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When HG Wells moved to Woking in 1895 he and his soon to be second wife, Amy Catherine known as Jane, rented a house for 18 months and the author got to work during one of the most productive periods in his writing career. “We furnished a small resolute semi-detached villa with a minute greenhouse in the Maybury Road facing the railway line,” he wrote almost four decades later in his experimental autobiographical volumes, “where all night long the goods trains shunted and bumped and clattered – without serious effect upon our healthy slumbers.”

From there he planned, among other works, The War of the Worlds: “I wheeled about the district marking down suitable places and people for destruction by my Martians.”

In Woking, Wells found an escape from the pollution of inner London twenty three miles away and on his walks and bicycle rides he scouted the suburban and rural locations. The ancient heathland sandpit on Horsell Common outside Woking is where in the novel the first Martian cylinders land and a curious local population - fascinated and frightened by the landing - turn up to wave the white flag of peace or surrender. They and the British military attempting to surround the visitors are zapped. And so it goes on.

The unnamed narrator survives assorted near misses, dodging the aliens who feed on human blood, by moving from the commuter town Woking to Walton, then heading into London itself via Putney and finally on Primrose Hill in the capital realising the Martians have all expired (killed by lack of immunity to earth’s microbes). Humanity is saved, but only after we learn valuable lessons about hubris, the risks of progress, the power of nature and our vulnerability in the grand scheme of things.

For obvious reasons, due to Hollywood and our fixation on the mysteries of space, most of the attention The War of the Worlds still receives is down to the then pioneering notion of earth experiencing an alien invasion. Of course, there had been a few earlier attempts at telling such stories, but Wells wrote his story in the high Victorian period, when mass market publishing was selling to a highly literate population and a rapidly expanding middle class was fascinated by science and change, which is hardly surprising given the effects of the Industrial Revolution in the preceding century or so. And the storyteller is Wells, so obviously The War of the Worlds is better than anything attempted up to that point.

When looking for a source or two on Wells the AI search function on Google even told me that The War on the Worlds is the start of an “alien franchise”, on account of all the film versions and reinterpretations, which is quite the way to describe one of the best novels of the 19th century. And a good example of the way in which an AI answer is often right enough then on a defining, crucial detail just slightly off.

There is another way to view this novel, and that is as a commentary on the then new phenomenon of suburbs in general and on the coming power of the suburbs of the South East of England in particular.

When Wells moved to bustling Woking it had only been a proper town for a few decades. Before the railways arrived it had been just a cluster of houses and villages. The settlement of Old Woking with its 13th century church was almost 1,000 years old by the time Woking Common station opened in 1838 on the new line between Southampton and London, finishing initially at Nine Elms in what today is Vauxhall. The line didn’t go closer to the capital’s centre until London Waterloo was opened in 1848. A plan to take the railway lines from there all the way into the City of London came to nothing. Waterloo became the terminus.

When writing a history of the City of London ten years ago I became obsessed by the map of London and its environs and this idea of the 19th century railways punching lines out into what had been the countryside, or alternatively punching lines into the heart of the great imperial capital.

This over the course of a few decades transformed and emptied residents from the City of London, the famed square mile and traditional financial and commercial centre that was once the home of all the wholesale food markets. Whereas in the early 1800s the population of the square mile was estimated as 130,000, in a wider city of one million people, today it is home to little more than 15,000 souls, although efforts are being made to reintroduce more residential space among all the offices.

The arrival of the railways meant the use of space could shift from cramped housing to the offices needed for what was then the world’s dominant finance industry - in banking, foreign exchange, commodities, shipping and insurance. This still holds as for all we hear about Britain’s decline, the City is still near the top just behind New York, despite all those wrongheaded predictions that post-Brexit it would be left in the dust by Paris and Frankfurt.

When in the 19th century the staff of those finance houses and the attendant support network of businesses were forced out they moved out to the new houses being built on the land alongside the new railway lines, and particularly the land nearest the new stations that became especially valuable for new housing. Victorian speculators and property developers built rows of neat streets and the infrastructure required for life with schools, shopping, cricket pitches and small pavilions, new churches or village churches repurposed and hospitals.

Perhaps because there was so little central planning governing this at times chaotic process it produced at speed one of the pioneering great examples of human flourishing. A clerk in the City or an aspirational banker or insurance salesman could, all being well, afford a nice house for him and his family with a small garden and plenty of room. Electrification would later complete the process of improvement in the second Industrial Revolution.

Remember how recent this rushing in of progress was. St Margarets between Richmond and Twickenham in South West London is a good example. When Turner designed and built his cottage there, owning it between 1813 and 1826, St Margarets was a properly rural escape for the painter, with only a small group of houses near the Thames surrounded by the orchards and agricultural land for the Duke of Northumberland’s estate at Syon Park. When the railway arrived in 1876 it was transformed into commuter territory.

Chris Packham, the fanatical environmentalist, said recently of Turner’s painting of a steam engine emerging through the mist that this was the artist capturing the moment we started despoiling the planet. Nonsense, I say. Thanks to the steam train and the expansion of our cities out into suburbs, millions of people, tens of millions of our ancestors, enjoyed greater prosperity, warmth, travel and fulfilment than if they had stayed on the land.

In this irregular, imperfect but nonetheless admirable process of improvement London and the wider South East was Britain’s laboratory.

Today it is, to put it mildly, fashionable to criticise London and the South East of England, although foreigners tend to be astonished that Britons could look at something as wondrous as London, perhaps the world’s best city, and see it as a problem.

The incoming Prime Minister Andy Burnham certainly sees London as a problem, because it has too much power and Britain is too centralised, he says.

It may be true that Britain is too centralised, although as the historian Sam Rubinstein pointed out on social media recently, England settled on an administrative and political centre - London - as long ago as the 12th century. If England is more centralised than, say, Germany this is hardly surprising when you consider how recently German unification took place, that is between 1866 and 1871. This explains Germany’s regional capitals, federal model and different governing structure. Italy has its own version of the city, kingdoms and regions story too. Countries are different and they developed differently on account of their different historical circumstances.

Notice how the new PM is in classic, keen to avoid offence, Burnham-style adjusting his rhetoric or briefings on London now that he is about to become Prime Minister and will have to move to London. It is reported he will spend as little time in the capital as he can, trying to get home to the North on a Thursday evening each week. Let’s see how long that lasts, given what is going on in the world. He talks so much about the North, or a rather narrow interpretation of the North, that it would hardly be a surprise if citizens in other parts of the country start wondering if he is Prime Minister for the North or the whole country.

If I read it correctly he says that London itself is held back by the divisions and centralisation in the country. Does he mean London suffers because London and the South East pays so much tax that is transferred to the rest of the country? Transfers are what one would expect in a civilised, unified country. Does that mean London will now get to keep more of what it makes? I doubt it means that. Quite the reverse seems more likely, given the vague promises to reduce the cost of living across the country. What in practical terms does any of the vibes-based Labour commentary about the state of the country and further redistribution mean? Search me, though presumably we are all about to find out and I bet you it is expensive.

What we do know is that Greater London has a population of 9.9 million and the South East beyond its perimeter has a population of another 9.6 million. In that definition the South East doesn’t even include East England with Bedfordshire, Cambridgeshire, Essex, Suffolk and Norfolk, distinct counties that are nonetheless pointed at London with their own train lines in and out. Add the Eastern counties and their 6.6 million population and Greater London and the wider South East have a population of more than 26 million, and those are the legal residents we know about.

London alone accounts for close to a quarter of the UK’s GDP, even if it contains less than a sixth of the country’s population. It is an economic powerhouse, a growth generation machine, a glamorous cultural marvel, an engine of ambition and opportunity, and still an epic financial success.

Amidst it is all manner of poverty and soul-sucking architecture alongside the beauty, of course. Indeed, the most troubled parts of London are as bleak as anything in the worst parts of other major cities.

But pitting the rest of the country against London and penalising the capital won’t do anything other than reduce the nation’s prospects for growth and sow the seeds of division.

My colleague Paul Lay, senior editor on Engelsberg Ideas and a historian of the 17th century, said recently on social media that the long story of these islands has gone into reverse: “Much of English then British history has been about bringing an end to tribes and clans. It seems the last thirty years or so has seen that instinct reversed.”

One of the defining features of the old and historically very successful British settlement was the accepted notion of London as the capital, the centre, the magnet. When this was at its height, and Britain was at it most successful, the other great cities of these isles - Newcastle, Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds, Glasgow, Belfast, Birmingham and Bristol - didn’t atrophy or moan. They powered intellectual and scientific revolutions and demanded national political change to match the rising prosperity.

In Edinburgh, with the help of Adam Smith via Fife and Glasgow University, in the Scottish Enlightenment it is no exaggeration to say the modern economic world was created.

Little of this was done according to central planning. It was organic and messy, although it took place within the boundaries of a clear constitutional settlement with property rights and solid institutions. One of the best and most productive of those processes was what happened to London and the South East. Why we as a country would curse or dismiss this great historical inheritance is beyond me.

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Watching the outgoing metro mayor of Manchester continue his merry progress to the premiership, clad in a black suit jacket over a black t-shirt and grinning his way round the Makerfield constituency where Andy Burnham hopes this week to be elected MP in a by-election, several thoughts come to mind. Hold on, what on earth are we all doing? And is this farce of a contest really our political and media class’s response to the enormous crises and challenges we face?

We are in the age of Trump, war in Ukraine and Iran, and AI. Quantum computing is about to bust open the encryption on which our entire financial system depends. AI, robotics, sensors and, soon, quantum computing are about to fuse, creating an automation matrix that will likely transform production and economic life. In Ukraine, we see how these developments are already reshaping warfare at extraordinary speed with the frontline and “killing zone” transformed. The US is racing to adapt its capabilities, while nations such as Poland spend almost 5% of GDP on defence.

Next, the AI revolution may usher in hugely positive medical and productivity gains that will fuel growth and alleviate or even eliminate our fiscal problems, yet the resulting disruption to employment could also produce a voter backlash. Worse, AI may make the production of bioweapons and others weapons of mass destruction impossible to control or regulate, leading in the end to the annihilation of our species. We also stand on the edge of a new era of nuclear proliferation; as Professor Frank Gavin puts it in his introduction to the summer edition of the Texas National Security Review: “Few recall the terrifying effects that nuclear weapons had on world politics during the Cold War, and the rise of loose nuclear talk in recent years is a cause for great concern. Yet the presence of the bomb hovers over international relations like a malevolent ghost, usually quiet and invisible yet always inspiring fear, and in danger of emerging in terrifying, murderous ways without warning.”

Meanwhile, China sits at the head of an alliance of autocracies while moving up the industrial value chain producing ever more high end products that threaten to deindustrialise Europe. In Britain, we have the highest electricity prices in the developed world and a net zero crackpot energy policy that accelerates our own deindustrailiasation.

In Beijing, the leadership that defeated the US administration in last year’s trade war, using its power to compel a climb down by Washington, ponders how to incorporate Taiwan whether by force or coercion. In its war on Ukraine, Russia is being beaten back right now but it may lash out in other directions in northern Europe, in the high north or on undersea cables for example, to compensate. It is in this dangerous context that Britain’s defence secretary and the minister of state both resigned last week, after the Prime Minister refused to find the money to build up our weakened defences against Russia and threats beyond Europe.

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For a leader who had just been deposed by his party, Sir Keir Starmer was attracting a lot of compliments in the hours following the delivery of his resignation statement last Monday. Putting on grave expressions for the broadcasters, assorted sombre Labour MPs and grandees described the outgoing Prime Minister as “honourable”, “patriotic” and “decent” in a manner that suggested some kind of terrible accident had befallen the poor chap rather than a brutal and deliberate whacking at the hands of his treacherous colleagues.

Meanwhile, in Westminster Hall a couple of hundred Labour MPs seeking a job from Andy Burnham, sorry, seeking to offer their comradely congratulations over his by-election victory, turned up to pose for a selfie with the new MP for Makerfield fresh off the train to “that London”. Inevitably, there at the front was the grinning phizzog of Stella Creasy MP, presumably hopeful that finally the party will have a new leader capable of recognising the full extent of her talents by elevating her to high office. If history is any guide she should not hold her breath.

The scene in Westminster a week ago was unseemly and undignified, when Burnham and Labour MPs might have done better to have dialed down the smiling and left the day to Starmer, the man they had just done in. But this is politics, and the reason there is so much excitement is that Labour MPs realise that in Burnham there is at least salvation from the purgatory of life with Starmer as leader, and at best they may even find that Burnham can save their seats and taxpayer funded livelihoods. They are thrashing about drowning and here is Burnham standing at the bow of a lifeboat holding up what looks like a flotation device.

Unless a challenger appears, and it seems unlikely anyone is going to risk standing in the way of the Burnham wave, the outgoing metro mayor of Manchester will become Prime Minister on Monday 20 July.

Burnham’s allies such as Lucy Powell, Labour’s deputy leader, are already being asked if he will call an early general election, which is what she and her colleagues demanded when the Tories were in the middle of their leadership travails and swapped leaders. No early election is required this time because, er, it’s different and we are Labour, seems to be the line from Powell.

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To understand how thoroughly corrupted Scotland’s public life became under Nicola Sturgeon and the Scottish National Party it helps to watch a video filmed by one of the nation’s broadcasters (I was going to say state broadcaster) six years ago this week in May 2020. Scottish children were recorded leaving messages saying “thank you” to Sturgeon “for always keeping us safe”.

The North Korean-style video featured the following message, underpinned by soft piano music that might as well have been recorded in Pyongyang:

“The children of Scotland would like to say thank you - to Nicola, our First Minister of Scotland. We are so grateful. Thank you for always keeping us safe. Working so hard. For being strong for us. Thank you for caring for every individual life and for always thinking about the children of Scotland. Thank you, Nicola.”

A lot of people went slightly nuts during the Covid crisis and the British media got the cultural infection, as opposed to the medical infection, bad. The STV video script was written by persons unknown at the channel and was swiftly deleted after complaints, because it had, a spokesman for the channel said, failed to live up to STV’s high standards of impartiality.

A lot of crazy stuff happened in particular over the course of that weird week or so in May 2020. On 25 May that year, Dominic Cummings, Boris Johnson’s erstwhile guru was dragged into holding a press conference in the Downing Street garden following revelations a few days before that he as one of the architects of “lockdown” had traveled to County Durham and Barnard Castle in breach of the (let’s face it) mad rules then pertaining in Britain, rules that Cummings had helped initiate and impose.

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This is my newsletter for paying subscribers. This edition is a Labour leadership contest free zone, quite deliberately to spare you as there will be months more of the unfolding farce and as an old editor of mine used to say when presented with a long piece about politics: “Will no-one think of the readers?” Instead, I’ve looked at the antisemitism crisis, our rotting digital information ecosystem, the monarchy, Wells Cathedral, buskers and a must-read new book on Weimar. Have a good weekend.

On Thursday, King Charles III visited Golders Green in North London to meet victims of the recent terror attacks. With much of the British media focussed on the interminable and dispiriting Labour leadership “drama”, the extraordinary visit by the monarch got less detailed attention than it might otherwise have done.

This omission means the grave significance of what just happened risks being overlooked. Remember, so serious is the situation that the monarch is concerned enough to have to show public solidarity with a British community facing daily abuse and death threats whipped up by domestic and foreign agitators. If this was any other group of Britons under attack in this way, it would be thought simply impossible that this could be happening in our country in the modern era.

But this is the Jews and antisemitism, and the shameful idea is so familiar and embedded in the dark corners of our consciousness through historical experience and folk memory, that somehow, incredibly, it is still treated differently, safe to be compartmentalised and sectioned off from other such hatreds, as though distinct rules apply when it comes to Judaism.

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In a previous life I would have been up all night watching the election results and, with a cold towel wrapped around my head, written thousands of words of analysis for one or other newspaper trying to make sense of what the voters had just decided. These days, having left the circus, I’m detached and instead had a good night’s sleep on Thursday into Friday, woke refreshed and after a train journey to Glasgow only tuned into the results late. Still, a lifetime of immersion in the vagaries of British politics means I still have some thoughts. Here, via Q&A, is my attempt to answer the key questions.

1) What does the SNP have to do to lose?

Good question. The Nationalists presided over an epic shambles since their last election victory in 2021. The First Minister Nicola Sturgeon had to resign and her erstwhile husband is awaiting trial. On education, health, and the economy, the record is abysmal, plus Scotland’s islands have suffered an appallingly poor ferry service that has disrupted life and frayed the economically vital tourist lifeline.

And still the SNP won on Thursday, winning 58 seats out of 129 in the Scottish parliament. That’s seven seats short of an overall majority.

For the SNP a win is a win, but remember that most Scots did not vote for the party. Turnout in the Scottish election will end up somewhere just north of 50% and in seat after seat the Nationalists won with a small share of the vote against divided opposition.

The rise of Reform in Scotland split the Unionist opposition even further. There are now four parties opposed to the SNP and independence - Labour, Reform, the Lib Dems and the Tories. The voting system that was designed in the 1990s to keep the Nationalists out, now works in their favour.

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Lord Robertson celebrated his 80th birthday last weekend. I assume the former NATO Secretary General spent it on his beloved Islay, the beautiful Scottish island that is, among its other claims to fame, home to nine whisky distilleries.

When I first visited Islay in 1994, having answered the phone randomly at the right moment on the business desk of the Sunday Times Scotland in Glasgow, and answered in the affirmative when asked if the whisky correspondent was available to join a trip to the island a few weeks hence, it was my first whisky experience. Flying in to the tiny airport, the traveller sees the name of Lagavulin spelled out on the walls of the building. A group of us hacks toured the distillery at nearby Laphroaig distillery and, introduced to the distinctive, smoky, peaty taste of Islay whisky, I fell in love, through that unusual route, with Scotch.

For the first few months, then a foolish 23, I threw myself with too much intensity into experiencing high-quality whisky. Be careful, my father said kindly, to treat it with respect; only when you have had a night of too much whisky will you realise why it has a dark reputation. Having found out the hard way he was right, ever since a dram has been something taken occasionally and sparingly.

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Can I let you into a secret? I’m increasingly unconvinced by Substack as a format. Perhaps it is odd for someone who writes here on Substack to acknowledge the shortcomings of this publishing platform, but there you go.

There is already way too much (dread word) “content” on Substack and it is difficult to make sense of it all and get it into some kind of order that is readable and understandable. There are basic problems of publishing comprehension. What is a Substack “note” for as opposed to a longer post? Is a “note” supposed to imitate social media? What is the point of writing at all if everyone has a Substack and half of it is filled with AI-inspired slop? What is the difference between following on Substack and subscribing? I don’t know the answers to those questions and I have been in the media one way and another for something approaching forty years. What the general reader is supposed to make of it I don’t know.

Don’t get me wrong, there are many great writers on here, but at a time when technology is challenging and undermining the very idea of writing and reading, those absolutely essential civilisational activities, I’m unconvinced that immersion in the swirling soup of Substack is going to help us much.

You really can’t beat a proper publication, it turns out.

And in that spirit (I always have written intros, or drop intros in old newspaper parlance, that are too long) I will get to the point.

Very much not on Substack is Engelsberg Ideas, the publication my team in London helps produce for the Axel and Margaret Ax:son Johnson Foundation for Public Benefit. EI launched five years ago and features writing by many of the world’s brightest minds on history, ideas, geopolitics and culture.

This week we launched the Engelsberg Ideas app.

It is free to read, providing access to excellence. It is an oasis of calm in a crazy world.

You can download it here on the App Store and here for Android.

There is no catch. The app is free to download and it carries no adverts, thanks to the support of its publisher, the Foundation I mentioned, which is based in Stockholm.

The range and quality of the writing - over essays, historical portraits, and shorter notebooks - is, without sounding boastful, astonishing.

This week, among the pieces we chose to launch the EI app is a magnificent new essay by one of Britain’s greatest historians, Sir Antony Beevor, dissecting Hugh Trevor-Roper’s 1940s classic The Last Days of Hitler.

You can read it here, and then download the app and read much more like it on Engelsberg Ideas.

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If you haven’t read Ed Conway’s book Material World from a few years back, can I suggest that in the context of what just happened to oil prices amid the war in the Middle East you do so, immediately? The premise is simple, even if the text is rich in detail. Ed (who is economics editor for SkyNews) is fascinated by the way in which complacent Western societies take so much for granted and take so little interest in how the stuff of our daily lives works and is produced.

It wasn’t always this way. Quite recently, relatively speaking, when the heavy manufacturing side of our economies was more visible, most people had some sense of the means of production. This was an era of coal, steel, shipping, armaments production, heavy bits of metal, and dirty, hard work. The education system in Britain and elsewhere in Europe placed a great emphasis on the physical sciences, and even if this wasn’t part of your schooling you knew someone - perhaps your entire family - who owed their living in some way to manufacturing.

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In Anthony Trollope’s The Way We Live Now, the villain of the piece (or one of the villains, the one who conveniently for the other characters gets all the blame) contemplates his imminent downfall and disgrace which must surely come the next morning. Melmotte has imbibed and is in a morose mood. What, he asks himself, could he have done differently to avoid the collapse of his City of London financial empire? Why he wailed, had he let himself be dazzled by the bright lights and London society into overextending himself and chasing status? Why had he not concentrated on running his business - in Abchurch Lane in the City - instead of going into Parliament?

“Why,” writes Trollope, “had he called down unnecessary notice on his head by entertaining the Emperor of China? It was too late now, and he must bear it; but these were the things that had ruined him.”

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I was invited to deliver the defence lecture at Newcastle University ten days ago, as part of their public lecture series. As my theme I took the “end of history” period in the 1990s and the way in which the rupture that has taken place since then requires us to transform our thinking about how the world works and the role that should be played by Britain and its allies.

I’m reproducing the lecture here (free to read) with the permission of Dr Martin Farr, who is a leading figure in the field of contemporary history. I have edited it down a little but I hope the essence of the message is clear - the world has changed, there is no room for future Budgets in which defence is not a priority and barely merits a mention, and we need to get our act together, fast.

This weekend, I was in Munich for a dinner connected to the Munich Security Conference. Along the way I was writing the next paid newsletter for loyal subscribers which should land in the next few days. Thank you for your patience.

Eight weeks today it is the London Defence Conference, the fourth edition of the gathering of allies and friends. Our theme for LDC 2026 is Readiness, with a big question implicit in that title: Are we ready?

Here’s the text of my speech from Newcastle.

Thank you for that generous introduction. It is a pleasure and an honour to be here, in one of my favourite cities, and to be invited to speak at a great educational institution by one of the nation’s finest academics in his field - Dr Martin Farr.

In this defence lecture my aim is to examine the arc of history since the end of the Cold War; to chart the effect of the post-Cold War ideology on weakening our defences; to examine the current threat picture and offer some thoughts on how we should think carefully about what comes next.

First, a disclaimer, or an advisory warning. Looking at the news and at the state of the world it is easy to be discouraged. Doing what I do, as director of the London Defence Conference, I am often asked - are we headed for war? Is it inevitable? How bad will it be if or when it happens?

The point here is not to instigate or provoke conflict. This is not about seeking war, which we know looking at history is best avoided whenever possible.

This is about avoiding war, if we can. With the world having become more dangerous, this is about strengthening our defences to create deterrence. To signal to potential adversaries that we have the wherewithal and capabilities to respond as a nation, with our allies, and in doing so to change the risk calculation.

And if deterrence does not work and our adversaries are intent on conflict at any cost? In that unhappy situation by rearming we will give ourselves the best shot at defending our way of life and repelling our adversaries.

This concept is something which was very widely understood across society in the 19th and 20th centuries, until relatively recently. But something changed since the end of the Cold War. What was it?

Understanding contemporary history and applying its lessons is the best place to start our search for an explanation.

Francis Fukuyama’s lost world

We begin in 1989, when a US State department policy adviser, Francis Fukuyama, wrote a paper in which, observing the implosion of the Soviet Union, he claimed that humanity had arrived not only at “the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: That is, the end-point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government”.

Three years later, after the formal dissolution of the Soviet Union, he expanded his thesis into a famous and bestselling book, “The End of History and the Last Man.” Fukuyama’s claim was that, with the triumph of liberal democracy over Communism, the Western model had evolved to a peak in human achievement. It could become the dominant form of governance globally. In fairness to Fukuyama, a great scholar, there were many nuances in his thesis that were little reported. And much later - in a defining essay - he deserves credit for being among the first to understand and explain in a clear sighted way the character of the Chinese regime under President Xi.

Nevertheless, his proclamation in the early 1990s of “the end of History”, in an age addicted to soundbites, provided an irresistible catch phrase for academics, politicians and the media.

It is difficult to explain, particularly to younger colleagues, just how much of an impact was made by the end of history theory when it arrived. Media was very different in the early 1990s. Everyone read newspapers and they dominated the debate, setting the terms of reference, and communicating the latest and most accessible academic and strategic thinking. On current affairs discussion programmes on television the end of history and associated thinking were pored over and the politicians of the time took their cue.

Obviously, it was immensely good and cheering news that for us voters lifted the air of paranoia which had permeated politics during the late Cold War. The nuclear nightmare faded.

For the Conservatives in Britain at the time it was an affirmation because the West’s victory in the Cold War was partly Margaret Thatcher’s victory. The Soviet economic system had collapsed under the weight of its own contradictions and the pressure of US defence spending. Deterrence and strong defence had worked, as Thatcher said they would.

For the parties of the centre left who sought a return to power - in the US the Democrats and in Britain Labour - the end of history was also an opportunity. With the Soviet Union defeated, defence would cost less and there would be more for other forms of social spending. Plus the Republicans and Conservatives would be deprived of one of their main campaign messages (the left is too soft on defence) that had worked well throughout the 1980s.

Back then, the end of history concept suited almost everyone. Unfortunately, as we now know, it turned out to be an extravagant indulgence in hubris.

A superficially plausible theory encouraged us to take a holiday from history and to forget that hard power is an essential component of grand strategy, national policy and successful alliances.

Nor was the concept philosophically consistent. The term “the end of History” was not invented by Fukuyama, but by Hegel, the precursor of Marx. The notion that history is evolutionary and has a beginning, a middle and an end was a core Marxist concept. So, in proclaiming that history had ended, Fukuyama was accepting a basic premise of the ideology on whose grave he was dancing.

Nor was Fukuyama’s claim consistent with historical circumstances even at the time he was writing. The Soviet Union, with a population of 290 million, had collapsed; but China, with a population of 1.16 billion, remained Communist.

At the time the dominant assumption, of course, was that as China liberalised its economy and grew - fast - it would automatically come closer to liberal democracy, to our system, becoming a market economy and more democratic and thus posing us no strategic threat.

In the 1990s at the dawn of the end of history it could also have been noted, too, that although the full emergence of radical Islamist militancy lay a decade ahead, there were plenty of warning signs in the late 1980s, particularly in Britain.

Weighed against post-1991 historical experience and current reality, the complacent “They all lived happily ever after” imposition of liberal democracy on a world, the greater half of whose population either rejected or were indifferent to the concept, now seems extravagantly naive. The “happy ending” delusion was abruptly exploded on 11 September 2001, with the terrorist attack on the Trade Center in New York and America’s subsequent wars.

Add to that the Russian Federation’s return to autocracy and the invasion of Ukraine, China’s exponential increase in economic and military power, the continuing pressure from militant Islamism, the weakness of Europe, the culture wars creating fissures throughout Western society and Trump-led America’s disengagement from former geopolitical commitments. In that context, the vision of a universal liberal democracy bringing peace and prosperity to every corner of the planet, on a permanent basis, seems less visionary than hallucinatory.

The Great Western Delusion: “the 1990s peace dividend’’

Maintaining Western defences at a level to deter Soviet aggression during the Cold War had put a strain on the finances of NATO member states and other nations with security concerns. The ending of the Cold War, therefore, brought a collective sigh of relief from countries that believed they were now at liberty to devote more of their national budgets to projects such as infrastructure, investment and welfare.

The term “The Peace Dividend” was coined by U.S. President George H W Bush and the outgoing UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher to describe this opportunity for a new allocation of government expenditure.

Although the notion of the “peace dividend” now seems naive, even delusional, at the time it was an understandable reaction to a post-Cold War situation, and as I mentioned earlier we should not underplay the psychologically liberating sensation of relief at what was believed to be the removal of the threat of nuclear annihilation. When the Soviet Union dissolved, the newly sovereign state of Ukraine unilaterally renounced its nuclear weapons; the newly created Russian Federation did not.

The lure of the peace dividend was strongest in Western Europe. In 1989, the average NATO member state’s expenditure on defence was 4% of GDP; by 2014, the year of Russia’s annexation of the Crimea, that figure had fallen to 1.4%. Such drastic reductions meant not only that European NATO members were no longer increasing their defence capacities, they were also running down their armaments and equipment, sometimes on an extravagant scale.

Some countries abolished conscription, though others were more cautious and robust. Most robust was hardheaded and sensible Finland, a close neighbour of Russia with experience of aggression from its eastern neighbour. It not only retained conscription, it also took advantage of Western thinking to buy Leopard tanks from the Netherlands, which ran down its tank force. Yet even Finland reduced its defence budget to below the 2% of GDP level in the post-Cold War years.

Overall, during the 30 years following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the “peace dividend” channelled an estimated total of €4.2 trillion to non-defence spending across Europe.

Britain embraces the peace dividend

The United Kingdom was no laggard in recalibrating public spending away from defence to other objects. The trajectory of British defence spending declined from almost 8% of GDP in the mid-1950s to 4% by 1980 (still in the Cold War era), heading towards 3% in 1990 as the Soviet Union was defeated.

Britain’s experience was unusual among the European allies in that after 2001 it not only answered the NATO call in Afghanistan, but it also joined the US war in Iraq to remove Saddam Hussein. Perhaps it was that experience - the terrible human cost abroad combined with the shock of the financial crisis at home reducing the funds available - that meant after 2010 we the public were reluctant to do more on defence. We wanted more spent on our welfare rather than more spent on war-fighting capability, which had failed in Iraq.

Today our defence spending stands at about 2.5%, four years after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Within that is roughly 0.7% of GDP for the nuclear enterprise, providing Britain’s deterrent which is operationally independent but closely connected to the US in logistical terms.

Remember the broader context. Spending on the NHS soared from 3% of GDP in the mid-1950s rising to more than 7% in the 2000s as expectations and medical progress made their impact.

During the pandemic, spending on the NHS hit over 10% of GDP, 12% of GDP in total for healthcare including private provision, and has fallen back a little since. Then there is welfare - taking in pensions and all benefits. That is is equivalent to another 10.6% of GDP or 23.6% of the total amount the government spends.

In context, today, Britain’s total welfare budget for 2025-2026 is estimated at £334bn, while the defence budget amounts to £62.2bn. That is just £14bn more spent on defence than was spent in 2014-2015, when Russia annexed the Crimea.

At the NATO summit last July, Britain was among those committing to 5% of GDP on defence after pressure from President Trump. That is 5% made up of 3.5% on core defence spending and another 1.5% on resilience.

Britain was chief among those making the commitment to the Americans. We await news on how it will happen. The government wants to increase defence spending to 3% in the next parliament, which means sometime between 2029 and 2034, meaning we may not hit 3% properly for perhaps eight years, a period as long as the Second World War, plus two years.

Mind you, speaking of the next parliament, if events at Westminster continue on their current trajectory, the next election and the next Parliament could be a lot closer than 2029. Who knows what the next few weeks will bring.

The imperative to increase defence spending fast should be obvious

There is a clear danger to Britain’s security in failing to maintain credible defences to deter the two main potential aggressors: Russia and China.

But there is a more immediate challenge from another quarter: the development of United States policy. The US has been urging Britain and its other European allies for the past 10 years and more to increase defence spending, instead of relying on the American armed forces – and ultimately the American taxpayer – to supply an unending guarantee of security, while Britain and EU states devote expenditure instead to social projects.

The language may be undiplomatic in ways that we Europeans find distasteful, on Greenland, for example; but the Americans are right to warn NATO members that we must step up.

Indeed, history shows us the American focus on this is not new. As far back as the late 1950s, President Eisenhower asked privately when Europe would be able to take care of itself so America could “go home”. In the 1960s his successor JFK asked similar frustrated questions about NATO commitments.

The good news is that as some - some - European defence budgets demonstrate, a decade of warnings from Trump is galvanising key states in Europe.

Poland - increasingly the essential European nation - is on track to spend 4.8% of GDP on defence this year. Germany is increasing its spending dramatically - up from 86 billion euros last year to 108 billion euro this year.

Still, it may not be enough. Not everyone is increasing spending as fast as the Poles and a future US administration may decide to go further and draw down forces from Europe. As it stands, the European pillar of NATO is heavily dependent on US capabilities - in terms of heavy lift, the ability to move troops around fast, and in intelligence and targeting.

Now, in the second Trump term, that deep and still smouldering American resentment with Europe is aggravated by a radical recalibration of American security policy away from Europe, and towards the Indo-Pacific theatre. Most of all there is a focus on a re-energised Monroe Doctrine impelling the United States to defend the homeland and reassert its influence in its neighbourhood in central and South America. In this climate, NATO has inevitably fallen down the list of American defence priorities.

Marco Rubio, U.S. Secretary of State, is the latest major player to express the administration’s frustration with the conduct of its European allies. Appearing before the Senate foreign relations committee earlier this year, the Secretary of State said that NATO needed to be reimagined. “The reason why it has to be reimagined is not because its purpose is reimagined,” he said, “its capabilities have to be reimagined.” He denounced rich European nations for channelling money into social programmes, instead of increasing defence spending, because they thought the United States would come to their defence in a time of need.

“Security guarantees basically involve the deployment of a handful of European troops, primarily French and UK, and then a U.S. backstop,” he claimed. He stated that some European states’ proposal to put troops into a post-war Ukraine in the event of a future peace plan was “irrelevant without the U.S. backstop”. The degree of disillusionment being voiced by the US Secretary of State suggests that America will - rightly - want more than vague promises of 5% by the middle of the next decade.

We have seen the impact of our underspending. The former defence secretary Ben Wallace said that governments of both parties - both parties, he stressed - had hollowed out our armed forces. Now, the holiday from history is over and they must be replenished.

But what is it all for? What and where are the threats?

The threat environment

It is incumbent on those of us who think that there is a great danger ahead to pause for a moment and with humility acknowledge the risk of war hysteria. Especially after a period of 15 years and more when our leadership class has got this so wrong, and when there is an obvious need to rearm, it is important to consider history and in doing so strive to keep our heads. It is important we get the balance right between caution and action.

In Niall Ferguson’s classic account of the First World War - the Pity of War - there is a defining passage describing and analysing the rush to war. The historians among you will be familiar with the arguments. Was it inevitable once the railway timetables got going and the men and machinery were moved into position? Or was it the disastrous system of alliances?

Ultimately, it appears Britain most feared the rise of Russia in the late 19th century. No country was industrialising at the same scale and at such speed. Britain chose alliances with Russia and France because longterm it feared Russia more than Germany. Thus helping to create the conditions for the miscalculations of the July 1914 crisis and the calamitous war that followed.

Then there is the role of stupidity and the climate created by the Kaiser and others. And the role of ultra-patriotic mindless jingoism here and elsewhere.

In the end it came down to the flawed judgments of human beings operating without the benefit of hindsight.

The lesson today is to try to define threats as calmly and realistically as we can. There the period 2001-2003 comes to mind, when post 9/11 an understandable hysteria took hold. Legitimate concerns over weapons of mass destruction, ending up in the hands of rogue states or Islamist terrorists bent on Armageddon, became distorted and disastrous judgment calls were made. Like many people at the time, I was in favour of the invasion.

Today, Russia is weakened from its failed illegal war in Ukraine where it has lost 1.2m men either killed, wounded or missing in action. Although it has built a war economy, the rearmament being undertaken fast by the Poles and the Baltic States and Nordics means that any invading army would meet resistance. Some strategists conclude the Russians would be unlikely to get very far, given the manner in which they have been held back in Ukraine.

Against that, those who are bullish should recognise that even future incursions by Russia into other parts of Europe, that are subsequently beaten back, would still be very costly in terms of the human toll and the damage done to our economies and infrastructure.

Beyond that what we face is a rolling threat over decades combining the risk of incursions, grey zone hybrid warfare, sabotage, and drone and hypersonic warfare, running through northern Europe but likely originating in the High North, by a Russia backed by China.

Indeed, perhaps the most significant feature of the Ukraine war - aside from the technological acceleration in warfare - is that China has emerged as the main supporter of Russia, a development that would have been thought implausible even a decade ago.

Their alliance means we’re faced with a classic danger that will be familiar to admirers of the work of the great Halford Mackinder, the father of geopolitics. For Mackinder it was all about the “heartland,” the Eurasian landmass - control that, control the world and its shipping routes and the flow of trade and ideas.

At the heart of our challenge is the alliance between two giant countries sitting at the heart of that Eurasian landmass - Russia and its much bigger brother China.

The central strategic challenge: China

China, the aspiring global hegemon, is the challenge that every other nation on the planet must make provision to contain. Nothing could more discredit the “end of history” delusion than the current reality that 1.4 billion Chinese live under totalitarian rule, 35 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

In a groundbreaking essay for the American Interest published in 2020, Fukuyama put it well when he said: “To understand how the United States and other Western countries should deal with China in the coming years, we need to understand what kind of society we are dealing with.”

Our hope during the “end of history” era was that China - having moved from totalitarianism under Mao to authoritarianism under his successors, with markets liberalised to a degree - would next become more politically liberal. Evolving, from totalitarianism, to authoritarianism, to the Western liberalism of the end of history period.

It didn’t happen. It took the West a while to realise it, and some in our political system still cannot grasp it, but XI represented a move back to totalitarianism, only this time the party has technology sufficient to exert complete control that was beyond even Mao’s grasp.

As Fukuyama put it from an American perspective: “What Americans need to keep in mind is that their enemy and rival right now is not China, but a Chinese Communist Party that has shifted into high-totalitarian mode. We are not dealing with the China of the 1990s or even the 2000s, but a completely different animal that represents a clear challenge to our democratic values. We need to hold it at bay until some point in the future when it returns to being a more normal authoritarian country, or indeed is on its way to being a liberal country. That will not necessarily eliminate the challenge that China represents; a more liberal China could easily be more nationalistic. But it will nonetheless be easier to deal with in many ways.”

In Xi Jinping’s China, we are facing a totalitarian power structure based on the attempted brainwashing of its subjects, even if Xi’s ideology is a more banal Chinese nationalism rather than Mao’s crazed, violent radicalism. Still, in Chinese Communist ideology, contemporary China is living through “The New Era”. That term is an abbreviation of “Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era”. This derives from the Chinese Communist Party’s formal History Resolution of 2021, the most recent of only three passed since 1949, which canonised, in secular terms, the five paramount leaders of the People’s Republic, beginning with Mao Zedong and ending with Xi Jinping, whose era began in 2012.

This placed Xi on the same level as Mao, giving him extreme authority, for which the way had already been paved by the abolition of limits on a presidential term in 2018. The expectation is that Xi will lead China to new heights of global power, a trajectory that must surely include the reincorporation of Taiwan into the Chinese state at some point, destabilising the Indo-Pacific.

Despite what we are told, China is not a great economic opportunity for us. China is an economic opportunity for China as it seeks to become the dominant civilisation. It is not going to open its markets any further to outsiders and it is not a major mainstream investor in the British economy, and will not become one. The Chinese Communist Party’s goal is to become the dominant exporter of everything, for ever.

China has pursued such goals with great tenacity and skill, first by converting itself into the workshop of the world through its vast supply of cheap labour, promoting the de-industrialisation of the West in the process, while pursuing its own de facto colonialist projects through its Belt and Road initiative. But that project has had mixed results, with some African nations rejecting Beijing’s interventions amid growing mistrust.

Most seriously, China is facing a major demographic crisis that partly may reflect a global population slump, but must surely also be a consequence of China’s disastrous one-child policy. Since male children were preferred to female under that social engineering experiment, there is a huge disparity between the young female and male populations, leaving hundreds of millions of young men unable to find a wife or to cultivate the domesticity that accompanies marriage.

A discontented urban population of male youths is a destabilising factor in society and even a potential threat to the regime. Last year, China’s population fell for the fourth consecutive year. UN estimates suggest the population will fall to 1.2 billion by 2050, bringing all the problems associated with an ageing demography.

But, for the West, the most urgent priority is to assess the military potential of the People’s Liberation Army. On paper it is formidable. China’s regular army is 2,035,000 strong, with 510,000 reservists and a further 500,000 personnel categorised as paramilitary. Unlike the Russian forces, however, it has not been blooded and is lacking in war experience. More sinister than that, from Xi’s point of view, is the deep-seated corruption that reportedly pervades the PLA.

Its Rocket Forces, for example, were found two years ago to have constructed missiles made of too heavy a material for effective launching and some missiles were filled with water instead of fuel. Of the corruption in the PLA, a former CIA analyst commented: “In its scope and scale, it’s breathtaking.” An earlier Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping had encouraged the PLA to engage in commercial activities. That led to widespread corrupt operations, including running dance troupes and high-end hotels. Even Xi, despite his recent purge of the military, is believed privately to acknowledge that the vast network of corruption within the PLA is too deep-seated to be eliminated.

Nevertheless, the only commander to survive Xi’s recent purge of the Central Military Commission (CMC) was Zhang Shenmin, the anti-corruption watchdog. At the same time, it is likely that Xi’s purge had less to do with uprooting corrupt practices than with assuming even closer control of the PLA. Between now and the next party congress, he can pack the CMC with his own choices.

What should we do?

Plainly, the burden of responding on China falls mainly to the US. The drawing away from Europe, and the understandable insistence that Europe should be able to handle most of its own conventional (and perhaps more) defence, compels us to rethink.

There is some good news on that front.

We are not starting from scratch in Europe when we have NATO, which is still the bedrock of Western defence.

The key fact Western policymakers need to bear in mind is that, for Britain and Europe, it is the most realistic current vehicle for collective security is NATO.

Throughout the tensions of the Cold War (including several accidental near misses at nuclear conflict) it maintained Western security competently and effectively. It has proved its worth. It is not obsolescent or struggling, except insofar as some member states lack financial commitment to the alliance. It is unlikely that even America’s current pivot eastwards would have led the White House to consider NATO membership dispensable, had it not been preceded by a decade and more of some member states defaulting on their obligations.

While the threat of withdrawal of the American defence umbrella makes it necessary for Britain and the EU to ramp up provision for their own defence, in the first instance this should be executed in the context of a reinvigorated NATO.

The European pillar of NATO exists as a concept and it is perfectly plausible that non-US members of NATO could do more to replace American capability as it reduces deployments - it will take time though.

Elsewhere, vague political talk, by politicians who have spent their careers ignoring defence, of an EU army as an alternative security guarantee is delusory. It would take many years to devise such a project and the rivalry and disharmony that accompanies such initiatives, mean an EU army is not a realistic defence prospect.

It may be canvassed under alluring soundbites about “standing on our own feet”, “coming out from under the shadow of America”, etc, but it would lack the strategic capabilities that only the superpower America can supply, as well as the magnified deterrence power of a US presence.

Remember, European nations have a too often unconnected variety of weaponry that defies reduction to integrated coherence. It is a Holy Roman Empire of nation-based defence procurement that already poses problems in the context of NATO, problems that would become insuperable in the context of fabricating a putative European army.

Bureaucracy and regulation would further impede the creation of a putative EU army. Britain would be largely excluded and exploited, allowed only to participate in weapons procurement, with large costs for market access, and without taking part in the decision-making processes.

But there is more good news - NATO is modernising.

The organisation is seriously addressing improvements in its capabilities. Its eastern-flank multinational battle groups are being enlarged to brigade level. Additionally, in a return to Cold War strategy, certain national forces are being assigned to secure specific geographical regions. While such measures are important primarily for the defence of Europe, they are also calculated to reassure Washington. The recently published US National Defense Strategy confirms that America remains committed to providing critical support to Europe, though on a more limited scale than before.

That leaves it to Britain and European NATO members to make up the deficit, which they are perfectly able to do if there is the political will, thus securing the future of NATO and the American security commitment, solely at the price of increasing their defence spending to 5% of GDP, a reasonable expectation.

Frontline nations such as Poland, Finland, Sweden and the Baltic States are becoming NATO’s spearhead. They are moving into a high state of military readiness and can become the core force on NATO’s eastern flank. In one likely scenario, they could create densely fortified land frontiers, defended by extensive minefields and a ‘drone cordon sanitaire’, reinforced by large artillery and missile concentrations. NATO thinking is flexible, but focused and creative, significantly informed by observation and analysis of developments in the Ukraine war, where the Ukrainians have impressively pioneered pragmatic and imaginative responses to challenges created by a more heavily armed invader.

Britain’s role and the need for hard power

The first and most obvious conclusion from the developments I have described - a multi-decade challenge flowing from a resentful, revanchist Russia backed by a totalitarian China seeking dominion - is that we have to change the way we think. Not only do defence and national security need to take up a much larger share of our attention and spending. Regenerated manufacturing, much cheaper energy (the core requirement for economic expansion) and much bigger defence industrial capacity are going to be needed.

We need to rearm and reorientate our politics so that more of our leadership class becomes familiar once again with the need to think in terms of grand strategy, security and alliances rooted in hard power rather than rhetoric.

In essence, and this cuts across all political parties, our entire political economy, statecraft and mindset somehow needs rethinking.

In the era since the end of history was declared most of our leaders forgot the indispensability of hard power, and most voters were happy not to think about it either.

That means us getting our act together fast and the UK Treasury being forced to follow through on pledges made by the Defence Secretary John Healey to fulfil the commitments signed up to at the NATO summit in 2025 - namely getting to 5%. At the heart of it we have to rebuild our defence industrial base, as must the rest of Europe, alongside consolidating and modernising the European pillar of NATO.

But there are also other highly useful alliances that overlap. That includes the Joint Expeditionary Force, established by Britain with nine other members, it forms an embryonic Northern Alliance defending the Baltic and the High North, stretching into the Arctic.

The links with Australia, through the AUKUS partnership and beyond, are strong and growing. And Japan will be an increasingly essential ally.

The myth is that we can consider this in European isolation, because we are a middle power. In reality, as Mackinder showed - it is all connected. The High North connects to the Arctic, where China has an interest. The Indo-Pacific begins only 120 miles from the Med, at the foot of the Suez Canal.

It is in our interests for the sea lanes that carry trade to stay open and not be controlled by the autocrats. Ditto with the global financial system. In alliance with other democracies, Britain has a vital role to play.

In playing our part we will only be taken seriously by the United States and by our other allies if as a society we take our defence more seriously and invest. And we will only be able to deter the autocrats if we take our defence more seriously.

Our defences have been neglected and run down for too long by governments of all the main parties. If we cannot see what Ukraine means, that it changes everything, we do not deserve to survive as a democracy. Freedom is the one amenity that is never free. If it means tightening our belts, trimming our welfare budget and making other fiscal sacrifices, that is the price to be paid for retaining the sovereign liberty won by the endurance of two world wars and countless other conflicts.

History has not ended. A competent defence and security system - true hard power - is the sole guarantee that we will continue to help shape history, rather than ending up as its victims.

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It’s obviously not as earth shatteringly consequential as the Mayor of Greater Manchester Andy Burnham being barred last month from standing in an upcoming Westminster by-election, but even up against the supposedly epoch defining scandal of Burnham having his career plans disturbed, the recent purge of the Chinese military leadership was a significant event.

Although it is not on a par with the cosmic injustice meted out to Burham, who was told he could not stand in a contest which might have allowed him back into the Commons from where he could challenge and topple Keir Starmer and become Prime Minister, China’s military purge is nonetheless important, though clearly not as important as the disruption of Burnham’s career.

For those of you living abroad, or for other reasons not familiar with the work of Burnham, or familiar with his work but immune to his charms, Labour is up against it in a by-election being held in Gorton and Denton on 26 February. Burnham, a former cabinet minister, wanted to stand and Starmer and last month Labour’s ruling National Executive Committee said no.

For days on end the saga led the news bulletins in Britain and Burnham received incredible amounts of analysis. Meanwhile, in China, Xi Jinping removed Zhang Youxia, China’s top general, and another senior military commander, Gen Liu Zhenli. Of seven members of the CMC, the Central Military Commission which oversees the armed forces, five members have been investigated or vanished. Of the two left in post, one is, obviously, China’s leader Xi Jinping.

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Well, that’s the end of that it was nice while it lasted. The West, I mean. The announcement that Britain and seven NATO allies from northern Europe will face 10% US tariffs, rising to 25%, for defending the right of Greenland and Denmark to self-determination, surely spells the end of any viable Western alliance.

Or does it?

Already there is intense diplomatic activity underway in the aftermath of the threats made by President Trump. Mark Rutte, the NATO Secretary General, said on social media on Sunday afternoon that he has spoken to POTUS and looks forward to speaking to him again about all this at Davos, where Trump is travelling to make a presumably hard-hitting speech later this month at the globalised festival of delusion.

It would not be surprising if the northern European countries threatened with increased tariffs attempt to deescalate in the days ahead in the hope someone in Washington persuades the President that he really cannot go around invading NATO allies. What seems to have irked Trump was the news of small deployments by other NATO nations to Greenland on a reconnaissance mission after he demanded ownership of Greenland. Let’s see, though, what Trump says next. At the time of writing, on Sunday evening, he has been quiet on social media. That could change any minute.

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Happy New Year! I hope subscribers had a relaxing break over the festive period. After travelling and then tuning out for two weeks, and reading a lot of books along the way, I’m back with this first post of the year on the implications of President Trump’s move on Venezuela. Thank you for being a subscriber to this newsletter - especially to paying subscribers. If you receive only a taste of it and want to upgrade to paid, where you have full access to read, then it is easy to do. There will be more from me at the weekend.

The first thing to say is that the US has always taken an elastic view of niceties when it comes to intervening in Latin America and the wider Western hemisphere. Teddy Roosevelt was notoriously robust on the question of America’s right to police its own backyard, to such an extent that he even participated in the “rough rider” expedition to Cuba in 1898 which freed the country from Spanish overlordship. Cuba became independent, albeit within America’s sphere of interest until the disastrous Cuban Marxist revolution of 1959. Go back further and large chunks of what is today the US were acquired after the war with Mexico ended in the treaty of 1848. California and New Mexico became part of the US and more land was added - though the Americans paid - in 1854 with the Gadsden Purchase. All this is relatively recent and consistent with the American view that the territorial integrity and security of the nation created 250 years ago this year trumps all other considerations. During the Cold War, under presidents of both parties, this manifested itself in repeated operations both covert and public to ensure that there were in place governments and regimes who wouldn’t threaten American interests. The naive US decision since the end of the Cold War to abandon any serious interest in the region helped facilitate Venezuela’s slide from prosperity into a Marxist narco hell-hole, and fuelled the migration crisis at America’s border.

Even so, even by the standards of American history, the decision to extract Maduro from a military base in Venezuela on Saturday morning and transport him to a prison in New York was audacious.

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This is my newsletter on politics, geopolitics and culture. If you are a paying subscriber, it is much appreciated and thank you. If you want to receive all of this newsletter - which is the only place I write - you can upgrade to paid. To all subscribers, I wish you the best for the festive season.

During the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics in 2008 a bunch of us journalists were standing in the Telegraph newsroom watching the slightly sinister scenes being beamed in on television from China.

The Telegraph had - and still has - what at the time was described as a “state of the art” hub and spoke office layout, designed to be ahead of the curve in the bright, glorious digital future which was said to be coming our way. In reality the new office was mainly hype-driven media marketing drivel, because hub and spoke only meant there was a large round table in the middle of the vast newsroom surrounded by giant television screens on tall poles, and from there rows of desks containing the hard-pressed and rightly cynical hacks. The Telegraph was owned by the infamous Barclay Brothers whose over-leveraged business empire would more than a decade later go splat against the wall when interest rates went up.

The newsroom had been the trading floor of Salomon in the 1980s and Michael Lewis, author of Liar’s Poker and many more books since about assorted disasters, worked there when it was the largest trading floor in Europe, before it became a newspaper office.

I’ve probably told versions of this story before, about the Telegraph and the Olympics in China, and apologies if it is familiar to regular readers. After more than ten years of this newsletter appearing in various formats and outlets, it would be unsurprising if there wasn’t occasional repetition.

The reason that scene - the Beijing Olympics opening ceremony on 8 August 2008 - comes to mind from time to time is that nearly two decades later it symbolises what with hindsight can be seen as a pivoting moment. China was on the rise and we in the West were about to be on the slide, though we didn’t know it yet. Our financial crisis had started the year before in 2007 and a month after the Olympics it would explode into the worst peacetime shock perhaps since 1929 and certainly since the twin oil crises of the 1970s.

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At this year’s LDC Investment Forum earlier this week, I was joined on stage by Lord Robertson for a conversation about UK defence, the threats we and our allies face, and the need for his Strategic Defence Review to be implemented much more quickly.

I’ve known him a long time now - from the days in the early 1990s when as a young reporter on the Sunday Times in Scotland I used to have to phone him up and ask him presumably annoying questions about meetings of the Scottish Labour Party Executive. With a sigh he would explain politely that the proceedings were private and he was trying to watch the rugby on the television.

Since then he has had a remarkable career, in the UK cabinet and at NATO seeing Russia’s return to authoritarianism up close. He is a vital, wise voice making the case for much stronger defences in the face of the growing threats confronting the West.

Here is the transcript of our conversation:

Lord Robertson, we are talking about getting to 5 per cent but I think we have to start by talking about Ukraine. It’s been a very strange few days. What kind of security guarantees do you think Ukraine really needs if this 19-point plan is going to work?

Only the United States has got the capability, both the air cover and the equipment, that would make any coalition of the willing credible in the eyes of the Ukrainians and in the eyes of their potential adversaries. So that’s going to be one of the big stumbling blocks. That’s going to be a problem for the negotiators to take on board and I think that’s one of the areas that is not in the 19-point plan but is being left for Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin and Zelensky to deal with.

Do you think such a deal is feasible?

It’s going to have to be feasible. It’s going to be necessary because the Ukrainians will need to have some guarantee that whatever deal is done is not going to be as paper-thin as the Budapest Memorandum was. So it’s going to have to be robust and it will have to involve troops on the ground for it to be in any way credible to the Ukrainians of the future.

How do you think these negotiations, particularly regarding the initial exclusion of European allies and coalition of the willing, will affect the cohesion of collective European security?

We are in uncharted territory. We are in a situation where a real estate expert is doing the negotiation on behalf of the US directly with the Kremlin, and then the diplomats pick up the pieces later on. So it’s impossible to tell what the outcome is going to be. In a normal course of events, you would go into the details, you would not have a guy with real estate experience going in and getting a piece of paper, that it transpires was translated from Russian, and bringing that back as an authoritative version that has to be adopted. So that is where we are in an area not only of uncharted territory but in the area of unreality.

There’s a meeting in Abu Dhabi in the next couple of days, following on from the Geneva talks. Marco Rubio is now engaged and Rubio has got a track record of being suspicious of Russia. He’s not only national security advisor, he is the secretary of state, so he carries the clout of the state department. But nobody can tell what on earth is going on. You need a psychiatrist to be able to get inside the minds of Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump, and even a psychiatrist would find it difficult at the moment. So, we will know when we know, we will see when we see.

In the meantime, the Russian economy is in trouble and the Russians are not making any real progress on the battlefield, advancing one metre at a time. The younger Russian generation are being eliminated in a country where the ethnic population is anyway declining…

What does this mean for the threat facing the rest of Europe if you end up with a frozen Europe? That presumably frees up Putin’s resources in terms of the High North, the Baltic states and Poland? He then has more to send to those border areas and more free time and capacity on his hands.

We need to be very very worried about how this ends up, because we are under threat as well. It’s quite clear from the Russian press and the Kremlin-controlled media that we, the United Kingdom, are being seen as a proxy for America. It’s inconvenient to attack America on a broad scale because of the relationship between Trump and Putin so we, the United Kingdom, are in the crosshairs. Relentlessy, the Kremlin media is attacking “the Anglos”, “the UK”, “the English”. So we need to be worried as a country as a whole that if Russia got the space to reconstitute its armed forces - and it’s already doing so but, if it could on a grander scale - then clearly the rest of Europe is in danger. If I lived in Moldova or Armenia or Azerbaijan, I would be very very worried about the possibility of a deal being done that left Russia with its forces intact and with at least some prize to be gained from Ukraine.

You recently talked about the UK being underinsured and underprepared in terms of modern threat. What do you think it is that the public doesn’t understand about this?

I don’t think that we see the threat in the way that we should. If the lights go out, what do we do? 98 per cent of all the data we use in this country comes in undersea cables, 77 per cent of our gas supplies to the UK comes in one pipeline from Norway, so the vulnerability of the country is really acute. But people are not in their day-to-day lives aware of it. But if the lights go out and the hospitals close and the data centres melt because the air conditioning has gone off, then the political classes will be told, ‘why have you not done something about this?’

A couple of months ago, Spain and Portugal came to a standstill, an outage. Nobody knows why, they claim it was to do with an excess of renewable power. But you got the experience there very very visibly, for 48 hours, of a country at a standstill - cash machines that don’t work, traffic lights that don’t work, two modern European countries paralysed. Imagine if that was to happen here.

Russian spy ships are mapping these undersea cables all the time, putting sensors on the seabed in order to detect where the main data lines are going to be. You’ve got these shadow tankers dragging anchors in the Baltic, and they can do so in the Atlantic as well. So people need to be made aware of how unprepared and uninsured we actually are. A CFO would be sacked if he allowed insurance policies to lapse at any of these buildings here today (in the City of London) and a country is no different. We need an insurance policy. There needs to be an insurance policy through robust defence - war-fighting capability that deters any enemy from making the kind of attacks we are talking about.

This question of war-fighting capability seems to be absolutely critical. In recent decades, we have focussed quite a lot on operational questions, which are important, but actually being able to fight wars and deter, that’s where we’ve got to get to. To that end, you oversaw and led the recent SDR, what do you think the next steps on that need to be? And, based on what you’ve said, we need to go faster surely?

It needs to be implemented, the Strategic Defence Review fundamentally transforms the way in which we do defence, from top to bottom, right through the whole system.

My nephew sent a text message when I got the job saying ‘more tanks, more ships, more planes, job done.’ And there are some people who think that, there’s some people in the defence industry who think that. But it’s not. We need to transform the whole way in which we do defence: the heavy metal is part of it but it’s also to do with logistics, it’s to do with modern training, with innovation, with reforming the way in which we do procurement, which is mired in bureaucracy and contrary to risk-taking. So all of that has to be done, and it needs to be implemented quickly.

The defence secretary sent me a message last night saying that we’re underway and that of the 62 recommendations, all of which have got timelines built into them, some of them are being delivered in advance of what the timeline suggests. But we need to move much quicker than that.

The minister has just said that we are going to reach 2.5 per cent in 2027 - that’s a year after next. But the Prime Minister is talking about a coalition of the willing, and putting troops on the ground into a World War Three war zone now, and I think that’s where our lack of preparation comes up against the ambitions of European leaders at the present moment. So the money that the PM has promised - an extra 13.4 billion pounds in 2027, and every year thereafter - the government is committed to the 3 per cent at the start of next parliament and 3.5 per cent by 2035, according to the Hague summit, but we’ve got to deal with what’s happening at the present moment.

When I went to NATO at the beginning, President Clinton said to me, ‘sort the relationship with Russia out’, that was one of his imperatives at the time, and the relationship was very badly fractured, with Boris Yeltsin believing that Kosovo had been a betrayal. So what I did was I sort of sat myself in a seat in the Kremlin, thinking how do they look at us, what does NATO look like if you’re sat in the Kremlin. So when Putin took over the following year, at least I was partly in his mind about how to deal with him. And we need to do that, we need to stop looking at the world through our own eyes and think about it in the eyes of these three guys who stood at Tiananmen Square last month - the president of Russia, the president of China, the president of North Korea. They weren’t spectators at that parade, they are part and parcel of a group of people who want to end the domination of the West, to stop the power of the EU, the power of NATO and they are banded together. They don’t like each other or trust each other but they have one common objective, and that’s what they are mobilising on at the present moment. Every single day they are doing that.

The world in 2010 was completely different from the world you’ve just described. This was a world in which we hoped Russia would be our economic partner and we were entering a golden era with China. Surely we need to think much bigger and go much faster?

We do and I believe that we do, and I think the defence secretary believes that we do. But is that the mind of the Treasury yet? The Treasury is being lobbied by the welfare lobby, by security, by education, all relentlessly putting pressure on it. But where is the outside lobby that says ‘we need to be safe, we’ve got to keep the country safer than it is at the present moment’? We are under-resourced, under-insured, under attack and therefore we are not safe as a nation.

The government signed up to the SDR, it’s the view of His Majesty’s Government and the review says this: ‘the UK and its allies are once again directly threatened by other states with advanced military forces. The UK is already under daily attack with aggressive acts from espionage, cyber attack and information manipulation causing harm to society and the economy. State conflict has returned to Europe’. So, these are words of the government of the day and I think the Treasury are going to have to pay attention to that. If the lights go out and the hospitals shut, then what happens?

When 9/11 came and I was at NATO, and you ride out the implication of Article 5, the German government put a levy on every insurance policy in Germany as a special security supplement at that time. I tried to get all the countries to do that but they failed to do it. But I think that is what, in my view, they should be doing. The country needs to know it’s not safe and that it can only be safe if the insurance policy is paid, and that means extra money for defence. And it will have to be before 2027 when that extra 13.4 billion comes in.

What is your perspective on the role of private capital, private investors and their expertise in this great endeavour?

The involvement of private money, the involvement of the private sector, is going to be absolutely crucial. It is quite clear that, in the short term, that the government is not going to be able to confront the welfare bill in the way that it should in order to release money for the defence of the country. But the private sector has the money and it can spend the money up front.

I was at a meeting last week where somebody said, ‘in terms of Europe, it’s either 5 per cent with the Americans or 7 per cent without the Americans’. That’s a dawning realisation. So the private sector has to be involved. There’s no way that the state can do all of this, especially in infrastructure terms, in terms of paying up front to get the equipment of the future. It’s one of the ways in which we can leverage the money, the skills, the ability of the square mile in order to make sure that the country and the square mile is safer than it is just now.

QUESTIONS

(Juliet Samuel of The Times)

Europe collectively spends more on defence than Russia does so why are we getting so little for our money and should we resolve that faster before we spend more?

We do spend much more than Russia, and it’s a colossal amount of money, but of course it’s used for sovereign projects, it’s used domestically, and a lot of it is not terribly productive in terms of war readiness. There are some countries that spend about 20 per cent on pensions which doesn’t exactly translate into capabilities, so the last secretary general of NATO and this current one are actually making war readiness a priority. But the Europeans are going to have to face up to the fact that the taxpayer in Europe deserves to get Euros for the money they spend and they’re not getting it at the moment.

(Iain Martin) This question of ‘Europe’, let’s try and define that. There’s the European pillar of NATO, there’s what the European Union is trying to do. There clearly is this urge for European countries to do more together to meet the threat. But how do you see it institutionally?

Institutionally, the European Union has changed. They now have a commission for defence. That was unheard of even in my day. They’ve changed the financial structures to allow more money to be spent on defence without breaking the stability pact. So Europe is waking up and is systematically changing a lot of its programmes. But the EU, like NATO, is made up of sovereign countries and they have relations - unlike the Warsaw Pact where one man in the Kremlin said ‘move’ and everyone said ‘how high do we jump?’ - you’ve got a conglomeration of countries, so NATO has got Viktor Orban in Hungary, Fico in Slovakia, they’ve got a new Prime Minister in the Czech Republic, who are not all on the same page as those who see Russia as a major threat. It’s a fact of life that the countries closest to the threat are more aware, the Poles are spending over 4 percent on defence at the moment but the Spanish and the Portuguese, certainly the Spanish, wanted to opt out of the agreement that was done at the Hague. But, generally speaking, they act together and I think we should recognise that its towering strength is that it’s made up of democracies unlike with our adversaries, but it makes it more difficult to come to common decisions. Institutionally though, the European Union has picked up thanks to the challenge of Ukraine and is moving faster than ever before.

(Iain Martin)

But is it a structure that’s built for speed? And the reason I mention that is I’m thinking increasingly about the question of denial and denying the Russians territory. The lesson of the last 11 years, since Crimea, that the Kremlin will draw psychologically is that ‘if you take it, no-one is going to come and take it off you; not the Ukrainians, and no other power. So if you can claim territory fast in a chaotic way, presumably the Russians then bank on us taking a while to organise a response to try and push them back. Or then you move into the peace conference phase of things and then the territory is lost.

I think that’s the dilemma we are all facing. There is an assumption that Ukraine is going to have to give up territory, sovereign territory. Despite the pledge guaranteed by the Budapest Memorandum in 1994, by the UK, by the US but also by Russia, China. And I think that presages a very difficult, worrying world for our grandchildren in the future, if it can be legitimised through whatever is being done at the present moment, then the principle of the use of force to change borders will be enshrined in some new peace treaty and that has profound implications across the world. I don’t understand why countries in the global south don’t wake up to that threat to them. The whole of Africa is based on colonial boundaries but they all decided collectively to keep them because otherwise you’re going to have tribal rivals and all sorts of territorial claims, so there was an element of stability in Africa for example that allowed it to survive all the proxy wars that were going on there at the time. The moment the principle is established, especially by the big powers in the world, that you can change borders with the use of force and with violence, then anarchy is the outcome. So all of us have a stake in what’s going on in Abu Dhabi today but we are all excluded from it. That’s the worrying aspect of what’s happening at the moment.”

Lord Robertson thank you for joining us.

In Oliver Moody’s must-read recent book on the Baltic, there is a succinct account of what it has meant for the Estonians to have Russia as an occupier and then a neighbour.

To put what Soviet subjugation meant in a purely economic context, at the end of the 1930s average incomes and life expectancy had been almost the same in Finland and Estonia. By the end of the Cold War, he writes, Finns were eight times richer and lived on average four years longer.

All that on top of a Soviet era drive to extradite and eliminate Estonian professionals and intellectuals, rewrite history along Communist lines, and turn the country into a vassal of Russia.

Russia’s other neighbours have all had pretty similar experiences. Germany was twice the rampager too. It is Russia, though, that is today led by an anti-democratic autocrat who is seeking to wipe out and subsume a European country - Ukraine - and seeking to widen Russia’s European orbit.

This is the context in which the last few days of peace talks should be considered. While the “realists” - and some friends of Ukraine - may well be right in saying that this conflict was always going to end or be paused with a negotiated settlement of this kind, it is still deeply disturbing to watch. Once again, a brave people find that when all the Allied rhetoric and bold speeches fade away, international diplomacy imposes its cold logic and a squalid deal freezes the conflict and stops the killing - for now.

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These things do not happen. Scotland’s football team does not qualify for the World Cup, with three of the best goals ever scored in one night by Scotsmen and the first of those goals being an overhead “bicycle” kick only three minutes into a do or die (sort of) fixture. There are not wild celebrations. This great victory does not then lead the UK national news the next day. I repeat - these things do not happen.

Only, these things did happen this week and like most Scotland fans, I imagine, I still cannot quite believe that after all these years it was real.

Against Denmark at Hampden on Tuesday this was the kind of night Scotland fans dream of, or dreamt of back when we were naive children, knew no better and had still to be confronted with endless Scottish footballing disappointment and falling short. This - Tuesday - was the night of dreams when, finally, the nightmare ended (for now) and everything worked perfectly as though it had been scripted by the sporting gods or as a fairytale concocted by the great sport writer Hugh McIlvanney during a magical night in the pub with Billy Connolly in 1977.

Let’s face it, Scottish football as a national team endeavour has been largely comical in character for more than thirty years now, perhaps even since the late 1970s. That is not to knock the talent or effort of a wide range of players who tried in those decades since and sometimes came close to defying our downward dive to the status of joke minnow status. This could not disguise the truth, though. Our role was to go out on goal difference or to be hammered by Morocco, as we were in 1998 the last time we made it to a World Cup final.

It was not ever thus. Scotland used to be a major force in European football because its best players dominated England’s clubs, filling many of the leading managerial and playing roles at Liverpool, Manchester United, Leeds and beyond in the old Division One, then the equivalent of the Premier League. Since then Scotland has lost its knack for producing true footballing greats, as the game changed and other countries advanced. Changing training techniques, diet, a fading of interest among young Scots and the internationalisation of English football meant there just weren’t as many top flight Scottish players to make up a serious national team once we got into the 2000s.

In the 1970s Scotland was no footballing joke. Our failure was tragic. Yes, Scotland’s exit from the 1978 World Cup was one of the most inherently amusing incidents in football, because our team went to Argentina with the nation convinced that we would return with the Cup. Alas, hubris was followed by nemesis.

It was funny, but it was also a tragic missed opportunity because the players in that 1978 squad were of such high quality that we should have won it, or at least got out of the group stages and come close to winning it. Instead, inept management meant we were humiliated by Peru and Iran before we beat the wonderful Holland side, but by one goal too few to proceed.

Since then, we’ve been on the slide.

If you are English and reading this with a smirk on your face it is worth remembering that if Scottish football has become comical, English football - the national team - has since Italia ‘90 become inherently tragic. Having failed narrowly to win the World Cup in 1990 - the campaign England should have won - England has been one near miss after another. The psychological damage gets worse every time. Who will beat England on penalties next? Surely one of the greatest footballing nations - inventor of the game - should be able to bring it home again? The last time England did so, the Beatles had just released their masterpiece album Revolver.

Which is worse? Scottish comedy or English tragedy? At least it is amusing being a Scotland fan. To follow England it increasingly seems you need a degree in psychology to make sense of the serial disasters and tragic near misses.

An English friend messaged me this morning to say he is pleased Scotland have qualified because World Cups are “funnier” when Scotland qualify. I responded that we are happy to provide light relief and amusement in the early stages, before a traumatised England are ejected - again - in the semi-finals.

But of course we are not happy to provide light relief and amusement. We - the Scots, Unionists and Nationalists alike - are a warrior nation desperately seeking greatness and vindication, to win something and really show everyone, particularly our large neighbour next door.

Could it happen? I doubt it, but in this Scotland team are a small group of really serious talents who are coalescing at the right time.

There is Scott McTominay, the brilliant young man rejected, sold, by Manchester United who has since become a hero in Naples as the key figure in a league winning Napoli side. Alongside him, also of Napoli, is the industrious playmaker Billy Gilmour, although not last night as he is out injured for a few weeks. Then the dynamo John McGinn, who whirrs away at the heart of the Aston Villa side, and the captain Andy Robertson, of Liverpool, who hoped to top a highly successful club career with his first trip to a World Cup. His ambition will be achieved - fitness permitting. Others deserve their trip too.

It is McTominay’s story that is most compelling, however. It was his balletic bicycle kick that opened the scoring against Denmark. Born in England, and qualifying for Scotland because his father was born in Scotland, there is something inspiring about his can do attitude. His great love was Man Utd and it was a very mixed experience being at the club, coinciding as it did with a calamitous slide in their fortunes. He took quite a lot of criticism and at times his form was erratic. Even his basic ball control seemed off at times. Would his confidence be destroyed? No. When the Napoli opportunity came up he didn’t whinge or melt in the glare of attention in a city that takes its football as seriously as Manchester or Glasgow. McTominay calmly got on with it, worked hard and became a star who scores wonder goals - as he did against Denmark.

I do not for a second think any of this means that Scotland will really shake them up and win the World Cup, or even get out of the group stages. I am familiar with the script.

There will be no final against England in which McTominay scores the winning goal, or a semifinal shootout in which England lose to an Andy Robertson perfect penalty and the Scots go on to beat Brazil 5-1 in the final.

These things do not happen. But sometimes they do.

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The entrepreneur Matt Clifford made a speech last month at the O2 that is well worth watching because it is so damn cheering, combining economic realism with optimism about Britain’s prospects if - big if - we can get it together.

Clifford was speaking at a conference held by a new insurgent organisation called Looking for Growth, of which more in a moment. What was so transgressive, shocking even, about Clifford’s fourteen minutes of remarks is that they were optimistic and hopeful. This was a counter cultural address in which he told an enthusiastic, young audience that national decline and stagnation are not preordained. It doesn’t have to be like this and we can draw inspiration from our history of innovation to get us out of our low growth doom loop, he said. The speech is quite unlike anything you’ll hear in most of our media, which is (quite understandably) focused on how dysfunctional our politics has become and how deficient is our state capacity.

I’ll admit as a life-long journalist - now more like a recovering journalist - that of late even for a news addict like me the news, particularly on social media, has grown oppressive. I have started to try to limit consumption, sticking to a handful of respected outlets among them a few key Substacks, and I hear all the time others are doing this too. At dinner on Thursday night in Manchester, where I was delivering an after dinner speech to a business audience, several guests told me they avoid too much exposure to current affairs although they know that what is happening is important. No wonder when everything we hear seems to be doom. News now moves so fast, all of it covered by an increasingly bewildered media battling to keep up with technology and how it is changing our tastes and habits.

One even hears it said - as on the promotional film for that BBC Newscast podcast - that the news or politics have never been like this before, never so crazy is the implication, which is why we need to hear about it constantly. Which is obviously rubbish. Look at previous decades such as the 1920s, or the 1940s, or the 1970s. The Seventies were defined by tremendous turmoil from two oil shocks, a deep recession, rampant paranoia in politics, the Iranian Revolution and for British children sinister public information films warning of imminent immolation by electricity sub-station or overhead wires or early death in a quarry.

Still, perhaps because I had such a happy childhood I look back on the 1970s as a boundlessly optimistic era defined by the expansion of the British middle class, the food revolution and widening access to travel. All this good stuff happened even while the world and the economy seemed to be collapsing. A friend from the Fleet Street era still maintains that the 1970s were fantastic because he and his colleagues got such massive annual pay rises. When I point out that these pay rises were eroded by inflation, which was also massive, he waves his hand dismissively. His point is that our then politicians - and what a breed they were, the post-War generation, or most of them apart from the scoundrels - were battling epic historic forces and we all got on with it, life carried on, we came through it stronger and here we all are, still on the go.

We need a dose of that realistic optimism today. And when a friend sent me the video of Matt Clifford’s speech evangelising for growth it hit the spot in that regard.

You can watch it here.

Clifford has started firms and been a senior adviser to the government on AI. The Looking for Growth event was packed apparently. They want radical planning reform, technology unleashed, a tax system that works and pro-business supply side reform implemented to the max.

Cards on the table, I expect I won’t subscribe to every one of their policies or ideas. One attendee says it is too much of a Dominic Cummings fan club and having critiqued Dom as being brilliant but too often (what’s the word?) nuts that is always going to make me suspicious. But there is such an energy about what Looking for Growth are saying that they are worth listening to.

What’s interesting is that there is an observable wave of this, of younger people who like business and innovation deciding that actually they have had enough of decline and stagnation.

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Anyway, thank you for reading. Substack right now seems to be full of pieces about the death of reading with the obvious implication that writing is becoming a waste of time, which it isn’t. The longterm link between reading and thinking is so obvious, and the effects of replacing it with a purely visual culture resting on endless video scrolling are so destructive, that as many of us as possible should carry on doing the opposite.

The old joke that economists have predicted nine out of the last five recessions is a good joke because it is rooted in the truth that there is always someone, somewhere, predicting that the economy is about to collapse. An investor or analyst or commentator can usually be found at any given moment who will say that one aspect or all aspects of the economy - government debt, corporate debt, employment, the stock market - are in such a state that, just you wait, there is about to be an explosion.

Several times in the last decade I’ve had - and it turned out to be wrong - that financial crisis tremor feeling many of us learned to identify in the run up to the 2008 disaster. Just because there is a tremor it does not mean an earthquake comes next.

It was like that with tremors in the early 2000s when I remember standing smoking a cigarette alongside the late great Bill Jamieson in Edinburgh on the balcony at the then new Scotsman building (don’t look for it, it’s not there anymore). It was the day of one of Gordon Brown’s budgets when the New Labour Chancellor was in his pomp and his enemies were being crushed. Bill was a fantastic City commentator, and we agreed Brown was making hubristic mistakes by increasing spending too much and boasting about how he had ended boom and bust, an impossibility.

The real economy was apparently doing well in the early 2000s, so in the good times government debt should be on track to go down quite a bit rather than rise. Yet according to Brown’s team that didn’t matter because it seemed as though the boom - particularly in finance - would go on for ever. Perhaps critics such as Bill and me were just stuck in our ways and wrong? Perhaps Brown and his friend Alan Greenspan, the governor of the US Fed, had rewritten the rules of economics so successfully we did not yet understand? Even the Dotcom bubble bursting a few years before had been managed successfully. I remember us laughing that budget day and saying we must be mistaken, and yet… Likewise, in subsequent years when the bank profits of Edinburgh’s banks got bigger and bigger by the billion, Bill used to say “wow… wow” and shake his head with a worried look on his face. Could the boom really last?

And then look what happened. Bill’s gut instincts had been right, just four or five years too early.

Several times in the last decade I’ve felt the financial crisis tremors and it came to nothing. A few years ago a friend in the City showed me his workings on the rise of private credit and excessive risks, and it looked worrying. On another occasion, a leading economist gave me lecture on the dead cert unsustainable nature of US government debt back when it was around $30 trillion. It is now at $38 trillion and I spent more than a week in the US this month, the restaurants were still full, New York’s Metropolitan Opera House was packed and sold out on a Saturday afternoon and places such as Texas are booming.

That one state, Texas, is the eight largest economy in the world with an estimated GDP of $2.7 trillion. It grew at 3.7% last year and the population has increased by more than 50% in the last quarter of a century to 31.9m today. Voracious Texas is booming and I doubt even a bursting of the financial markets bubble will change that longterm.

Sensing the impact of the Covid pandemic doesn’t count as a financial crisis tremor, as it was a sudden natural event, or perhaps unnatural event, and governments mobilised like it was a war. Though after dinner in late January 2020 one of my favourite City analysts did show me the app he used to track Chinese shipping. Look, he said, everything has stopped. And the same week an entrepreneur who shipped most of the stock for his business from China told me cheerfully at lunch that within two months the global economy would be in shutdown.

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