He woke up and accepted the adulation of his subjects. He walked between golden rooms and received his coterie of sycophants. He sat and preened and celebrated himself.

Occasionally, small half-formed intruders stumbled into his mind. These were thoughts, but he was unable to assess what they meant or could lead to. He was burdened with a sense of encroaching humiliation, a feeling of being trapped in a prison of his own making, from actions which he himself initiated. But he lacked the self-awareness to understand how he ended up in this position or the coherence with which to break out of it.

America has no president. It has an emperor. And the emperor is insane.

This is how he spends his days. Last Friday, the US Commission of Fine Arts approved a commemorative gold coin featuring Donald Trump, to celebrate America’s 250th year of independence. Federal law does not allow a living president to appear on US currency, but the law is a thing of the past which no longer troubles the American establishment. The members of the commission are acolytes, hired to worship the emperor. Last year, Trump fired all sitting members and replaced them with his loyalists. Now they think as he instructs them or as they believe he wishes them to think.

The Commission’s vice-chairman James McCrery said: “I motion to approve this as presented, and with the strong encouragement that you make it as large as possible, all the way to three inches in diameter.” The only quality which competes with their obsequiousness is their stupidity.

On Thursday, he held a Cabinet meeting. These have now devolved into sanctification ceremonies, a form of emperor-worship ritual. The most senior figures in the US government compete to lower themselves as close as possible to his feet as they eradicate what is left of their dignity. Doug Burgum, the US interior secretary, invented an alternate version of Venezuela where they worship the American emperor. “I literally think they’re going to put up a statue to President Trump,” he said. “It’s like they view President Trump like Simón Bolívar. He’s the liberator of a country”.

Later that day, Mike Johnson, the speaker of the United States House of Representatives, created a new award so that he could “honour” the emperor. “He is the suitable and fitting recipient of the first ever America First award,” he said. “That’s this beautiful golden statue here, appropriate for the new golden era in America.”

Afterwards, the Treasury Department announced that all American currency will be changed to feature Trump’s signature. It is the first time this has ever taken place for a sitting president. Treasury secretary Scott Bessent said: “There is no more powerful way to recognise the historic achievements of our great country and President Donald J. Trump than US dollar bills bearing his name”.

It is bitterly ironic that a country which is famed for a constitution of checks-and-balances should have ended up so vulnerable to a leadership personality cult. The US constitution is designed in a series of elaborate countervailing tensions between legislature and judiciary and executive, the product of men who were concerned with limiting power, with strapping it in restraints and holding it down.

But a constitutional system is only as effective as the people who believe in it. You can write the constitution down in one place, as the Americans do, or have it hidden away all over the place, as we do. None of that matters. All that really matters is that people behave according to the social and moral norms it establishes. People must believe it to be true, or it is only paper. In the US, they ceased to believe it is true long ago. That is why the legislature, which lacks all self-confidence, refuses to stand up to him. It is why the judiciary, whose supreme body he partly appointed, does not restrain him. It is why the press, which is subject to its own institutional pathologies, is unable to meaningfully hold him to account.

The mad emperor is therefore allowed to do whatever he likes. He has total discretion.

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One day the mad emperor woke up and decided that he wanted to bomb Iran. From that point on, a series of events took place which would impact people all over the world. It would impact people who live in high-rise apartments and rain-lashed slums, in corporate offices and rice fields, in wealthy post-industrial countries and poverty-stricken agrarian states.

It began from the first moment of the operation. The Shajarah Tayyebeh elementary school in Southern Iran decided to close as soon as US bombing had been confirmed, at around 10am on February 28th. They called parents and asked them to pick up their children. They did not know it yet, but it was too late. The roads were congested and most parents would not make it there in time to save them.

Sometime between 10:23am and 11:47am, the school was hit in a missile strike. The roof collapsed, trapping children and teachers under rubble. The school principal seemingly managed to move a group of children to a prayer room and called parents again to have them rescue them. The school was then hit by a second strike, killing most of the children who had taken shelter. At least 175 people were killed, including over 100 children.

The US was almost certainly responsible for this strike, as officials close to the military investigation have made clear. When he was asked about it, Trump replied that “that was done by Iran”. When he was asked why he was the only one suggesting this, he replied: “Because I just don’t know enough about it.”

One of the defining elements of the second Trump administration is how glib and nonchalant his replies to questions are. He’s not even that angry with reporters anymore. He simply doesn’t care. He doesn’t think about these things. They do not matter to him. He is nonchalant not as a political exercise but because he is emotionally unaffected and intellectually disengaged. Core issues of war and peace are now reduced to this man uttering incoherent and internally contradictory sentences, like someone mumbling in their sleep.

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Once the war began, Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz. Or rather, insurance companies closed it. Iran just had to make threats and show that it could deliver on them, the realities of modern actuarial ecosystems did the rest.

Trump had probably not considered this eventuality at all. Insofar as his military strategists had done so, they evidently believed that Iran would avoid this approach because of the damage it would inflict on their own economy. But once Trump escalated his rhetoric away from ballistic missiles and towards regime change, the existential consequences made that calculation redundant. He has created his own worst outcome, but he will never understand this and is probably not even aware that it has taken place.

The immediate impact was to oil. It is a commodity whose function is to allow for movement, so once its price rises the price of everything else rises, by virtue of the additional expenditure required to get it where it needs to be. For Trump, this will be electorally toxic. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) forecasts that US inflation will surge to 4.2%, on what are pretty optimistic forecasts assuming a reduction in energy prices in June. If the conflict drags on and those reductions do not take place, the inflationary consequences will be longer and more severe.

There will be people in the US who go out of business because they cannot afford the increase in their transport budget. There will be workers who lose their jobs because the company folds or has to lay people off. In the UK and across Europe, families who are struggling to get by will go to the supermarket and see that, once again, the food they are buying is rocketing up in price. They will save, they will purchase cheaper food of a lower quality, they will give up on life’s little luxuries, like a visit to the fish and chip shop on Friday night, and in some cases they will go hungry. The emperor will not care about them. He will not recognise that they exist. He will not lose a moment’s sleep over it.

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The Strait of Hormuz is not just an oil chokepoint. It is much more than that. In addition to oil it is a key transit point for liquified natural gas, aluminium, helium, petrochemicals and fertiliser. What we are seeing is akin to no-deal Brexit, in military form and on a global scale. It is a system-wide event with primary, secondary and tertiary causal waves which touch nearly all areas of the economy.

The strait is the transit point for roughly 20% of global liquified natural gas. Qatar, the world’s second-largest exporter, shipped 93% of its exports through Hormuz. The UAE shipped 96%. There is no pipeline alternative to the global market, as there is for oil.

People in Europe will suffer. People in the Indian subcontinent will suffer more severely. Last year, Bangladesh, India and Pakistan imported almost two-thirds of their total liquified natural gas supplies via the strait. They are particularly exposed, with serious threats to electricity supply security in Bangladesh and Pakistan particularly. The very poor will be forced into darkness. The less poor will make savings elsewhere. The emperor will not think of them.

Somewhere between a quarter and a third of the world’s helium goes through the strait. This noble gas is crucial to the AI boom. It is used in the manufacture of microchips and semiconductors. It is also a key input in MRI machines, fiber optics, and aerospace applications. Sometime in the future, a promising tech start-up will never get the chance to establish itself. A medical machine will never be built. The emperor will not think about it.

Major aluminum smelters in the UAE, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia depend on the strait for export. Once the strait closed, prices sky-rocketed. This will soon drive up the price of the products in sectors which use it as an input, including automotive, aerospace, and construction. The great industrial engines in Europe and the US will suffer once more. Workers will be left in a more precarious position than they would have been otherwise.The emperor will not think of them.

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One of the most severe consequences concerns fertiliser. It cannot be rerouted. There are no pipelines. There are no strategic reserves.

The Strait of Hormuz is required for over 30% of the world trade in ammonia, nearly 50% of urea and 20% of diammonium phosphate - all key inputs in fertiliser production. Since the war began, prices have soared. Urea prices at the New Orleans import hub jumped over 30%, from $475–$516 to roughly $680 per metric ton. In the Middle East, the price of Urea went up by 19% in the first week of March. In Egypt it went up by 28%.

There is a secondary impact from the restrictions on natural gas, which is a key feedstock for nitrogenous-based fertilisers. This makes the upward pressure on costs even more severe. Fertiliser firms in India, Bangladesh and Pakistan have shut down production without access to natural gas from Qatar.

There will then be a third inflationary impact from restrictions on ongoing exports. Brazil, for instance, imports 85% of its fertiliser. It is then uses it in soybean production, where it is a major exporter and global price-setter. Three quarters of China’s soybean imports are from Brazil, which it uses to feed livestock. The inflationary wave will travel overseas, hitting country after country, and bouncing off to hit another country, in a series of interlaced economic effects.

In the US, this comes during the spring planting window for corn and soybeans. Without fertiliser, there will be reduced planted acreage, lower yields and consequent increases in prices for customers. But the impact will be felt much more broadly than the US. It will be felt in Sri Lanka during the Maha rice harvest, in Bangladesh during the Boro rice season, in India ahead of the Kharif season and in Egypt, Sudan and Sub-Saharan Africa.

Poor countries will suffer the most and they will suffer worse than before, given that the US and the UK have effectively shuttered their government funded aid programmes. The emperor will not care. He will barely recognise the humanity of the people we are discussing. To him, they will be a great dark mass, off in the horizon of the world, an indistinguishable homogenous protrusion without moral purpose or moral consequence. The further impoverishment which is inflicted upon them will not overshadow his mind.

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Even if the war ends tomorrow, the pain is coming. The damage has already been inflicted: on extraction, capacity, distribution. It will not be restored in months, it will take years. And in that time we will all suffer, to some extent or other. All because the emperor woke up one morning and decided to start a war.

Liberal democracy rejects leadership personality cults for the same reason it believes in countervailing constitutional restraints. It is because power cannot be trusted. Because power cannot be allowed to persist without supreme vigilance. It cannot be tolerated except insofar as it is pinned down by multiple controls. We have developed this system specifically to prevent madmen becoming leaders and to moderate them if they do.

This is why we have the judiciary, the legislature, the press and the voting public: to hold power to account. This is why each part of the system is scrutinised and moderated by some other part, or multiple parts in tandem.

For a decade now, populists have told us that independent institutions are a threat to the people’s will. That the judges are biased, the legislature is elitist and the press a pack of liars. But if you look around the world today, you can see the full extent of this fiction. It is a lie that killed those children in that school, that will destroy an American start-up before it can get off the ground, that will price a British family out of their weekly shop and will drive people in some of the poorest countries on earth into greater suffering.

We do not serve the people by allowing power to be exercised without restraint. We serve them by taking it firmly under control.

These events are caused by the madness of the emperor. But they are ultimately the result of populism and the dark, blood-dimmed lie it has told the public. They can be brought to a halt, once we call that lie out and commit to the values that our society is based on.

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Odds and sods

Best be quick because that was a long one. This newsletter is available as a podcast at the top of the page, or on Spotify. My column this week was the European far-right having a terrible time due to their connection to Trump. Poor them. We put out a Origin Story release this week on Introvert/Extrovert - is it real, or just some fetishistic way for people to self-categorise? We reveal all, in a story of psychoanalysis, human profiling and super weird Austrian sex stuff. I haven’t watched or read or listened to a goddamn thing, sorry - utter cultural death at the moment - but I’ll be on new and improved form next week, I promise. See you then.

The other day, I had a casual conversation with colleagues about buying music. Nobody gave a rat’s ass; they all just either downloaded the .mp3 files or used Spotify. Most conversations on this topic end like this so I expected the response from more than a few individuals, but not from everyone. I was deemed the silly fool who buys stuff and supports artists.

Yet at the same time, we all bemoan the fact that creative individuals are losing their job due to the rise of generative AI. To that I say: maybe that’s our own fault for not properly compensating these people in the first place?

Please compensate the work you appreciate. Showing appreciation is not enough to bring food to the table. If you get paid for the work you are doing each month, don’t you think it’s only logical that these people also get paid? Where do you think that money should be coming from? It’s weird to still encounter that much reluctance to support makers in 2026. Most Brain Baking readers will (hopefully) find this obvious, and this article won’t have a big impact on the reasoning of my colleagues, but it doesn’t hurt to re-iterate this, so I’ll mention it again: please compensate the work you appreciate. Below are a few remarks I heard every time I bring up this topic (related to music & software in general).

I’m not buying music albums, I’m not as rich as you are.

Even though the person meant this as a joke, the underlying message was: “I don’t want to spend that much money on music/a creative product”. I buy one to two albums each month and on Bandcamp artists can decide for themselves how much to charge. You don’t have €20 to spare for this, but you are paying for three streaming services? Right. See also: You Shouldn’t Use Spotify.

I can share the Spotify subscription with my sister to make it even cheaper.

Did you know a thing called libraries exist where you can, you know, lend stuff, including CDs? Did you know that once you buy a digital album, you can do whatever the hell you want with it, including, you know, lending it to your sister?

But those artists already have millions, no way I’m giving them more.

This is a tougher nut to crack indeed. Michael Jackson is dead (remember, 2Pac isn’t), so where does that money end up? Even when he was still alive, supporting an artist who already has eight figure numbers on their account might be harder to justify. I’d say you should prioritise buying and supporting smaller (indie/local) groups. Maybe in this case you can also turn to the second hand market and at least support your local music shop that way.

I only like popular pop music and they already earn more than enough.

Consider the previous example; for instance Jackson’s album Bad. It wasn’t only Michael who was involved in the creation of that particular album you like. So all these people don’t deserve to have a meal. Consider this: if everybody thought like you, would that artist still be rich—or Dy Tryin (got it? 50 Cent? No?)?

Micro$oft is bad.

You’re right. Today, you should boycott Microsoft—but there used to be a time where they weren’t evil and helped propel software (and its development) into the modern age. If nobody bought MS-DOS, Windows 3.1, if no OEM deal was ever made to package Win95/98 with your new beige Compaq tower, maybe the contemporary software landscape looked a lot bleaker. What does this teach us? Compensate the work you appreciate only if it’s ethically sound¹.

You can’t find all these things on Bandcamp.

Right again, but the remaining can be found on plenty of other platforms such as Apple Music. This is not an excuse to neglect compensating the artist.

But thirty percent is pinched off by Apple!

Yes. That means seventy percent remains for the artist. And if you don’t buy anything but stream or download music, a hundred percent of zero remains for the artist. I’ll leave that calculation up to you as an exercise in critical thinking.

I used to buy CDs in stores but don’t anymore these stores are gone.

Unfortunately, most brick and mortar stores are struggling, indeed. Perhaps also because most people sopped buying music and just download and/or stream stuff instead?

The last thing I bought wasn’t good.

I’m sorry to hear. Did you also consider that buying the bad thing might put the creator in a financial situation where they can produce something else that potentially might be better—with your help, that is? Bigger creative projects that take months or years require funding beforehand. I presume you are aware of the disadvantages of being funded by venture capital.

I’m not paying anything for free software.

Open source does not equal free in the sense that the people that created these packages don’t deserve to eat. Supporting a project sends an important signal to its maintainers: the thing you are doing is relevant, please continue doing so. Sending an appreciative letter also helps but doesn’t pay bills, and since we’re living in an increasingly bill-paying society, many expert developers simply quit working on free software. What do you think all those “donate” buttons are for?

I only buy hardware, not software.

I’ll be sure to tell my software engineering friends and colleagues to retrain into hardware engineers as soon as possible.

I’m not using paid service x because free Google service y exists.

You’re still paying, buddy. Just not with money, but perhaps with something that is worth even more than the green currently in your wallet. It’s called your personal data.

Going to a music gig already costs an arm and a leg, no way I’m also buying the album.

What kind of an argument is this? So you like the band enough to drop €80 for a concert but you’re against paying for music just to make a statement? Next time simply stay home and instead buy the album, that’s 80% cheaper and you can listen to it again and again.

I don’t have room to collect CDs.

Who said anything about collecting? Then buy them digitally. At this point, we’re just arguing for the sake of arguing…

I think it’s strange that many people still completely ignore all these arguments for compensating artists. These arguments alone are pretty useless: it’s not the awareness that’s the problem. Most illegal downloaders or lazy Spotify users are well-aware of the ethical concerns and financial consequences. Knowing is not enough to get people to act. Most people have heard of global warning and know we’re slowly but surely destroying the earth, yet we happily keep on driving cars, eating meat, flying planes.

If you know what does move people, please let me know.

By Wouter Groeneveld on 24 March 2026.  Reply via email.

European countries should not rush into social media bans for children, human rights adviser Michael O’Flaherty told POLITICO.

The comments come as many EU countries push to restrict minors’ access to social media, citing mental health concerns. In France, the parliament’s upper house is this week debating restrictions that President Emmanuel Macron has said will be in place as soon as September.

Such bans are neither “proportionate nor necessary,” said O’Flaherty, the commissioner for human rights at the Council of Europe, the continent’s top human rights body, adding that there “are other ways to address the curse of abusive material online.”

The debate on how to protect children from the harms of social media “goes straight to bans without looking at all the other options that could be in play,” he told POLITICO. Restricting access to social media presents “issues of human rights, because a child has a right to receive information just like anybody else.”

O’Flaherty’s concerns come amid live discussions on the merits and effectiveness of bans in Europe. Australia became the first country in the world to ban minors under 16 from creating accounts on social media platforms like Instagram in late 2025, and Brazil moved forward with its own measures last week.

Now France, Denmark, Spain and Greece are among the EU countries heading toward bans, albeit on different timelines.

Proponents argue that age-related restrictions setting a minimum age for the most addictive social media platforms are vital to protect children’s physical and mental health.

Critics say that bans are ineffective and are detrimental to privacy because they require users to verify themselves online.

O’Flaherty argued that — while children’s rights to access information could be curtailed if that overall limited their risks — any restrictions need to be proportionate and necessary.

That must follow a serious effort by the EU to tackle illegal and harmful content on social media, he said, which hasn’t happened yet. “We haven’t remotely tried hard enough yet to ensure effective oversight of the platforms.”

The human rights chief praised the EU’s digital laws as world-leading, including the Digital Services Act, which seeks to protect kids from systemic risks on online platforms — but said it wasn’t being policed strongly enough.

“We have a very piecemeal enforcement of the Digital Services Act and the other relevant rulebook right across Europe. It’s very much dependent on the goodwill and the capacity of the different governments to be serious about it,” he said. Governments have “an uneven record” in that regard, he said.

EU countries must make sure they have exhausted all other solutions before heading for the extreme measures of bans, he said. “I don’t see much sign of that effort.”

Still, Denmark, Spain and Greece are among the EU countries heading toward bans, although they are on vastly different timelines.

The European Commission, in charge of enforcing the DSA on large social media platforms, is considering its own measures. Countries like Greece have called on the Commission to go forth with an EU-wide ban to avoid fragmentation across the bloc.

President Ursula von der Leyen has convened a panel of experts to advise her on next steps, which is expected to give its results by the summer.

If the UK wants to regain serious respect in the world, it needs its European leg as well as its transatlantic one

“A friend who bullies us is no longer a friend. And since bullies only respond to strength, from now onward, I will be prepared to be much stronger. And the president should be prepared for that.” Thus spoke Hugh Grant, playing the British prime minister confronting the US president in a famous scene in the romcom Love Actually. Real-life British prime minister Keir Starmer has attempted to stand up ever so slightly to the current bully in the White House over the latest US war in the Middle East. Despite the British government’s right-royal efforts to flatter Donald Trump ever since he was elected US president, his response to Starmer’s little attempt has been a torrent of contempt. So the reality is not Love Actually. It’s Contempt Actually.

Asked about the British government’s subtle distinction between defensive strikes in the Gulf, which it now supports, and offensive ones, which it doesn’t, Maga ideologue Steve Bannon tells the New Statesman’s Freddie Hayward: “That’s diplomatic bullshit. Fuck you. You’re either an ally or you’re not. Fuck you. The special relationship is over.” Ah, the “special relationship”! It must be 40 years since I first heard former West German chancellor Helmut Schmidt say: “The special relationship is so special only one side knows it exists.”

Your first, worst thought about Australian politics is that it is extremely similar to British politics. This seems obviously true at first and then increasingly profoundly untrue the more you get to know the place.

The similarities are immediately obvious. Australia has an uncharismatic centre-left prime minister who enjoys a huge majority but seemingly has no idea what to do with it. There’s a shattered centre-right opposition, crammed full of morons, in a state of advanced ideological disarray. There’s a resurgent far-right threatening on the wings. Hell, I walked around the New South Wales parliament and it looked like a mini-Commons in nearly every respect, except for the fact that it was cleaner and better maintained.

But once you get past these surface details, Australia and Britain seem to live in separate universes. If Australia feels like Britain at all, it feels like Britain around 2007, before the financial crash and austerity, before Brexit and Liz Truss. It’s not perfect. There’s poverty and ignorance, obviously. House prices are too high, young people are frozen out, and that issue could easily become connected to immigration rates in a viable populist attack. The asylum system is brutal and unkind. But on a fundamental level, Australia has just about managed to maintain the core promise of political life in a Western democracy: that things will be better for your kids than they were for you. In the UK, we have not.

You know what really feels different? It’s boring. Australian politics is beautifully, exquisitely, delightfully boring. It is boring in the way it used to be back home - sane, predictable, restrained, broadly rational, and consisting mostly of retail offers to voters rather than screeching rhetoric about identity and culture war. If I worked here, I would have a less interesting career and I mean that in the best possible way. The success of pundits and bloggers is inversely proportionate to the wellbeing of a society. If they’re having a good and interesting time it generally means everyone else is getting fucked.

Australia, almost alone among Western countries, has not really given populism room to breath. In the general election last year, a salivating imbecile of a man named Peter Dutton used his position as leader of the centre-right Liberal party to try and bring MAGA-style politics to Australia. In response, Australia handed him his arse. His party experienced a landslide defeat. He lost his seat. Populism was repudiated.

Why is this happening? Is it because Australians are somehow more politically evolved than Brits, Europeans and Americans? No. Is it because they are immune to racist or anti-immigrant rhetoric? Absolutely not. They love that filthy shit just as much as we do. It’s because the rules governing the electoral system have created a different set of incentives, which then provide for different outcomes.

They have created a system that values nuanced preferences rather than black-and-white winner-takes-all victory. It rewards politicians who reach out to the centre, rather than towards their base. It makes sure the views of everyone in society are heard and represented through policy. And it does all this through small, moderate changes to the electoral system.

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Instead of the British system of first-past-the-post, Australia uses preferential voting. In Britain, we put a cross by the candidate we support and the candidate with the most votes wins. In Australia, they rank the candidates in order. Instead of just voting Labour, say, you’d vote Labour first, Greens second, Lib Dems third, Conservatives fourth and Reform fifth.

The winning candidate in a seat must secure a majority of the votes. Initially you count the first preference votes - the people who put that candidate first. Then you start redistributing votes for second preferences - people’s second best option - until a candidate gets over 50% support, at which point they’re declared the winner.

The most beautiful thing about this system is the notion of preference. In Britain, we choose a winner. This is extremely primitive - most people’s political wishes are more complex than that. But it also mutilates democratic thought. Instead of voting for who we most want to win, we are often forced to vote tactically for whoever we think is best placed to defeat the party we most want to stop. We’re forced into a game of Battleships, trying to figure out who is best placed to defeat Reform, or the Conservatives, or whoever else we’ve taken a dislike to.

In Australia, they simply describe their preferences. Very often, that will involve people giving their first preference idealistically to the party they most like and their second preference pragmatically to the adjacent ideological party most likely to win. It forces people to think about different versions of goodness, rather than black-and-white assertions of party support. It allows them to think both optimistically and practically, which is a winning combination of instincts.

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Just like the UK, Australia is experiencing a long-term decline in the two-party system. In 1983, Labor won under Bob Hawke with 49.5% of the vote with just 6.9% of people voting for third parties. In 2025, Labor won with 34.6% of the vote, with 33.6% of people voting for third parties. Like Britain, Australia is also experiencing a two-bloc ideological divide between progressive voters on the one hand, who are typically university educated and living in big multicultural urban areas, and reactionary voters on the other, who are typically school educated and living in towns and rural areas.

In Britain, this change is sabotaging any sense of meaning in our democracy. We are utterly exposed to arbitrary, meaningless election results which do not represent the popular will in any meaningful way.

Take the Gorton and Denton byelection last month. As it happened, the Greens won, taking 40% of the vote to Reform’s 29% and Labour’s 25%. That’s what happened in that particular seat, but there will be plenty of seats at the next election where the demographics and the preferences will be slightly different. You could get a lot of results that look like this: Greens 30%, Labour 30%, Reform 35%. That is an insane result. It provides a Reform victory in a seat that is overwhelmingly progressive. It is an abuse of any sense of logic or democracy that this should be the case, but that is the kind of deformed outcome you get in a post-two-party system that still uses first-past-the-post.

Preferential voting acts decisively against that problem, because the Green voter would make Labour second preference and the Labour voter would make the Greens second preference. This allows voters to opt for their preference without giving up a stake in the question of who ultimately wins. It allows them to state their desires while still preventing their worst outcome.

The British system punishes diversity of thought within an ideological camp. It rewards whoever can monopolise the vote on their side of the great tribal divide. Margaret Thatcher managed this in the 80s, monopolising the right while the left split into Labour and the SDP. Keir Starmer managed this in 2024, monopolising the progressive vote while the reactionary bloc splintered into the Tories and Reform. The Australian system recognises diversity of thought within an ideological camp and makes elections about popular will rather than the delivery of an effective monopolisation programme.

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Most importantly, it discourages movement towards the extreme and rewards movement towards the centre. Imagine that you are a candidate in an Australian election. You want to get first preference votes by speaking to your core supporters, sure. But then there is a secondary consideration. You also want to pick up second preference votes. And that means saying and behaving in a way that will appeal to voters who prefer other parties, making yourself palatable to them.

This doesn’t always work. The centre-right Liberal party in Australia, for instance, is going through a period of hysterical discombobulation. It is making the exact same mistake the Tories are making and fixating on voters lost to the right while ignoring the much more serious problem it has of voters it is losing to its left. It no longer possesses a single parliamentary seat with an expansive view of Sydney Harbour - a testament to how badly it has fumbled its support among Australia’s wealthy cosmopolitan voters.

But there is no electoral system which can solve the capacity for foolishness and self-harm in the modern conservative mind. There is no force on earth so powerful it can make stupid people recognise objective truth. All we can do is combine incentives with desired behaviour and hope that most people, most of the time, will act accordingly.

The system has ultimately worked very well. When the Australian centre-right party failed to recognise this incentive, others arrived to take advantage, as if by strength of market forces. In the 2022 election, 16 seats were won by candidates who did not win on first preference vote. Every single one of them had a Liberal party victory on first preference, but second preference votes saw them lose their seat in favour of seven Labor victors, two Greens, and seven independents. All but one of these independents were so-called Teal candidates - fiscally conservative, socially liberal centrist types alienated by the small-minded stubbornness of the mainstream right.

This was a decisive moment in the election. It’s hard to compare results under one electoral system with another because people’s behavior is different, but - you know - fuck it, let’s just play around with numbers for a laugh. Under first-past-the-post, that election would have made the centre-right the largest group in a hung parliament, with 73 seats, versus 71 for Labor and seven for independents. But under preferential voting, it translated to 77 seats for Labor, 58 for the centre-right and 16 for independents.

In the 2025 election, the new MAGA-style right-wing approach attacked woke and gender diversity and all that - you know the drill. It alienated urban moderate voters, particularly women and young people. And it got hammered, recording its lowest ever seat count and experiencing something close to liquidation in inner city and suburban Australia. The Teal independents held their ground.

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There is a second reason for the Australian victory over populism. It is mandatory voting.

I have always opposed mandatory voting. In general, my instinctive response to any form of coercion is: no thanks fuck you. That is probably the single most irreducible aspect of my political personality. Mandatory voting, obviously, involves a form of coercion by the state on the individual.

Australia is generally an extremely compliant nation. I am deeply alienated by it. Hardly anyone smokes here. They’ve basically banned vapes outside of a pharmacy setting and although you still see people vaping, you see it far less than at home. The rules around alcohol purchase and consumption are tighter than in the UK. This is a society which follows rules. People say the same of Britain, but there is a greater degree of savagery and chaos in the British personality, as you will see on any weekend evening in our towns and cities.

I went to a free gig in a park in Adelaide. No-one was visibly drunk, literally no-one smoked or vaped, there was plenty of personal space and at the end we all left in an orderly manner. In the UK, no-one would have gotten out of that place alive. I felt terribly alone. I longed for women wearing short skirts in winter vomiting on street corners, mad drunks screaming at passers-by, someone eating a kebab next to a dead body, the great Hogarthian beauty of my country.

Mandatory voting is in line with the general Australian instinct towards rules and compliance. My instinctive distaste therefore remains. But when you break it down into a series of losses and gains it becomes very hard to resist.

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In terms of state coercion, it is basically the same as jury service. Is there anything wrong with jury service? No. We therefore accept, as a liberal principle, that you can take away the freedom of the individual to not attend an event in order to maintain the civic health of a society. Mandatory voting asks for less time from the individual in exchange for a greater gain. There is also no real punishment for not voting. You get a $20 fine - a tenner basically. It doesn’t grow upon non-payment. It’s a token penalty without a meaningful civil implication.

I used to object to mandatory voting on the basis that people should be able to register their protests against all options by not voting. They shouldn’t be coerced into supporting one of the parties on offer, because they may not like any of them. But the mandatory element is not actually for the voting. It is to attend the polling station. What you do inside the polling booth is up to you. You can draw a cock on the ballot - this is naturally an option many people take - or leave it blank, or scribble over it. You still have the ability to spoil your ballot and register a protest.

The liberal consequences of mandatory voting are therefore pretty insignificant. But the liberal advantages of it are extensive.

In the UK, elections are won by targeting your vote and getting them out on polling day. Parties have detailed databases of who lives where, whether they’ve voted for them in the past and whether they’re likely to do so today. They target that vote and target that vote and target that vote. It is a remorseless professional campaign - a numbers game. We barely question this but of course it is completely irrelevant to any higher notion of what democracy is for.

In Australia you simply cannot win by targeting your core vote. This entire element of the electoral game has ceased to function, because turnout is around 90%. The base mobilisation approach is neutralised.

Instead, you have to stretch out your vote. You have to target voters who don’t care that much, who aren’t really that bothered, who have no pre-existing ideological disposition. Political incentives point towards broad inclusive messaging rather than targeted core-vote strategies.

Mandatory voting also brings in young voters. Australia gets between 90% to 95% turnout in each age group, including the young. And because they vote young, they get into the habit and keep doing it as they get older.

In the UK, we have a severe problem of variable voting levels by age group. Older voters are very likely to vote. Younger voters are much less likely. That’s why the last election saw the Tories promise to maintain the triple-lock pension for the old and reintroduce conscription for the young. It’s a basic question of incentives. In Australia, you are forcing that youth vote to be heard. By virtue of that, you are compelling the political system to respond to the full spectrum of societal demands.

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There are surely other reasons why Australia has proved surprisingly immune to populist seduction - economic, psychological, cultural, whatever. But the incentives built into the electoral system must surely have a decisive role.

Why don’t we hear more about these Australian ideas in Britain? I suspect it’s because Australia, like the US, is right-wing coded. It speaks English, it is considered tainted by colonialism, it is the originator of many of the worst anti-immigrant policies implemented internationally, and it is the birthplace of many of the most morally decrepit conservative voices in the UK, from Rupert Murdoch to Lynton Crosby. It is the kind of country which right-wingers like to refer to and progressives do not.

This is why we hear about the ‘Australian points-based system’ on immigration but not about their electoral model. If a Scandinavian country had trialled preferential mandatory voting, I think we would hear more British liberals celebrate it.

Defeating populism is the great mission of our time. Australia has proved very good at it. We should be paying much greater attention to what they’re up to.

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Odds and sods

This newsletter is available as a podcast - on Spotify, Substack or at the top of the page.

My piece for the i paper this week celebrated Starmer’s approach to the Iran war and thanked our lucky stars he was prime minister when it mattered.

This week I watched a lot of extremely middling films on airplanes while trying to get home. Materialists is a film which thinks it is idealistic, but is in fact astonishingly cynical. The Running Man has good politics but a poor script, weirdly underpowered direction and a flat leading man. But I had great fun watching Final Destination: Bloodlines. I laughed my head off at every death and in fact found it even more funny when the man in the seat next to me turned to look at what I was laughing at, saw someone’s head being ground up in a lawnmower, and then shifted visibly away from me.

I am now finally back in the UK and enjoying every raindrop, and every filthy stinking chaotic corner of London. See you next week you cunts.

Last year it was China’s answer to tariffs, now it’s Iran’s retaliation to airstrikes – ‘America First’ keeps foundering on global economics

Donald Trump is teaching the world a lesson, but not the one he thinks. The attack on Iran was meant to be a dazzling display of military supremacy. It has instead illuminated chinks in the US’s armour.

The US president’s formidable arsenal cannot summon up an insurrection from Iran’s tyrannised and leaderless opposition. It cannot force merchant ships to run a gauntlet of missile and drone attacks in the strait of Hormuz. The government in Tehran and the facts of geography that give it leverage over global trade are unchanged. Trump’s exasperation is showing. He urges tanker crews to “show some guts” by sailing into harm’s way. He calls on Nato members to provide naval chaperones and accuses them of cowardice and ingratitude for refusing. He comes across as peevish and flustered. Impotence is not a good look in a potentate.