Running Out of Time

Economic and geopolitical forces are increasing pressure to change course

Feb 20, 2026

Towering Columns

For The Times, Ben Judah says that this government can do nothing until it has a plan to reform the failing state.

The state itself is failing. This is what I learnt in government. Discovering this in office has been a shock for my generation of Labour advisers and politicians. It’s not just, as the party believed in opposition, that the Tories, mired in impropriety, were failures. Slow, secretive and sclerotic, the government machinery itself is jammed.
Our good intentions, in a busted system, are not enough. You need scepticism, a plan and some history. When Labour came to power in 1964 it did so not only with a healthy suspicion of the state but a compelling critique. Such thinking has been sorely lacking this time round. As a result, we have ceded any critique of the civil service and the state to Dominic Cummings and Danny Kruger.
Labour back then revolutionised political appointments with special advisers — the Spads without whom you can’t imagine Whitehall — and used Nicholas Kaldor, the leading economist of his day, as an adviser. They even sought to break up the Treasury with a new Department of Economic Affairs. Obviously, 60 years on, not all of these ideas have stuck but they met the measure of their age.

On Substack, Tom Tugenhat calls for a whole-of-nation response to a rapidly changing world.

Air Chief Marshal Sir Rich Knighton, the Chief of the Defence Staff, has said that the current threat environment is more dangerous than at any point in his career and that responding to it requires a whole-of-nation response: building industrial capacity, growing the skills we need, and increasing the resilience of society and the infrastructure that supports it.⁴ That language is not routine. It is a serving military chief telling the country that defence is no longer a problem the armed forces can solve alone.
Building that consensus requires honesty. The British public has not been told clearly what the country faces, what it will cost, or what the consequences of inaction would be. Governments of both parties have preferred reassurance to candour. That must change and that’s why I’ve been writing these articles. The public are not children. They can weigh difficult choices if they are trusted with the facts.
Four pillars of British defence were dismantled in fifty days. They will not be rebuilt on the same foundations. The assumptions that sustained them, American constancy, allied automaticity, strategic predictability, political convenience, belong to a world that no longer exists. The only real question is whether Britain builds something new before events force our hand.

For The Critic, Jethro Elsden warns that we are facing another lost decade like the 1920s.

It was reputedly Mark Twain who said that “history doesn’t repeat itself but it does rhyme”. So far the 20’s have been rhyming strongly with that of a hundred years ago; just as today the 1920s were a decade which began with a global pandemic, marked by political turmoil in the UK, a new party rising to prominence and a near constant churn of prime ministers. And now the 2020’s are on track to be the worst for economic growth since the 1920’s.
While the 1920’s saw truly anemic growth of just 0.8% per year, we’re hardly doing much better, with average growth per year of just 1.1% since 2020. What’s worse is that unlike in the 1920’s we lack the explanation of having just been through one of history’s most destructive wars or made the mistake of reentering the Gold Standard at the wrong rate, or had the disruption of a general strike like that in 1926.
While it’s true that Brexit (and more importantly the drawn out process after the referendum) has been somewhat disruptive and the pandemic caused significant damage, an inherently strong and healthy economy would have shrugged these setbacks off and caught up with strong growth. But that hasn’t happened.

On Substack, Andrew O’Brien argues that Conservatives cannot go back to the ‘coalition years’.

The Austerity Programme was a catastrophic mistake which accelerated a downward spiral that was already taking place. The books did need to be balanced but they certainly did not need to the dramatically balanced in a low-interest rate environment and the manner they were done was totally flawed. The Conservative Party had come to see the public spending of New Labour as pure waste, just a sop to voters. They could not accept that expanding public services and welfare was propping up a failed economic model that had deindustrialised and hollowed out communities. Replacing old industries with nothing. This was a model that the Conservatives had kicked off when they were last in government. Spending cuts, without a new economic model, worsened deep seated social and economic problems and was directly correlated to Brexit voting.
The Coalition was New Labour but without any populist public spending, it would survive and fall purely on the strength of its governing philosophy. It fell.
The Conservative Party could not seriously countenance a new economic model because its Panglossian philosophy was the market was always right - this is what backing business meant. If the economy was the way it was, it was because that is what was right. There is no alternative. If businesses wanted corporation tax slashed, they should have it. If they wanted red tape cut, they should have it. If they wanted devolution, they should have it. The immigration system should be as liberal as possible to help them, providing it did not prevent re-election. The only areas they resisted were on planning and environmental regulation. The former where the ‘establishment’ consensus, including business, was to be seen to be green and the latter because voters did not want to be disturbed by new housing. It was necessary to reduce house building to appease the coalition that sustained the ‘back business’ mantra. The Conservative Party’s view was that the British economy was the best of all possible worlds. It was wrong.

For The Critic, James Mackenzie Smith discusses the possibility of British sovereign debt crisis.

That said, recent volatility in international bond markets — including that seen in Japanese government bonds — combined with a deteriorating global perception of Britain as a stable jurisdiction, mean this is not an entirely theoretical event. Moreover the UK, which runs both consistently high fiscal and current account (trade) deficits, is structurally vulnerable, with natural demand for UK government bonds (gilts) declining as domestic pension funds roll off their holdings.
From a risk management perspective even a moderate likelihood of a debt crisis — combined with what would be catastrophic ramifications — necessitates a response plan. It is for this reason we ran a series of working groups on this subject, with our recommendations published last November, detailing how the Government must respond if the markets decide to strike.
A crisis could be triggered by any number of events: a significant deviation from the Chancellor’s “fiscal rule”, a credit rating downgrade, a failed gilt auction, or even a “black swan” geopolitical shock. The risk of a less fiscally prudent administration following a change in political leadership should not be discounted by investors, either.

For The Times, Nick Timothy attacks the government clamping down on legal transparency.

The government claims access to court information for journalists and the public has not been affected, and that listings and records remain available. But, as the investigative reporter George Greenwood wrote in The Times, “this is simply untrue”. He explained that because he can no longer search the records by keyword, crime type or court, “journalist access to court records has certainly been affected”.
If we want to stop the rape gangs permanently, as we must, the first critical step is transparency. Ministers should be making every effort to get more data and more information into the public domain. But they are not. This matters, because without transparency there can be no accountability, and without accountability there can be no justice.
Yet the government is attacking this transparency. And in so doing it is entrenching the culture of opacity that allowed the rape gangs to go unpunished. Without this archive many more cases will escape scrutiny and lives will be destroyed. Whatever the motive for the government deleting this archive, it is not too late to change course. Lammy must stop this plan to hide the facts. For justice to be done, we must all be given the truth.

For The Critic, Daniël Eloff writes about the paralysis created by excessive legalism.

Human rights governance systematically transfers risk downward. Moral authority, reputational insulation, and legal protection accumulate upward among the professional classes who design and administer the system. Material consequences accumulate below. Elites encounter failure as procedural friction like another court challenge, another policy refinement or another interpretive debate. Communities encounter it as unemployment, crime, electricity blackouts, and collapsing services in South Africa, and as strained policing, unmanaged migration, housing shortages, and declining public order in the UK. This asymmetry explains the widening gap between governors and governed better than ideology alone. Those most fluent in the language of rights are also the least exposed to the costs of governing by them.
Rob Henderson’s term “luxury beliefs” describes ideas embraced by elites that impose costs on others. Transformative constitutionalism in South Africa is a textbook example — with one essential difference. These luxury beliefs were not merely expressed, they were enforced. They became procurement rules, hiring criteria, and regulatory thresholds. Their costs were borne by the poor (overwhelmingly black) while their moral prestige accrued to the professional classes who designed them.
This might be called a form of jurisprudential toxic compassion: the prioritisation of emotional reassurance over long-term consequence. The language of transformation comforts those who speak it — signalling virtue and absolving guilt — but it does not fix roads, keep the lights on, or build capable institutions.

In The Times, Melanie Phillips writes about the recent ruling that Palestine Action was not a terrorist organisation.

Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of the ruling was its conclusion that proscription was “disproportionate” because “the nature and scale of Palestine Action’s activities falling within the definition of terrorism had not yet reached the level, scale and persistence” to warrant it.
Yet since August 2024, the group had been responsible for 158 “direct action events”, 28 of which had caused damage to property exceeding £50,000 or were events that had required significant police presence. And the court itself noted that the group “encourages the causing of more, rather than less harm … a risk that’s all the greater, because the manual encourages everyone to take matters into their own hands”.
So must the government wait until more people are injured or someone even gets killed by these activities before the judges agree that such a terrorist group should be banned?

In The Telegraph, Allister Heath says a new right-wing government must be prepared for fierce resistance.

Sensible compromises are necessary. French populists have been defeated repeatedly because the middle classes feared for their money under a Marine Le Pen presidency or a euro Frexit: the British Right must never lose the support of prosperous Middle England. It must always protect their wealth.
Ensuring it cannot be attacked on macroeconomics will give a Right-wing government the latitude to fight back on every other front. It will certainly be vicious. Leaving the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) and United Nations conventions, vital policies, will be met by a campaign to render the UK an international pariah. Abrogating the Equalities Act will infuriate the Left, while slashing welfare and ending gold-plated public sector pensions will lead to a 21st-century version of the miners’ strikes by the nation’s bureaucrats.
There will be endless judicial activism and a constitutional crisis will surely be engineered. Sir Keir Starmer’s Brexit betrayals will need to be reversed, triggering a trade war with Brussels. An Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or Gavin Newsom presidency in the United States will be weaponised against a Faragiste or Badenochite British government, with sanctions a possibility.
Naive Right-wingers must stop underestimating the viciousness and power of the status quo forces arranged against them. Winning the election will be tough but merely an early battle in a lengthy war to seize control of a hostile, blue-pilled British state, supported by a radicalised establishment. Without the right plan, it will all be for nothing.

And finally…Henry Hill moves on as Deputy Editor of Conservative Home. In his last article, he questions whether the party has learnt the lessons from its time in office.

The Tories failed for broadly the same reasons that Sir Keir Starmer is failing now, although the specifics are different. Ultimately, there was nothing resembling a proper governance project, and thus nothing to counteract the continual temptation to make the easy short-term decision and hope for the best.
Spending went up, planning applications were blocked, prisons were closed for economic reasons, and eventually we woke up in the future, which turned out to be populated not by the better, braver people to whom we had delegated the difficult decisions but by us, and the consequences of our actions. One is put in mind of this passage by Joan Didion:
“That was the year, my twenty-eighth, when I was discovering that not all of the promises would be kept, that some things are in fact irrevocable and that it had counted after all, every evasion and every procrastination, every mistake, every word, all of it.”
Sadly, the capacity of today’s leaders to evade this revelation far exceeds hers, and there remains too little evidence that the party has really grasped this problem. Badenoch has finally found her feet as leader and made some sensible policy interventions at conference, but on the big strategic questions the evidence is mostly bad. The Conservative Party remains committed to both the pensions triple lock and an un-means-tested Winter Fuel Allowance, two of the most obviously correct spending cuts of which it is possible to conceive. Meanwhile if the Tories actually have a housing policy, James Cleverly is being very quiet about it.
None of this is entirely the party’s fault. Our increasingly fragmented party system affords the electorate one refuge from reality after another; where once the consecutive failure of both the major parties of government might have created space for a radical break with the status quo, today there are always others – Reform UK, or the Greens – prepared to pretend that the country can be fixed by way of painless decisions and the targeting of baddies. The best that can be said of them is that, since Downing Street increasingly resembles a machine for destroying its occupant, if they take office by such means they will deserve it.

Wonky Thinking

Neil O’Brien has published a new ‘Welfare Atlas of Britain’ on his Substack. The atlas shows how over £100bn in working age welfare spending is distributed across the country by local authority, parliamentary constituency and at a neighbourhood level.

O’Brien analyses the data and concludes:

Before coming to office in 1997 Tony Blair promised to cut what he called “the bills of social failure” - and while the welfare bill actually went up on his watch, at least his argument was right - taxpayers’ money that you are spending mopping up problems is money you aren’t spending on preventing those problems.
Obviously we can’t just overnight shift all of the large bill for working age welfare into more productive uses. But over time we need to control welfare spending if we want to have the money for other things that can get the economy moving.
I have written before about getting growth going in poorer places and spreading opportunity. People sometimes moan about poor places receiving lots of taxpayers’ money - but the truth is that that money often comes in a form (welfare) that doesn’t help change their trajectory. It may even compound it in some cases.
The Starmer government is showing how limited the room is for tax increases, with the economy sagging most in the sectors hit by the biggest tax hikes. More tax increases will be counterproductive. So if we want the firepower to fix broken places, we need to look to control spending instead. If we could cut the ever-growing welfare bill then maybe we could get somewhere.

Podcast of the Week

On The Winston Marshall Show, Lord Andrew Roberts debates the long term consequences of Labour’s victory in 1945 and the illusion of prosperity created by overseas debt and Keynesian economics.