There is no food shortage Media coverage in recent weeks has led to the false impression that Britain has a food shortage.  One reason for this is that much of the establishment media is vehemently opposed to Brexit, and used the absence of certain salad vegetables to play the Brexit …

It is 2015.  Tom has a job paying £1000 a month.  He spends £500 on rent, and £75 each on energy, food and transport.  He spends another £25 on assorted occasional items like clothing.  The local council takes £150 in taxes.  He spends another £50 on various subscriptions such as …

Humanity faces a bottleneck of crises which threaten the collapse of industrial civilisation.  Of these, most people are only aware of climate change, which most believe can be solved via electrification and a range of simple changes to our lifestyles. But climate change is just one of myriad crises, including: …

According to a certain interpretation of the long arc of human history as seen from the prism of the religion of progress, we are currently passing through the “third disruption.”  According to this view, the first disruption – also referred to as the neolithic revolution – arrived with the emergence …

With tedious predictability, the people – politicians, journalists and keyboard warriors – that David Graeber referred to as “the extreme centre,” are blaming Britain’s vegetable shortage on Brexit, even though three-quarters of the foods involved are usually grown within the UK, where free movement still exists for European pickers.  Indeed, …

An economic death spiral occurs when a system loses critical mass.  For example, the UK’s energy death spiral – which is reaching its crisis phase – is the result of rising energy costs creating an involuntary loss of demand across the system.  In part, businesses and households engage in energy-saving …

It has been called “America’s Chernobyl.”  In short, following the failure to maintain rail side detectors, a freight train containing several tanks of vinyl chloride – a precursor of PVC – experienced an over-heated axle causing a train fire and a derailment close to the town of East Palestine, Ohio.  …

One of the ways we can spot propaganda is when an identical story appears across the world’s media.  So it was last week, when news outlets parroted the idea that the global economy in general and the western economies in particular, were going to experience a “soft landing.”  The central …

Britain is a country which can only keep its lights on by paying businesses and households not to consume electricity when the wind isn’t blowing.  And if ever there was an argument for keeping the economy as analogue as possible, this is it.  Because anything and everything digital depends upon …

It is 64 years since Michael Young’s satire, The Rise of the Meritocracy was published.  It was, no doubt, a response to the aspirations around the post-war expansion of education.  The school leaving age had been raised, and an expansion of grammar schools provided a route for working class kids to access higher education.  This social mobility had been accompanied by geographical mobility too, as kids from the old industrial regions of the UK went off to study in the affluent university towns of the south of England, and then later stayed there when they found work.