Laird Stephen Powell

PhD from @UofGlasgow: I also research armed nonstate actor rivalries in the MENA region. Labour member, pro EU & pro UK & pro Kurdistan

[Laird Stephen Powell @Laird_SRPowell]

Following a challenging year, I am very pleased to share that my new article with @adrianflorea13 Introducing the new Armed Nonstate Actor Rivalry Dataset (ANARD) has now been published in @JournalofCW. A wonderful start to the week! @GANARG2019 @UofGSPS https://t.co/acy4c9DYX4

[Laird Stephen Powell @Laird_SRPowell]

Agree with lots of this, but an obvious answer as to why Finland has a population willing to fight for the state is that they are much more homogenous than we are and haven’t spent the past 25 years flagellating themselves over Empire!

[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.

[Laird Stephen Powell @Laird_SRPowell]

There’s not been anywhere enough Craig Levein on the airways during this title race. What’s going on?

Fair play if he’s looking after his ticker though! @BBCSportScot.

Is he alright @AmyJIrons?

[Ellie Rofe @eliotranch]

Explain to me how mass immigration is a 'left wing' concept.

I can't fathom how people swallowed this idea wholesale.

- Endless supply of cheap labour helps capitalists, not workers

- Strip mining of talent from developing countries is a form of neocolonialism

- Endless pressure on the housing market inflates assets and prevents the poorest from having reasonably priced homes

- A refusal to train enough people here removes vocation paths that the working class used to follow

- The most negative social and cultural second order consequences are happening to working class, deindustrialised or neglected areas

So it's left wing how?

I can see how anti-immigrant sentiment can be seen as ethnonationalism and therefore right wing.

But I can't see how support for mass immigration is left wing.

And to be clear: it's not just a part of left wing thought. It's now so central to left wing thought, apparently, that any divergence from this immediately makes you 'far right'.

[Jack Montgomery @JackBMontgomery]

Average Scottish nationalist in 2026:

[Smirkley @Smirkley]

British Muslims and the British public live in the same country. They do not share the same world.

On every Western adversary, Iran, Russia, China, British Muslims are dramatically more favorable than the general public. On every Western ally, they are more hostile.

[Damian Counsell @DamCou]

I'm sharing this for the replies. Even in the 1980s, there were parts of provincial England where white natives would react to brown skin and afro hair like they were green skin and antennae. This kind of establishment revisionism is, weirdly, a denial of black history in the UK.

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

This happened under a “conservative” government

[Laird Stephen Powell @Laird_SRPowell]

My mate Steve: Shes more empire biscuit than emperor:

[Laird Stephen Powell @Laird_SRPowell]

Justinian used the Nike Riots and great fire to turn Constantinople into the Queen of Cities. I’m not sure Susan Aitken has it in her to do the same for Glasvegas 😬

[Laird Stephen Powell @Laird_SRPowell]

Justinian used the Nike Riots and great fire to turn Constantinople into the Queen of Cities. I’m not sure Susan Aitken has it in her to do the same for Glasvegas 😬

[Jeremy Carl @realJeremyCarl]

During the Cultural Revolution in China, tens of thousands of priceless artifacts that had not been taken to western institutions like the British Museum or taken to Taiwan by the fleeing nationalists in 1949 were destroyed forever.

[Laird Stephen Powell @Laird_SRPowell]

Fuck sake. A possible fire in a vape shop leading to the destruction of the biggest train station in Scotland is a shattering indictment of late stage capitalism, eh? Imagine the cheap monstrosity they’ll build in place of the collapsed sections. Nightmare.

[Laird Stephen Powell @Laird_SRPowell]

It’s clear now that academics have grossly overstated the material strength and robustness of Hezbollah, the IRGC, Russian anti-air warfare systems, and Hamas. 😅🤣

[Laird Stephen Powell @Laird_SRPowell]

Kemi Badenoch is basically the Tories’ answer to Wilfried Nancy, eh?

[Politics UK @PolitlcsUK]

🚨 NEW: Kemi Badenoch has summoned all Tory MPs for a meeting tonight amid fears of further defections to Reform UK

[@christopherhope]

[Laird Stephen Powell @Laird_SRPowell]

Forgive me Home Secretary, I was not familiar with your game! 💪👏

[Politics UK @PolitlcsUK]

🚨 NEW: Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood says the ethnicity of all offenders should be recorded and published

[@Telegraph]

[Laird Stephen Powell @Laird_SRPowell]

No matter what you do for these arseholes, it will never be enough. The line has to be drawn. No more appeasement.

[Marc Goldberg @MarcGoldberg111]

This video of Corbyn being confronted at a Your Party meeting for not being anti Zionist enough is quite something, exasperated he says "I'm fed up with being painted into a corner of being seen as a pro Zionist" then says "what do you think I've been doing with my life?" only to be met with "it was under your leadership the IHRA definition of antisemitism was adopted, you condemn the resistance in Palestine, you haven't called for one unitary state..."

[Laird Stephen Powell @Laird_SRPowell]

Get Grant Hanley doing some keepy uppies in Prestwick airport, please and thanks: https://t.co/XeH2HoLnoL

[Laird Stephen Powell @Laird_SRPowell]

Plenty of others will feel the same way. It’s time to crackdown on this and the immigration which fuels it.

[Melinda Richards 🇦🇺🇺🇸 @goodfoodgal]

As a woman, I am not afraid to speak out anymore and say that this photo scares me.

Call me whatever you want.

This scares me more…

[jim cross @jimcross27]

@Oliver_foster_

[Laird Stephen Powell @Laird_SRPowell]

I’ll be deep in the cold ground before I recognise Gannon-Doak.

[Tom Jones @93vintagejones]

Amazing graph by @LouisElton96