Tom Haward

8th generation oysterman. Novelist. The Path of Revenge: Book 2 in The Path of Chaos series is out now.

[Tom Haward @HawardTom]

The phrase, ‘EU shellfish ban,’ keeps being used by news outlets and it’s important to understand how this language is misleading and how Government is deliberately using misinformation to hide from its own failures...
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[Tom Haward @HawardTom]

@TRobinsonNewEra I would like to think all that sniff has been rotting your brain, but that implies there’s a brain there in the first place.

[Tom Haward @HawardTom]

@HELENSTATHAM2 @MonkEmma @LBC @TomSwarbrick1 I was about to reply that I was unaware I had changed careers into broadcast radio!

[Clive Lewis MP @labourlewis]

Westminster may finally be about to have the argument it has spent 40 years avoiding.

If Andy Burnham returns to Parliament, the political class will know how to cover it. A leadership drama. Who is up, who is down, whether Keir Starmer can survive, whether Labour is once again turning inward. The familiar machinery of Westminster psychodrama will whirr into life.

That framing misses the larger point. Burnham’s possible return matters not because of what it says about Labour’s leadership, but because of what it reveals about the British state: what it can still do, what it has forgotten how to do, and what kind of country it must become if it is serious about resilience.

Britain is finally having a more serious conversation about national security. The Strategic Defence Review, the pivot back towards Europe, the recognition that hybrid warfare turns citizens, infrastructure and civic institutions into part of the front line: all of it marks a real shift in how the state thinks about its own survival.
But at the centre of that conversation lies a question that the defence establishment, and most of Westminster, still does not want to answer. What kind of society do you need to be before resilience is possible?

Finland is now the model everyone cites. Comprehensive security. Whole-of-society defence. Civilian preparedness woven into military planning. British strategists admire the Finnish system and ask how it might be copied. But the admiration stops short of the uncomfortable question: why does it work there?

The answer is not geography or history or some mysterious quality of Finnish national character. It is structural. Nearly 80% of Finns say they would defend their country if attacked. In Britain, the figure is closer to 33%. That gap is not an accident. It exists because Finland has spent decades building a society in which people have a genuine stake in what they are being asked to defend. Energy is affordable. Housing is available. Public services function. Institutions command trust. The Nordic welfare state is not a sentimental add-on to Finnish security policy. It is the foundation of it. You cannot ask people to defend a country that does not work for them.

Britain has spent 40 years building the opposite. The privatisation of essentials – energy, water, transport, housing – transferred wealth upwards from households to shareholders while making the basics of everyday life more expensive. The state, stripped of the tools to control costs at source, has been reduced to compensating after the fact.

Out of every pound the Government spends on housing, 88p goes to subsidising private rents. Just 12p goes to building homes. When energy prices spiked in 2022, the Government spent £40bn in a single winter cushioning the blow, not because it had a resilient energy system but because it lacked one. Debt interest now consumes more than £100bn a year. Britain has the highest debt servicing costs in the G7: the compounding price of financing failure rather than eliminating it at source.

This is what bond market dependency actually looks like. It is not an abstract fiscal condition. It is the consequence of a state that has been stripped of the supply-side tools that would let it cure the problems it now pays, indefinitely, to manage. And here is the paradox the Treasury refuses to confront. The countries that borrow most cheaply are often those that have retained the public investment model Britain abandoned. The spread between UK and Dutch borrowing costs has widened sharply not because markets fear public investment, but because they have lost confidence in a model that borrows to subsidise private failure while never addressing its causes.

This is the connection Britain’s defence debate is missing. The familiar framing, that social spending is what must be sacrificed to meet the NATO target, is not merely politically toxic. It is strategically illiterate. Cutting the foundations of social cohesion to fund the hardware of national defence is self-defeating. You end up with planes and no pilots, submarines and no crew, an army that cannot recruit because the society it is meant to protect has stopped believing in itself.

I think Burnham understands this. That is why his programme is more interesting than the leadership gossip suggests. What he has been building in Greater Manchester – public control of transport, expanded social housing, investment in the productive foundations of the city economy – is not a nostalgic rerun of postwar nationalisation. It is a proof of concept for a different kind of state.

The Bee Network is the most visible example, but the argument behind it travels. A state that can shape markets is not condemned to subsidise their failures. A state that produces affordable energy through public generation does not need to spend tens of billions cushioning every price shock. A state with a serious public housebuilding programme does not need housing benefit to rise endlessly in line with private rents. A state that builds institutions people can see, use and trust begins to restore the civic confidence on which resilience depends.

The real constraint on Britain is not money. It is capacity: the workers, institutions, supply chains and public purpose needed to turn national will into national renewal. Britain’s tragedy is not that it has run out of money. It is that after 40 years of hollowing out the state, it has made itself less able to act.

Burnham’s critics will reach for the familiar warning. Borrow more, spend more, spook the gilt markets, repeat the Truss disaster. But this misunderstands both the problem and the opportunity.

Bond markets do not have ideological preferences. They have functional ones. They prefer clarity, credible revenue streams, productive investment, and a state with a plan. What they punish is not public ambition but incoherence. A properly designed productive state programme would not be a leap into fiscal fantasy. It would be an attempt to end the much costlier fantasy that Britain can keep borrowing to compensate for broken markets while refusing to repair them.

The defence conversation and the economic conversation need to become the same conversation. Finland did not build national resilience by choosing between welfare and security. It built resilience by understanding that they are inseparable: that a country in which the basics work, where people trust one another and the institutions around them, is one that can face danger with something more than anxiety.

That is the deeper argument Burnham represents. Westminster will be tempted to treat him as a leadership story. It should resist the temptation. The question is not whether Burnham can return to parliament. It is whether Britain can return to the idea that the state should make life work. Because a country that cannot command the confidence of its people cannot truly defend itself.

[Tom Haward @HawardTom]

It’s amazing how many of these evangelicals haven’t read the book they commit idolatry with.

[Mukhtar @I_amMukhtar]

Piers Morgan asked Russell Brand which passages were relevant to him when he brought a Bible into court.

[Tom Haward @HawardTom]

@ZackPolanski Great interview. Would love you to visit my oyster farm to chat about nationalisation of water companies and protecting our environment for future generations 🦪

[Clive Lewis MP @labourlewis]

This crisis wasn’t just made by the weather. It was manufactured by decades of political cowardice and corporate greed.

Privatised water hasn’t just failed. It will be remembered as one of the most criminal acts in Britain’s long history of failed privatisations.

Since privatisation, England has sold off or decommissioned nearly half of its publicly owned reservoirs.

Companies then siphoned billions in dividends while failing to build new capacity or fix leaks that now waste 3 billion litres of treated water every day enough to fill more than 1,200 Olympic swimming pools every 24 hours.

Now they want to build new reservoirs, decades too late and they want us to pay for them.
That’s like selling off your house, pocketing the cash, then sending the bill to taxpayers to rebuild it when it you’ve burnt it down.

This is the great water con of our time: Sell the assets; Let infrastructure rot; Blame the weather; Bill the public for the rebuild.

Building reservoirs alone won’t solve the problem. Without reform, they’ll simply become new profit streams for private operators.

Real resilience requires two things:

Public ownership:
If we knew water was ours, we’d back a national programme of conservation and efficiency. Ownership builds responsibility. People protect what they own.

A massive leak-reduction and efficiency drive:
Every second, thousands of litres vanish into the ground from burst pipes while executives take home bonuses for “performance”. The only word for that is ‘criminal’.

This isn’t just about dry rivers and hosepipe bans. It’s about our food, our farms, our future. Water is a national treasure, not a commodity.

And yet we have a government and an opposition afraid to face that truth because it means confronting the system itself.

The privatisation of water will go down as one of the gravest policy failures of the modern era, a textbook case of private profit over public good.

The climate crisis and the cost-of-living crisis are two faces of the same monster - corporate greed and ecological destruction.

It’s time to wake up and smell the rancid stench of stagnation under this system.

We need a Labour government that faces the future - not one that tells us it “costs too much” to care for the essentials of life.

Water belongs to all of us.
And the longer we leave it in private hands, the drier and poorer, we’ll all become.

[Tom Haward @HawardTom]

Water companies through their negligence, greed and incompetence are literally bleeding the country dry. How can we, an island nation, be in the position where private companies are polluting and creating droughts for dividends? Public ownership now.
https://t.co/xQvR6IyVnh

[Tom Haward @HawardTom]

If Reeves’s budget increases VAT and NI and Income tax then that means businesses will have to raise their prices whilst staff have less take home money, meaning staff will spend less in the places which have raised prices. And businesses will then have to make redundancies…

[Tom Haward @HawardTom]

Vacuous platitudes, which have nothing concrete is the same playbook of politics over the past two decades: it’s depressing Labour has become something so bereft of bold and society changing action.

[Keir Starmer @Keir_Starmer]

We’re choosing renewal over decline.

Unity over division.

Unlocking the potential of everyone in every part of the UK.

[Tom Haward @HawardTom]

If your message, culture and policy attracts Nazis to support you then you are clearly a far right party with fascist ideology.

[PoliticsJOE @PoliticsJOE_UK]

Man in Caerphilly quotes Adolf Hitler and says Reform UK are not racist enough for him

[Tom Haward @HawardTom]

I don’t understand this gaslighting nonsense of posting a statement that is clearly false and can be verified by looking outside. Labour have sadly become as toxic as the sewage he falsely claims has been cleaned up.

[Keir Starmer @Keir_Starmer]

Promise made. Promise delivered.

[Tom Haward @HawardTom]

10 years ago this month I tried to kill myself. I’m happy that I failed. This is a bit of my story #WorldMentalHealthDay

[Tom Haward @HawardTom]

Fear, despair and scapegoating have been driving the narrative in the UK. It’s okay to think that hope and optimism can be this country’s story instead. And that you can be part of that.

[The Green Party @TheGreenParty]

Let's make hope normal again.

[Tom Haward @HawardTom]

Listen to him, carefully. He asks a question about swans being eaten and then makes sure it is solidified by the interviewer and then says, “I’m not saying that,” with a dismissive chuckle , but has made his base froth and the disinformation spread. We must counter this nonsense

[LBC @LBC]

"They're eating the carp. They're eating the swans."

Nigel Farage doubles down on his bet that immigrants were eating cats and dogs in America.

He now suggests there's a 'similar story' in Britain.

[Tom Haward @HawardTom]

Populism thrives because it steals pleasant sound bites from all political spectrums and coats them in fear. Fear which tingles that primal part of your brain and evokes ‘fight or flee’. And so many people choose to fight the scapegoat charlatans like Farage place on the altar.

[Aaron Rupar @atrupar]

Nigel Farage looks uncomfortable as Jamie Raskin uses his opening statement to absolutely demolish him

[Lisabet Sarai @LisabetSarai]

https://t.co/Gw5tOnPhzh #AltHistory from @HawardTom What if the Roman Empire still ruled in modern times?

[Goddess Fish Promos @GoddessFish]

The author of the #alternatehistory THE PATH OF REDEMPTION, Tom Haward, discusses the world he created for the book. Win a $10 Amazon/BN GC. @HawardTom @Sybrina_spt https://t.co/qRNGsZmuq6

[Tom Haward @HawardTom]

@hogge_fred Looking forward to feedback!

[Tom Haward @HawardTom]

My newest book, The Path of Redemption, is out now via most book sellers. It’s the third book in my alternate history trilogy exploring a future where the Roman Empire still rules the world.

[Goddess Fish Promos @GoddessFish]

Enjoy an interview with Tom Haward, author of the #alternatehistory THE PATH OF REDEMPTION. Discover what inspired him to write the book. Enter to #win a $10 Amazon/BN GC. @HawardTom @MagickofBooks https://t.co/17fJKc47pi

[Tom Haward @HawardTom]

When the Govt’s vacuous argument about nationalisation being too expensive is rolled out, remember that your criminally high water bills are in place to pay someone over £1m to poison the environment.

[Feargal Sharkey @Feargal_Sharkey]

"Water chiefs’ pay rises to average of £1.1m despite ban on bonuses and outrage over pollution."

So how's that ban on bonuses thing working out then? Yet another shallow policy doomed to fail.

https://t.co/owuQ9tOO4y