National Belonging and Ancestral Heritage

Much of the response to Rupert Lowe’s Early Day Motion on English, Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish identities has suggested that Northern Irish identity did not exist. But at the 2021 census, 31.5 per cent of people in Northern Ireland identified as Northern Irish either alone or with another designation, and those professing to be only Northern Irish were 19.8 per cent, comparable to the Arabs in Israel.

Lowe, however, should consider who they were. They seem most likely to vote for the Alliance Party, although the parlous condition of Unionism might lead to the revival of the perennial muttering about UDI among people who would otherwise seem fertile soil for Restore Britain, yet who in that case could not be further from it.

Lowe’s co-signatories Andrew Rosindell, Suella Braverman and James McMurdock suggest that ethnonationalism in Reform UK, however confused in Braverman’s case, had been infused from the Conservative Party, where much of the same tendency no doubt remained.

And speaking of Remainers, those who would rejoin the European Union should face the fact that its governments and electorates were as indifferent to them as Donald Trump was to his British fan club, or as almost everyone in Great Britain was to Ulster Unionists, while four fifths of people in the 26 Counties regarded Sinn Féin anywhere, and actually existing Nationalism of whatever stripe in the Six Counties, with something a great deal more virulent than mere indifference.

Systemic and Fundamental

Throughout its existence, this site has argued for a criminal offence of sexual activity with any person under the age of 18 who was more than two years younger than oneself, with a maximum sentence equal to twice the difference in age, and the abolition of different rules for “positions of trust”. We need to ban abortion and contraception for those under 18 at least without parental knowledge and consent, just as they thankfully cannot now be given puberty blockers.

What sort of parent would want to put his underage daughter on the Pill? There is only one possible reason for doing so. The Thatcher Government secured a judicial fiat that, without bothering to ask Parliament, abolished the age of consent altogether. Gillick competence ought instead to be called Thatcher competence. The Major Government did write Thatcher competence into the Age of Legal Capacity (Scotland) Act 1991. But it is applied in Northern Ireland on no apparent authority. Even in England and Wales, it has never been subject to a parliamentary vote. Let there be one now.

We need to rule out the legal possibility of being a specifically sexual assailant below an age of consent that had been raised to 18, thereby correcting the anomaly that had existed since 2003. In that year, a male heterosexual age of consent of 16 was created by default due to political horse-trading among the feminist and gay groups around Harriet Harman, of all people, which insisted that both sexes and all acts be treated in exactly the same way. Yet the age of criminal responsibility remains 10, meaning that boys can be prosecuted for rape, itself significantly redefined in 2003, six years before they can legally have consensual sex. And they are. Indeed, boys who allege abuse by women are routinely accused of rape.

We need the replacement of the existing categories of sexual assault with aggravating circumstances to the general categories of offences against the person, such that the sentences could be doubled. There should be no anonymity either for adult defendants or for adult complainants. Either we have an open system of justice, or we do not. We need to specify that intoxication was a bar to sexual consent only insofar as it would have been a bar to driving. We need to end the blocking of progress into paid or voluntary work even though one had been acquitted. C5 notices should be outlawed. And we need to make it a criminal offence for anyone aged 21 or over to buy or sell sex, with equal sentencing on both sides. The Universal Basic Income, the Jobs Guarantee, and the dividends from public stakes in the FTSE 500 companies, distributed equally to everyone, would remove any conceivable excuse for prostituting oneself. That would include filmed or photographed prostitution. As Jonathan Cook writes:

There is something all too obviously going unnoticed as the latest scandal breaks about a celebrity engaging in sexually abusive behaviour – this time concerning the comedian and children’s author David Walliams. Days after fellow comedian Russell Brand was sentenced to 10 years for rape and sexual assault – and there are already indications that the cases heard in his trial may be just the tip of an iceberg – Walliams is accused of a long history of grooming teenage girls.

Perhaps the most shocking scene in an ITV documentary that broke the story this week is of fellow comedian Jonathan Ross joking at the 2004 Comedy Awards: “The comedy awards is 15 years old – 15 years old! And like most 15-year-olds, it’s drunk, it’s unpredictable and it’s probably going home with David Walliams.” Shocking because his comment precedes most of the cases of alleged grooming uncovered by the documentary. Shocking because the author, or authors, of Jonathan Ross’s “joke” – Ross denies he wrote it – knew full well what Walliams was up to and thought it worthy of being turned into a joke. Shocking because the audience at the awards ceremony – including many people dear to the public’s heart – appeared to be in on the “joke” and found it uproariously funny. And shocking because Walliams himself responded to the “joke” as if it were a pat on the back rather than any kind of rebuke, or as if there were any real danger of exposure.

In ITV’s documentary, let us note, Ross is also shown in a photo of a group of celebrity friends on a night out that includes Walliams accompanied by one of his young accusers – a teenage model who, alone among the group, appears not to be having a good time. She looks deeply uncomfortable, more like a hostage. And of course, Jonathan Ross was the other participant in a notorious 2008 BBC radio-show “prank” that backfired disastrously. For the first time, it got the self-confessed sex addict Russell Brand into trouble. Brand left messages on the answerphone of ageing actor Andrew Sachs – Manuel from Fawlty Towers – revealing that Brand had had sex with Sachs’ granddaughter. Ross got off relatively lightly from that affair, dubbed Sachsgate, with only a short suspension. He’s been a staple on TV ever since.

Power imbalance

We have been here before. Many times. And just as happened in 2011 after posthumous revelations emerged – again that had been widely known for years – of Jimmy Savile’s decades-long sexual abuse of children, we have been delivered the same predictable responses. Those closest to Walliams have hastily denounced him and distanced themselves from his behaviour. Institutions and companies that profited from his TV work and books are making no less implausible claims that they did not know what was going on, as well as empty promises that lessons will be learnt. None of this should be taken seriously. The industry that creates the Saviles, the Brands and the Walliamses – and the culture that stands behind it – is not about to change or be reformed. Too much money is at stake.

We will continue to act outraged when such people are outed. But they are very much products of a culture we helped create and that we continue to venerate. We made them. We are the Dr Frankensteins to their monster. Not surprisingly, sex is the medium through which these male celebrities’ particular depravity was expressed. But sex as a weapon – rather than as intimacy – is not really about sex, as the feminist movement explained to us decades ago. It is about power. Brand’s expression of power crossed the line into illegality. It is not yet clear whether Walliams did the same.

What the women in the Walliams’ documentary keep noting is the power imbalance in his relationships. As one, “Alex”, notes: “OK, it’s legal to have sex when you’re 17, 18 – 16, even. But the context of who you’re having sex with – if that person is double your age, if that person has known you from a young age and promised you things and is in a much bigger position of power than you, both in age, in work, in finance, in stature and size, like, everything, I really don’t think that’s OK.” She’s right. It’s not okay. And she’s right that it is the imbalance of power that is the problem, not some arbitrary legal definition of a sex crime. That power imbalance clears the way to exploitation, manipulation, abuse and violence.

Celebrating depravity

TV and newspapers are not averse to exposing a celebrity sexual predator – especially one who is near his sell-by date, when his most profitable years are behind him. Earlier, the media cashed in on Russell Brand by celebrating his sex addiction. We the public were meant to marvel at his “antics”, either in admiration or envy. The media are now cashing in on Brand’s humiliation over the abusive acts his sex addiction inevitably spawned. This time we are meant to be consoled by his downfall, by his comeuppance. The media similarly celebrated Walliams for his creepy, ugly private life – again hiding in plain sight – in exactly the same way it had earlier enthused about the creepy, ugly characters he played on TV.

But the framing of this as individual stars abusing their position, or even as proof of oversight failures by the industry, misses the main story. This isn’t simply about one man’s abusiveness. It is not even about men and the weaponisation of sex. Nor is it about poor industry practices. It is about something much bigger. It is about a culture, whole societies, that are built on the basis of deep structural imbalances of power – in every sphere of life – as their most cherished value. Indeed, as their purpose. 

We prefer to define the Brand and Walliams problem simply as one of sexual predation, of a power differential in the sexual arena. It is easier for us to corral that behaviour into a category of the grotesque, the abhorrent – and for us to sneer at these deviants. But the point is they precisely are not deviants. They are the logical culmination, the distillation, of values we colluded in engineering – whether we did so actively or passively. The Brands and Walliamses are what happen when power knows no limits, when power becomes unaccountable, when power is an end in itself, not the means to achieve something better, to realise something more transcendent.

Too big to fail

This isn’t about showbiz, though the media would love you to think it is. Brand and Walliams’ abuses are just one – the most easily noticed and punished – ripple on the surface of an entire lake of similar abuses, caused by gross disparities of power in every aspect of our lives. It should hardly need stating that those who chase power are also those with an appetite for it. And those with an appetite for power are the most likely to abuse that power if and when they achieve it. That happens in the entertainment industry, but it also happens in media, in politics, in law, in business.

The creation of deep power imbalances is the very purpose of capitalism. It divides: the “wealth creator” from the worker, the have from the have-not, the landlord from the tenant. And it measures that difference – rewards it – with money. Greater wealth equals greater power in the political, economic and social systems we in the West are educated to respect and revere. The rich own the media that act as our window on the world. Rich donors capture our politics, ensuring that the political priorities of the billionaires – the protection and expansion of their wealth – must also be our political priorities. The rich wage the wars – wars the rest of us pay for – that steal the wealth of others, of poorer nations. And, as we learnt after the 2008 economic crash, when the rich screw up, when they break the self-enrichment system they themselves devised, our captured governments bail them out with our money. The rich are too big – too powerful – to fail.

The focus on sexualised abuses of power is intentional. It distracts from these far more systematic and fundamental abuses. After all, the power imbalances of our societies are not diminishing. They are accelerating like never before. And that growing, yawning gap is something the powerless – the vast majority – are being persuaded to exalt rather than rebel against. We live in an era that celebrates the very first trillionaires in history – trillionaires whose fortunes have been built on the backs of overseas workers stripped of their dignity in sweatshops and of domestic workers eking out a living on zero-hours contracts.

We live in a time when the billionaire class can unleash AI on us, selling it as our salvation, even as it threatens to bring much human work to an end – and with it our sense of purpose and potentially our ability to survive. We live in a time when western governments openly collude in the mass slaughter of children abroad, when they arrest and jail people as terrorists for holding placards stating their opposition to a genocide, and when they crush any meaningful criticism of the state carrying out the slaughter as proof of “antisemitism”.

We live in a time when an oil industry grows fat as it destroys the basis for advanced life on our planet – raping the Earth – and when the politicians it owns pass ever more laws designed to make protesting this looming mass extinction event a crime. We live in a time when the tech industries have more powers than ever to stalk us, to harvest our most intimate thoughts, to control us, and when the state readies its militarised police forces to beat us into submission should we ever try to liberate ourselves. 

We are watching this dystopia gradually unfold before our eyes, powerless to stop it because we have been groomed into acceptance, into passivity, into helplessness. We live in a state of growing precariousness, playthings in the hands of the super-rich. And in contrast to the belated condemnation of Brand and Walliams, our abusers continue to be feted, rewarded and honoured.  But the disease is the same. It is a disease caused by a hierarchy of value. Of people who matter and people who don’t. Of those who have a voice and those who are silenced. Of those who get to choose and those who must submit.

Never mind protecting children from YouTube Kids or from Lego Play. The real danger is elsewhere. Nor is it where Nish Kumar in the Netflix documentary Russell Brand: Open Secret, or Diane Morgan in last night’s Cunk on Cinema, would lazily have it. In the latter case, are we supposed to accept that from the BBC? Just as it has always banned cousin marriage, Catholic Canon Law has a specific offence of sexual activity with anyone under 18, regardless of any lower age of consent, if there even is one, in the civil jurisdiction where it took place. It is beyond dispute who has the moral high ground.

After the murder of Sir David Amess MP, I wondered whether anyone knew of a case in which a priest’s administration of the Last Rites had contaminated a crime scene, causing a prosecution to collapse. We would have heard about it if that had ever happened. The same is now true of the Seal of the Confessional. Priests would of course choose to be thrown to the lions or burned at the stake rather than break the Seal. But the Epstein Class has been exposed, so this whole furore is being got up in order to reintroduce the somewhat faded popular association of child sexual abuse with the Catholic Church instead.

They are playing the long game. Their very last motivation for discrediting the Church would be to protect children from sexual exploitation. On this as on so very many other matters, they need the Church out of the way so that they can get down to business. I shall almost certainly be dead, but in 50 years’ time, the Church will be “blamed” for “what is now the unbelievable fact” that there ever was an age of consent. Print this off and keep it.

Support Offer?

Rightist opponents of the lockdowns and the vaccines ought to feel vindicated by the explosion of mental illness and physical disability among the children of that time. I cannot understand why they would wish to deny it. There is no tough decision involved in punching down. The tough decision would be to punch up. MPs whose inspiration was the Blair Government can no more claim that they did not come into politics to kick the poor than they could claim to be blessed among the peacemakers. Labour is a party of extremely right-wing people who lack the social connections to make it in the Conservative Party, and whose two defining experiences were being brought up to spit on everyone below them, which was everyone else where they grew up, and discovering in their first 36 hours at university that they were nowhere near the top of the class system, a discovery that embittered them for life. Cutting sickness and disability benefits neither cures anyone nor creates jobs, but neither of those is the point.

The only thing missing from the present spite is Harriet Harman, who was the Secretary of State in 1997, when Tony Blair proved himself by relying on the votes of the Conservatives to snatch the bread out of the mouths of children, and who was the Leader of the Opposition in 2015, when Labour abstained on another such measure which eventually proved too much for Iain Duncan Smith but not for Andy Burnham. Burnham is heavily dependent on James Purnell, who was memorably likened by the late Alice Mahon to a Poor Law Guardian such as Alan Milburn now wished to bring back.

Milburn knows that PIP, which was introduced by the Conservatives, has nothing to do with being in or out of work. But by taking away the PIP of 16 to 24-year-olds, Milburn would also take away the Carer’s Allowance of other members of their households. It would be impossible to tell which of those young people was unable to work, since they would also be disqualified from the health element of Universal Credit, which is payable only to people who had, with immense difficulty, succeeded in establishing that fact.

Disgraceful Labour MPs accepted the halving of that element as somehow the compromise last time, but they are not even planning to oppose the Milburn Plan at all. Clearly, Ministerial office now beckons whereas they stood no chance of it under Keir Starmer. And a cross-party consensus of the very worst kind is emerging, since while John Pring is being overly generous by glossing over the fact that causing deaths, not least by suicide, was most emphatically the intention of both Government and Opposition policy, nevertheless he writes:

Conservative plans to cut £36 billion a year from social security spending have completely ignored the risk of harm to disabled people, despite past Tory governments being responsible for hundreds, and probably thousands, of claimant suicides and other deaths. On Tuesday, party leader Kemi Badenoch spoke of the need for “some tough decisions and some tough love” as she announced the publication of Welfare that Works: The Conservatives’ plan for Welfare Savings. The document includes seven separate attacks that target disabled people’s support, with these measures making up half of the £36 billion-a-year cuts. Helen Whately, the party’s shadow work and pensions secretary – although she calls herself the “shadow welfare secretary” – told the invited audience of journalists and Tory supporters that making these cuts was “morally the right thing to do”. But the 52-page document includes not a single mention of “safeguarding” or the risk to many long-term and new claimants of disability benefits if the cuts were introduced.

Among the measures announced in the plan are to force every claimant to undergo a face-to-face assessment, apparently eliminating the long-established reasonable adjustment that allows a small proportion of claims to be decided only on paper evidence, and possibly also ending telephone and video assessments. Another proposal would remove cash support from claimants with what the party calls “milder mental health issues and neurodiversity conditions such as anxiety, depression and ADHD”, across both personal independence payment and the universal credit health element. Both measures risk repeating the harm caused by post-2010 Conservative-led governments, which were closely linked to deaths such as those of Michael O’Sullivan, David Barr, Ms DE, Roy Curtis and Ker Featherstone.

But there is no mention of safeguarding in the report, or of claimants in vulnerable situations, and the need to protect those claimants from the risk of harm. The closest Badenoch came to such a reference was when she told the launch event: “Of course, there are people who genuinely cannot work, people with serious illnesses or severe disabilities. We must have a safety net for those people.” But she also told the event: “Conservatives believe that real compassion means not writing people off. We understand that a nation is built by millions of people getting things done every day, overcoming challenges, taking responsibility for their future. That is why fixing Britain’s welfare system and getting Britain working again is a moral mission for the Conservatives.”

Her words mirror those of Iain Duncan Smith in December 2010, when he told Sun readers – when talking about the old incapacity benefit (IB) – that they were right to be “upset and angry” when they saw neighbours who do not work, because such “unfairness saps away at our sense of togetherness in society”. Duncan Smith, at the time the Tory work and pensions secretary, told The Sun that Britain used to be “the workshop of the world” but had now “managed to create a block of people” who “do not add anything to the greatness of this country”. He added: “They have become conditioned to be users of services, not providers of money. This is a huge part of the reason we have this massive deficit.”

In subsequent years, the reforms Duncan Smith was introducing – trying to force IB claimants into work by putting them through the new work capability assessment – would be linked to an estimated 590 suicides in just three years, according to government-funded research by Liverpool and Oxford universities. None of the media organisations that were chosen to ask questions about the party’s proposals on Tuesday mentioned the past deaths connected with cuts to disability benefits, and the risk of future deaths if the Tory plans were introduced, even though all of them have reported on such deaths in the past. The Conservative party is not currently engaging with Disability News Service, although it refuses to say why. It had not responded by noon today (Thursday) to a question about its failure to mention safeguarding in the report and launch event.

Over on the other side of the pantomime bidding war, Rowena Mason writes:

Downing Street is considering whether plans to replace key disability benefits with work and training for people under-25 should be expanded to older age groups, The Guardian has learned, in a move that risks reigniting Labour tensions over welfare changes. Andy Burnham and other cabinet ministers are looking at applying the idea of “participation first” to all people of working age, meaning spending billions more on support to enter the workplace while cutting or removing some disability benefits. The move would be politically risky given the difficulties that Keir Starmer faced in getting changes to health and disability benefits past the Labour parliamentary party last year, with a rebellion leading to a major U-turn.

The government is preparing to accept recommendations from its adviser, Alan Milburn, next week on overhauling the benefits system for young people. In his report, Milburn will propose that under-25s should get training and support instead of the universal credit health element. Under the plans, young people with disabilities will also lose their personal independence payment (Pip) but will be able to apply to a local fund for specific short-term expenses and equipment, rather than an ongoing payment. Those with the most extreme needs who cannot work will have their entitlements protected.

This week, cabinet ministers looked at whether the arguments could be applied more broadly to over-25s, and were considering an intervention from the prime minister or Pat McFadden, the work and pensions secretary, to make the case that the principles should apply to all. This could happen within weeks of both the Milburn review and the Stephen Timms review into disability benefits being published. Some government sources said they believed the idea of expanding the welfare changes to over-25s would ultimately not survive given the probable backlash from some parts of Labour. Others said they believed Milburn had successfully made the case that the system needed to change and that the public were behind his efforts. Burnham has repeatedly said the changes would not be “crude cuts”, but some backbenchers have said they are sceptical and worried about the impact on young disabled people.

If the changes were expanded to the over-25s, it could yield more savings as the cohort is much larger than the under-25s and the level of support needed to get people back into employment would probably be lower. Ministers have said they believe any system for the over-25s would need to reflect the different circumstances of older people, many of whom had families or caring responsibilities, and more complex health needs. However, there was a belief that many of the core problems, including detachment from the workplace and a need to encourage greater participation, were the same for under- and over-25s.

A government source said: “The support offer and benefit changes Alan has set out were devised for young people and the specific circumstances they face. But the Timms review has set out that Pip is no longer fit for purpose, and the government will respond to that review when it reports.” Milburn, a cabinet minister under Tony Blair, has promised his report is about giving billions more in support to young people to help them into work. The Guardian has learned there has been consternation within some government departments – including the Department of Health and the Department for Education – that the upfront funding for Milburn’s extra support will come from within their budgets. Some estimates have put the cost of Milburn’s proposals at around £6bn. However, it is understood the report will not commit to a level of spending that high, even though it will provide some costings for the upfront funding needed and a trajectory for projected savings.

Milburn told The Guardian this week that the support for young people outlined in his report would create 440,000 employment and education opportunities by 2036 and raise the net incomes of young people by more than £2bn. He said the main finding of the review was not a lack of ambition from young people but a lack of opportunities. “I have not met a single young person who wanted to be Neet [not in education, employment or training]. Not one. They want independence, they want to earn their own money and they want someone to give them a chance,” he said. The Guardian revealed last month that ministers were working up sweeping plans for welfare changes, including scrapping key disability benefits for under-25s and replacing it with a multibillion-pound package of support to get into work.

Charities are nervous about how the proposals will affect young people. The Joseph Rowntree Foundation said the proposals could significantly weaken the safety net for hundreds of thousands of young people with a disability or health condition, leaving many of those on universal credit living on a basic rate of support of about £80 a week. “Cutting someone’s income when they’re already struggling to afford food or the bus to college makes it harder for them to stay in education or find work,” said Iain Porter, the charity’s senior policy adviser. More than 40 of the UK’s leading charities have warned ministers against imposing tougher benefit sanctions or cuts on disabled young people.

In their joint letter to Milburn and McFadden, they said cutting support or bringing in sanctions risked pushing thousands of vulnerable youngsters deeper into poverty and further away from employment. Polling suggests that while the public favours cutting the welfare bill overall, they believe that tackling the root causes of joblessness instead of cutting benefits is the best way to do it. Welfare spending has reached £333bn this year, with pensioners receiving roughly 55% of the budget, and young people, including Neets but not children, about 2.5%. A government spokesperson said: “The Milburn and Timms reviews are due to be published shortly, and we will respond to their recommendations in full. We will always ensure there is a safety net for the most vulnerable and those who are unable to work. But the prime minister has been clear that we need a wholesale change in the way we support young people to grow up in this country, where we invest in their success rather than paying for failure.”

And as to how things were already progressing, Maryam Zakir-Hussain writes:

The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) will have the power to check the bank accounts of millions of pensioners and benefit claimants under new government powers, it has been announced. This is part of new benefit fraud rules, with powers created by the Public Authorities (Fraud, Error and Recovery) Bill. According to DWP, the department will share “eligibility indicators” with banks and other financial institutions.

These will be based on “benefit eligibility rules and help institutions identify accounts that may need to be checked by DWP”. It is planned to help ensure people receive the benefits they are entitled to. Financial institutions will then check the information they hold on accounts receiving certain DWP benefit payments. They will tell DWP when a personal account into which a relevant benefit is paid meets an eligibility indicator. This includes linked accounts. The account may belong to either a claimant or a non-claimant.

What information will be shared?

Where an eligibility indicator is met, financial institutions will only share limited information with DWP for two reasons:

1. To help identify incorrect benefit payments
2. To check benefit entitlement. 

They may share:

• the names of all account holders details of any accounts you hold, including linked accounts and joint accounts
• account numbers
• sort codes, if the accounts have these
• information about how much money is in the relevant accounts
• the date of transactions that took place in another country

It is important to note that DWP cannot log into your online banking or see your account in real time.

Banks and other financial institutions cannot share:

• full statements or transactions
• how you spend your money
• sensitive personal information about your background, such as political opinions or religious beliefs
• specific transaction locations

Banks and other financial institutions can be fined if they do share this information. 

How DWP collects and uses your information:

• DWP will only use the data to help check benefit entitlement, help identify incorrect payments and support any enquiries into those payments, if needed
• DWP cannot ask for information that breaks data protection laws
• where information is shared with DWP that is not directly relevant to a benefit claimant, it will be destroyed in line with DWP’s Information Management Policy
• DWP will not share your personal information with banks or other financial institutions

An independent reviewer will check that DWP, banks and other financial institutions have followed the law, amongst other things. Its reports will be presented to Parliament.

Against This Bleak Background

My comrade, Yanis Varoufakis, writes:

Opposition politicians critical of the sitting chancellor always have an ambitious plan to rebuild Britain — until they move into No. 11. There, petrified that the gilt market will punch them in the nose, their ambition dies. Soon, as if by rote, they begin to recite the line that has imprisoned every chancellor since Denis Healey: “We can’t afford it.” And that’s how stagnation triumphs, a rich country gets poorer, politics gets discredited.

Painfully aware of how daunting it is to inherit the Treasury of a stagnating country in the bond markets’ crosshairs, let me dare answer the hard question: “What would you do if you were chancellor?” Any answer depends on your diagnosis. Here is mine.

Britain’s malaise is not due to Brexit, as the Rejoiners would have it, nor immigration, as Britain’s Rightists seem to have convinced themselves. Britain is plagued by the collapse of a business model that Margaret Thatcher launched, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown deepened, David Cameron, Nick Clegg and George Osborne shored up, and Liz Truss tried, albeit farcically, to reboot.

Thatcher’s growth was never the fruit of shrinking the state, of trickle-down, of her fictional “shareholders’ democracy”. It came from liquidating council houses and public utilities, and throwing them, at cut-down prices, into the City’s cauldron — while allowing its bankers to go haywire. In other words, Thatcher’s famous putdown to socialists, that we fail because eventually we run out of other people’s money, became a kind of boomerang: Thatcherites, and their New Labour imitators, failed the moment they ran out of silverware to pawn.

After 2008 established the madness of putting every egg in the bankers’ basket, the Bank of England refloated the City with gargantuan quantities of money plucked from the proverbial moneytree, which miraculously materialises every time the spivs lose their shirt. Then along came George Osborne to impose austerity on almost everyone else.

That’s how Britain landed in the most delicious of antinomies. On the one hand, austerity crushed demand for high-end goods and services, so British firms cancelled their planned productive investments. On the other, the City and its big-business customers were drowning in cash. And what happened to all that free money? It was squandered on Britain’s ugly assetocracy.

CEOs ploughed the new money into share buybacks, and bankers into raising house prices, not into factories or any other productive activity. Between 2011 and 2018, as the nation’s net savings turned negative, Britain’s hundred largest companies handed £468 billion to their shareholders. Bluntly put, British capitalism has been devouring itself for decades.

In response, Truss tried to do a Thatcher with a bare cupboard of assets to privatise. Burnham is now trying to do a Wilson without the white heat of technology. The Tories pretend to foster entrepreneurship; Labour pretends to care about social justice. Both keep feeding the same beast — the same assetocracy — impoverishing the country and angering its populace.

Against this bleak background, the first task of a progressive chancellor must be to avoid antagonising the gilt market, while also refusing to bend to its will — a balancing act requiring innovative public financial tools. The second must be to convert the UK’s ample liquidity into patient, productive investment in people and infrastructure, in innovators and maintainers alike, generating new incomes for the majority.

So, how would I dodge another Truss debacle while boosting public investment? Recall that Truss was not walloped for her ambition but for dropping a new load of gilts — to fund her tax cuts for fat cats — into an already saturated gilt market. And the Treasury has been oversupplying that market for years: in 2025 alone, by an additional £303 billion, or 4% of GDP. My first task, then, would be to refrain from any net increase in the supply of gilts.

How to do so, while also funding large-scale public investment? In three ways. First, stop subsidising the City. The Bank of England pays Bank Rate on hundreds of billions of commercial bank reserves, while selling gilts below the price it paid for them and sending the losses to the Treasury. The interest bill alone runs to around £25 billion a year. Pay interest on only a small slice of reserves, however, and you’d reduce the Treasury’s need to issue more gilts over the next decade by approximately £210 billion.

Second, swap the £482 billion of gilts the Bank of England now owns with new perpetual bonds that the Treasury issues of the same face value — but at 0.5% interest rate (in other words, a quarter of the average yield of these gilts). Given that the average maturity of the existing gilts held at the Bank is just over 15 years, this translates into one-off gains of a net present value of £362 billion.

Third, as Jamie Driscoll suggests, offer savers a National Infrastructure ISA, run by National Savings & Investments, holding non-tradeable bonds that no hedge fund can short. Also restrict ISA tax relief — savers who prefer their cash to be wagered on Silicon Valley remain free to do so, just not at the taxpayer’s expense. To absorb about £100 billion of the current annual ISA inflows, meanwhile, have the Bank of England announce that, “if needs be”, it will stand behind this ISA, an announcement which, by itself, will push its yield below the gilt equivalent without the Bank spending a penny. A trillion pounds would thus become available, over a decade, for the infrastructure everyone agrees Britain desperately needs.

These three measures alone would create a trust fund for Britain exceeding £1.5 trillion over the next decade, much of it available early on. These monies must be invested, not frittered away on day-to-day expenditures. Invested in what? The reclamation of public utilities, crumbling infrastructure, social housing, and large-scale training. To this mix, I would add a significant cut in national insurance contributions, which currently leave small businesses unable to breathe.

Water and the grid are natural monopolies. Private ownership brought £78 billion paid out in water dividends, £64 billion of debt loaded onto companies sold debt-free, and sewage pouring into Britain’s rivers. The solution is obvious: place the water companies in special administration, as the law already allows, rather than buying them back at inflated regulatory values. From there, bring the national grid into public ownership, and price electricity from wind and solar at what it costs to produce, rather than at the margin set by imported gs. This should be shadowed by properly funding Great British Railways, introducing the best practices of Chinese and Japanese railways.

Housing is where Britain’s assetocracy bites hardest. Private developers offer a few “affordable” flats at 80% of an exorbitant rent, as a fig leaf for 10 more at the full rate. The average social rent in London is around £550 a month; in the private sector it exceeds £2,300. The only cure is council housing, built by municipalities for local families at rents no higher than a quarter of disposable income: 100,000 homes a year, on land bought at existing-use value. Alongside this, a right-to-rent rule should allow struggling families facing repossession to remain in their homes at a fair rent.

Next, rebuild the productive base without which Britain cannot generate shared prosperity. As Costas Lapavitsas and the other authors of Reindustrialise Britain propose, start modestly, aiming to raise manufacturing from 8% to 11% of national income by 2035, adding about 725,000 jobs. I would also fund a decade-long mass training scheme with a living wage and trades-union rights for apprentices. Because short-term contracting stops firms committing to four-year apprenticeships, Driscoll proposes a “Retrofit Blitz”: a long-term, publicly financed drive, delivered by small businesses, to retrofit whole streets with insulation, heat pumps and solar panels. To keep the program non-inflationary — while boosting local wages, tax receipts and pay elsewhere — I’d further adopt a “capacity guardrail” that releases each funding tranche only when trained workers and supply chains become available locally.

Last but not least, in what’s perhaps the most radical but defensible proposal, I would end the banks’ scandalous monopoly over our payments system. Instead, every UK resident gets the right to a free digital wallet, hosted by the Bank of England but governed as a commons, paying interest at the Bank Rate that now only bankers enjoy. Transactions would be anonymised, with a citizens’ jury deciding when to de-anonymise them: no Chinese-style surveillance, no Visa-style toll.

Naturally, such a Budget would cause a hail storm of criticisms, some well-meant. I would doubtless be accused of violating the fiscal rules. But these should have been torn up long ago and replaced, as Lapavitsas et al propose, with a test of public-sector net worth: borrowing that builds earning assets is not a burden on our grandchildren, instead creating the means of its own repayment.

From there, critics are likely to claim my perpetual bonds swap amounts to a default on the state’s creditors. Not at all: these gilts are already parked within the UK state sector. The state, in other words, would merely be reshuffling debt it owes to itself.

“But you are violating the independence of the Bank of England!”, others will scream. Not really. I would leave interest rates to the Bank. But when it comes to public monies thrown at the City, no, the Bank should have zero independence on that. A chancellor need only insist that the Bank stop subsidising the City and, if rebuffed, legislate with a simple majority in the House of Commons.

“Won’t your policies bring house prices sharply down?”, the smartest journalists will ask. “The pound will take a hammering,” The Economist will prognosticate ominously. In saying these things, my critics would be threatening me with a good time. Let’s be honest: breaking the assetocracy means a managed decline in house prices and a weaker pound, kept orderly by a scheme to liberate mortgage owners from negative equity and the graduated controls on hot money that Lapavitsas and his co-authors set out. It’s anyway a price worth paying to end Britain’s assetocracy and the aridity that it spreads in its shadow.

It’s clear, then, that there is an alternative to Britain’s continuing malaise. People with inordinate influence over the money markets will hate it. As the party that dares put these policies in its manifesto begins to ride high in the opinion polls, gilts and the pound would wobble. But remember: the funds that move these markets hold just below one third of the gilts, which they buy with money borrowed in the US to use as collateral for purposes that have nothing to do with Britain. Once they realise that the total supply of gilts will not only not rise but, in fact, may fall, yields and the pound would steady. The more pragmatic among them may even appreciate the solid plan to boost productive investment by £1.4 trillion without new taxes. They won’t like any of it — but it will be in their interest to make their peace with it.

Of course, I may be fond of Britain but I can never be its chancellor. So, my message to a future progressive chancellor who contemplates all of the above is simple: hold your nerve! Provided your prime minister keeps her or his cool, you’ll be alright. Then again, I know from experience that it is pure folly to presume your prime minister’s steadfastness!

Slashing The Dinghy

I have known Jonathan Ashworth for 29 years, but whenever he is on television, then I wonder where Shockat Adam is. And I am no supporter of the Green Party, but whenever Matt Goodwin is on television, then I wonder where Hannah Spencer is.

The Liberal Democrats are now pitching to disgruntled Greens. Until the point of defection, each of those would at least have pretended to believe that Zack Polanski ought to be Prime Minister. Polanski has never been a spokesman for the British Red Cross, he has never been a spokesman for Make Votes Matter, he has never been a full member of the National Council for Hypnotherapy, and he has never worked for the nonexistent “justice assessment committee” of the Ministry of Justice. But he did fail to pay Council Tax on his narrowboat despite having been registered to vote there, he did fail to register to vote anywhere in the local elections this year, and he did take payment to hypnotise women so that their breasts would grow bigger.

The Greens are the British party for which Noam Chomsky would vote, so taking in their refugees formally admits to the Epstein Class the Lib Dems who were the more pro-austerity and pro-war party to the Coalition when Polanski stood as a Lib Dem for the Camden Borough Council seat of St Pancras and Somers Town, in the Holborn and St Pancras constituency that he recently failed to win as a Green. Polanski had joined the Lib Dems during the Coalition, but they now provide a happy home to Greens for whom even he was too left-wing.

Meanwhile, with deep reactionary roots, the Greens are a party of anti-industrial Malthusianism and misanthropy, and therefore of NATO and the EU, of their war in Ukraine, of the conscription to which that was leading inexorably, of Scottish and Welsh separatism, of gender self-identification, of drug legalisation, of licensed prostitution, and of Peter Tatchell. So yes, interchangeable with the Lib Dems, then.

The Green Party was all of those things on the day before its recent conference, yet just as the Old Greens are not making a fuss about its hugely significant abandonment of its opposition to nuclear power, so there was no talk of a firewall until it passed a resolution stating the view of most of the relatively few people in Britain who had much of an opinion on Zionism. Polanski was defeated at Holborn and St Pancras because he was as described above, not because of that resolution.

But how does that resolution look now, anyway? Israel was not an apartheid state because the Arabs were “allowed” vote, but they barely did, so that once they did in such numbers at to end up with the potential balance of power, then that must have been because of the kind of foreign interference that the implacable opponents of Brexit or of Donald Trump were wont to allege? And Zionism required no inclusion of the Arab-led parties in government no matter how well they had done, even if that required further elections, quite possibly on a more restricted franchise, or with a higher threshold, or with the Arab-led parties banned, or with all of those measures? If that is not racism, then what is it? And if that is not racism, then what is?

Speaking of racism, Daniel Thomas has pleaded guilty so that his sentence will be reduced, with his time on remand also taken into account, because the Crown Prosecution Service had been too frightened of my fellow obese middle-aged men to charge him with attempted murder. That Stephen Yaxley-Lennon was able to become involved in a brawl at a boxing match in Kilkenny demonstrated that, with a very long and serious criminal record, he had been permitted to leave the country while on bail awaiting sentence, again out of physical fear of his supporters. How and why does Nathan Cofnas still hold a United Kingdom visa? And how long can anything be imminent, as the report into Nigel Farage’s five million pounds has been for as long as some of us can still be bothered to bring ourselves to remember?

Personal Independence No More

Seriously ill and disabled 16 to 24-year-olds are to be cured by being paid a new “youth allowance” at the Universal Credit standard rate, instead of PIP and the health element of Universal Credit. That latter has already been halved for new claimants despite being available only to people who had been found medically unfit for work. If you doubt the extreme difficulty of that, then try it. There are 690,000 job vacancies in the United Kingdom, and there are 1.7 million people seeking them. This would put that second figure above 2.5 million. None of this has anything to do with either making people better or finding them work. This is about saving money by killing them. Yes, really. We are talking about one of Tony Blair’s closest allies here.

Whoever is to sort out the problem of young people who were Not in Education, Employment or Training, it is no job for a perpetual student. Alan Milburn started a PhD in 1979, but it remains lost in the Haze of Dope that he and Nick Robinson recently thought such a giggle. Dopey Alan was Secretary of State for Health. Specifically, with Blair and with Paul Corrigan, he brought NHS privatisation from the outer fringes of the thinktank circuit to the very heart of government. We already have a good idea how he intended to repeat the trick.

Third and fourth generation middle-class teachers in primary schools will identify potential future NEETs. Third and fourth generation middle-class teachers in secondary schools will deliver to them a curriculum designed by and for the local vape shops, phone shops, nail bars, tattoo parlours, carwashes, mini-marts, adult gaming centres, Turkish barbers, American candy shops, and lap dancing clubs, there being nothing else, not even Poundland. And without trade unions, no one will be able to come up through those to enter the political process. I feel 24 again myself, back in 2001.

Indeed, this is a classic right-wing Labour Government all round, licking its lips to commit the second ethnic cleansing of Chagos Islands on the orders of the United States, in the finest tradition of Denis “Monetarism” Healey and David “The Torturer” Miliband. Not only should the anti-racist movement take to the streets over this, but just for a change it very well might. And in denying the rights of the people who were forcibly removed from the Chagos Islands and of their descendants, Andy Burnham is placing himself in the same category as Javier Milei, backed up by Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu. The same right of self-determination is enjoyed by the people of the Falkland Islands and by the Chagossian people. Anyone who does not believe in both does not really believe in either.

The British Right worships Argentina under Milei, the United States under almost anyone but especially Trump, and Israel under absolutely anyone at all, even though Israel armed Argentina during the Falklands War. Meanwhile, British centrism idolises the European Union of Emmanuel Macron and Friedrich Merz, who are offering to supply submarines to Argentina in a very significant departure from France’s strong support for Britain in 1982. Both the Russell Brand rightists and the David Walliams centrists are unfit and need to get out of the way.

Compliance Failure

There is a word for the combination of state and corporate power to the point of physical violence, and of which Paul Knaggs writes:

In early 2023, an undercover reporter from The Times joined Arvato Financial Solutions, a debt collection firm working on contract for British Gas, and went out with its agents. He was there as they forced their way into the home of a single father of three to fit a prepayment meter. Job notes seen by the paper showed it was no one-off. Other forced fittings included a woman whose notes read ‘severe mental health bipolar’, a partially sighted woman with mobility problems, and a mother whose disabled daughter relied on a hoist and an electric wheelchair. The paper reported that the agents were paid bonuses for the meters they fitted. Those agents were not stumbling through paperwork in the dark. The vulnerability was on the file, and the regulator’s rules said the most vulnerable must be spared. The meter went in regardless, because a debt was owed and a bonus was waiting. 

Now the part that should stop every reader cold. None of it was a crime. The agents arrived with warrants from magistrates’ courts, some of which were reported to be granting applications by the hundred in a single sitting. Nobody was charged. When Ofgem finally closed its investigation in May this year, more than three years later, it found that British Gas had breached licence conditions meant to protect vulnerable customers, and that its management had been warned by an external review in 2018 and an internal audit in 2021. The penalty was a £20 million settlement and a debt write-off. A door forced open on a disabled family was, in law, a compliance failure.

So what does the government propose to protect households from the next boot at the door? Ministers will point to tougher powers for Ofgem. Yet in the same bill they propose to widen the gateway, letting the state share household income, benefit, pension and property records with this same industry. These companies already knew which customers were vulnerable, and their contractors went in anyway. And the safeguard on offer this time? Misuse of the data will be a criminal offence. Now we are expected to trust the same industry with an even more detailed picture of our financial circumstances. A file marked vulnerable did not protect people from the debt collectors; they used the information they had and kicked the door in anyway. Why should handing over more of not only their private data, but everyone’s data, make them or us any safer?

A Door Taken Off its Hinges 

The Energy Independence Bill, presented to the House of Commons on 4 November by Energy Secretary Miatta Fahnbulleh, arrives under the familiar banner of modernisation. Ministers sell the legislation on grid connections, North Sea licences and a tougher energy regulator. Tucked inside the machinery sits an amendment to sections 36 and 37 of the Digital Economy Act 2017. That was the narrow gateway Parliament opened nine years ago, permitting state departments to disclose data to commercial energy suppliers for a single, tightly restricted objective: assisting households in fuel poverty. This new bill takes that door entirely off its hinges. The statutory gateway broadens to capture anyone facing high energy bills, a hard-to-heat home, or extra domestic expenses arising from a chronic health condition. The approved recipients multiply from licensed domestic suppliers to network operators and, in the energy department’s own words, ‘other bodies involved in designing or delivering energy support measures in the future’. Not one of those outside contractors or intermediaries is named on the face of the statute.

According to reporting by the Press Association, eight separate government datasets are brought within scope. Four draw directly on personal state archives: HM Revenue and Customs income records and child benefit ledgers, Department for Work and Pensions benefit and state pension files, property registers, and domestic energy performance ratings. The information traffic is designed to run in both directions. Once a support mechanism is operational, private energy firms could be compelled to surrender their own internal customer histories back to the state. Ministers will protest that nothing becomes active before the winter of 2028-29, and that Whitehall departments will face no statutory compulsion to share immediately. But a loaded statutory power left lying on the statute book is never made safe by the reassurance that nobody intends to fire it this morning.

The Fox, the Henhouse and the Keys

Energy Suppliers, Insider Leaks and Household Data Risks

The foundational premise of this legislation is that the energy cartel can be trusted with the most intrusive financial dossier of British households ever assembled. The sole safeguard offered to reassure the public is a criminal offence. We already know what a criminal penalty is worth inside this corporate culture, because we have watched one fail in real time. In 2018, Chintan Paida, a call-centre worker employed by British Gas in Coventry, spent six months quietly harvesting private customer records: names, home addresses, dates of birth, and energy consumption patterns across 1,700 accounts. He sold the stolen dossier to commercial brokers for £45,000. His contractual duty was to verify customer identities, meaning every query he launched registered as legitimate on internal audit logs. British Gas discovered the leak only when customers began fielding unsolicited cold calls that matched their internal account data. He pleaded guilty in 2025 under the Data Protection Act 2018 and the Theft Act 1968.

The criminal statute was in force every single day he sold that data. It did not deter him for a second. The law caught up with him seven years later, long after the files had dispersed across the unregulated broker market. That is all a criminal sanction represents in practice: a padlock fitted to an empty stable after the horse has already been traded into an illicit spreadsheet. The courts rarely make the penalty sting, either. When an employee at a car-hire firm sold nearly 28,000 customer records for £5,000, the court imposed a £1,000 fine, prompting the Information Commissioner’s Office to plead once more for custodial sentencing powers that Parliament continues to withhold. Place the two scandals side by side. Arvato demonstrates what the energy monopolies do with records of vulnerability when there is a debt to pursue. Paida demonstrates what an individual insider does with basic customer records when a criminal easy earner is offered.

This legislation opens the door to sharing income figures, child benefit information, state pension records and property data with private energy companies and potentially their contractors. The same industry, the same commercial pressures and the same risks of human failure. We have already seen what basic customer information was worth on the black market: roughly £26 per household. Now imagine the value of a verified salary, matched to a home address, date of birth, pension and benefits history. A criminal wouldn’t need to spend weeks piecing together your personal circumstances. One dishonest insider, one stolen database or one successful cyberattack could potentially hand them the lot in a single transaction.

And spare us the comforting assurances about cybersecurity. Banks, government departments and multinational corporations spend fortunes protecting their systems, yet data breaches still happen. What makes ministers think private energy companies and their contractors are somehow immune? Their servers are not automatically held to the same security requirements as government systems, and even the strongest safeguards cannot eliminate the threat from hackers or corrupt employees. Every additional company given access to sensitive records creates another potential point of failure. The more information held together, the greater the damage when something goes wrong.

We have enough real-world examples to know that no database is impregnable. In 2021 npower shut down its app for good after criminals used stolen passwords to break into customer accounts, taking contact details, dates of birth, addresses and, for some customers, sort codes and part of their bank account numbers. E.ON, which owns npower, had closed its own app after a similar attack only weeks earlier. People’s Energy, a small Scottish supplier, lost the personal details of its entire customer base, around 270,000 current and former customers. None of those systems held anyone’s tax records. Under this bill, the next one might. Every company handed a copy of this data becomes one more target, and sooner or later every target is tested.

DESNZ insists the bill ‘does not change individuals’ privacy or data protection rights’. Strictly, that is true. Your rights stay exactly where they were. What changes is the number of organisations holding your data, the number of desks it can be reached from, and the price it fetches when it walks out of the building. The Department for Energy Security and Net Zero insists that the bill ‘does not change individuals’ privacy or data protection rights’. In the narrowest, most sterile legal sense, that is true. Your statutory rights remain printed in the law books. What changes is the number of commercial entities holding your personal files, the number of private computer terminals from which your earnings can be read, and the price those files fetch when they walk out of the building.

A Sharper Instrument, not a Dragnet

The government’s public justification deserves a fair hearing, because it addresses an undeniable social failure. Officials point out that 42 per cent of households living in fuel poverty claim no state benefits at all, and that around half of the poorest families are projected to miss the Warm Home Discount entirely. Support today is rationed either by benefit entitlement or property band, and both metrics leave desperate people behind. A pensioner living on a modest private annuity, in a terraced house bought half a century ago, is asset-rich on paper while freezing in her kitchen. A low-paid worker who never claimed state support, whether out of pride or administrative confusion, simply does not exist on departmental computers. Direct tax data would find those forgotten households. Nobody should pretend otherwise.

Yet the answer to a blunt instrument is a sharper instrument, not a universal dragnet. The sharper mechanism has been functioning for years. Under the Warm Home Discount scheme, the Department for Work and Pensions already matches records against supplier lists. Energy companies submit customer names, addresses and meter serials; civil servants execute the match and return a simple eligibility identifier for each qualifying account. The supplier learns that the household qualifies for a bill credit. It never learns the personal details behind the qualification. That is the architecture Open Rights Group fought for in 2016, establishing the basic civil liberty principle that utility providers need to know only that a customer is entitled to relief.

A binary data flag reaches the hidden poor without surrendering their lives to a corporate ledger. Why, then, has the state engineered a pipeline to hand over the underlying file? Because the file does a second job. The government’s own impact assessments concede that if an energy scheme is funded through domestic bills, its costs will fall ‘principally on those most able to pay’, and that households deemed ineligible are ‘expected to face higher bills’. As Byline Times revealed, departmental documents speak openly of data matching to identify ‘households most able to fund the scheme’. Finding whom to help requires a list of the poor. Finding whom to charge requires an inventory of everybody. And everyone means everyone under the roof. HMRC taxes individuals, not households, and an energy account sits in one name.

If ministers intend to measure who is truly “most able to pay”, a supplier cannot simply check the person whose name happens to sit at the top of the direct debit, or every higher-earning household would put the gas bill in the lowest earner’s name tomorrow morning. To calculate household ability to pay, the state has to pull the tax and benefit records of partners, adult children and every other earner under the same roof. One meter on the wall becomes the hook on which an entire family’s financial file is hung.

The government already knows how this goes wrong. Under the High Income Child Benefit Charge, a couple each earning £59,999 keep the full benefit, while a single earner on £60,001 starts to lose it. Labour dropped the plan to move that charge to household income in 2024, saying it would cost too much; one analyst noted it would have been a huge administrative task for HMRC to assess couples together. The alternative is worse. To measure what a household earns, the state must first decide who lives in it, then pull the tax records of every adult in the house: the partner, the grown-up son on a zero-hours contract, the lodger. None of them signed the energy contract. All of them would be matched. The bill and its factsheets do not say which way ministers will jump. Either the scheme is unfair, or it is a dragnet.

The Tax That Never Faces a Vote 

Strip away the reassuring language of ‘support schemes’ and ‘cost recovery’ and look at the machinery being assembled. Ministers are creating powers to place additional costs on household energy bills, potentially charging some customers more to subsidise others according to their financial circumstances. A compulsory payment, collected through the price of heat and light, necessities no household can simply refuse to buy. Call it redistribution, call it a social tariff, dress it up in whatever Whitehall language you please. If the cost is imposed on one group of households to finance another, it begins to look remarkably like taxation by another name. It is a tax in every respect save one. Taxes are voted on in the House of Commons.

And that is where the democratic problem begins. Taxes face parliamentary scrutiny, yet this Bill creates no actual support scheme, sets no rate and identifies no final list of who will pay. Instead, Sections 104 and 108 hand the Secretary of State broad powers to establish schemes through secondary legislation and determine how their costs are recovered. The government’s own factsheet confirms that energy suppliers must be able to recover those costs in full. More troubling still, Section 114 explicitly places regulations under this chapter within the negative resolution procedure. They can become law without MPs voting to approve them, unless Parliament subsequently intervenes. According to the House of Commons Library, no motion to annul an instrument under that procedure has succeeded in the Commons since 1979.

And as Byline Times notes, the default statutory route is the negative procedure: regulations pass into law automatically unless MPs actively force an objection, meaning most are enacted without a word of debate. The government’s factsheet remains silent on whether a vote will ever take place. Think about what that means. Parliament is being asked to approve the framework now, while ministers retain considerable discretion over who qualifies, who pays, how much they contribute and how the whole arrangement operates. These decisions could be made through regulations that Parliament cannot amend and may never debate. The Chancellor need not announce each charge at the dispatch box on Budget day. The household discovers the consequences when its energy bill arrives. That is the Orwellian danger at the heart of this proposal: financial decisions affecting millions of households could be made with far less democratic scrutiny than an ordinary tax.

Britain has been down some peculiar roads when governments start using household circumstances as a measure of what people ought to pay. In 1696, William III introduced the window tax, treating the number of windows in a property as a rough measure of wealth. People responded by bricking them up, sacrificing daylight and ventilation to escape the charge. The tax survived until 1851, when medical objections to its consequences helped secure its repeal. Then came Margaret Thatcher’s community charge, introduced in Scotland in 1989 and England and Wales in 1990. The poll tax required authorities to identify the adults living at each address. According to parliamentary research, an estimated 350,000 people disappeared from electoral registers during that period to avoid being caught by the system.

This scheme is no flat poll tax. It is graded by income, and its defenders will call it progressive. Yet its machinery rhymes with both of its ancestors. An income-related contribution would plainly differ from Thatcher’s flat-rate charge. But history offers a warning about what happens when governments build financial obligations around the contents of a household. If ministers assess only the named bill payer, what prevents a higher-income household from putting the account in the name of its lowest earner? If they assess total household income, whose earnings count? The husband, the wife, the adult son still living at home, the daughter paying her parents a little board, or a lodger renting the spare bedroom? And does the presence of an earning adult automatically mean their income is available to pay everybody else’s bills?

The Bill does not settle those questions. Yet they are fundamental to whether any income-related scheme could operate fairly. One approach risks people rearranging their accounts to qualify for help or avoid charges. The other raises the prospect of wider financial checks on people who may not even be named on the energy account. The state would have to decide whose income belongs to the household and how much of it ought to be available to pay for energy. That is a considerable intrusion into private family circumstances for something presented as a straightforward reform of energy bills.

Now consider who is being asked to shoulder the burden, and who is being protected from it. Centrica, the parent company of British Gas, reported adjusted operating profits of £1.55 billion in 2024 and £814 million in 2025. Its chief executive, Chris O’Shea, received total remuneration of £4.73 million for 2025, including £3.57 million in variable pay and long-term share awards. Research for the End Fuel Poverty Coalition puts Centrica’s accumulated operating profits since 2020 at more than £9 billion. Those figures cover the wider business, including energy trading, generation and infrastructure, rather than household supply alone. That distinction matters, but so does the sheer scale of the money.

There are already windfall taxes on parts of the energy industry, including North Sea producers and electricity generators. Yet the government’s proposed framework also makes provision for the costs of household energy support to be passed between customers, with suppliers entitled to recover their expenditure. So while one family struggles to heat its home, another may be required to help pay the bill, even as substantial profits continue to be made elsewhere in the energy system. Ministers should have to explain why that is the preferred arrangement, rather than expecting households to accept it as an administrative necessity. 

Even supporters of a social tariff recognise the problem. Simon Francis of the End Fuel Poverty Coalition welcomed the prospect of better targeted help but criticised the decision to put funding through household bills first, arguing that asking households to subsidise other households should be the last resort. He has also warned about the danger of support being withdrawn through secondary legislation without proper parliamentary debate. Nobody should object to protecting pensioners, disabled people or families who cannot afford to keep warm. But Parliament ought to decide openly how that protection is funded, whose income is examined and what safeguards exist against unfair charges. The working class should not be left paying for an energy system whose profits remain private while the burden of making it affordable is passed from one household to another. The companies recover their costs. Ministers retain their powers. The household gets the bill.

The Terms of Parliamentary Resistance 

Protecting the hidden poor does not require opening the nation’s Personal Data to corporate boards. Members of Parliament must refuse to wave this measure through without writing non-negotiable statutory safeguards onto the face of the bill. Write the data flag into primary law: government computers must execute the matching internally, commercial suppliers must receive nothing more than a verification mark beside an eligible account number, and no HMRC income record must ever cross onto a private corporate server. Name every single body permitted to handle this data directly in the statute, closing the open-ended clause that allows ministers to license commercial intermediaries by decree. Require that every support scheme, and every decision dictating who pays for it, passes through the affirmative procedure, forcing ministers to stand before the Commons and cast a recorded vote. Fund targeted fuel poverty relief out of public money through progressive taxation, where rates are openly set by Parliament and tax records remain inside the revenue service where they belong.

Then look past the immediate legislative text to the material question underneath it. A publicly owned energy supply, answerable to Parliament and run for the common good, would never require the state to farm out tax records under threat of the criminal law, because the infrastructure would remain in public hands. Who inspects your wages is, in the final analysis, inseparable from who owns the grid. And here’s a thought. If the government already knows that around 42 per cent of fuel-poor households receive no qualifying benefits, why isn’t it concentrating on using the information held by its own departments to identify those missing out and get support to them? Why does that require widening access to people’s private financial information across the energy industry? 

Why Working-Class Households Pay Twice Under This Bill 

Who actually benefits from this settlement? Not the widowed pensioner, who could have been protected by an anonymous data flag. Not the low-paid worker, sorted into a punitive payment band by a commercial utility she never chose to confide in. The beneficiaries are a Treasury eager to run social welfare off the public balance sheet, and a cartel of private energy monopolies granted an exhaustive financial profile of the population alongside a statutory guarantee that every penny of their costs will be recovered. The working class pays twice: once with their private data, and again at the prepayment meter. This industry once used the law to break down front doors and force meters onto the vulnerable. Parliament is now being asked to hand it the key to the filing cabinet.