Jamie Dettmer is opinion editor and a foreign affairs columnist at POLITICO Europe.

“It must be a policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressure,” said former U.S. President Harry Truman during a speech to Congress in 1947. The Truman Doctrine, as this approach became known, saw the defense of democracy abroad as of vital interest to the U.S. — but that’s not a view shared by President Donald Trump and his acolytes.

If anyone had any doubts about this — or harbored any lingering hopes that Vice President JD Vance was speaking out of turn when he launched a blistering attack on Europe at the Munich Security Conference earlier this this year — then Washington’s new National Security Strategy (NSS) should settle the matter.

All U.S. presidents release such a strategy early in their terms to outline their foreign policy thinking and priorities, which in turn shapes how the Pentagon’s budget is allocated. And with all 33 pages of this NSS, the world’s despots have much to celebrate, while democrats have plenty to be anxious about — especially in Europe.

Fleshing out what the Trump administration means by “America First,” the new security strategy represents an emphatic break with Truman and the post-1945 order shaped by successive U.S. presidents. It is all about gaining a mercantilist advantage, and its guiding principle is might is right.

Moving forward, Trump’s foreign policy won’t be “grounded in traditional, political ideology” but guided by “what works for America.” And apparently what works for America is to go easy on autocrats, whether theocratic or secular, and to turn on traditional allies in a startling familial betrayal.

Of course, the hostility this NSS displays toward Europe shouldn’t come as a surprise — Trump’s top aides have barely disguised their contempt for the EU, while the president has said he believes the bloc was formed to “screw” the U.S. But that doesn’t dull the sting.

Over the weekend, EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas sought to present a brave face despite the excoriating language the NSS reserves for European allies, telling international leaders at the Doha Forum: “We haven’t always seen eye-to-eye on different topics. But the overall principle is still there: We are the biggest allies, and we should stick together.”

But other seasoned European hands recognize that this NSS marks a significant departure from what has come before. “The only part of the world where the new security strategy sees any threat to democracy seems to be Europe. Bizarre,” said former Swedish Prime Minister and European Council on Foreign Relations co-chair Carl Bildt.

He’s right. As Bildt noted, the NSS includes no mention, let alone criticism, of the authoritarian behavior of the “axis of autocracy” — China, Russia, Iran and North Korea. It also rejects interventionist approaches to autocracies or cajoling them to adopt “democratic or other social change that differs widely from their traditions and histories.”

For example, the 2017 NSS framed China as a systemic global challenger in very hostile terms. “A geopolitical competition between free and repressive visions of world order is taking place in the Indo-Pacific region,” that document noted. But the latest version contains no such language amid clear signs that Trump wants to deescalate tensions; the new paramount objective is to secure a “mutually advantageous economic relationship.”

All should be well as long as China stays away from the Western Hemisphere, which is the preserve of the U.S. — although it must also ditch any idea of invading Taiwan. “Deterring a conflict over Taiwan, ideally by preserving military overmatch, is a priority” the NSS reads.

Likewise, much to Moscow’s evident satisfaction, the document doesn’t even cast Russia as an adversary — in stark contrast with the 2017 strategy, which described it as a chief geopolitical rival. No wonder Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov welcomed the NSS as a “positive step” and “largely consistent” with Russia’s vision. “Overall, these messages certainly contrast with the approaches of previous administrations,” he purred.

While Beijing and Moscow appear delighted with the NSS, the document reserves its harshest language and sharpest barbs for America’s traditional allies in Europe.

“The core problem of the European continent, according to the NSS, is a neglect of ‘Western’ values (understood as nationalist conservative values) and a ‘loss of national identities’ due to immigration and ‘cratering birthrates,’” noted Liana Fix of the Council on Foreign Relations. “The alleged result is economic stagnation, military weakness and civilizational erasure.”

The new strategy also lambasts America’s European allies for their alleged “anti-democratic” practices, accusing them of censorship and suppressing political opposition in a dilation of Vance’s Munich criticism. Ominously, the NSS talks about cultivating resistance within European nations by endorsing “patriotic” parties — a threat that caused much consternation when Vance made it, but is now laid out as the administration’s official policy.

Regime change for Europe but not for autocracies is cause for great alarm. So how will Europe react?

Flatter Trump as “daddy,” like NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte did in June? Pretend the U.S. administration isn’t serious, and muddle through while overlooking slights? Take the punishment and button up as it did over higher tariffs? Or toughen up, and get serious about strategic autonomy?

Europe has once again been put on the spot to make some fundamental choices — and quickly. But doing anything quickly isn’t Europe’s strong point. Admittedly, that’s no easy task for a bloc that makes decisions by consensus in a process designed to be agonizingly slow. Nor will it be an easy road at the national level, with all 27 countries facing critical economic challenges and profound political divisions that Washington has been seeking to roil. With the assistance of Trump’s ideological bedfellows like Hungary’s Viktor Orbán and Slovakia’s Robert Fico, the impasse will only intensify in the coming months.

Trump 2.0 is clearly a disorienting step change from the president’s first term — far more triumphalist, confident and uncompromisingly mercantilist; more determined to ignore guardrails; and more revolutionary in how it implements its “America First” agenda. The NSS just makes this clearer, and the howls of disapproval from critics will merely embolden an administration that sees protest as evidence it’s on the right track.

Europe’s leaders have had plenty of warnings, but apart from eye-rolling, hand-wringing and wishful thinking they failed to agree on a plan. However, trying to ride things out isn’t going to work this time around — and efforts to foist a very unfavorable “peace” deal on Ukraine may finally the trigger the great unraveling of the Western alliance.

The bloc’s options are stark, to be sure. Whether it kowtows or pushes back, it’s going to cost Europe one way or another.

While those who defend the status quo and those who say ‘simply rejoin’ the EU are both wrong, there is a new mood and a clear opportunity

Being right that Brexit was a bad idea is no substitute for knowing what to do next. Our chance of salvaging something from the mess it created is being undermined by those selling false hope – either that Brexit can work, or that it can be easily undone. For the 16,000 businesses that have now given up trading with Europe because of paperwork, prospects remain bleak unless the government stops offering a sticking plaster and starts major surgery on our future with Europe.

Forgive pro-Europeans for thinking the momentum is now with us. Labour has been slow to say what it wants from the EU reset, and slower still to acknowledge the inevitable tradeoffs required. Until the summer, ministers promised to “make Brexit work” and endlessly repeated “red lines”. Yet in recent weeks, a major study has found that leaving the EU cost the UK 6-8% of GDP per capita; now the chancellor calls the damage of Brexit “severe and long lasting”; the prime minister condemns the “wild promises” of the Leave campaign. Belatedly, a window of opportunity to change course may be opening.

Stella Creasy is the chair of the Labour Movement for Europe and MP for Walthamstow

As leaders try to break smugglers’ business model, research suggests strategy so far has had opposite effect

Hardline migration policies adopted by governments across the globe have been a boon for people smugglers, fuelling demand and allowing them to raise their prices, according to a report.

The findings, released on Thursday by the Mixed Migration Centre of the Danish Refugee Council, and based on interviews with thousands of migrants and hundreds of smugglers, come as officials prepare to gather next week in Brussels to discuss how best to combat smuggling.

Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves claim to be dealing with the world as it is, but their choices betray yearning for a world that has disappeared

Hollywood has stopped betting on original ideas. Sequels and remakes dominate the box office. Among this year’s Christmas movie releases are Zootropolis 2 (the first Zootropolis came out in 2016), Avatar: Fire and Ash (third in a series that began in 2009), and Wicked: For Good (part two of the adaptation of a musical that premiered in 2003).

New stories are risky. It is safer to retell old ones. British politics feels similarly afflicted by paralysis of the imagination, intimidated by change, stuck in a narrative loop.

Rafael Behr is a Guardian columnist

From Tom Brown’s Schooldays to Jennings, Nigel Molesworth, Billy Bunter and Harry Potter, public schools hold a special place in the English cultural imagination. And because so many British prime ministers and politicians have had a public school education, their schooldays have often become the object of media scrutiny. From time to time reporters will track down former headmasters, teachers, and schoolmates, to find out what they once thought of their former pupils and classmates, and what they think of the leaders they became.

Such attention is not always flattering. In January 2022, in the midst of the Partygate scandal that would soon bring him down, a letter surfaced from Boris Johnson’s former classics teacher at Eton, written in 1982, which told Johnson’s father of his son’s ‘disgracefully cavalier attitude to his classical studies’, and his apparent belief that he was free of the ‘network of obligation that binds everyone’.

This came as a shock to probably no one at all. Similarly, in 2025, the former Tory Northern Ireland secretary Julian Smith denounced David Cameron’s ‘cavalier’ embrace of the Brexit referendum as ‘some sort of Eton game.’

Such are the men that our cloistered elites have foisted on the nation, and you might think that a sensible country would look elsewhere for its leaders, with a record like that. Yet now, the British electorate appears poised to place another former public schoolboy in Downing Street, with a past that makes ‘cavalier’ seem almost like a virtue.

I speak, of course, of Nigel Mosley-Farage, whose schooldays at Dulwich College have come under a lot of scrutiny over the last two weeks, and not at all in a good way. ‘What were the words overheard by the Nazi child masturbatin’ in the bathroom?’ asks detective Benoit Blanc, in Knives Out.

Well, now we know. This is not the first time that Mosley-Farage’s salad days have attracted negative attention. In 2013, Michael Crick revealed a 1981 letter on C4 News from a former teacher who described Mosley-Farage as a ‘racist’ and a ‘fascist’ who sang Hitler Youth songs in local villages.

These stories came and went, without making the kind of splash that they might have made if, for example, similar allegations had been made about Jeremy Corbyn or Keir Starmer. But now a Guardian investigation based on interviews with some twenty former pupils has painted a more comprehensive portrait of the cheekie-chappie, man-of-the-people, hail-fellow-well-met Pied Piper of Brexit as a young Nazi, who liked to sing ‘Gas ‘em all’ to the tune of George Formby’s classic.

One pupil remembers how the boy-who-would be PM would

…sidle up to me and growl: ‘Hitler was right’, or: ‘Gas them,’ sometimes adding a long hiss to simulate the sound of the gas showers

Another recalls:

It was habitual, you know, it happened all the time. He would often be doing Nazi salutes and saying ‘Sieg heil’ and, you know, strutting around the classroom.

This began at age 13-14, and continued right up to 18. Even after Young Nigel became a prefect, he was still at it, according to one of his classmates:

He took me for a walk up to the lower school playground, where all the children from about nine years old to 12 would be. And he singled out, completely at random, a kid of Asian extraction, and just put him in detention for no reason whatsoever. I was flabbergasted, absolutely stunned. I was just disgusted, really. No rhyme or reason, just purely based on the colour of his skin.

The Boy From Farnborough

This is not Hogwarts or St Custards. Some readers may recall the Hollywood version of Ira Levin’s novel The Boys from Brazil. It’s a brutal, compelling and rather ludicrous film, which describes a post-war plot by Joseph Mengele to clone 94 Hitlers in different countries, and assign them to families with a similar background to the fuhrer’s.

The Little Hitlers we see in the film are all arrogant, sociopathic little brats, played by Jeremy Black, who look like they were born and bred to pull the wings off birds. But the young Mosley-Farage who appears in these anecdotes could have played this role just as well.

The Guardian interviews reveal a remarkably precocious little Nazi, with his repellent hatreds and white supremacist views startlingly fully-formed, already espousing racist views at the age of 13 with the same airy fervour with which Nigel Molesworth’s schoolmate Basil Fotherington-Tomas called out ‘hullo flowers, hullo bees.’

Boys will be boys, you might think, but in early 70s England, boys like this were something of a rarity. It is true that racist slurs, and antisemitic depictions of Jews as misers were much more common then than they are now. This was the age of Till Death Us Do Part, The Black and White Minstrel Show, and It Ain’t Half Hot Mum. But there is still a big leap from Alf Garnett, tuckshop jibes and racial caricatures to telling your Jewish classmates that ‘Hitler was right’ and taunting them with the sound of the gas chambers.

Wasn’t Young Nigel defying establishment norms and having a larf, the way he does now. Once again, there are many ways of defying the establishment that do not require you to celebrate the Holocaust. This requires real hatred and real cruelty, and - at the very least - a complete absence of even the most basic level of empathy.

The Teflon-skinned Reform leader has variously denied these allegations or claimed that he can’t remember them. He has attributed them to a ‘desperate establishment’ witch-hunt, and called them ‘playground banter’, before plaintively insisting that he had never engaged in racial abuse ‘with intent’ or ‘in a hurtful or insulting way’ - a novel notion of racial abuse which is unlikely to ever come from anyone who has been at the receiving end of it.

Mosley-Farage and his supporters have argued that what a politician might have said or done did 50 years ago should not necessarily exclude them from high political office. This argument might have some weight, were it not for the fact that Mosley-Farage has never acknowledged, repudiated or apologised for his youthful fascistic high jinks. In 2014, UKIP founder Alan Sked claimed that Farage had once told him in 2004 to run ex-National Front candidates in elections, because: ‘ There’s no need to worry about the n….r vote. The nig-nogs will never vote for us.’

Mosley-Farage denied this. But whether true or not, he has become adept over the years at coding nativist and racist views within a wider discussion about ‘immigration’, in which it just so happens that immigrants invariably appear as criminals, outsiders, parasites, invaders, cultural intruders, rapists, and extremists.

Mosley-Farage may wear Barbour jackets and cloth caps, but whether explaining why you wouldn’t Romanians to be your neighbours, or posing in front of the ‘Breaking Point’ posters showing endless lines of brown-skinned migrants supposedly en route to Britain, or disseminating anti-Muslim ‘two-tier policing’ conspiracies in the wake of the Southport murders, the teenage Nazi is never far beneath the surface.

He may not sing songs about gassing Jews, but he has appeared on US TV shows and podcasts espousing antisemitic conspiracy theories about ‘globalism’ that invariably are associated with Jews. On the Alex Jones show in 2018, he argued that ‘globalists’ were seeking to engineer war with Russia as part of a coordinated attempt to override national sovereignty.

Between 2011 and 2016, he appeared six times on the web radio show of the antisemitic American pastor Rick Wiles, to discuss plots by bankers and ‘globalists’ to impose world government. This is the Rick Wiles who called Democrat attempts to impeach Trump as a ‘Jew coup, plain and simple.’

Interviewed in 2019 by Tucker Carlson, Mosley-Farage described George Soros as ‘the biggest danger to the entire Western world’, and claimed that Soros wanted to ‘break down the fundamental values of our society and, in the case of Europe, he doesn’t want Europe to be based on Christianity.’

Such statements are garbage, but they are also antisemitic, far-right garbage. Insofar as he has taken a different path from his teenage Nazi wasteland, the direction of travel appears to be tactical. And the cruelty and bullying has never disappeared from his politics. Mosley-Farage is currently advocating the Trump-style mass deportation of 600,000 people - a savage policy that will devastate communities across the country.

In this sense, the child really was father to the man. And no wonder Mosley-Farage has not enjoyed the scrutiny that Young Nigel has attracted. It comes at a time when Reform is faltering in the polls, when a former Farage crony has been sentenced to ten years for taking Russian bribes, when Reform-dominated councils across the country are disintegrating amid allegations of authoritarianism, acrimonious incompetence, and pervasive racism and extremism

In an attempt to deflect from this negativity, Reform produced a video last week containing Mosley-Farage’s post-budget ‘letter to Britain’ in which he promises to fix the country’s economic problems that he did so much to cause.

Mosley-Farage would rather you think of him as the statesman-with-the-pen and the man with the big ideas, than the boy who mocked Jewish children with the sond of the gas chamber. This is entirely understandable from his point of view. But this is a politician who used immigration to get Brexit over the line, and the more Brexit has failed to produce the outcomes that he predicted, the more this snake-oil salesman and political wrecking ball has exploited immigration for his political benefit.

All this is tragic, but it is not an individual tragedy. Mosley-Farage is too shallow and boorish, too devious and morally-vacant to be a tragic figure in his own right. He is not a good man overwhelmed by his dark side, hubris, or an unavoidable destiny. Hubris is not lacking for sure, but Mosley-Farage has no good side to be overwhelmed. If the boy who once adored Enoch Powell had a political destiny, it has been to become the man he has now, tormenting ethnic minorities, people of colour, foreigners and all the other intruders he believes have ‘invaded’ this increasingly septic isle., just as he did in his teens.

The tragedy is that too many people did not spot the game he was playing or shared his aims, to the point when the country is now poised to mark a new chapter in Britain’s dire history of public schoolboys-turned-politicians, and elect a man who once taunted his classmates that ‘Hitler was right’ and burned the school roll because it had too many Patels on it.

One of his former schoolmates claimed that he was moved to speak to the Guardian because he could hear the same ‘hectoring, jeering tone’ in the adult Farage that he once heard as a boy. The reverse is also true. Pay attention to the MP for Clacton, and beneath the bluster, the fag and the pint, the endless self-aggrandisement and the braying anti-establishment rebel, and it is only too easy to imagine the teenage Nazi that he once was, using the same tone to bully his classmates.

That any country should have allowed this malignant charlatan to have such influence ought to be a cause for national shame and self-examination. To put him in a place when he might become prime minister, raises the disturbing possibility that too many people don’t care what Mosley-Farage once was, or what he is now.

All of which makes it incumbent upon the rest of us to do whatever we can to prevent him from entering Downing Street, and inflicting even more damage on the country than he has inflicted already.

The conversation around the Budget seems very far removed from Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin and Nigel Farage. All this talk of fiscal headroom and property valuations seems utterly distinct to the conversation around small boats, Ukraine and pronouns. But in fact, they are component parts of the same debate. They are all one storyline, playing out in disparate narrative strands.

Since 2016, populism has mounted an artillery attack against the British economy. It has convinced people that the solution to their problems lies in hatred and suspicion of outsiders. It has seduced them into a rejection of the open society - closing the door to people, goods and ideas in roughly equal measure. The results have been ruinous: a shredded, moth-eaten economy, a thin lice-infected veil where we once enjoyed substantial cloth.

This is not a problem for populism and in fact benefits it. By worsening the existing conditions, it can then demand that voters take ever more radical steps towards its position, becoming ever more virulently nativist as they do so. Look at Farage’s current ascendancy, despite Brexit visibly refuting every promise he made before 2016. National failure is a precondition of populism’s success, not an obstacle to it. And if their demands can speed up that failure, it’s all for the best.

The battle against populism is therefore an economic battle as much as it is a cultural, moral and intellectual one.

We must build an economy which works for people, to remove the inspiration and motivation of populism. But we rarely see any efforts to actually achieve this.

Our tax system looks like it was designed by a clown on meth. Why do we tax employee pension contributions but not employer pension contributions? Why does the marginal tax rate start to behave very strangely around the £50,000 mark and basically experience a seizure at the £100,000 mark? Why do we have a VAT exception on gingerbread men who have chocolate eyes but apply it in full if they are decorated more expansively with chocolate? For no good goddamned reason at all. More importantly: What is our broader economic strategy? What kind of economy are we trying to create? Who knows. To even ask that sounds dangerously abstract and a bit foreign.

The core liberal demand in this area was first voiced by former US Treasury Secretary William Simon. It was that the tax system should look “like someone designed it on purpose”. In other words, it should be based on reason and long-term national interest, not irrationality and short-term personal interest.

We can go a step further and demand that for the whole of a government’s economic strategy. Does it look like someone designed it on purpose? Is it clear what it is trying to achieve? Does it seem likely to do so? And how would that improve people’s lives?

A rational tax system encourages growth and tax revenue. A rational economic strategy encourages wealth and material wellbeing. And those two things together can help bury populism.

The press coverage of this Budget has pitted various groups together - Reeves and Starmer versus their backbenchers, the government versus the opposition, Blue Labour versus the soft left, benefits claimants versus the comfortably off. But the true story of our time is the battle against populism. That is the most important lens to view the Budget. And that is an analysis which is sorely missing.

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Rachel Reeves did numerous admirable things in the Budget. People should bear this in mind the next time they claim there is no difference between the Conservatives and Labour. There is. You are mad if you claim otherwise.

The decision to scrap the two-child benefit limit removes one of the most morally obscene policies the Treasury has ever produced, one which was so objectionable it failed on something approaching a biblical level: we do not punish children for the sins of the father. Reeves’ decision will benefit 560,000 families to the tune of £5,300 a year, leading to a 450,000 reduction in child poverty. I understand that most of the public do not support this. Most of the public should take a look in the mirror and ask themselves what has become of them.

Reeves also rationalised her fiscal rule. This is the promise she makes to markets: that day-to-day income and expenditure will match in five years’ time. It is an important rule. The moment the markets no longer believe in it, we’re all in much deeper shit than we are now.

Previously, Reeves’ met the rule with £9.9 billion to spare. This is what is annoyingly termed ‘the headroom’. The problem was that it was just too tight. Small changes blew the numbers off course. There would be a change in productivity estimates for instance, or Labour backbenchers would rebel on disability benefits. Then Reeves’ numbers no longer added up, speculation would grow about which taxes she would put up, and we’d be treated to the madcap chaos of the last six months, where every day seemed to suggest a new possible tax rise.

This is a terrible way to write policy, but it is also economically damaging in its own right. It stops people taking economic decisions because they want to wait to see what will happen at the Budget. It took Labour’s greatest economic asset - stability as a trigger for investment - and eradicated it.

Reeves gave herself the £9.9 billion in the first Budget. Then in the Spring Statement she fiddles in various ways to rebuild it, almost to the penny, and the whole shitshow played out again. This time she seems to have finally learned the lesson. The headroom has been expanded to £22 billion. She has also changed the rules so that the Office of Budget Responsibility only assesses compliance once per year rather than twice.

These are good, smart changes. But that is pretty much where the good news stops. Elsewhere in the Budget we see a continuation of three traditional Treasury approaches to economic policymaking: Sticking plaster solutions, arbitrary no-plan chaos, and fiddly bullshit with time and categories.

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Sticking plaster solutions are clearest in property tax. The government introduced a mansion tax, applied on homes over £2 million. This is morally sensible. People with homes of that value can afford to pay more. But it is not actually very effective. It’ll secure just £400 million by 2029-30 - a rounding error.

We all know what’s required. Even a child knows. Council tax is based on property valuations from the 1990s. It taxes people in low-value homes more than high value ones. It is irrational. But Reeves is too scared to change it, so instead she introduces a second set of valuations for high-value homes in addition to the existing set of dated valuations for establishing council tax.

This is how we end up with such an insane tax system: because it is much easier to add a tax element than to repair what we already have.

Now look at the income tax thresholds. This is an example of arbitrary no-plan chaos. Reeves promised not to raise income tax, VAT or national insurance at the election. Reeves has therefore frozen the thresholds instead. These are the points at which you start paying income tax, at £12,570, or when you start paying the higher rate, at £50,271. Because of inflation, people’s salaries are constantly being pushed upwards into these thresholds, but it is not a real increase in pay, because the price of everything else has gone up alongside it. They have no additional purchasing power. And yet by keeping the thresholds fixed, Reeves is extracting more money.

The moral consequences are severe. It means that the tax system is grounded in fluctuation of future inflation. There is no justice, no sense of basic fairness, as to the income tax that someone pays. It is entirely unpredictable and arbitrary.

Elsewhere we see the third Treasury tradition: Fiddly bullshit. This Budget frontloaded the pleasure and backloaded the pain. The benefit changes come into force immediately, but the tax changes are mostly delayed to later in the parliament. More than half of the tax increase comes in 2029/30 - the crucial five year fiscal rule target.

Reeves then went a step further and started writing in cuts to public spending in 2028-29 and 2029-30. A third of the increase in her headroom was due to a projected £4 billion of ‘efficiency savings’, which have about as much objective reality as KPop Demon Hunters. Actually, that’s not right. KPop Demon Hunters makes real money that exists in an objectively real world. The projected efficiency savings invent imaginary money which exists in a future fantastical world.

Elsewhere there is simply nothing. An absence where policymaking should be. This is the single greatest crime in this Budget. It is an historic betrayal, a vitiation of national responsibility. The government came to power promising growth. It pledged to put this at the root of everything it did. But there is no plan for it. No new policies that the OBR scores positively towards higher GDP. No strategy. No vision. No ideas.

It is a vacuum. A void.

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The reason for this absence is ideological. The government has become seduced by populism.

There are moments when it breaks free of this trance - the last Labour conference, or those now rare points where Keir Starmer’s vestigial moral sentiment gets the better of him. But Starmer has now broadly submitted to the ideology which he once set out to destroy. No.10 chief of staff Morgan McSweeney happily notifies the press that he is spending 90 minutes in private meetings with Maurice Glasman, a babbling sexual neurotic who considers Steve Bannon his ally and progressives the enemy.

Culturally we can see the impact of this conversion in proposals around asylum, including the flirtation with the notion that the British state should strip refugees of their jewelry - halfhearted Nazi cosplay, essentially. But economically it has been much more ruinous.

Earlier this month, Andrew Sissons and John Springford published the outline of a plan for the British economy. I would urge you to take an hour, make a cup of coffee, and read it in full. It is valuable not just in its own right but as a reminder that there are still serious-minded conscientious people in this country who care deeply about its future.

The authors’ diagnosis of our economic malaise is simple: “Britain has fallen out of love with the things it is good at and in doing so it has undermined its advantages in the international economy.” What is it good at? “Finance and business services, tech and the creative economy, various advanced manufacturing niches”. What do these things rely on? “Openness: to trade, to ideas, to skilled workers”. In other words, precisely the quality which populism aims to kill.

Once you recognise what British economic success entails, it becomes fairly clear what kind of tax system you need to fund it. You would make the system rational, transparent and, most importantly, fair. It is precisely the arbitrary unfairness of the current system which motivates people to avoid it wherever possible and its labyrinthine complexities which provides avenues to do so. Needless to say, Reeves did not take that opportunity.

Populists argue that Britain’s historic openness to trade and immigration hurts the indigenous working class. In fact, it serves them. Successful productive industries create well paid jobs, which increases local spending, which revitalises town centres and provides revenue to the Treasury, which can fund public investment. But when our political priorities strangle those industries, the precise opposite happens. And that is the continuity we are living in today. That, in a word, is why we are so fucked.

Look at what the populists have wrought. Nine years ago they scored their first triumph: Brexit. The campaign was grounded in a fear of immigrants, specifically through a rejection of European free movement. Back then the demonised immigrant was a Polish plumber. Today it is a Syrian refugee. The scapegoat changes, but the storyline remains the same.

The consequences to trade were disastrous. Our trade in goods is now lower, as a share of GDP, than in 2019, whereas other economies of our size and type have reverted to around the same level as before the pandemic. Manufacturing is still a vital part of the British economy, particularly in major towns where it is often a regional anchor. They were the ones which took the worst hit.

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This process continues today. Our obsession with immigration, fuelled and made vicious by populism, is once again strangling the life out of our economy. It is killing us.

Take higher education. This is a British success story. It is a vital economic lifeline to the country. Almost every medium-sized UK city has a university. They support their local economy through demand and supply. And they bring youth and vigour and dynamism to locations which might otherwise face stagnation.

The government’s response to this success is to try to kill it. Ministers never say anything good about universities anymore - that is against the populist code, which treats them as incubators for liberalism. Tuition fees were frozen in the face of inflation for years on end, basically eradicating their revenue. Universities were instead encouraged to make ends meet by taking on international students, who pay higher fees. Then the government decided that this was intolerable because it had to reduce immigration.

Labour originally threatened to impose a six per cent levy on international students. Instead, it decided this week to apply a £925 flat fee per student from 2028, with an exemption for the first 220 students per provider. This is better than the original threat but still completely insane. They are actively trying to reduce numbers, despite the fact that these numbers bring real economic benefit to the UK. They’re not even unpopular. Just two per cent of the public want the government to restrict international students. And yet the government is intent on reducing them and indifferent as to the effect it will have on universities.

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Yesterday, new immigration numbers were released.

They showed that net migration at the end of the year ending June 2025 was 204,000, a drop of 445,000 compared to a year earlier, driven mostly by a sharp decline in student dependents and health and care visas.

This is largely a result of policy decisions taken by the outgoing Conservative government. We haven’t yet seen the impact of policy decisions taken by the new Labour government, which has decided to follow a similar populist approach. They will lead to even greater reductions, predominantly due to Shabana Mahmood’s purposeful demeaning residency rules and high salary and qualification thresholds for young skilled workers. The Home office estimates a further fall of 100,000. Other estimates suggest net migration could fall as low as 70,000 next year.

This is covered as if it was good news. The reality is that it will hurt us very badly indeed. This is stated in black and white in the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) paper published alongside the Budget. “Our central forecast sees potential output growth slow from 1.8 per cent in 2025 to 1.3 per cent in 2026,” it states. “The slowdown next year partly reflects a further fall in levels of net migration”. You can’t get any clearer than that, and yet we choose to ignore it.

This kind of decline would hurt any country but it hurts us most of all. An economy which relies on high-skilled services needs human capital. A country with aging infrastructure and cities which lack decent connectivity needs imported labour. A nation which wishes to have a decent health and social care system needs foreign nationals to work inside it.

Instead, Starmer says the reduced numbers are a “step in the right direction”. A direction to where? How many immigrants does the government think we need? What kind of sectors should they be operating in? On what basis should we make those decisions and towards what end? No idea. There is simply no coherent government view on this issue, except to do whatever Farage and his press supporters demand of them.

The populists will welcome the fall in numbers - not because of the reduction in immigration per se, but because it will impoverish the country. This is the immigration doom loop, outlined by Jonathan Portes and Minnie Rahman: Reducing immigration damages the economy and hurts public services, which feeds the disillusionment on which populism thrives, which leads to further demands for reduced immigration, which then starts the process again.

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We are in a struggle against populism. That is the story of our age. It desires a closed society: closed to people, and goods, and ideas. It would impoverish us, then use the hatred and anger which results to target immigrants in ever more grievous ways.

The open society has the ability to improve people’s lives in a way populism never will. But to do so, it must commit to its principles: rationality, transparency, sober policy-making and national responsibility. We need a tax policy which is geared to growth, an economic strategy which desires growth, and a political agenda which is prepared to face down the nativist complaints which get in the way of growth. That is how we will improve people’s lives. That is how we can kill populism.

The Budget may have had some welcome policies, but on the core issue of our time it was an act of criminal negligence.

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Odds and sods

It’s that time of year again: The day of my world famous Black Friday Sale. For one month only, you get a massive 50% reduction off a paid subscription to Striking 13. That’s 50% off of fuck all, giving you absolutely nothing back in return. Just £2.50 a month or £25 for the year.

Other websites offer piddly deals, like ten or 20% off their goods. But I go deep with the cuts, slicing half off the asking price. What better values can there be? Well, admittedly the sort that offers something which you cannot get for free. But there is no sense of pride in that, none of the deep satisfaction that comes with funding independent liberal journalism.

Joking aside though, I really will give you nothing. Sign up here.

We’ve gone live with our first Origin Story live show of 2026.The previous shows all sold out quickly, so we’ve booked our biggest ever venue - the Bloomsbury Theatre. We’re already starting work on how that night will work. It’s going to be rather wonderful.

This week’s i paper column was on the Budget, obviously, and this week’s Origin Story, in a rather wonderful bit of timing, is a recording of our previous live show, which you can watch below. Oh, while we’re on the subject of Black Friday deals, the i paper has a very robust offer of £20 for the year or £2 for the month for a premium subscription. That has the rather significant additional benefit of giving you things you can’t just access for free, ie getting you past the paywall, and I highly recommend it.

I am loving Pluribus, on Apple TV. It’s such a delightfully unusual piece of work. At first I thought that the notion of the whole world being happy is as distant from our current preoccupations as it is possible to imagine. But it turns out that the sight of people behaving in a drone-like fashion is in fact very on point to the world we live in today.

Most of all, it is so refreshingly different. We’re so used to seeing dystopian Children-of-Men-style thrillers about collapsed future states, that it’s actually a relief to see a topical sci-fi which comes from a completely different angle, namely that of a disturbing utopia. We live in a George Orwell world, but Aldous Huxley has always had just as much to say and it’s about time we explored his concerns a little more thoroughly. It’s also very satisfying to see a return to the style of the Twilight Zone.

Most of all, I start each episode with no idea at all what the hell is going to happen next. Feels great.

Right that’s your lot, you cunts. Fuck off.