and I), next, funding comes through the Scottish Government and Glasgow City council and also there is a cost to public services; police, the NHS. There is a commercial element that is used to offset the costs, but the key point here is that the public pays for the games, the private broadcasters monetise it and then sell it back to us.

Participation

Participation does not collapse overnight, and it would be dishonest to claim a single cause, but visibility matters, and it always has.

British Cycling’s membership has declined in recent years, and wider survey data paints a similar picture across sport. A YouGov study found that only 23% of Britons take part in sport in a typical month, while around a third say they used to play but no longer do. Those figures reflect many pressures, time, money, ageing, but access is one of them.

When the Tour de France was free on ITV, it sat in the background of summer. Children saw Wiggins, Froome, Cavendish, and cycling felt present, familiar, possible. Today, watching the same race online requires a subscription of £31.99 a month. The effect of that shift is impossible to quantify precisely, but the direction is clear. Fewer casual viewers means fewer sparks of interest.

The same pattern applies elsewhere. Cricket struggles to reach beyond its existing base even with the Hundred appearing on terrestrial television. Here County Cricket is the biggest loser. Football’s entry point increasingly requires money before it requires love. These are not abstract losses; they are cumulative ones.

What we do know is that cost hits unevenly. Lower-income households are far more likely to cite expense as a barrier to watching or attending sport, and access to live sport now tracks income with remarkable consistency. What was once culturally shared is increasingly economically sorted.

This is what happens when a commons is privatised. Not all at once, but gradually, quietly, until the absence becomes normal. The children priced out today are not just missing entertainment; they are the future fans, players, volunteers, and shared culture that sport cannot survive without.

I fell for it. I said “children need to know how to use technology” I repeated “it’s how they communicate these days” I just didn’t think about it. I was wrong and now I (we) are stuck in a dilemma. We’re right in the middle of an experiment on our children.

The real problem in our house is now trying to get out of the experiment and it’s really hard. Hard in two specific ways:

The Problems

Firstly, our own self-discipline. I love technology. I have worked in tech for 25 years now, I stare at a screen in one way or another for most of my day. Now with Wild Together I’m using more social media than I have done in years and it’s so easy to let it control me. So easy to let it pervade every corner of life. So easy to sit in front of the telly and check how many people are reading my work or looking at videos of Willow (the latter is more popular by some distance).

The other, more intractable, more emotionally difficult problem is not allowing a 13-year-old the technology that all his friends are using. The guilt we feel and the arguments it causes feel almost too much at times. We haven’t gone full digital demons, WhatsApp and YouTube are allowed (although we have time limits on this). It is tempting to throw the towel in sometimes, but we can’t.

The Evidence

I don’t want to get too academic, but here are a few things I try to keep in mind when it gets tough, they are partly how we made this decision.

1. The evidence we do have points in one direction. Across all countries and platforms, heavy social media use in children is associated with worse mental health, poorer attention, more anxiety, and more social comparison. The argument now is not whether it has an effect, but how strong it is and who is most vulnerable.

2. The people who built this world don’t trust it with their own children. Senior figures in tech and social media routinely delay or severely restrict smartphones and platforms for their kids. They understand the incentives, the mechanics, and the algorithms better than anyone, and they say no.

3. China doesn’t allow the western version of TikTok for its children. They run a heavily restricted, educational, time-limited version at home, while exporting the unrestricted, attention-maximising version abroad.

4. The biggest risks to children have moved online. Exploitation, grooming, coercion, and exposure no longer depend on physical proximity. They happen through private messages, disappearing content, group chats. These platforms are designed to reduce friction and accountability.

5. We already know how this ends, because we’re living it. As adults, many of us feel distracted, anxious, compulsive, and exhausted by the internet and social media. We talk openly about needing to ‘cut back’ or ‘get off our phones’. It seems reckless to assume children will somehow be immune to the same forces.

I want to be completely clear, my aim here is not to judge, or make anyone feel judged. Parenting is hard enough without other people making you feel like you’re doing a bad job. There is no manual, no instruction book. I remember looking at grown-ups when I was a kid, they seemed to know what they were doing, had all the rules sorted out. It turns out they were lying, just making it up as they went along, and they never told us! Now we find ourselves in a world infinitely more complicated with dangers that couldn’t have been conceived of even 10 years ago.

Some Things That Help

Social media is the part that worries me most, but also the hardest to deal with, we need to start somewhere, we need to do something collectively, it’s almost impossible in isolation.

My suspicion is that most parents feel this way, but starting is the hardest thing – no parent wants their child to be the only one left out. I don’t, this is not fun at all, but if I am right, and this is bothering everyone else, then there are some things that can be done now that might cause problems to start with but will be of real benefit to you and your children.

1. No phones or tablets in rooms overnight.
   Sleep and unsupervised scrolling don’t mix – if there’s one thing to do, it’s this.

2. No devices at meals
   Eating together and talking is one of life’s real pleasures (most of the time). Protecting it matters more than we realise.

3. No devices while you’re watching TV

   One screen is plenty. Netflix have started explaining the plot through dialogue multiple times in films now because no one is paying attention.

4. Get outside together

   Go for a walk, bike or take a football outside, it generally takes a little coaxing and cajoling, but once they’re out then they love the outside world

5. Get them outside - without you

   Unsupervised play is the ultimate ‘hack’ for not only development, but turning them into well rounded, decent human beings who can resolve conflicts on their own and be empathetic and creative.

Do I live by these rules? Um…. Sometimes. I try, it doesn’t always work, and it’s not about perfection, it’s never going to work all the time, but it is about consistency and applying the rules to everyone I can think of a million reasons why this applies to them, not me, but ultimately they’re going to watch what we do and if we’re all following the rules, together, that’s family and that’s how we succeed.

There was a very popular theory for a long time that all human beings were born as a blank slate, that what shaped the way a person behaved and what they achieved was almost entirely conditional on how they were raised. According to this view, there was nothing meaningful set at birth, and everybody could fulfil whatever potential they wanted. Over recent decades this theory has become less and less popular. In Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate, he makes the case that human behaviour is shaped not just by upbringing, but by biology and genetic inheritance stretching back thousands of years. That is not to say that environment does not matter, it clearly does, but it does not act on neutral material.

These ideas often spill into culture-war debates about good and evil, responsibility and blame. I am not interested in wading into those waters here. This is not about politics or ideology. It comes from something far more ordinary: raising children. My wife and I were talking recently about some of the traits we see in our children, some we absolutely love, and some we find more… difficult, and wondering whether they could or even should be removed. I remember feeling ashamed as a child, even being made to feel ashamed, about certain ways I behaved, my laziness among them, the report was always the same: “he possesses talent, but fails to apply himself” “could try harder”. I’m sure I’m not alone here. Since becoming a father, I see some of those same traits in my own children, and looking back I can see them in my own father as well. I can hardly punish or berate my children for these inheritances any more than I could for them having blue eyes or big feet.

We have come to the conclusion that this is the wrong way to think about children. The task is not to remake them, but to encourage and guide them, given the materials they arrive with.

This piece is not an academic paper. It is a primer, an attempt to explain how genetic inheritance, temperament, culture and society combine to produce the people we become. If you want to go deeper, your favourite LLM can help, and I will also point to some resources at the end.

History

The blank slate idea is relatively recent in the history of ideas. It gained popularity during the Enlightenment, particularly through Locke, and later through 20th-century behaviourism. It’s easy to see its attraction because it allows equal potential from birth and the possibility that humans can be shaped morally, and perhaps that we could engineer a perfect society.

The theory has become less popular in recent times. Part of that shift has come simply from observation: societies and families do not behave as though children arrive interchangeable. Many attempts have also been made to prove the blank slate theory in studies, but have failed to do so. Differences in behaviour, temperament and outcome persisted even when environments were similar.

Pinker’s book did not introduce this change on its own, but it neatly summarised the broader shift in thinking: human behaviour is shaped by genes and environment together. Upbringing matters, culture matters, education matters, but they already had some material to work with.

Temperament

One of the first observable ways we can see temperament in babies is in differences such as their reactivity to noise or how easy they are to soothe. In the same way that the body evolved over hundreds of thousands of years, the nervous system has evolved as well. Genes influence ranges, not precise amounts. In the same way that the average man is faster or stronger than the average woman, genes give a wide scope for temperament, preferences and threat responses. This is not just anecdotal, it shows up time and time again across cultures and populations. There is a famous study by Jerome Kagan on inhibited (strong reactions to new people, distress in unfamiliar settings, preference for predictability) versus uninhibited (calm reactions to new situations or settings, moving readily towards stimulation) infants. He showed that highly reactive, inhibited babies often became cautious children and low-reactive babies often became exploratory and bold. Again, these were ranges rather than rules, it wasn’t always the case, but the trend was in that direction.

You’re just like your mother

There have been more than a few times since my children were born that I’ve been struck by the way they look or act like their ancestors. Some of it is very cute, like the way my daughter looks like my mum sometimes, others not so much. Both my daughter and I share a body shape that finds it easier to gain fat than is ideal. My wife and my son share many physical similarities too, but I don’t share many with him, nor my wife with our daughter.

Temperamentally the same is true. My daughter and I are very good at relaxing, while my wife and son struggle to switch off easily. I see this very clearly with my wife, her three sisters and their parents, they react in similar ways to certain situations. If I’m feeling in a particularly masochistic mood I might point some of this out to her. The human species has, over millennia, evolved to suit its surroundings, both physically and mentally. In families we see this most clearly: inherited tendencies shaped and softened by habits, stories and ways of doing things, and what happens at this small scale is repeated, more slowly and more formally, across whole cultures.

Families at scale

Think about the way you were brought up, the rules your parents had for you, and the rules your grandparents, aunts and uncles passed down. All of these explicit rules, and many of them felt harsh or ridiculous at the time, helped shape the way you see the world and how you behave in it. Many only made sense later, once you had children of your own, or at least knew people who did. The things you were praised or scolded for did not disappear, they stayed with you and still shape you today.

Society does this at scale, over much longer periods of time. These rules and expectations change slowly and unevenly, but they persist. What we loosely call ‘Britishness’, even if it is hard to define precisely, is a product of this process. In the same way that families develop their own ways of doing things, what you might call ‘Smithness’ or ‘Jonesness’, societies develop shared customs and expectations that hold people together and allow them to live alongside one another.

Your biology is innate, we can see that from birth. It then meets your family, where it is shaped to greater or lesser effect, and as you grow you encounter other people who teach you, often implicitly, how to behave. School is usually the first formal meeting with society, where you learn that you cannot steal Emily’s dolly, throw a train at Connor’s head, or pick your nose and eat it. From there you move into wider and more varied social worlds, each with different expectations, which people meet in different ways.

That variation matters. People respond differently because they start differently. They arrive shaped by their genes and their early surroundings, and although you will find people you recognise yourself in, people you feel immediately at home with, you will never find another person who is quite the same as you.

So where does this leave us?

As tempting as it is to try and change our children (or the children we meet and care for) into something we think they should be, it isn’t going to work. It hasn’t worked for millennia, and it didn’t work on you. That doesn’t mean there are no rules. Children need boundaries, they need to be kept safe, and they need to learn how to exist alongside others. Customs and traditions matter, but children have to be allowed to understand what those things mean to them, and to grow into them in their own way.

This is hard. I fail more than I succeed trying to live by my own rules. I still want to grab mine around the neck like Homer Simpson and throttle them, and when I see their peers changing my sweet little babies I almost cannot resist the urge to push back and try to make them mine again, but I know it won’t work. The forces of biology and society, of both nature and nurture, are too strong.

Our job is not to manufacture children. It is to guide them, to keep them safe, and to help them understand the world they are growing into.

Definitions

Temperament

A set of biologically influenced tendencies in how a person responds to the world — for example, how reactive they are to new situations, how easily they calm down, and their typical level of activity or caution. These differences are observable early in infancy and remain relatively stable over time.

Behaviourism

A psychological approach dominant in the early 20th century that treated human behaviour as learned entirely from the environment, often ignoring internal biological factors. The idea of the “blank slate” in psychology has roots in behaviourist thinking, though modern science understands both genes and environment shape behaviour.

Blank Slate (Tabula Rasa)

The idea that people are born without built-in mental content and that all behaviour and personality traits come from experience and environment. This view has declined in popularity because evidence shows biological and genetic factors also shape who we are.

Further reading

· The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, Steven Pinker — on how science challenges blank-slate assumptions.

· The Nature of the Child, Jerome Kagan — foundational work on early temperament.

· Nature vs Nurture overview (Wikipedia) — evidence showing both genetics and environment matter.

· Not in Our Genes, Lewontin, Rose & Kamin — critical perspective on genetic explanations.

Image: UK Parliament chamber, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 3.0).

What Are We Fighting For?

This week, the head of Britain’s armed forces warned that there is a “growing risk” Russia could attack the UK, and that the nation’s “sons and daughters need to be ready to fight.”

This is an utterly extraordinary thing to say to a nation with whom the state has been eroding its side of the social contract.

A Crisis of Competence

I am beginning to think the Crisis of Competence in our establishment is worse than first thought. It’s not just that decisions are bad, it appears that there is no self-awareness and no basic common sense left anywhere near the centre of power.

A catalogue of failures in the past decades, they may have different origins and timelines, but they all point in the same direction: a steady decline of trust in the state’s competence and good faith:

• Living standards declining

• Quantitative easing redistributing wealth upwards on a scale few thought possible

• Unaffordable housing

• Fraying public services

• Borders visibly unmanaged

• Trust in state institutions at an all-time low

Sacrifice Without Trust

Now brought into sharp focus – defence spending, managed on the assumption that large-scale war was no longer possible. The armed forces reduced to a shadow of their former selves and now the news that “more families will know what sacrifice for our nation means.”

For what, exactly, and for whom?

We have just been told it is important to be honest with “families and households” about the need to prepare for “real, physical threats.” We are told that “sons and daughters. Colleagues. Veterans… will all have a role to play. To build. To serve. And if necessary, to fight.”

Firstly, this has been a very quick escalation from “the war will end soon” to “looks like there’s going to be a lot more war” but more importantly, this is serious language, a consequential message, but delivered from an establishment that has very low trust from the public and no legitimacy, no right to demand this from its people.

The message of war arrived without acknowledgement of failure, there was no effort to rebuild trust before asking for loyalty and sacrifice.

Perhaps in the high-trust society we once were this would have come across as realistic and measured, but in Britain in 2025 it comes across as arrogance.

Experience, Expertise and Exposure to Consequence

There is another problem here, a recurring theme in my writing.

Who, exactly, has the experience to speak this way?

Parliament is now dominated by a political class whose members increasingly arrive through think tanks, NGOs into special adviser roles with very little experience of a world outside Westminster. Similarly, the military has become more managerial and professionalised. The head of Britain’s armed forces has many years of experience with operational military matters, but no front-line combat experience of the kind he’s now asking the countries “sons and daughters” to prepare for.

This has come about partly due to the wars that Britain has chosen to fight, but it does matter.

We are entitled to ask whether anyone actually knows what they are asking for.

To be clear, it’s not the lack of technical expertise that is the problem here, but a lack of exposure to the consequences of action. It is easy for leaders to talk of children and families and sacrifice, while staying insulated from that reality. Historically, British leaders knew this. Nelson did not command from the back, he stood on the deck of the Victory in full view of the enemy, sharing the risk of the men he commanded and he was killed there. I’m not suggesting our leaders need to volunteer for active duty, but the imbalance here is hard to ignore.

The Ukraine Contradiction

It feels like there are contradictions running through all of this. Supporting Ukraine against Russian aggression is not the issue, it has wide support on moral and strategic grounds, but the logic of supporting Ukraine just enough to keep going and not lose is not a good strategy – it is attrition by proxy and invites cynicism about its purpose.

Large amounts of money have been spent, but industrial capacity has not been rebuilt, investment has not really increased, and we are told that the chance of Russia directly attacking the UK is “remote,” maybe 5%.

All of this indicates that our leaders really believe that the risk is low, which makes this rhetoric jarring. Any nation can tolerate danger and sacrifice in the right circumstances, but danger and sacrifice without honesty is another chip away at the social contract.

Hyperreality and the Desert of the Real

There is a French philosopher called Jean Baudrillard who will be another recurring theme in my writing. He has a concept called “Hyperreality” in which he warned that modern societies increasingly replace reality with representations of reality that feel real enough to organise behaviour or justify authority, but, over time the representations cease to point to anything solid underneath them, they become the reality, its endpoint (where the underlying reality is no longer needed) he called “the desert of the real”

This is where we are now.

The rhetoric does not match the underlying conditions, podcast war games simulate national collapse, strategic language simulates mobilisation, speeches simulate solidarity. (and once you see this, you can see it everywhere).

The simulation continues because admitting the absence of reality would expose the emptiness underneath.

When the defence chief cites media simulations as a way to “raise awareness,” it is not reassurance. The nation wants to see its leaders act like leaders, and if they believe war is coming, act like it.

The Reality

This is not war readiness. It is theatre.

The public are not stupid. They understand that the world is dangerous. What they no longer accept is being asked to pay the highest price by institutions that have yet to understand their own failures, or with the loss of trust that those failures produced.

There’s a scene in the Godfather, after Sonny Corleone is killed that Don Vito turns to Tom Hagen and says “Consigliere of mine, I think you should tell your Don what everyone seems to know”, this morning we are Don Vito and the OBR is Tom Hagen, although that is flattering to the OBR. News in the Times (and wherever else you get your news) this morning “UK economy contracts 0.1% in October” and the sub-heading is even more revealing (or maddening, or both) “GDP shrank unexpectedly” – hands up who here is surprised? Is that one hand at the back I see? No, OK, thought not. Everyone knows that the economy is in a total mess, it’s obvious everywhere you look, yet when the figures arrive, the media presents them as a surprise, as if we’ve not been living with this reality for months.

If there was any doubt left that this system is not working for ordinary people then that should be gone now. You don’t need OBR forecasts or Newsnight to know what life I like for you and your family. Contrary to the news from SW1, the economy doesn’t live in a spreadsheet, it’s a real thing that affects everyone. The complete chasme between reality and institutional narrative has become impossible to ignore.

We have already discussed, at great length why GDP is not a good measure of the strength of an economy (for normal people living in it). It measures how much activity is taking place but doesn’t tell us whether this is productive or improving peoples lives. It reduces everything to a single digit which we’re expected to applaud when it moves in a positive direction, even when the underlying reality is falling confidence, non existent growth and stagnant wages.

So, the question we have to ask is: what is the point in these forecasts? What is the point in the OBR producing projections that do not reflect the real world? What is the point in the media reporting them as though they are actually news? We can see something completely different, which raises a more pertinent question: what exactly is the purpose of this governments economic policy (we could go on to ask what is the point of this government, but maybe that’s for another day). The policy at the moment seems incapable of understanding the lived conditions of regular Brits.

The previous budget increased employer NI, which did look good on the treasury’s spreadsheet, but almost immediately weakened the jobs market, this budget raised taxes on working people (the fiscal rules are another alternative reality in SW1). GDP per capita has been flat or falling for years (the exact numbers can be debated, but we can see the direction of travel) Living standards are plausibly the worst in decade. The basic duty of a government is to make the best of a difficult sitautuon for its citizens and this government (and the blue one before it) has completely failed.

As I’ve said, none of this should be surprising coming from a system that treats human beings as a fiscal lever to make a spreadsheet go green. ‘Growth’ (GDP) has been pursued by increasing the number of workers to make more consumers. Anybody who thinks that people are just an input variable should be a long way from being able to make that a reality. The appeasement of the OBR and the bond markets is socially corrosive.

All this plays out in a theatre; Question Time and Newsnight, The Politics Hub and Peston, X and even TikTok. Politicians point to one another’s failures or quietly rewrite their own records praying that the next election is kind to them. The performative nature of modern society does not lend itself well to serious politics and when politics becomes performance, everything else suffers.

The deeper issue is structural. The problem is not that all politicans have the same background, they don’t. This government has many working-class MPs on its benches, but the problem is that they almost all came through the same narrow pipeling, the same courses at the same universities, the same NGOs and think-tanks resulting in the same economic and political assumptions. Different accents, same ideas. When all of the decision makers think the same way, we’re going to get the same decisions over and over again.

We need more diversity. Diversity of opinion, of thought, of experience. There are so many thoughtful, switched on, knowledgeable people. Critical thinkers, business men and women, philosophers and thinkers in Britain who could radically alter the shape and prosperity of Britain, but they remain outside the structure. The problem is not a lack of talent or ideas, it’s getting them to a position where they can help grow this country. If we want different results we are going to have to change the system.

Disclaimer:

The views expressed in this essay are entirely my own. They do not represent the opinions or positions of any organisation or project I’m associated with.

This piece reflects personal interpretation and commentary based on publicly available data and reporting from sources such as the ONS, IMF, and the House of Commons Library. While every effort has been made to ensure accuracy at the time of writing, this should not be taken as financial or investment advice.

Frame from Chas & Dave’s Christmas Knees-Up (Thames Television, broadcast 25 Dec 1982) Source: YouTube — ChasNDaveVideos, accessed 6 Dec 2025.

I love country music, I’ve always loved country music. My earliest memories are of Tammy Wynette or Johnny Cash on the record player on a Sunday afternoon, watching my mum and dad singing in the kitchen. I also loved Chas & Dave and Lonnie Donegan and Jethro Tull, and I still do, but I’ve often wondered why country music is going through another revival and selling out the Albert Hall with Luke Combs and Darius Rucker, while I’m still watching Chas & Dave’s Cockney Christmas Knees Up on a grainy YouTube video every Christmas. That gig, in a pub, features one of the best country guitarists to ever have played, Albert Lee (from Birmingham), and the best blues guitarist who ever lived (come at me, I’ll die on this hill), Eric Clapton (from Guildford). It was recorded in 1982, forty-three years ago, yet American artists are selling out the Albert Hall in 2025.

What happened? Where is our country music? Surely a country that’s thousands of years old, with a history as rich and varied as ours and with the hardships our working class has had to bear, should have the best country music in the world.

So what is country music? The answer depends on who you ask, and even that may change with the time of day or the amount of whisky drunk, but for my purpose the cliché will do: three chords and the truth. Country music at its heart is simple, honest and rooted in the experiences of working people. Musically it normally features a guitar, a banjo or a mandolin, and the percussion often comes from the strings themselves. There are fiddles everywhere.

The country music that came alive in America has its roots in the British Isles. Many of the songs, instruments and styles that became country music crossed the Atlantic with British and Irish settlers in the 1700s and 1800s.

I first heard the song ‘Barbara Allen’ on an album by Billie Joe Armstrong and Norah Jones in 2013. What I didn’t realise at the time was that the song was first mentioned in Samuel Pepys’s diary in 1666, at the time of the Great Fire of London. It crossed the Atlantic and was rediscovered in Appalachia in the early 1900s. From there it became a cornerstone of Anglo-American balladry, absorbed into early country repertoires and recorded by Dolly Parton and Bob Dylan alongside Armstrong and Jones and many others.

Similarly, I knew Scarborough Fair, made famous by Simon and Garfunkel, was an old folk song, but not that it began life in the Middle Ages. Along with Barbara Allen, versions were found by collectors like Cecil Sharp in the Appalachian Mountains in the early 1900s.

Settlers also carried their instruments, most notably the violin, or fiddle. Developed in northern Italy around 1550 and spread to the British Isles by the 1600s, it became the heart of rural dance music in England, Scotland and Ireland. Ulster Scots and English migration carried fiddling to North America, and by 1800 it was central to Appalachian life. Tunes like Soldier’s Joy and Fisher’s Hornpipe, both born in Britain, became American standards.

Even some of the rhythmic motifs of country music came from these shores. Listen for the bass that rocks like a boat: low note, fifth, back again. You can hear it in Welsh and Irish harp tunes long before the boom-chicka of Johnny Cash. I’ve kept one harp track on the playlist so you can hear the family resemblance.

So the bones of country music are Anglo-Celtic in nature. We were its early pioneers. We are country music. Which leaves the question: what happened back here?

Well, and this will probably not come as a complete shock to anyone British, I think we got embarrassed about who we are. We stopped believing our own lives were worth singing about. The emotional vocabulary of home, faith and belonging became unfashionable. Country requires sincerity, but we abandoned all that to become ironic, sarcastic cynics.

I’m not saying that this is the only reason for our lack of mainstream voices from the heartlands. Industry and demography matter. The United States kept a commercial infrastructure for plain-spoken music that Britain never built at scale: radio formats, church and hymn traditions, rural touring circuits. Migration and media economics shaped what reached the mainstream. I’m also not saying British music fell silent; it evolved, punk, Britpop, grime. Authentic in their own registers, authentically British, but my claim is narrower: the emotional vocabulary that country keeps in the mainstream - home, place, belonging, faith - was pushed to the margins here. When that does appear in Britain, it shows up as niche or irony, not centre-stage.

We did not run out of stories; we learned to flinch from telling them. Orwell saw the beginnings of this. In The Lion and the Unicorn he wrote that “England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality.” In those rooms irony and sarcasm pushed out feeling, and patriotism sounded vulgar.

That tone did not stay put. The places that set our taste, the private schools, publishers, newspapers and the BBC taught it to the rest of us. Recently John Humphrys has written that, for years, the BBC’s output reflected an educated, liberal world view, with working-class voices often marginalised and trust lower among poorer audiences.

As it spread, the middle class stopped being embarrassed about England and started being embarrassed for the English: the pubs, the flags, the sentiment, the unfashionable sincerity of it all.

The working class absorbed it. Bit by bit they learned to see their own culture the way the tastemakers saw it, as something to be ashamed of, something to grow out of. People kept their pride at home while learning to hide it in public. That tension made the old songs feel out of place.

The old songs faded from the centre. We imported our folk feeling from America, where the vocabulary of home and faith never went out of fashion. There were holdouts: Fairport Convention, Steeleye Span, village sessions that never died. But they were niche. Chas & Dave, for all their working-class understanding, were treated as a novelty. Morris dancers and wassailers became quaint, rolled out for village fetes.

Billy Bragg is the exception that proves the rule, a Barking voice carried by protest and folk-punk. The appetite survived; the permission often needed a cause.

The desire never left us though, American country artists tour here more and more and in late September 2025 the Grand Ole Opry took over the Royal Albert Hall and the place roared. Luke Combs brought out Marcus Mumford and led a room of Londoners through songs about love, loss, longing and home. For a moment you could feel the river running both ways. The appetite is not the problem, the permission is. We reach for American songs because they never stopped speaking plainly, from the heart. Nashville has its machinery and its polish, of course. It can be as calculating as any scene. But it never abandoned the hunch that ordinary lives and plain speech are worth celebrating, even when packaged for the mass market.

We had felt that place before. Chas & Dave’s Cockney Christmas Knees Up, filmed in 1982, could mark the end of unapologetic authenticity, the last moment we were not embarrassed by who we are. The set list ran through ‘Rabbit’ and ‘London Girls’, a simple hymn to our own, and brought on Lenny Peters, who sang about Jesus without a wink while the crowd swayed and joined in. Clapton, Lee and Chas & Dave’s ‘Goodnight Irene’ was a pub singalong across generations. I am not sure we would even allow it now; we take ourselves far too seriously. The closer, ‘If I Could Write a Love Song’, was tender and unguarded, and the room met it the same way.

For a long time we forgot what that room felt like. The pandemic offered a glimpse of what we had lost, during lockdowns people rediscovered sea shanties, kitchen-table concerts, and songs that spoke to shared experience rather than individual aspiration. For a moment, sincerity didn’t feel naive; it felt necessary, proof that simple songs about work and weather still move people. The crowd still answers when the voice is local. Nathan Evans, a former postman and ironworker filled our homes with those shanties during Covid, Gerry Cinnamon fills stadiums with a plain Glasgow voice and crowd-made momentum. Sam Fender carries brass band and pit-town feeling, singing about council houses and grassroots football onto the biggest stages. Whenever we sing in our own accent, audiences answer.

The desire is here; the stories are here. What we lost was the nerve to sing them in our own voice. We can take it back any time we like. Write the songs about terraces and allotments, mills and markets and about call centres, childcare and the night bus. Drive the Ticketmasters from the temple, stop treating sincerity as a guilty pleasure. The stories haven’t disappeared; we’ve just convinced ourselves they aren’t worth the telling. Let the voice of this country grow loud again.

Playlist

Here’s a companion playlist for the essay - a whistle-stop tour from old English/Welsh ballads and dance tunes that seeded American country, through Appalachian standards and Cash’s boom-chicka, to modern flashes of unembarrassed, local voice.

1. Billie Joe Armstrong & Norah Jones - “Barbara Allen”
   Pepys-era ballad that crossed to Appalachia; Exhibit A for our shared songbook.
   

2. Martin Carthy - “Scarborough Fair”
   Medieval English ballad in its home accent; the root before Simon & Garfunkel.
   

3. Robin Huw Bowen - “Ar Hyd y Nos”
   Welsh harp tune; hear the rocking bass (root-fifth-root) that underpins country rhythm.
   

4. The Watersons - “Country Life”
   English rural chorus singing - work, seasons, community - without irony.
   

5. Jean Ritchie - “The Cuckoo”
   Anglo-American ballad preserved in the mountains; the folk line intact.
   

6. The Carter Family - “Wildwood Flower”
   Bedrock of early country; British-Isles melody reframed in Virginia.
   

7. The Sharp Flatpickers - “Fisher’s Hornpipe / Whiskey Before Breakfast”
   British dance tune into American fiddle standard - roots and afterlife in one cut.

8. Bill Monroe & The Blue Grass Boys - “Uncle Pen”
   Bluegrass cornerstone honouring the fiddler who carried the old tunes on.
   

9. Ralph Stanley - “O Death”
   Stark Appalachian spirituality; the plain voice laid bare, with echoes of English balladry.
   

10. Johnny Cash - “I Walk the Line”
    The alternating-bass “boom-chicka” no one did it better.
    

11. Chas & Dave - “London Girls”
    Unapologetically local, pub-room affection - authentic English vernacular.

12. Nathan Evans - “Wellerman”
    The lockdown shanty revival; proof the crowd still answers to work-songs.

13. Gerry Cinnamon - “Sometimes”
    Stadium singalong from a plain Glasgow voice; sincerity and honesty.

14. Sam Fender - “Remember My Name”
    Modern North-East storytelling (colliery-band DNA in his world); people, place and pride back on big stages.

Despite already knowing it was not going to be pleasant, and the OBR giving us a preview (to soften the blow?) an hour before it was announced, it is difficult not to feel disappointed by this Budget. On any side of the political divide I cannot see many people jumping up and down with excitement. The question that keeps coming back to me is simple. What was the point? What exactly was Reeves trying to do here?

If you want to stop relying on the bond markets you could cut spending.

If you want to get re elected you could avoid hammering the only productive part of the economy.

If on the other hand you want to obliterate any sense of goodwill among the hardworking people you claim to care about, then well done. That part you have achieved.

This is the first problem. None of this happened by accident. Reeves made these choices because she is terrified of ‘doing a Truss’ and is even more terrified of being accused of being the ‘same old Labour’ or of attempting welfare reform again, so instead of taking any risks or attempting any reform, she chose the one path that guarantees short term market praise and long term stagnation – truly the worst of all worlds.

There is almost no growth in this Budget. Nothing on the supply side, no reform, no investment story, no plan to get more people into work, no route to a more productive economy. We are a low investment, low productivity, low participation country with rising welfare costs. Whatever productive base we do have is shrinking and has been for a long time. A serious, competent government would start with the structural weaknesses we already face, but what Reeves has done is stabilised a problem she, herself created by choosing an arbitrary fiscal rule, that ties her hands behind her back and then presented the result as competence.

Of course the markets reacted positively. They always do when the government taxes people more and spends less. The bond market does not care how much worse off households are, how miserable life is, it cares about fiscal stability and discipline. The Reuters article spells this out clearly.

“Reeves delivered a Budget that will take more tax from workers, people saving for a pension and from investors to give herself more room for meeting her borrowing targets.”

That is it. All they care about is getting their money back, but they cannot be blamed for this, it is their function, we are the cause of our predicament, not the bond markets.

What will happen now is that Reeves will stand up and tell us that she has brought the cost of borrowing down, so therefore her choices were right. This sounds impressive as long as you do not look too closely (this is a common theme in modern politics) but it does not mean anything for the real economy, it is once again, vibes. Gilt yields did not fall because she improved productivity, investment or growth. They fell because she took more money off the parts of the country that still generate value. That is not real stability.

Reeves has lowered the cost of government borrowing by raising the cost of living for everyone else. That is what threshold freezes, higher NI on pensions and cuts to take home pay do. These policies are not free. Interest rates are predicted to fall, but only because the Budget is contractionary, not because it made the economy more productive or healthier. A rate cut would be a sign of weakness, not success. Lower mortgage rates will help households, but they will not fix any of the underlying structural problems, beware when you are told this is progress. These are simple revenue grabs dressed up as a responsible plan. As I have said previously, this looks good on the Treasury’s spreadsheets, not the country’s.

She is stabilising the state’s finances by squeezing households in a low growth economy that already has record taxes, record inactivity and a shrinking productive base. That may please the markets, but it does not fix the underlying problem. And this is the heart of it. If you only treat the symptoms, the disease gets worse. Britain’s structural weaknesses do not improve when you make working households poorer.

It is also untrue that the tax burden will be carried by the wealthiest. This Guardian framing is dishonest. The OBR scores show that the majority of new revenue comes from middle earners, the productive part of society. Taxed more and penalised for saving for retirement. This is not affecting the wealthy. The only ‘wealth tax’ (on houses over £2m) raises £0.4 billion out of £26 billion. Reeves has balanced the books on the only group she felt safe taxing – for all the talk of how the billionaires are the problem it turns out that it’s managers and doctors who are the real villains.

And just to show how misleading the government’s messaging is, look at the claim that Reeves has created £21.7 billion of headroom - this sounds impressive, however:

Headroom is the amount of spare cash the Chancellor leaves herself and is the difference between planned tax income and spending in the final year of the OBR forecast.

Firstly, it is not real. It is a forecast and only applies in the final year of the forecast, which makes it useless for anything except signalling (more vibes). Secondly, you can wipe out £21.7 billion of headroom with

• 0.3 per cent productivity downgrade

• 0.25 to 0.5 per cent rise in gilt yields

• A softening of wage growth

• A rise in welfare caseloads.

All of which have happened.

And this is the absurdity. Reeves is congratulating herself for hitting a target that collapses under the slightest pressure.

This is something else that nobody mentions. In the last three years the OBR has downgraded its own forecast nine times. Nine downgrades in three years. Two forecasts every year. Three downgrades every year. This is the foundation on which headroom is built. It is almost meaningless. Even worse, now they are moving the OBR forecast to once a year “if you can’t see it, it can’t be happening”

One of the major headline measures, removing the two-child limit seems to be a moral step and it definitely helps children who already exist, and that is a good thing, but it does not fix the structural reasons those families are in poverty. Children raised in households without work, without skills, or without stability are much more likely to become adults who struggle in the same way, not through fault of their own but because disadvantage repeats itself unless you change the environment around it. I am not reducing anyone to economics here. It is not good for the individual or for society to pretend that income support alone changes long term life chances.

We need a productive society, and in my view removing the two-child cap creates the opposite incentive. More dependency, not more contribution. More cost, not more capacity. Poverty needs to be relieved in the present, but long-term outcomes need to be improved as well. The Budget does one and ignores the other.

Everything comes back to the same point. We need a productive economy and a productive society. There is no other way. More people working. More people invested in the country they live in. More people contributing. A government that prioritises looking responsible to bond markets over fixing the real economy has its priorities the wrong way round. Nothing in this Budget moves us toward a more productive future. It simply makes the present more expensive for the people who are already carrying the country.

Disclaimer:

The views expressed in this essay are entirely my own. They do not represent the opinions or positions of any organisation or project I’m associated with.

This piece reflects personal interpretation and commentary based on publicly available data and reporting from sources such as the ONS, IMF, and the House of Commons Library. While every effort has been made to ensure accuracy at the time of writing, this should not be taken as financial or investment advice.