Funding the Future

This Easter, the message of hope, renewal, and resurrection stands in direct contradiction to the world being built around us. A narrow elite, which is overwhelmingly male, white, and self-identifying as Christian, is deliberately promoting division and conflict to concentrate wealth and power in our wolrd at the expense of collective well-being. The ideological roots of this agenda lie in neoliberal economics, shaped by Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, and actively promoted today by organisations such as the Atlas Network and the Tufton Street network of think tanks. Their programme deliberately weakens social cohesion, normalises inequality and insecurity, and strips public services to the bone. The Tory government between 2010 and 2024 put this into practice as a matter of deliberate policy and Labour has done precious little to reverse it. Economic stress fuels resentment, and the elite redirect that resentment toward scapegoats from minority ethnic groups, to women, and LGBTQ+ people, all to maintain their hold on power and wealth. The result is the rise of authoritarian politics across the UK and beyond. It is profoundly revealing that recent polls suggest large numbers of Church of England attendees would vote for Reform, a party whose values are, in every meaningful sense, completely alien to the Christian tradition. Easter's core command is not complicated: love your neighbour as yourself. That is not a partisan slogan. It is a universal ethical imperative shared across religions and humanitarian traditions alike. If Easter means anything, it requires us to choose renewal over division, to rebuild public services, to resist the politics of exclusion, and to name the forces that profit from our fragmentation.  

What if everything you think about money is wrong?  And does  it matter for the UK economy if it is? Most people believe governments must tax or borrow before they can spend. That belief shapes every political debate, every austerity programme, and every argument that public services "can't be afforded." But what if that belief is simply false? In this video, I explain why modern monetary theory (MMT) is forcing a reckoning with economic orthodoxy, and why understanding how money works and how money creation actually functions is essential if we are ever to escape the trap of unnecessary austerity and constrained public investment. The parallel with Galileo is not accidental. Just as heliocentric astronomy was resisted by those with institutional power to lose, the truth about government spending and fiscal policy is resisted today by politicians, commentators, and economists who cannot afford to admit they were wrong. The cost of that resistance is paid by the rest of us: in underfunded public services, stagnant wages, and a UK economy that fails the majority. This is economics' Galileo moment. The choice is between a comfortable illusion and the truth.

Bloomberg is predicting oil could hit $200 a barrel, a price the world has never seen before. If that happens, the UK faces a full-blown oil price crisis that will send petrol prices soaring, squeeze household budgets, and push up the cost of almost everything else. Right now, a litre of petrol costs around 150p. Of that, 52.95p is fixed fuel duty and around 25p is VAT sojust over half the pump price is tax. The remaining cost is the oil itself, plus refining, distribution, and retail margins. If oil rises from $110 to $200 a barrel, which is an 82% increase, the most likely pump price is around 192p per litre, and it could hit 221p in a worst-case scenario. That could be a devastating hit to the cost of living when UK families are already struggling. But let's be clear, this oil price crisis is not being caused by UK tax policy. Fuel duty and VAT are not the drivers of this price rise; the disruption to global oil markets is. But that means the government has a real choice because it could cut fuel duty, as other countries have already done, to stabilise prices and protect people. A cut from 53p to 30p per litre could make a material difference. On top of that, it could also look at rationing, speed limits, or other demand-reduction measures used elsewhere in the world. The choices here are political. The question is whether the government will act.

A warning that the UK already faces war-like supply shocks to oil, gas, fertiliser and food. Discussion of shortages beyond energy, from helium to microchips, and how markets will ration by income. Case for government-led rationing of fuel, aviation and food. Proposal to redesign taxes to curb excess consumption and fund large-scale state intervention.

Donald Trump has signalled his intention to attack Iran’s civilian infrastructure, power stations and desalination plants, and that is a war crime under international law. The law is unambiguous: military gain does not justify targeting civilian populationsand the infrastruture they depend upon, and pre-announcing an attack does not reduce culpability. This is the reality of the Iran war that the world urgently needs to confront. The United States has not signed up to the International Criminal Court, meaning Donald Trump faces no meaningful accountability. But what is equally disturbing is the UK’s role in all of this. Keir Starmer’s talk of de-escalation is hollow when his government remains deeply complicit in Trump’s plans. The proposed state visit by King Charles to the United States sends a message of political endorsement, not challenge. That is not diplomacy; that is complicity. This, though, is not simply about Trump’s erratic behaviour or the latest Iran news. There is a deeper ideological logic at work here, which is neoliberalism. Neoliberal economics reduces human beings to units in a system, economic cogs with conditional worth. When civilians are treated as expendable targets in a war in Iran, that is not aberration. That is the neoliberal system working as designed. Margaret Thatcher applied the same logic to UK communities in the 1980s, treating unemployment and social harm as acceptable costs of economic policy. Trump’s Iran policy is the modern expression of that same ideology, now directed at Iranian civilians on a far grander and more lethal scale. The mindset is identical; the human cost is simply larger. The collapse of moral constraint we are witnessing in the US-Iran conflict is a systemic danger. Neoliberalism, combined with distorted justification, is overriding both international law and basic humanity, and the UK government is choosing alignment over accountability.

We're facing awartime economic emergency, and Rachel Reeves is saying nothing. No reassurance. No plan. No action. In this video, I set out exactly what the Chancellor must do right now to protect the UK economy from the predictable consequences of this war, and why her silence is making things worse. The tools are all there. The Bank of England must be instructed to intervene in bond markets to keep UK interest rates under control; it did that in 2008, 2016, and 2020, and there is no reason it cannot do so again.  The “there is no money” narrative must be abandoned. Government spending will need to rise to protect households and businesses from disruption, just as it did during Covid. Reeves needs to say that clearly, and say it now. And on energy, the link between electricity pricing and gas prices must be broken immediately, something I have argued for repeatedly on this channel. Meanwhile, with 92% of UK flights being for holidays, jet fuel must be rationed and redirected to essential travel, whilst road fuel rationing plans must be drawn up before the shortages hit, not after and renewable energy output must be maximised.  And on food and critical medical supplies, there must be a plan, publicly communicated, so that businesses and households know what to expect. This is not radical. It is basic wartime economic management, with clear historical precedent. The question is why Rachel Reeves, the Chancellor of a Labour government, is failing to lead during the gravest economic crisis of her tenure. The UK economy cannot afford her silence.

Your savings are dead money. That's the uncomfortable truth about how money works that politicians don't want you to understand. In this video, I explain why UK savings — including ISAs holding over £700 billion and pension funds costing the taxpayer £70 billion a year in subsidies — do nothing for economic growth, don't fund investment, and don't create jobs.   This is about how banks create money and the banking system explained honestly. When a bank makes a loan, it doesn't lend your deposits — it creates new money from nothing. Your savings sitting in a bank deposit simply give the bank cheap capital. They don't fund wages, they don't fund taxation, and they certainly don't fund productive investment in the UK economy. The same applies to the stock market — well over 99% of share transactions are secondhand shares, meaning your money in stocks and pension funds investment doesn't reach companies either.   This matters because savings vs investment is the key question for UK economic growth. We spend £80 billion a year of public money subsidising saving when we should be subsidising productive investment. Understanding how money works, how banks work, and why fractional reserve banking means your deposits are actually at risk is essential financial education. If we shifted incentives from dead money to real investment, we could build a fairer, more productive economy. It's time to tell your MP.

What would happen if no one went to work tomorrow? It sounds like a simple thought experiment, but it exposes a fundamental truth about how our economy actually works. If work stopped, food would not be produced, care would not be delivered, services would collapse, and money itself would quickly become meaningless. In this video, I explore why wealth is not money, but the result of human effort. Drawing on ideas from Adam Smith and beyond, I explain how real value is created through labour, care, creativity and contribution, much of which is unpaid and ignored. I also argue that modern economics has lost sight of this. We have elevated finance above production, rewarded ownership over contribution, and built a system that undervalues the very activities that sustain our lives. If we want a better economy, one that supports well-being, fairness and real productivity, we need to rethink what we mean by work and what we choose to value.

 If all the world's countries are in debt and that's pretty much true, then who do they owe the money to? That's a question that I heard asked recently on the radio, and the commentators on the programming question did not know the answer. So let me explain. There is roughly $100 trillion of national debt in the world at present. Now I say roughly because this figure is changing all the time and the data is a little outta date. So take every number that I give in this video with a pinch of salt because most will be 2023 or 2024 data. And of course we're now in 2025. But give or take, the USA is the world's biggest debtor by a long way in a total debt in 20 23, 32 0.9 trillion, but which we now know is heading for something like 36 trillion. So roughly. One third of all the national debt in the world is owed by the USA. I've made other videos on this subject pointing out that actually the world can't survive without the USA owing that debt because the money in question is the dollar, of course, and that is the world's reserve currency. And so is that debt really debt? It's a good question, but it still leaves well over 60 trillion of other debt in the world. China is the next biggest debtor. It owes over $15 trillion. Japan owes around $11 trillion. In comparison, the UK comes in a very low fourth and only a bit over $3 trillion, roughly the same as France, a bit ahead of Italy, somewhat above India, above Germany, and then Canada and Brazil and those countries between them, make up the top 10 at present. There are, however, a vast number of other countries with debt. In fact, almost every country in the world, except its 10 or so failed states have got data that show that they are in debt. Being in debt is something that countries do as a matter of course, which is quite interesting in its own right, because why then do we obsess about the fact that national debt is such a bad thing when every country is in debt? Well, of course the answer is very simple and it's very straightforward. The national debt of a country represents the currency that it has effectively put into circulation in its jurisdiction, in its own domain, in its own legal tender, in a way that is essential if its local economy is to work, and therefore national debt is nothing more than the world money supply. But who owns this supposed debt? That's the question that was asked, and that's the question that needs answering. So I've had a look at this and I'm quite surprised to find the answers. First of all, I expected a very high part of that national debt to be owned by other countries. So for example, in the case of the USA, I expected to find that a significant proportion of the total value of US national debt would be owned. By the central banks of other countries, but in fact, only one eighth of the national debt, a bit over $4 trillion. In the case of the USA is actually owned by foreign governments. It would see the rest is in private circulation. In the case of the uk the figure in question appears to be one sixth of our total national debt is owned by foreign governments. In the case of France, it's a bit higher than that. The situation is confused there by the existence of the European Central Bank, but the figure might be creeping a bit above 20%, and that also appears to be the case in Germany. In Japan, one of the biggest detonations in the world, there is almost no overseas ownership of the debt because whilst it's dead is massive in proportion to the country's gross domestic product at well over 200%, which puts it completely outta proportion with. Any other developed economy, almost all of it is domestically owned, either by the Japanese national government itself or by private individuals. The point is very simple though, and it is quite straightforward. There is a massive amount of debt, which is in private ownership, give or take. More than 80% of the world's debt is likely to be owned privately. If that's the case, who are these private owners? Well, you might be one of them. I probably am as well. And the reason why is you probably have a pension arrangement of some sort, as do I. And pension funds are major holders of national debt in the uk. A bit under 30% of all the UK's national debt is owned by pension companies and life assurance companies. They need it. To fund their operations because the UK government is the only person in the UK who is guaranteed to never go bust and who will always pay their debts in the pounds that the government alone can create. And therefore, pension companies who make very long-term promises to people like me who might live a long time on the pension that they've earned, need that assurance to guarantee that they can fulfill the promise that they've made. And this is true right around the world. In the USA vast quantities of the US national debt is owned by pension funds, and that's true in Europe as well. So the point is that this money, this national debt, about which the world obsesses as if it's a great burden, is in fact the bedrock of the private sector finance industry. You would never imagine this from what is said, but there's something even more important than that because if it is the bedrock. Of the private sector finance industry. Then it's also the foundation of the private wealth, which that industry manages, and the vast majority of the private wealth that is managed by the private sector finance industry is owned by a few percent of the world's population. We know that the ownership of wealth around the world as a whole is massively skewed. If there are. 8 billion people in the world, maybe 80 million of them might own a significant proportion of the wealth. In other words, there are 1% of the world's population with ownership of most of the world's assets. And if that's true, and if they own these funds through their pension funds and other such arrangements. Then the interest paid on this national debt, which might amount to something like $3.2 trillion a year, might equate to something like $40,000 per head for the top 1% of wealth earn around the world. Now think about $40,000 a year in interest being paid to 80 million people, but the other 99% between them. Have average income of only $13,500 a year. So the wealthiest are earning potentially three times more per Adam in interest than the rest of the world are earning as a result of their labor. Now these figures are simplistic. They are extrapolated and they're bound to be wrong to some degree. I make that very clear. I am working on the basis of simplified assumptions, but I'm doing so to make clear just how great. The bias in this system is towards those with wealth. It may be that the world's wealthy claim government is spending recklessly and piling up debt, which is gonna be a burden on future generations and all the other nonsense that you hear, right wing politicians talk. But the truth is, when the government creates debt, somebody has to own it, and the only people who can own it are the wealthy. And they get wealthier as a result of that debt being produced. Because effectively every time interest is paid on the national debt, their wealth goes up. They tend not to spend it. They therefore can pay for more government debt issues, and as a consequence, the ownership of wealth becomes ever more concentrated and we get a more divided world. What can we do about this? Well, I suggest there are a number of things we can do. First of all, there needs to be a concerted effort, the world over to reduce the interest rate on national debt. It is too high. Secondly, around the world, we need concerted efforts to make sure that unearned income, which is of course what interest is tax more fairly at present. It tends to be taxed less than earnings from workers, and that is absurd. It should be taxed more 'cause quite clearly. It's unfair to tax unearned income at a lower rate than earned income. And thirdly, around the world, we need more progressive tax systems. Why? Because we need to recover more of this money from the wealthy to make sure that governments are not burdened by this cost to the point where they cannot provide the services that people in their countries need. That's a simple, straightforward fact, but the ownership of this wealth also needs to be democratized. We need to look at how we might bring it back under public control. Japan has done this. It is possible to some extent this happened during COVID and during the crises after the 2008 financial crash. Why did that happen then? Because of quantitative easing, and now the UK in particular is trying to reverse that through quantitative tightening for public ownership of this debt. Which has provided benefit to Japan and does I think provide benefit in the UK is being unwed. We need to bring debt under control. We need to bring the money supply under control. We need to bring the benefit of the government being able to create money into the public domain and not into the private domain, which is where it is now. So that question, who owns the debt, is very simply answered. The world's wealthy people own it. They win hands down. By doing so, if only we understood that if only the radio competitors that I heard had understood why it is possible for all the world's countries to be in debt simultaneously and yet have somebody to own that dead who are the world's wealthy, then they too would've reached the conclusion that something needs to be done about this. Now you know, now you know what is required. Go and talk about it. Go and tell the world. That the national debt is not a problem because it is our money supply, but the ownership of our national debt and the fact that the income from it is undertaxed is a problem, and that's what we have to address.

Fiscal rules, deficit targets, inflation targets, interest rate rules — every one of them was invented by neoliberal economists to constrain government and limit what democracy can achieve. In this video, I explain why these economic rules are holding back the UK economy and why it's time to forget them entirely.   Current economic policy starts with spending caps and debt-to-GDP targets before ever asking what society actually needs. This is backwards. Governments are uniquely capable of delivering universal healthcare, mass education, climate transition, and full employment — but austerity and rigid fiscal rules prevent that action. Rachel Reeves and the Labour government remain bound by rules designed to shrink the state, not serve the public. I set out a different approach rooted in functional finance: start with societal goals, identify the real resources — labour, skills, infrastructure — needed to deliver them, and only then consider the finance required. Taxation exists to manage inflation by withdrawing excess spending power, not to "fund" government spending. Interest rates should steer financial flows towards productive investment in housing, small businesses, and public services — not fixate on an inflation target that monetary policy barely influences. Forty-five years of market hegemony and neoliberalism have delivered poor outcomes — rising cost of living, crumbling public services, and growing national debt used to justify yet more austerity. The Bank of England needs reform. Fiscal policy and monetary policy must be used pragmatically, judged by outcomes, not by arbitrary rules. Economics is meant to serve society, and it's time UK politics reflected that. If you believe democratic goals should come before deficit rules, like, subscribe, and join the conversation in the comments.