Accidental Republic

[Accidental Republic @accidentalrepub]

@mir_ocall Bolloxology is an exciting new addition to my lexicon. Thanks!

[Bob Servant @bobservant]

Saddened to see the “anyone but England” attitude of some of my fellow Scots today. And as someone with a genuine affinity with Croatia, having briefly considered holidaying there in 1987, I find it a little patronising to myself and my Croatian amigos on our big day. 🇭🇷

[Richard Sanders @PulaRJS]

Jeremy Johnson - in 50 years time this will be the only 1.39 minutes of your life you'll be remembered for. It'll be played in genocide museums to sum up the complicity and callous brutality of the British state in the face of the slaughter of the Palestinian people - and the courage of those who opposed it.

[Michael Calderbank @Calderbank]

We have over 14m people who have gone hungry in the UK last year

it’s funny no cabinet minister ever resigns so that more can be spent on keeping people out of poverty, but money is no object apparently when it comes to guns and weapons

[Accidental Republic @accidentalrepub]

Much speculation today that Al Carns is considering throwing his helmet into the ring.
#alcarns
#labourleader
#labourwars

[BRYN_BORANGA @BRYN_BORANGA]

if Starmer wants to survive the next 48 hours as PM, he *must* finally reveal to the British public what his late parents' jobs were

[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.

[Accidental Republic @accidentalrepub]

@PulaRJS @ProfHall1955 This is brilliant riveting journalism.

[Paul Holden @pauleholden]

This is going to be excellent

[Accidental Republic @accidentalrepub]

@ewangibbs This looks great!

[Flying_Rodent @flying_rodent]

They didn’t have actual plans because they didn’t think they’d need them, and because they spent most of the last decade on squealing, schmoozing, cliping, sneaking, bullshitting, rolling around pretending to be injured and writhing in plainly fake terror. https://t.co/MQz1BpZ0ql

[Steve Hall @ProfHall1955]

This 'free-market economist' agrees that reducing benefits will 'incentivise' lazy workers and increase productivity. Given that it's almost impossible to be that simplistic, the tactic is to distract attention from neoliberalism's destruction of the British economy.

Instead, these coy eugenicists elicit the spite and stupidity that poisons the soul of too many Brits to direct their venom at those who for many reasons are struggling to find adequately remunerative work. A few lazy individuals? Probably, but I hesitate to blame some people for feeling defeated in this going-nowhere shitshow.

Will individual 'entrepreneurs' and fearful 'incentivised workers' turn things around? The political damage is that the constant circulation of this simple-minded, atavistic bullshit prevents general awareness of the huge institutional and structural problems we must overcome if we are to reboot the British economy. That way global corporations, financiers and rentiers can continue to drain the energy out of the rest of us. https://t.co/jJl0S19UO3

[Tim Walker @ThatTimWalker]

I remember when Millwall fans had a terrible reputation, but, oddly, I don’t remember many politicians at the time defending their inalienable right to beat the shit out of people.

[Jason Hickel @jasonhickel]

Let’s be clear, it is the entity that has committed genocide and ethnic cleansing, and which pledges to continue doing this, that must be demilitarised and deradicalised. If we cannot see this obvious fact we are truly lost.

[Clive Lewis MP @labourlewis]

I think the question @AndyBurnhamGM is asking here, is critical to the future or our democracy:

Who runs this country and in whose interest?

If your answer is the bond markets, Blackrock & tech billionaires then call it what it is: oligarchy.

Power must serve people

[Jamie Driscoll @JamieDriscollNE]

Anyone who supports ID cards on the grounds that “if you’ve got nothing to hide you have nothing to worry about” should be banned from having curtains.

[Accidental Republic @accidentalrepub]

Over the last few days I've been enjoying quite a few "fun size" Twix's which are a revelation compared to those old style massive Twix's which I now see were unnecessarily huge and oppressive and brought with them a sense of tangible dread and despair.

[The National @ScotNational]

Tomorrow's front page 📰

Starmer rolls out red carpet for genocide