Wars are won on the factory floor. Expensive, unreliable energy is a gift to our adversaries. Spiked 01/09/26 Russian threats to attack British factories producing drones and missile components for Ukraine are a reminder that the industrial base is once again becoming part of the battlefield. In a way, this has always been the case. In an attritional conflict, the ability to produce, replace and sustain military capability matters as much as the weapons a country starts with. Military power has always depended on productive force. It was Paul Kennedy who documented the relationship between economic power and military power across five centuries of great-power competition in his magnum opus, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers . In December 2024, John Bew, former chief foreign-policy adviser to No10, gave this logic a new name – ‘machinepolitik’. He argued we are returning to an era of ‘raw power’ in which the ability to harness productive force, from armaments to energy to tec...
The PM will keep plucking the goose until there are no feathers left Daily Telegraph 27/08/26 With ever-growing tedium, the forthcoming Budget once again seeks to extract more tax from the public. As Jean-Baptiste Colbert famously said: “The art of taxation consists in so plucking the goose as to obtain the largest possible number of feathers with the smallest possible amount of hissing.” Andy Burnham, it would seem, is deaf to the hissing. He appears determined to keep plucking, no matter the pain. But more tax is not just a threat to Britain’s attractiveness for wealth creators and entrepreneurs – it’s a direct attack on those who keep the economy alive. Nor should one be surprised that, when asked which taxes should go up, people always plump for the one they are unlikely to have to pay themselves. So, which taxes are being spoken about the most? The first is a wealth tax, which will be impossible to collect and will cost more to administer. Outside quoted invest...