Every time I wish the rest of the world to make like Gavin Williamson and go away and shut up, I remind myself that without those billions of other people, there would be neither the ingenuity, market forces nor economies of scale necessary to design, construct and ultimately fly the Airbus A380.

And without the A380, I would never have got to experience taking a shower on an aeroplane (it was only once, it was a points redemption, yes there is video, no it will not be published.) And consequently — and with apologies to anyone I’m married to — I would never have had the greatest moment of my life1. In other words, there is some latent wisdom in crowds.

But this theory is routinely tested by our culture’s insistence on taking the 6am flight from London Stansted, London Luton or whatever regional airport that insists on laundering our capital city’s good name. Sober or otherwise, what on earth are you thinking taking the first flight of the morning?

Theoretically, the peg for today’s newsletter is an interview with Ryanair boss Michael O’Leary in The Times, in which the famously reclusive executive complains of drunk passengers on early morning flights2, leading to his airline having to divert almost one aircraft a day due to disruptive passenger behaviour. In reality, this is one of my longest-held and most cherished beliefs.

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With notably rare exceptions — business travel, day trips, those who live in what I assume the rest of the country calls ‘Not London’ and so have fewer options — booking the first flight is at best a mistake, at worst the sort of optimisation fetish that will get you kicked out of even the most open-minded of Berlin nightclubs.

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It was considered unthinkable, perhaps even unsurvivable, certainly immoral. On 20 January 1972, the number of people out of work in Britain rose above one million for the first time since the 1930s. And we all know what happened then.

It wasn’t entirely Ted Heath’s fault, of course. The Bretton Woods system had collapsed, the long postwar expansion was running on fumes while traditional industries such as coal, steel and shipbuilding were in terminal decline.

Nevertheless, the government’s deflationary “Selsdon Man” policies, which included cuts to public spending and non-intervention in industry, contributed to the sharp rise in unemployment, which had sat at around 600,000 when the Tories came to power in June 1970.

Four days later, on 24 January, the mood in the Commons chamber was thermonuclear. Labour leader Harold Wilson denounced the one million mark as “shameful”. Neil Kinnock, still very much a man of the Left at this point, called it “if not of a criminal act, certainly of criminal negligence.”

At one point, the Speaker was forced to suspend the sitting for 10 minutes for order to be restored, such was the abuse that greeted the prime minister’s statement. Yet even Heath said he “deeply deplored” the situation. In other words, there was cross-party consensus that mass unemployment was big, bad and politically humiliating.

So how is it that, little more than a decade later, Margaret Thatcher would go on to win two landslide reelection victories, first in 1983 and then 1987, with unemployment not of one million, but three? And what has this got to do with the poll tax?

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The future is already here — it's just not evenly distributed

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Honestly, I thought it was a northern thing, like saying “me mam” instead of “my mum” or eating black pudding instead of something marginally less dense than the singularity of a black hole. One after another, Labour MPs representing long-abolished seats with names like Sheffield Hillsborough and Tyne Bridge rose from the green benches1 to ask the prime minister when she would abolish what history would later call “THE poll tax” but was, at the time, often simply “poll tax”.

What is jarring to contemporary ears makes a certain amount of sense. We don’t speak of “the income tax” or “the fuel duty”. In the English language, only specific, unique or widely understood phenomena get to dance with the definite article. The sky, the Alps, the BBC. Only once it became a defined political event and cautionary tale did it fully become “the” poll tax.

Before we go any further, I think it’s worthwhile briefly explaining what poll tax/the poll tax actually was. Because, however strange it may have been that reform to local government taxation brought down a prime minister, it was even weirder as a tax. I promise to be brief because, let’s face it, local authority funding, like sewage systems and pension contributions, is the apotheosis of ‘boring but important’.

No such thing as community [charge]

Prior to 19902, local government was funded through a system of domestic rates. Households paid tax based on the estimated rental value of their property. In theory, this was a bog-standard progressive tax: the more valuable the home, the steeper the bill. In practice, things were a lot messier.

The rates were widely criticised for being outdated and opaque. Because (and stop me if you’ve heard this before) property values often hadn’t been reassessed for years, and many people didn’t know how their ‘rateable value’ was even calculated. And you’ll never guess who hated the status quo most.

Margaret Thatcher opposed the rates for a combination of ideological, practical and political reasons. She saw it as a system unfairly tied to property rather than individuals, insufficiently transparent and devoid of personal responsibility. Just as importantly, it insulated local authorities — I’m sorry, “big spending Labour councils” — from accountability to local taxpayers. In short, it was seen as something that hurt “her people”.

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The solution was devilishly simple: replace the property-based tax with a per-person charge. A community charge, if you will. One that meant that every eligible adult paid a fixed amount, regardless of income. Oh, and the charge itself was to be set by local authorities, not national government. Again, the theory was sound. If your council spends more, you pay more. But the politics were toxic — devolve the tax, centralise the political pain.

So, why did she do it? Well, that depends on who you ask.

Mad, bad and dangerous to serve

The view of many of the prime minister’s critics — and I’m referring mainly to former members of her cabinet — is that she lost her touch. Her foreign secretary Douglas Hurd attributed it to Thatcher fatigue:

People ran out of patience really, out of support with her particular style of doing things.

Hurd wasn’t specifically referring to the time in early 1989, when Thatcher rushed out of Number 10 wearing a huge pink coat with bat-like fur trim, to make possibly the maddest (and campest) prime ministerial statement of all time:

“We have become a grandmother. Of a grandson, called Michael.”

Her former chancellor, Nigel Lawson, put it down to declining judgement.

Her courage didn’t desert her but her political instincts did. She became reckless3.

Thatcher was not always one to treat even her allies well. Having spent more than a decade shooting verbal bullets at her longest-serving cabinet colleague, Geoffrey Howe, she promptly demoted him before agreeing to join the European Exchange Rate Mechanism without even telling him, the nominal deputy prime minister. Howe later revealed:

I heard about it from The Queen, rather embarrassingly.

Which, let’s face it, is a bit of a humblebrag.

That the prime minister refused to U-turn on the policy despite plunging political ratings, agitated backbench MPs and a rebuke at the 1990 local elections, may come as no surprise. The lady was not for you-know-what and so on and so forth. But Thatcher’s reputation as a conviction-only politician is somewhat mythologised. Indeed, in the gleeful words of Ken Clarke:

She didn’t have an ideological agenda in 1975. I don’t think she did for most of the time she was prime minister. I think she became a Thatcherite in… about 1987, 1988 when people persuaded her there was something called Thatcherism to which she was the leader.

Without doubt, Thatcher was rather more politically agile and electoral attuned in her earlier, more fraught days in office. Which is where we pick things up tomorrow in a special, poll tax double bill.

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Several years ago, I developed a terrible habit. Unaccustomed to actually liking my job, I would routinely apply for roles I didn’t want. For sure, part of the problem was ego. Despite having something close to the perfect arrangement — autonomy, creativity and the unofficial right to disappear home in the afternoons — I’d spot lesser jobs at more prestigious newspapers and feel compelled to fill out a form. Like some 1980s horror film featuring a renegade DocuSign update.

It was odd, because I’d done my time at high-status institutions doing spectacularly tedious tasks. Tell someone you work at the Treasury and it sounds impressive — certainly more so than the Wales Office. But there are few things more hollow, more bruising to one’s sense of self than the gap between how something looks, and what it is like in reality.

And while I have no doubt regressed across multiple dimensions in the intervening period, I have at least learned to quit, even when I’m behind. I often reach for one of my favourite inverted aphorisms1: “Don’t just do something. Stand there.” The urge to act, the compulsion to fix, the desire to submit an application — these are all forms of avoidance. A ploy to deny the uncomfortable possibility that nothing needs to change.

I’ll be honest with you. This was meant to be a brief intro for one of those mini review newsletters, with a particular focus on books and TV that I was supposed to like but stopped reading and watching. Yeah, it’s been a rough week/two-and-a-half years and things kind of got out of hand. I can’t help constructing anecdotal bridges that threaten to collapse under the slightest evidential weight. Nevertheless, here we go:

Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!

Richard Feynman was to physics what Bugs Bunny was to baseball, specifically the short where Bugs takes on an entire professional team by playing virtually every position. Feynman was present at Los Alamos for the Manhattan Project, involved in the Challenger space shuttle disaster investigation2, won the Nobel Prize for his work on quantum electrodynamics and helped establish modern particle physics as a computable field3.

He was also a renowned storyteller, able to communicate complex ideas using simple language without ever dumbing down. There’s a reason why, if you can name only one non-Einstein physicist, it’s probably Feynman. So I downloaded the audiobook (actually, I downloaded it over a decade ago) hoping for some of that famous Feynman philosophical charity.

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Instead, the reader is subjected to endless edited anecdotes (I know I’m one to talk but it was almost like those headache-inducing jump-cut YouTube videos) which lurch between unrelated topics, with an assumed interest in the man rather than the ideas. Look, if you’re pre-disposed to be charmed by 1950s academic culture and the novelty of the quirky scientist, just accept you have given up on life and stream The Big Bang Theory instead.

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The Met Commissioner is a bit like your mum. Sure, he wants you to be happy, but wouldn’t it be nice to stay in and watch a film once in a while? Outside is where bad things happen. The young get in fights, the old fall over and the Jews get stabbed in the streets.

So, in the aftermath of yesterday’s antisemitic terror attack, it was striking to hear Sir Mark Rowley ask:

Why don’t we see more condemnation of the attacks we’ve seen in recent weeks? Where are all the voices against hate? And where is the solidarity with fellow Londoners who are being targeted simply for who they are?

The Met Commissioner has frequently alluded to the strain — both financial and logistical — that policing weekly pro-Palestinian protests has had on the force. Policing any large crowds — particularly those where racism is a common occurrence — is inherently expensive and time-consuming.

So, why is it that, in the wake of the latest outburst of anti-Jewish hatred in northwest London, Sir Mark has effectively called out — and called on — Londoners to raise their voices and come out against this? Something that even most politicians will not say. Why was he demanding more work for his officers — like the kid in class who raises his hand and proclaims: “Miss! You forgot to give us homework!”

The answer isn’t great, I’m afraid. It is that the absence of any mobilisation by the organised, self-avowed, anti-racist movement is contributing not only to making Jewish life in Britain intolerable1, but making police work more difficult and dangerous. Because it is Sir Mark’s officers who are the ones running up to knife-wielding maniacs to tackle them down2.

A conspiracy of silence

We know that a 45-year-old man, a British national born in Somalia, has been arrested by police on suspicion of attempted murder. But this being an antisemitic attack, we don’t yet know why he hated Jews. There are simply a lot of people with a lot of reasons — Islamists, the far-right, far-left, the Iranian regime and those with no clear ideology. Jews are blessed to engender such a diversity of disdain.

What we do know — and all too well — is the awkward silences, the sitting on hands, the near total absence of empathy and compassion that would be shown to any other vulnerable minority subject to a relentless campaign of violence and intimidation. And while that silence is not directly deadly — we are scarcely one Jewish allyship bagel march away from ending three thousand years of antisemitism — the silence inculcates the problem.

The inversion of “solidarity” — that word so adored by so many — is more than just hurtful to Jewish feelings. It significantly lowers the barrier to antisemitic entry, making it more likely that British Jews will be stabbed in the street for being Jewish. Meanwhile, far from giving antisemitic tropes a wide berth to avoid accusations of racism, many in the anti-racist Left gleefully elide Jewishness with accusations of genocide. How that isn’t an incitement to violence, I do not know.

And what we often end up with is industrial gaslighting.

The obvious question is: why? Helpfully, Dave Rich, director of policy at the Community Security Trust, has answered that for us. First, he observes, it is important to notice the phenomenon, easily missed because it is so familiar:

If Israel stood accused of paying local criminals to fire-bomb British mosques in the name of an extreme Zionist group, there would be emergency protests in our city centres demanding action. But when it’s an Iranian-linked group claiming responsibility for petrol-bombing synagogues? Instead of solidarity we get ‘false flag’ conspiracy theories that it’s really Mossad doing the attacks. We shouldn’t be surprised by this: when far right mobs attacked asylum hotels two summers ago, the anti-fascist response was peppered with people claiming that “Zionists” were the puppet masters behind the scenes, pulling the rioters’ strings. This is how politically deformed parts of the left have become, a grotesque parody of the true anti-racist solidarity that previous generations showed Jewish communities.

It emerged last month that one in five students said they don’t want to share a house with a Jew. If one in five students said they didn’t want to share their house with a black student, you can bet that every Stand Up To Racism branch in the country would be campaigning against it. But when it’s Jews? Forget it.

Next, Rich comes to the “why”.

There are several reasons for this silence. Understandings of racism have changed to focus exclusively on people of colour, so antisemitism, even where it is regretted or condemned, is not seen as ‘real’ racism, and Jews are seen as white, wealthy, powerful and integrated - so not needing or deserving anti-racist solidarity. When much of the anti-racist left looks around society and puts people into different boxes, the Jewish community doesn’t make it into the box marked ‘our people’. Some people mean well but just don’t get it, and need to re-learn what antisemitism is all about.

But beyond that, there is a deeper, more troubling reason: there are large parts of the so-called anti-racist left that accommodate and encourage exactly the hateful, violent extremism that is fuelling this rising tide of antisemitism. Call for death in this movement and you become a celebrity. Claim that the UK is under “Zionist control” and nobody bats an eyelid. Solidarity statements flood in for people who rant about

“Jewish supremacy”, rather than for the Jews they are inciting hatred against. And all driven by an obsessive, violent hatred for Israel, and a purifying desire to denounce and destroy anyone and anything touched by the sin of “Zionism”.

Of course this generates antisemitism. How could it not? And of course, the people pushing this hatred, marching alongside it, or saying nothing when the people on the same platform as them express these views, cannot mount a campaign against antisemitism even when synagogues are being fire-bombed. How could they?

They can’t even begin to acknowledge why this antisemitism is happening, because to do so would be to incriminate their own political world. So instead, they do nothing.

It is why, for instance, when not actively selecting countless conspiratorial antisemites as local council candidates, Green Party officials post this sort of thing. The verbal gymnastics are worthy of literary criticism:

I’m not a comms guy, but a shekel of free advice: if you're a public figure and you're not prepared to utter the word "Jews" or "antisemitism" in response to this latest attack, you might be better off not posting your "absolute horror".

Where to?

I still vividly recall how, following the Bondi Beach massacre, I saw numerous social media posts briefly condemning the shooting before moving on to business: making sure the event wasn’t “weaponised” against Muslims or migrants. Not-so-encrypted code for: gee, let’s not have something actually bad happen as a result of this antisemitic shooting spree.

I sometimes wonder how different life would be if there were several million British Jews, rather than a few hundred thousand. Enough to swing more than a few council wards, so that politicians would feel compelled to court our votes and even parrot our prejudices. Enough so that our would-be attackers would think twice about the repercussions before beating us up. But it is a waste of a daydream.

The reality is, you can afford to disrespect British Jews — small in number and non-violent. We’re not going to smash up your shops or stab your grandpas. The worst we can do is… leave. Some of us already have.

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Further reading (though not necessarily recommended as who can bear it at this point):

Adam Wagner K.C.

After Golders Green

This post’s title could be five weeks old, or two days. Because today’s double stabbing in Golders Green was the third attack there in five weeks. Not just in Golders Green, but practically on the very same spot of Golders Green Road…

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6 days ago · 17 likes · 2 comments · Adam Wagner K.C.

Everyday Hate

The Sound of Silence

The past week has brought the shocking reality of anti-Jewish hatred home to a lot of people in this country - but there is one part of society that still doesn’t seem to have noticed…

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15 days ago · 94 likes · 28 comments · Dave Rich

Rachel Cunliffe, New Statesman

“A stunning rebuke to Donald Trump!”

“A highly political speech.”

“UK to cancel American independence.”

Sure, one of these descriptions of King Charles’s address to a joint meeting of Congress is fabricated. But it won’t take long, scrolling through the newspaper coverage or short-form video, to find interpretations that cast the speech as unusually political.

And at first glance, it is not difficult to see why.

Amid the usual jokes about the absence of a common language, quotes from former presidents and allusions to shared histories between great nations, the King:

• Highlighted the principle that “executive power is subject to checks and balances”

• Deployed terms such as “diversity” and “equality” — words that have literally been scrubbed from US federal websites on Donald Trump’s order

• Spent quite some time on the importance of interfaith dialogue

• Praised the transatlantic alliance and reminded his audience that Nato invoked article 5 following the September 11 terrorist attacks

• Drew attention to increased UK defence spending (though, as ever, no sense of where the money is coming from but then again, this speech was signed off by the government)

• Called for the defence of Ukraine from Russian aggression

• Praised “the rule of law” and an “independent judiciary”

• And finally, warned that we “ignore the clarion calls to become ever more inward looking.”

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And yet, this interpretation is worth challenging. I took the liberty of watching (actually, because I am beyond sad, rewatching) the address delivered by Charles’s mother, Queen Elizabeth II, to a joint meeting of Congress in 1991. A time of great triumph for the West and the United States in particular, when the march of progress, peace and human dignity seemed far more assured.

And much of the sentiment — indeed many of the words — were near identical.

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Another exogenous supply shock, another energy crisis, another round of inflation with the usual course of central bank tightening. Here we go again. But before the parallels with 2022 petrify into received wisdom, and whether you sit on the Monetary Policy Committee or not, it is worth pausing. Because the latest supply shock differs in some important ways from the last one.

The energy crisis Britain faces is — thus far at least — smaller than the one which followed Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. In the aftermath of the February 2022 Russian offensive, UK gas prices peaked at 300p per therm above pre-war levels. Compare that to 78p today.

This feeds into household energy costs. But for the Energy Price Guarantee, the typical household bill would have hit £3,549, a rise of 80%. Compare that to today, where forecasts for the July energy price cap have jumped to £1,973. Painful, and a 20% rise compared with April, but not yet on the same level.

Then there is food, which saw a year-on-year increase of 19.1% in March 2023, the highest rate since 1977. In fact, over the three years between May 2021 and May 2024, food prices rose by a stomach-churning 30.6%, according to the House of Commons Library. Compare that to today, where the Food & Drink Federation expects a “gradual but persistent pickup in food inflation”, reaching 9-10% by the end of the year.

Next, we come to the broader economic environment. The war in Ukraine coincided with a post-Covid re-opening of the British and global economy. All those supply chain bottlenecks would have been broadly inflationary even without Vladimir Putin’s adventurism. Recall there were major shortages in all manner of materials, such as plastic, concrete, steel and timber. The cost of shipping spiked dramatically too. In January 2021, it cost a mere $1,500 to send a shipping container from Asia to Europe. A year later, that figure had jumped to $17,000.

Little wonder that the Bank of England’s February 2022 Monetary Policy Report, published prior to the Russian invasion, forecast CPI inflation peaking at around 7.25% in April 2022. Compare that to today. Prior to the US-Israeli military action against Iran, the Bank forecast inflation would fall to 2.1% in early 2026.

Moving on to the demand side, there were numerous other inflationary pressures. Consumer demand back then was strong — during the pandemic, the UK savings ratio hit a thirty-year high. Hardly surprising given that people weren’t allowed to leave their homes. This spare cash, in concert with those supply chain problems, was inherently inflationary.

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Now, consider labour. Post-pandemic, the jobs market was extremely tight, with total vacancies peaking at almost 1.3 million in February to April 2022 and growth in private sector earnings peaking at 8.1%. Compare that to today, when the labour market is soggy, vacancies have fallen to 711,000 and private sector pay is less than half the post-Covid peak. All in, businesses simply have far weaker pricing power.

It is also worth a brief glance at consumer sentiment which is, frankly, on the floor. GfK’s Consumer Confidence Index, which measures a range of attitudes on households’ financial expectations and views on making major purchases — fell to -25 in April. As for business confidence, April’s CBI Industrial Trends Survey hit -20%, meaning more thought output would decrease than increase over the next three months, compared with 0% in March.

Apologies for a newsletter groaning under the weight of statistics. If a politician were to deliver a speech of this sort, I’d be the first to suggest that it was a poor use of time and paper. Moreover, I really don’t intend to suggest that the Iran war is no biggie. For one thing, those Bank of England rate cuts for later this year — also known as the government’s growth strategy — have been flung far out of the window.

And that’s before we consider the impact on the global economy, the energy transition, food security, the freedom of navigation, the US as hegemon, the Labour government’s re-election chances, terrorism against Jews, the bond markets, Gulf nations, the semiconductor supply chain — it is massive and, until the Strait of Hormuz reopens, still very much ongoing. The comparison with 2022 may well become apposite.

My point is only: this is a supply shock hitting a largely disinflationary backdrop, not an inflationary one. Even if that doesn’t make the pain to come any less real.

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Few things are more dangerous than a single data point.

Imagine, if you will, that a million people are thrown in a jail, one inmate per cell. None know how many others are locked up with them, and each is given 60 seconds and a paper clip to pick the lock. If they succeed, they are free to go. If they fail, they die1.

The timer starts and each occupant frantically begins trying to get out, but they have no idea how difficult the lock is. It turns out that the lock can be picked, but it takes, on average, several hundred hours of random prodding before it clicks open. Consequently, when the minute is up, all the inmates are dead. Well, all but one. For ease, let’s call him ‘Jack’.

Now, imagine walking up to Jack and asking him if it was hard. And he nonchalantly replies, “Oh, it was pretty easy. I just put the paper clip in the lock and it opened immediately.” Jack only has one data point to work with — his personal experience. And so from his perspective, it was no trouble at all to pick the lock. But if Jack were to learn of the 999,999 dead inmates left behind, he would likely reevaluate his position.

Now, imagine that each prison cell is in fact a planet, and each prisoner a sort of chemical soup trying to become alive in the limited time available while the planet is habitable. In which case we — Earth — are all Jack.

Statistics don’t care about your feelings

The above thought experiment is from David Kipping, a British astronomer and associate professor at Columbia University, best known for his pioneering research into exoplanets (and for wearing alarmingly tight-fitting t-shirts on camera).

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Fiction

I think I may have just read my first ever thriller: Fatherland by Robert Harris, an alternate Cold War history in which Nazi Germany has won the Second World War, concealed the Holocaust and is now on the brink of a détente summit with the United States.

My main reflection, other than, you know, whether the premise — that the world discovering the Nazis murdered millions of Jews would be seen as a big and bad deal that could blow up a superpower summit — still holds up in the current climate, is: are all thrillers this confusing? I had to continually check everyone’s name. Thank goodness there was a female character so I could at least reliably identify one of them.

I raised this with a much better-read friend, and he assured me not to worry about the plot, which is never that important in the end, and kindly directed me to that old Raymond Chandler quote:

“When in doubt, have a man come through a door with a gun in his hand."

Non-fiction

The title has major WHSmith-at-Gatwick-Airport-business-book vibes. But Calling the Shots: How to Win in Football and Life by David Dein, former vice-chairman of Arsenal, is hugely insightful and terrific fun.

There is a Forrest Gump quality to Dein’s career — whenever something major is happening in elite European football, there he is, often with a hand placed firmly on the tiller. Dein was instrumental in the old First Division’s 1988 broadcasting deal with ITV, the breakaway that formed the Premier League and the Kroenke-Usmanov tussle for control of Arsenal.

Dein is clearly still terribly aggrieved at how it all ended at the club back in 2007. I found his raw hurt and anger a little hard to bear. But once that is disposed of in the opening chapter, you get to the good stuff: not least his relationship with Arsène Wenger.

Highlight: in my audiobook, Wenger himself reads the foreword, and you can hear him turning the page which is deeply amusing.

Memory unlocked: May 2006, when half the Tottenham squad went down with food poisoning before the final day of the season, with Spurs a win away from pipping Arsenal to a Champions League spot. The joke at the time was that the club called up the FA to get the game postponed, only for Dein — then also on the FA board, to pick up the phone and politely decline the request.

YouTube

Paul Simon is 84 years old! Anyway, here he is taking the famous Stephen Colbert Questionert. And taking it very seriously indeed.

I don’t much care for golf. But like watching Shane Warne spin the ball yards or Ronnie O’Sullivan secure a 147 maximum break in five minutes, there is something about watching a sportsperson do something self-evidently astonishing. See: Bryson DeChambeau’s drive on No. 6 at Arnold Palmer.

It’s a perfectly pleasant song (as far as songs about school shootings go). But what is it about this live performance? Give that sound guy a raise!

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Jed Bartlet was a terrible president. Sorry, President Bartlet. In terms of major policy achievements, there was incremental gun legislation, a solid economy and I think they made college tuition tax deductible? But mostly, it was about the speeches.

Before we go any further, an important (albeit mortifyingly revealing) admission: I do not consider seasons 5-7 of The West Wing to be canon. Consequently, that time Toby saved social security and some minor character resolved the Israeli-Palestinian conflict do not count. How do I manage this? Quite straightforwardly, thank you.

Not only have I never re-watched an episode post-season 4, when the series creator and lead writer, Aaron Sorkin, left. But I’ve created my own fictional show within a show. Thusly, Bartlet (sorry, President Bartlet1) loses re-election because, I mean, sorry lads but he lied about a degenerative disease and his Republican opponent carried Florida. At which point, NBC replaced the show with Sunday Night Football.

You get Hoynes

The list of what’s wrong with The West Wing is both long and not especially new. Even at the time, it was criticised for being too liberal, too schmaltzy, too didactic and far too earnest. A more modern lens would throw in misogynistic (19-year-old women are deemed too young to date while female staffers always seem to sit in wet paint). Most alarmingly, it is fairly striking how none of the characters seem to hold consistent world views from episode to episode.

To modern observers, the show appears irredeemably quaint. Not just the use of pagers, or the fact that a late evening news story breaking on “the blogs” would not be considered to have breached the information ecosystem until the morning newspapers. Rather, the underlying belief that you can make real and lasting change in the US through bipartisan consensus.

Clearly, it was another time. Most Republicans in The West Wing simply wanted to cut taxes and prevent gays from getting married. They didn’t appear eager to stop the promotion of senior black military officials or make the Jews responsible for all manner of evils. Democrats, meanwhile, had only good intentions, if only they could get out of their own way.

I’ll admit, fans of the show hardly helped matters. Though to be fair, fans of any show, football team or political movement rarely do. The idea that it was ‘smart people’s’ television, that all problems are solvable with a dash of intelligence and a sprinkle of good faith, the mimicking (both ironic and very much not) of the walk-and-talks.

Oh — I almost forgot! — the parliamentary assistants in MPs’ office who called themselves ‘chief of staff’ as if they were Leo McGarry and not, you know, answering constituent emails on badgers in some godforsaken corner of Norman Shaw South.

But here’s the thing.

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The importance of not being earnest

Having worked both in politics and the civil service, I have some bad news. Politicians and their staff really are believers. Now, some of those beliefs may be dreadful — season according to taste. Meanwhile, MPs obfuscate, dissemble and occasionally lie. But they are deeply earnest people. You don’t go door-knocking for hours on end (Labour), or compete in the rubber chicken circuit (Tory) unless there is an ideological fire lit beneath you.

Then there are the speeches. More bad news, I’m afraid. If you are a president such as Bartlet who does not enjoy majorities in Congress, then using the pulpit at your disposal to try and shape public opinion is incredibly important! A major problem Joe Biden encountered in his otherwise legislatively successful term is that the man could barely speak cogently, let alone distil complicated policy achievements into digestible short-form video content.

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It feels to me there are two things we have come to hate: the way things are, and change. For years, airlines have been urging Heathrow, the world’s busiest two-runway airport, to construct a third. Yet as soon as a proposal kisses the mahogany grain, they balk at the cost — the latest one projected at £33bn, as part of a wider £49bn, decade-long investment programme.

International Airlines Group, the parent company of British Airways, Iberia and Aer Lingus and the airport’s largest customer, has branded the project “unaffordable” — and this is far from a minority view. Virgin Atlantic, Singapore Airlines and United Airlines have criticised the proposed costs.

No lesser authority than Sir Tim Clark, whose airline, Emirates, serves Heathrow with six daily A380 flights, threatened legal action if airlines were forced to fund the redevelopment via higher landing charges. Which is exactly what the Civil Aviation Authority, the industry regulator, looks set to sanction.

As far as on-again, off-again situationships go — Ross and Rachel, Carrie and Mr Big, Mulder and Scully — they have nothing on the UK government and Heathrow. Feel free to glaze over the bullets below:

• December 2003: Labour government’s Aviation White Paper backs a third runway, subject to environmental conditions

• January 2009: Government formally approves the plan

• May 2010: New Conservative-Lib Dem coalition government cancels the project

• July 2015: The independent Airports Commission recommends a third runway

• June 2018: The House of Commons backs expansion by a majority of 296. Boris Johnson, who had previously promised to “lay down with you in front of those bulldozers”, missed the vote

• February 2020: The government’s approval is ruled illegal by the Court of Appeal, on the grounds that it failed to consider the UK’s obligations under the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement

• December 2020: The Supreme Court overturns the lower court

• 2021-2024 — Expansion activity paused due to the Covid-19 pandemic

• January 2025: Chancellor Rachel Reeves announces support for a third runway

• July 2025: Heathrow submits its proposals to the government

• November 2025: Government backs Heathrow’s £49bn plan

And I get it. Heathrow is already planet Earth’s most expensive airport, with fees per passenger of around £28. The proposed £49bn cost is mad. Then there’s the need to demolish up to 1,000 homes, pick up the M25 and drag it 130 metres to the west (oh, and underground), fundamentally redesign London airspace, somehow negotiate the environmental constraints — all while keeping the UK’s only hub airport operating at 98% capacity.

So why am I so picking on the airlines? I think because of the idea, so rife across Britain, that while something must be done, no one, or at least not ordinary people, should have to pay for it. I’m fairly certain it wasn’t always this way.

Panic, a tax

Back in the prelapsarian 1990s and 2000s, governments raised taxes. And not just any old taxes — broad-based ones. In 1991, VAT rose from 15% to 17.5%, 1993 saw the introduction of the fuel duty escalator and council tax, 2002 the rise in national insurance. But something snapped.

These tax rises were hardly painless — the fuel escalator was eventually ditched. But governments made them anyway, judging that the long-term economic benefits outweighed the short-term political costs. Even the Coalition government raised VAT to 20%. But since then, the willingness to go big on tax has atrophied. In its place: endless ‘tax locks’.

In the build-up to the 2015 general election, the Tories ruled out raising any of the three main taxes: income tax, national insurance and VAT. This pledge was repeated in 2019 and 2024. Despite massive and consistent polling leads, Labour did the same in its 2024 manifesto1. Instead, aside from the short-lived Health and Social Care Levy under then chancellor Rishi Sunak, we got Jeremy Hunt’s two national insurance cuts, as part of an apparent scorched earth policy.

In lieu of broad-based tax rises, we got two phenomena: fiscal drag and small, politically damaging tax rises. Oh, and fibs.

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Home Office officials are not paid to be cheerful. Perhaps that is why for decades, every new secretary of state received the same bleak assessment: that crime would continue on its inexorable rise. And the logic, it seemed, was unimpeachable.

During periods of economic recession, where there is more poverty and higher unemployment, there is greater incentive for illegal activity. Meanwhile, during periods of economic growth, there are more consumer goods in circulation, and so greater opportunity for theft.

Indeed, this played out in the data. Crime had increased, largely uninterrupted, for half a century following the end of the Second World War. It rose during the ‘never had it so good’ 1950s and the swinging sixties, the three-day weeks of the 1970s and mass unemployment of the 1980s.

And then, around about the mid-1990s, crime began to fall — not just in Britain but in other high-income countries too. And no one really agrees on why. Explanations range from the reduction in lead exposure to more liberal abortion laws, better car and home security to ageing societies, greater use of CCTV by police and later the shift to online commerce1.

The unsettling thing isn’t that the forecasters were wrong — it’s good that crime fell! Rather, it’s that when all roads appear to lead to the same destination, that’s usually an indication the map is somewhat askew.

High on their own supply shocks

Earlier this week, the head of Northern Trust’s $1.4 trillion asset management unit predicted that advances in artificial intelligence had “the potential to be massively disinflationary”, thanks to widespread efficiency gains. Mike Hunstad told the Financial Times:

If even a portion of those actually materialise on an economy-wide basis, it could be one of the biggest positive supply shocks we’ve ever seen… You can’t ignore that.

We’re all accustomed these days to negative supply shocks — those sudden decreases in the economy’s productive capacity. They occur when something bad has happened: think the Covid-19 pandemic, Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine or the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. Basically, supply falls, prices rise.

Positive supply shocks, on the other hand, occur when there is a sudden increase in an economy’s productive capacity. Something has made it cheaper to produce goods and services, and as a result prices tend to fall (or rise more slowly). Think China’s accession to the World Trade Organisation, the US shale oil boom or the dramatic reduction in the costs of solar and wind power.

There appear to be three broad responses to the AI boom. The first from the boosters, often with a financial interest, who believe the technology will transform whole swathes of cognitive tasks, reshaping (or destroying) jobs, how value is created, wars are fought. Then there are the doubters, who argue that AI is overhyped, its many products loss-making and the industry is driven as much by bored venture capitalists as by any real productivity gains.

Finally, there are the people whose eyes simply roll to the back of their heads whenever the subject is raised. I’m firmly in the latter camp, but when the subject turns to AI’s impact on inflation, I begin to take an interest.

Productivity puzzle: solved?

Alright, so we have advances in AI leading to a seismic rise in the supply of goods and services, driving prices lower. This, Hunstad argues, will allow the US Federal Reserve to reduce interest rates2 without stoking inflation, much as the flood of cheap Chinese consumer goods in the mid-2000s enabled central banks around the world to keep borrowing costs low amid an era of robust economic growth.

Hunstad is far from alone. Writing for the International Monetary Fund, economist and Nobel laureate Michael Spence observed:

AI is our best chance at relaxing the supply-side constraints that have contributed to slowing growth, new inflationary pressures, rising costs of capital, fiscal distress and declining fiscal space, and challenges in meeting sustainability goals.

You want numbers? Well, a 2025 study in Economic Letters found that “AI diffusion is associated with reduced inflationary pressures,” with a 10–percentage-point increase in the share of firms employing AI corresponding, on average, to a 0.3–0.6 percentage-point decline in inflation, with a particularly pronounced impact in the dominant services sector.

But there are a few reasons to be sceptical. First, the sheer amount of investment in AI infrastructure, in data centres, energy infrastructure, high-end chips and indeed high-end talent, risks raising prices in the short-term, when any productivity gains of AI are likely to take longer to materialise.

In other words, even if AI is itself deflationary — building AI is inflationary. Earlier this year Andrew Sheets, a strategist at Morgan Stanley, told Reuters that US consumer price inflation would remain above the Fed’s 2% target3 until the end of 2027 “in part because of heavy corporate investment in AI.”

Then there is our friend, Baumol.

Pepto-Baumol

Ok, very briefly because I already burned through 250 words at the top on crime forecasts that was parenthetical at best to my thesis. Baumol’s cost disease (a name so cheery it could have been drafted by Home Office officials) is the idea that in labour-intensive, low-productivity sectors (such as education and the arts) wage increases tend to match those in more productive sectors (such as manufacturing).

The classic example is that of a string quartet. It takes as many musicians the same amount of time to perform a Schubert piece today as it did in the 19th century. Yet the real wages of those pesky violinists have risen substantially over the last hundred years. And those costs are borne by higher prices for concertgoers.

So here’s an added wrinkle on AI and prices. Should the most optimistic of the AI boosters be right, and productivity growth goes through the roof. Administrative work is completed in the blink of an eye and abundance is everywhere. What used to take a week of tedious data inputting is now completed by AI in half an hour. Well, won’t that make Baumol’s cost disease even more acute?

Those violinists, teachers, nurses — anyone left behind in the inherently human, low-productive sectors, whose output cannot be scaled with AI — will still demand to be paid more, propelled by the productivity bonanza all around them. What will that do to the price level?

These roles may also be among the safest in the economy — AI can support teachers or plumbers, but it is unlikely to replace them. Worse still, many of these lower productivity sectors provide essential services, often paid for in full or in part by already cash-strapped governments.

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Of course, like those old Home Office civil servants, these predictions could be wrong, right or right for the wrong reasons. For instance, should AI lead to mass unemployment precipitating a near-total collapse in aggregate demand, you might still get deflation, but the bad kind, the end of times variety, rather than the cheap-Chinese-manufactured-T-shirts-on-sale-in-Zara-supply-expansion kind.

Which is just as well. I’ve long believed that Deflationary Spiral would be an ace name for a glam rock band.

You know how it is. You really don’t want to be that guy. Come on now, you’re in public, an image of urban anonymity, you could be anyone tonight. An unflappable companion to your spouse, a charming stranger to the waitress, an adventurous, blithesome, verging on the… COULD YOU TURN THAT MUSIC DOWN PLEASE I CAN BARELY HEAR MYSELF THINK. THANK YOU.

Hi. This was me on Saturday.

As I sat down at the local pizzeria, my forehead instantly began to contort. That sound. Cloying, preposterously folksy, presumably Italian music emanating from a set of speakers that, like a rotary hammer, can still be felt long after you are gone. You don’t so much hear it as experience it spatially. You look at each other. Should we just leave?

But you’re hungry. It’s 8pm and lunch is a distant memory. Imperceptibly, you shrug those pathetic shoulders and meditate over your personal shortcomings. That over-reliance on noise-cancelling headphones. Or the fact that you never play any music at home on loud, even when hosting a dinner party. I think it might be a class thing. Like removing the Viennetta from the freezer and casually declaring to Bob and Barbara: “You know what? I just don’t trust that Neil Kinnock.”

In a better world, noise pollution would be the moral panic of our age. Think strangers holding phone calls on the 16.52 to Guildford for the benefit of the entire carriage. This post comes to mind:

Though a shared space, a restaurant isn’t a commuter train or a library. The manager has every right to play music to whatever volume they desire. But it comes at a cost.

The science bit

Consider the slew of contributing factors to this trend of rising restaurant decibels. Open kitchens, stripped down surfaces, high ceilings and even higher-density seating. Meanwhile, the unconscious human response is to speak louder, a phenomenon called the Lombard effect. This generates that bustling atmosphere owners — and to be fair, patrons — often crave.

There are also financial incentives: various studies have shown that louder sound levels encourage people to drink more and eat faster, ideal for table turnover. Of course, the pizzeria in question was practically empty, I imagine on account of the fact that the pizza was floppy and the bowl of pasta with prawns and chilli cost double 2018 prices.

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*Places dictaphone to mouth*

“Idea for a sitcom: daily newsletter writer with a strong background in politics and public policy who, for reasons of self-preservation, no longer reads the news. Also, he’s a ninja.”

For roughly a decade, my weekdays looked something like this: walk to the office, park myself in front of what was then called Twitter, and scroll. This, it turned out, made me ideally suited to write a daily newsletter. Though the practice was rather more frowned upon at the Treasury.

To write a daily newsletter, even a bad one, you need ideas. And Twitter was the home of ideas. I would wake up every morning knowing I’d have to write about something, ideally a subject on which I could genuinely add value. But I rarely worried — I had subcontracted the hard bit to the virtual commons.

Perhaps Torsten Bell, then chief executive of the Resolution Foundation, had shared a nifty chart. Or Paul Johnson, then Director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, had posted a clip of him wearing a silly tie while bemoaning the government’s spending plans. Maybe Matthew Yglesias had said something trolly but broadly correct, or Phil Neville was sharing his astonishment that the Americans had killed bin Laden.

I was very online.

Bluesky Scrolling

But then a few things happened. In October 2022. Elon Musk completed his purchase of Twitter, and soon the user experience began to atrophy. Which is an oddly coy way of saying it descended into something of a Nazi bar. Then a year later, October 7 happened, and multiple corners of the internet, not least algorithmic social media, became an even more hostile place to be Jewish.

I had by this time migrated to Bluesky. It was not exactly a like-for-like replacement. For one thing, there was hardly anyone around. The best way to describe the site in late 2023 was that it was essentially a Financial Times journalists’ Slack channel. I was so starved of content I ended up following a bunch of US NIMBY types. Now, I think we should build stuff as much as the next millennial but Christ alive, planning discourse is dull.

Bluesky is superior to X in a few concrete ways. It does not throttle links, a rather handy benefit for someone who writes stuff and then shares it online. Nor does it boost the output of far-right political entrepreneurs. But as alluded to above, Bluesky exists on the internet in 2026 and is therefore heaving with conspiratorial antisemitism.

I learned to mute — not just people, but keywords — though it only helped so much. There are still days when I stay away entirely, even if it is to my professional detriment.

What would Billie do?

In addition to being a pioneer of women’s sport and female empowerment, Billie Jean King is one hell of a quote machine. You may have heard her most celebrated axiom, “Pressure is a privilege”. But my favourite is even pithier: “Champions adjust”. Top performers (of which I absolutely do not suggest I am one) don’t simply rely on a fixed plan — they adapt to whatever the situation demands. And they do it in real time.

To that end, I concluded that if I wanted to continue writing a daily newsletter, I would have to adjust.

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It always used to bother me. How when a celebrity died, my social media feed would groan under the weight of pictures of people with said celebrity. Why are you inserting yourself into this story? It isn’t about you!

But then my synagogue — the place where I have personally thrown teenage temper tantrums, where my mom volunteers and my dad was chairman (the man can’t read Hebrew but likes to be involved) — was subject to a petrol bomb attack.

I could tell you all the good things that Finchley Reform Synagogue (FRS) does for the community — the whole community. The nursery it provides, the charities it supports, the way it opened its doors and its heart to the local Somali Bravanese community after their place of worship suffered an arson attack in 2013.

But it’s futile. First, because many readers of this newsletter are themselves members of the synagogue and know the story. And second, FRS could be the meanest, crotchetiest, most Disney villain shul in all of North London, and it would still be bad to try to set it on fire. I’m fairly certain of this.

I hope you know by now that I don’t enjoy writing about this. Partly, because it means something bad has probably happened. But mainly because I’d much rather drone on about Veblen goods, Air New Zealand’s new bunk beds, even Arsenal’s faltering title bid. It’s why, for instance, I resisted opining on Kanye West, and how Wireless Festival would never have invited him had he been quite so gleefully racist against any other minority.

I really don’t want to be an activist — I mean, have you ever met a happy one?

Professionally speaking, there’s definitely a bit of scar tissue from the week after October 7. Writing in my old newsletter, West End Final, when I suggested something provocative like “It’s bad to murder Israelis”, I was inundated with angry emails saying “actually it isn’t” and variations thereof. One correspondent became something of an online stalker, whose harassment only ceased months later when my employer threatened to go to the police.

Then and now

It’s strange, but seeing private security guards and high fences around synagogues and Jewish schools doesn’t bother me, yet police cars and temporary concrete barriers knock me sideways each and every time. Why, when they’re both there for the same reason?

The obvious answer is that private security and metal fences are “normal”, or at least priced into my emotional market. Whereas police cars and crash barriers, at least in Britain and Australia, are very much a post-October 7 phenomenon.

Don’t get me wrong, if I were a regular synagogue attender, the visible presence of the state would make me feel safer. And perhaps one day we will elect governments who do not consider Jewish safety to be a worthwhile endeavour. As it is, they just make me sad. A visible manifestation that the rest of society is perfectly content with this new equilibrium for their tiny Jewish minority.

The playbook

With every violent attack, we get the same set piece responses. Pick your fighter:

• Tough-sounding words from politicians, who self-evidently do not mean it when they declare that this hatred will not be tolerated.

• Otherwise kind and supportive people who, for whatever reason, feel the need to caveat their condemnation with denunciations of Israel or Netanyahu. Erm, what’s that got to do with the price of [gefilte] fish?

• The silence from the self-avowed anti-racists

• The “anti-Zionism isn’t antisemitism” defence [see the fish]

• The rising tide of conspiratorial cranks, for whom every act of antisemitic violence is a ‘false flag’ i.e. the Jews did it for… secret reasons.

All washed down with the understanding that antisemitic violence always, always leads to more violence. See October 7 itself, or the spike in antisemitism following last year’s Glastonbury Festival. But I think what I find most difficult is the sense of abandonment, and how quickly it all happened.

I don’t believe I was naive. In the 2010s, on the mercifully rare occasions I would need to get to a synagogue, I would reflexively input the address into the Uber app as a random house across the street from the shul. Why go looking for trouble? But I had clearly missed the fact that, for years, animus against Jews was gaining strength and waiting for its moment. It took October 7 for it to be unleashed.

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I still remember waking up that day and being shocked — not by the BBC live blog detailing the events, but an Instagram story shared by a friend that was justifying and celebrating the attacks while they were still ongoing. This person later seemed genuinely surprised and angry not to be invited to my wedding!

More and more, I think I ought to exercise some gratitude. That I got to live the first three decades of my life during the great aberration — when the post-World War II taboo surrounding antisemitism was largely enforced in Britain. Where one could be Jewish and not have to think about it. What a privilege. I only wish I’d appreciated it at the time.

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In the year 2000, American Airlines did something unusual. The biggest and most longstanding complaint from passengers was then — like now — about space, or lack thereof. Economy class is not only uncomfortable, but an exercise in maintaining one’s dignity in the face of mild disrespect.

The airline spent almost $75m removing more than 7,000 seats from its aircraft, in order to increase economy seat pitch (essentially legroom technically the distance between a fixed point on one seat and the same point directly in front) by an average of three inches. In other words, the carrier listened to its customers. Big mistake. Huge.

Despite a mass marketing campaign called “More Room Throughout Coach”, the gambit was a financial failure, in a case of stated versus revealed preferences. Passengers said they valued comfort, but when it came to buying tickets, they chose the cheapest fare available in a competitive market. The missing seats were quietly inserted back in — and an industry truism was born.

Except, passengers clearly are prepared to pay more to get more. One only has to glance over at the boom in economy extra seats and the premium economy cabin. The failure of American Airlines’ “More Room Throughout Coach” was in taking away choice. Travellers are more than happy to pay for specific perks (see: the rise of unbundling) or upgrades. What they do not like is being denied the option of the cheapest possible ticket, or the fact that their money is not buying them any sort of exclusivity.

A classless society

It is striking how, over recent decades, premium cabins have enjoyed revolutionary upgrades, from flat beds and all-aisle access to onboard bars. Yet at the same time, the economy experience today looks remarkably similar to that of the 1990s, albeit with bigger seat-back screens and charging ports. Chief financial officers really do not want an economy seat so good that it will cannibalise premium products. They needn’t worry.

Indeed, the experience at the back of the plane has if anything deteriorated. On short haul flights, seat pitch has fallen to around 28 inches on budget airlines, down from 31-32 inches in the 2000s. Meanwhile on the Boeing 777, the sort of plane that will take you over oceans, most carriers have squeezed in an extra seat per row. Positive innovations are conspicuous by their absence.

But Air New Zealand has never been afraid to differentiate. It unveiled its Skycouch concept in 2010, whereby for an upgrade passengers can turn a row of three seats into a lie-flat bed — the poor man’s business class, if you will. And today, the airline has gone further, launching Skynest, what it ambitiously calls “the world’s first sleep pods in the sky”. But what they really mean is bunk beds.

Top or bottom?

This is what the promotional images want you to think it will look like.

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“Supply and demand!” That was the most common response my A-level economics teacher received, on telling strangers what she did for a living. Why are people so weird? Not least because this contravenes the single best piece of advice I have ever received.

That is: when someone tells you what they do for work, and you want to sound broadly sympathetic, don’t reply with the standard “that sounds so interesting.” First, because, let’s face it, it probably isn’t. And second, there’s a decent chance the other person doesn’t think so either. Instead, say “that sounds really challenging”.

Think about it. Whether you love or hate your job, we all get a serotonin boost from being told it sounds difficult. My only reticence in sharing this nugget is the distinct knowledge I have almost certainly deployed it at weddings, bar mitzvahs and first dates attended by subscribers to this newsletter.

So, if you are reading this and recall I once said this to you over canapés, I really did mean it.

High on their own supply

It’s not that supply and demand isn’t central to economics. Thanks to Donald Trump, we’re all getting a crash course in the concept. As of last year, indeed as of a couple of months ago, around 25% of the world’s seaborne oil trade and 19% of liquefied natural gas transited the Strait of Hormuz. As of April 2026, that number is, erm, lower.

What happens next is reasonably straightforward: supply falls and so the price rises. This is a signal to consumers — the demand side of the equation — to buy less of the stuff. Not just petrol, of course, but everything that the oil supply chain touches, from food and plastics to holidays. But in reality, the law of supply and demand is about as heavily enforced as fare evasion on the Tube.

First, there is the question of price elasticity, which measures how sensitive consumers are to a given change in price. An extreme example would be addictive goods. Cigarette companies may be able to raise their prices without precipitating a fall in demand because their customers are physiologically dependent on their products. Close behind are sporting franchises — if Manchester United raises season ticket prices, are fans really going to nip across town to support City instead?

Then there’s the issue of supply. Sure, in an idealised market, higher prices should lead to more producers entering the market, moving the curve toward a new equilibrium. But the theory ignores short-term supply limits — producers can’t immediately increase output. It also assumes no panic buying on the part of consumers or interference by panicked politicians.

But by far my favourite exception is for the one type of goods that don’t just ignore the law of supply and demand, but actively flaunt it: Veblen goods.

Luxury is a state of mind

What is luxury — and why is it different to premium? This was a question raised by Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal in a 2022 episode of Acquired, the podcast on business history and strategy, about LVMH. This is one of those situations where, even if you don’t have a pithy definition at your fingertips, you just know the difference.

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BMW is premium, but Ferrari is luxury. Ralph Lauren is premium, but Hermès is luxury. Sofitel is premium, but Mandarin Oriental is luxury. In short, premium means you’re paying more for higher quality. But luxury? It’s about paying more to make a statement about yourself. Without wishing to sound like ChatGPT, the price isn’t the signal — the conspicuous consumption is.

Which is where Thorstein Veblen comes in. The American economist observed that for certain goods, the demand curve is inverted. That is, an increase in price leads to an increase in demand. People want it because it’s expensive, not in spite of it. Owning the handbag or watch is a form of communication: look how wealthy I am, or how much taste I possess, or my access to exclusivity12.

An extreme example would be a work of high-end art, which has essentially zero utility or objective value. But practicality is for the merely well-off. Owning something completely useless or impractical is the signal that you’ve made it. I mean, a Ferrari in central London will not get you to your destination any faster, or even in greater comfort than a Ford Mondeo. That’s the point.

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I think I find Veblen goods so satisfying (the concept, not the objects) as it sits at the intersection of economics, psychology and sociology. It demonstrates that while simple models assume rational actors seeking maximal utility, preferences are often social, value is at least partly constructed and demand can be identity-driven.

Perhaps Lines to Take needs to raise its prices.

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As it’s Easter break, I thought I’d take the opportunity to remind you that, statistically speaking, your risk of accidental death is significantly higher on holiday than at home. The explanation is pretty straightforward: mortality is strongly correlated with increased activity. Driving on unfamiliar roads, drinking to excess, exhaustion from heat or, if skiing, the cold. You pays your money and takes your choice! But the big one is water.

Humans really do like to be beside the seaside. This despite the fact that drowning is the third leading cause of unintentional death worldwide, claiming around 236,000 lives each year, according to the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention. Only a small portion of these occur during holidays, but the risk does rise. In Australia, for example, it roughly doubles on public holidays, when more people are swimming, boating and generally being a bit of a larrikin.

Of course, water isn’t just good for bathing or getting that perfect Insta story. Humans have tended to settle near the stuff because it makes survival — and later, civilisation — far easier. Fresh water is essential for everyday life, and early settlers needed a reliable, nearby source for drinking, cooking and cleaning. But wait, there’s more.

Water also provides irrigation for agriculture, rivers create fertile soil while fishing is a steady source of food. Then there’s water’s ability to facilitate transport and trade, to act as a natural defensive barrier and its moderating impact on the climate. So sure, you may be more likely to die next to it, but you’d only die much sooner from its absence. And you certainly wouldn’t get complex civilisations without it.

The same logic applies beyond water. Why do so many people live in earthquake zones or near volcanoes? It’s not as if Pompeians were blissfully unaware of what Mount Vesuvius was up to, or the power of fault lines to wreak havoc on your cave dwelling1. But again, volcanic areas have some of the most nutrient-rich soil on Earth, while tectonic regions often also provide ideal conditions for living, farming, as well as access to water, whether from rivers or aquifers.

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So now we come to the Middle East. A region that is somehow home to three things: the cradle of civilisation, roughly half the world’s proven reserves of crude oil and lots of wars. What are the odds? It’s not as if the ancient Sumerians of Mesopotamia, basically modern-day Iraq, set up shop because of their booming commercial aviation scene. Once again, and without going the full geography is destiny, geology has a lot to answer for.

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Books

A City on Mars: Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, and Have We Really Thought This Through? By Kelly and Zach Weinersmith

First off, a deeply funny book. There’s a gag about the science of artificial wombs being “in its infancy” that I particularly enjoyed. But it’s also a cogent, thoroughly researched and even-handed investigation into whether we should actually do this. Or at least, do it now.

Flesh by David Szalay

A warning — your relationship with the word “Ok” will never recover after this. And I think that’s… fine. Winner of the Booker Prize 2025, this is the story of a man through the ups and downs of life, from childhood to adulthood and from Hungary to West London via Iraq. I suppose I’m duty-bound to describe the prose as “minimalist” but it’s more gentle than that.

Television

Looking (2014)

It was badly miscast as the ‘Gay Girls’, but the HBO comedy drama, following the lives of three men living in San Francisco, meant a lot to me as a twenty-something Hackneyite. Though it would be an exaggeration (as well as cliché) to call the rewatch an emotional rollercoaster — more an emotional Disney’s “It’s a Small World”.

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“You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics” observed the economist Robert Solow in 1987. Solow was alluding to the fact that, despite widespread investment in computers and digital technology, labour productivity in the mid-to-late 20th century remained less than yeasty.

I wonder whether a similar phenomenon is underway with culture, and specifically the 1990s. I mean, you see it everywhere, from the Oasis reunion tour to the glut of TV reboots. Even Arsenal are able to defend set pieces again. Everywhere, that is, except in geopolitics, where the United States can’t even any longer guarantee freedom of navigation.

Partly, this 1990s nostalgia follows a well-trodden path. Practically speaking, those who remember the period now hold positions of power across the arts, and are therefore in position to recommission their childhood favourites. Think of it as a sort of 30-year rule but for culture, rather than the release of public documents.

I mean, this is a civilisation that had no qualms about doing 1970s nostalgia, what with Boogie Nights (1997), That ‘70s Show (1998), Life on Mars (2006) and the mercifully brief revival of flared jeans. Despite the fact that the decade was not exactly a triumph for the West. No doubt in 30 years’ time, there will be earnest attempts to dredge up the 2020s.

I’m as guilty of 1990s revivalism as the next middle-aged millennial. I’ll watch Friends while playing Nintendo 64 and munching on lunchable-style snacks. But there’s an era I’m even more obsessed with — what I can best describe as the period just before I knew what the hell was going on. That interstitial period from just after time began (the year of my birth) but before my first proper cultural memories.

At that age, it all happens so quickly, doesn’t it? I have no memory of Euro ‘96 but obsessively watched every match from World Cup ‘98. Until the age of eight, I cared little for any music other than The Lion King soundtrack, and then all of a sudden Top of the Pops became must-see Friday night viewing. And it is that in-between period I find myself repeatedly drawn to. A sort of no-man’s land, where many of the characters in sport, politics and culture are recognisable but somehow warped out of shape.

It’s up for grabs now!

Take Michael Thomas. I know full well that he scored the championship-clinching, last-minute, Sergio-Agüero-could-never goal for Arsenal at Anfield in 1989 — but that’s history. To see VHS-quality footage of Thomas later playing in the same Liverpool side as Michael Owen is downright weird. As if Stanley Matthews showed up at Tony Pulis’s Stoke to play outside right.

Or take politics. Michael Heseltine is to me one of two people: the 1980s Tarzan figurine with flowing locks who walked out of the cabinet in 1986 over the Westland affair, or the very model of a modern elder statesman unapologetically campaigning for Remain. In other words, what the heck was he doing in 1996, slugging it out with John Prescott at the despatch box as deputy prime minister?

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