You’d be hard-pressed to convince an alien observer that anything demonstrates the success of our species more powerfully than the number of us that are here to represent it.

It took around 300,000 years to populate the planet with 4bn humans — and only 50 years to add another. That 50 years was closely preceded by WWII, the most morbid war in human history, itself barely two decades after an earlier festival of death.

If humanity’s utility function is to maximise total human life, war, it seems, doesn’t get in the way.

Japan lost 3m between 1940 to 1945, to total war, including two nuclear bombs. Yet, from 1940 to 1950, it added 10m to its population. At the height of the longest period of peace in the Pacific, it lost 5m — between 2008 to 2024 — and is predicted to lose a further 20m by 2050.

I recall in early life the forest floor blooming to life with foxgloves after a ravaging fire — its first breath of sunlight after decades in shadow. It seems appropriate, on Good Friday, to ponder the peculiar possibility that we need death to survive. And that those peaceable folks like me that don’t seem to be having babies, might be the ones to fulfil Eliot’s prophecy about the way the world ends.

The story of Snow White’s performance at the Box Office was writing itself before ticket sales.

The Times said of Disney today, ‘The studio has been widely criticised by conservatives for the diversity of the casting and for including LGBT characters into films and television shows, with accusations it had attempted to spread a left-wing political agenda.’

But ‘polarised politics’ is what the commentary about the commentary gets wrong. It isn’t the criticism from conservatives that matters. And the criticism that does isn’t over including diversity characters in storylines, or about ‘a left-wing agenda.’

What you’ve got is a majority audience that can see straight through the naked cynicism of Instagram ethics. Stochastic algorithms have made certain ideas more prominent in the population of posts than they are among the populations posting. Disney, like others, have conflated a prevalence among the former with one among the latter. And optimised for it.

Some people are truly ecumenical; some aren’t; and some just shuffle around the criteria for high-status group membership. But most have a nose for virtue being marshalled for self-interest, and they don’t like the smell of it.

The gears are finally moving on peace in Ukraine. But why? Ministers and editors warned against a 1930s appeasement. Kiev today, Paris tomorrow. Only troll farms claimed this was about Nato membership and security guarantees. With Putin’s prized asset Trump restored to power, his ambitions will know no bounds, surely.

Well… Britain and the US have been investing in Ukrainian nationalism — exfiltrating its leaders to work throughout the western world, funding nationalist parties, investing in Ukrainian media, promoting the Ukrainian language, and arming nationalist paramilitary groups — for 70 years (Google ‘Operation Aerodynamic’ for a teaser). Even the Kievan Rus are now the Kyivan Rus. It’s enough to make someone in the North Korean Ministry of Information blush.

Here’s what Vance’s parodied speech in Munich got right: enough of the diversion and deception for the stated aims of preserving a free and open society.

Voters don’t have a right to know the performance envelope of the latest military aerospace technology. Governments need secrets. And there might be good reasons for us giving guns and money to neo-Nazi Ukrainian nationalists on and off for decades. But when a hot war with Russia breaks out, that we’ve been doing so warrants a mention.

I was never a devotee, but a central feature of Lynch’s work long resonated with me: that folk are either overtly strange, or secretly strange. I don’t think the conceit is as true as it is funny, but I don’t think it’s entirely false either.

Both truer and funnier, though, is its corollary that the macabre is most at home in the mundane. The pristine geometry of clipped front lawns and fluttering apron strings drying in the breeze… Where’s the body?

Extending the smoking ban to more public spaces is rather nice for those like me that don’t smoke. But is seems an odd policy priority.

Strained NHS budgets are naturally foregrounded. And polls show it’s popular; the public sees smoking as a huge financial burden. So, we’re set for another inconclusive dispute over the simple equation, A (tax revenues) minus B (healthcare costs), for which data is sufficiently muddled to be confoundingly difficult to evaluate.

But is it really that simple, anyway? Non-smokers live ten non-productive, post-retirement years longer than their smoking peers. They draw ten more years of public pensions, require ten more years of late-life care, including costly nursing homes, and are more likely to suffer from dementia. Eventually, they land the same burden on the NHS for heart disease and cancer as smokers. Not even smoking compares to old age on morbidity outcomes.

If banning smoking in pub gardens were really about public finances, we’d see this analysis. It’s not, so we don’t. Individual freedom must necessarily be limited when it opposes the public good, but there must be a test — and that test must be passed.

The Harehills riot reveals cultural divisions, but how significant are these divides for a nation?

In South Korea — arguably the most culturally homogeneous and ethnocentric nation in the OECD — grievance and suspicion between Gyeongseong-do in the east and Jeolla-do in the west are sufficiently deep and enduring to make you wonder whether the nation might have split on both latitude and longitude.

Humans swarm, they don’t ‘integrate’. It’s too soon to say whether Celtic Britons will make their peace with Anglo-Saxon arrivals. That’s been one and a half millennia now. As interest in league tables for ethnicity and religion has declined, new leagues have taken their place, for ideology and social codes. The demand for team membership often seems to outpace supply.

A nation can survive all this. It’s our division of rights and responsibilities between culture and state that has lost coherence. In Britain, culture and state ask the wrong things of each other. We need education, health, and law from the state, but morality, welfare, and order from culture.

I suspect more of a consensus on this among Britain’s cultural islands than pessimists have accounted for. Middle-aged Reform voters would find the cultural values of many recent arrivals to be more familiar than those on their own children’s university campus — a fact both parent and child might take a moment to digest.

We can live with vast differences, and little integration. What we must agree on is the terms of the social contract.

Why do we choose sides in conflicts like Israel-Gaza? Let’s consider child mortality figures in neighbouring conflicts:

• Syrian Civil War: 20,000 children

• Yemen Conflict: 11,000 children

• Libyan Civil War: 5,000 children

• Gaza Conflict: 4,000 children

If you’ve found yourself to be more vocal about Gaza than you’ve been on Syria, Yemen, or Libya, is it really about child mortality or something else?

For supporters of Israel’s self-defense stance, Jan 2008 – Sep 2023 saw 6,407 Palestinian vs. 308 Israeli deaths. Pleading self-defence after inflicting 20x the fatalities also suggests this is about something other than the numbers. 

Then there are other conflicts that receive almost no comment at all. Why has the Azerbaijan-Armenia conflict in the Nagorno-Karabakh region failed to contribute flags to Instagram bios?

If we’re selective in the conflicts over which we choose sides, and pay little regard to comparative fatality counts, our real solidarity is more likely to others at home than to victims abroad — and a less fitting tribute to them than they deserve. 

Often unseen among those itching to serve a cause is the social hierarchy created by one. Claiming yourself a champion claims another a villain, and a third your charge. There’s only one guaranteed winner, here. Trendy graduates on Fleet Street celebrating the emerging challenges faced by Silicon Valley’s ‘servant economy’ are pitying entire tribes of workers into class relegation; it’s much less clear whether they’re improving lives any more than the jobs that offend them.

Like all groups, those staffing on-demand driving services are a more diverse bunch than even the best-intentioned stereotypes account for. I’ve been Uber-ed around by the privately educated son of a Mayfair art dealer, a full-stack software developer, a Nigerian revolutionary, and an ex-fighter pilot. Another, nearing the end of both his shift and his career, was looking forward to retiring back in Sierra Leone, leaving behind his younger daughter as an accident and emergency registrar at St Thomas’ Hospital, and his elder daughter a fully qualified anaesthetist.

Becoming party to such insights should have been unlikely in the context of the reportedly nameless and faceless servility of these roles. Except such upstairs-downstairs parallels (👉 Sarah O’Connor, Financial Times) are reported suspiciously more often by those that seem to think they’re upstairs. The now-defunct but widely cited Doteveryone think-tank, for all its laudable stated intentions, did less to certify the dehumanising properties of the job than to inadvertently advance bigoted notions about its inability to convey status.

None of which is to say we shouldn’t pay attention to creeping societal changes to work. If we’re to see more of tech startups that demand a looser covenant between business and workers, it’s right to discuss what it means for the social contract — seriously, I mean, rather than with voguish outrage. Given that Uber, together with several on-demand delivery brands, now employs its UK staff — unlike most of its traditional analogue antecedents — one presumes focus will turn to more nuanced grievances. But in the meantime, incautious remarks about an Uber shift turning a human into some other primate denigrate the driver more than their role, and are guilty of a greater injustice than that they’re intending to speak to.

A little humility might better equip one to realise that those who’ve survived civil war, piloted a MiG-21, navigated the UK asylum system, or had both children enrolled with the Royal Society of Medicine, probably aren’t pawns in anyone’s game. And deserve, from anyone given to either, less sympathy than they do respect.

I’ve been reminded, thanks to my wife’s attainment of British citizenship this week, that nationhood is a fragile story. It’s fitting, then, that naturalisation should be subject to the truly defining properties of the British narrative: a refusal to take anything too seriously, and to never miss an opportunity for self-parody.

I can’t say the ceremony agenda is intimidating, but it certainly has the appearance of formality, with its declaration of allegiance, national anthem lyrics, and list of ceremonially titled officials in attendance. And The Old Marylebone Town Hall makes quite an impression, with its Graeco-Roman facade, Corinthian capitals, colonnaded tower, and toilets that wouldn’t be out of place in a 5-star hotel. Like the fabled English gentleman, though, beneath the surface is a reassuringly familiar farce.

‘We’re joined today by citizens who’ve come from all over the world,’ announced the theatrically camp Superintendent Registrar. ‘Canada, Greece, South Korea… Barbados? Hang on, why are you here?!’ Prefacing the arrival of the Lord Mayor of Westminster — a young Muslim lad, who’d soon read a scripted welcome with all the austerity of a first-year undergraduate student — the Registrar asked of the attendees, ‘Be gentle with him: he’s new, and we want this one to stay; he’s probably more nervous than you are.’

Those wondering what to expect of the final step in becoming British can look forward to a goody bag and a reasonable best man’s speech. Which, as the Registrar reminded everyone, ‘Is the least you could expect for the amount you’ve paid.’

Anyone suspecting some kind of anomaly here would benefit from reading David Zolkwer’s remarks on organising the Platinum Jubilee pageant, who took to reassuring journalists at The Times that the event wouldn’t ‘take itself quite so seriously’. Well, we’ve had bobbies bundling off vegan protesters, a prince pulling faces on the palace balcony, the family’s most embarrassing member pulling a conspicuously convenient Covid sickie, and the nation’s oldest celebrity vigorously applauded for smiling politely before quietly disappearing — to mark seven decades of smiling politely before quietly disappearing. It’s all going swimmingly.

You’ve only got to witness two people that actually like each other trying to decide what colour to paint a wall to realise how improbable it is that 68 million people, that mostly haven’t met, might agree on even the basics. Humanity’s proclivity to employ autocracy in the pursuit of some consensus, against such odds, accounts for the back story of every place the species has ever gathered. One would be hard-pressed to deny that autocracy’s seemingly more natural than any alternative to it; or that whilst the reality of it can be eliminated, the idea can’t: There will never be a shortage of egoists who consider it their destiny to rule by decree, or of others mysteriously willing to usher them towards their aspirations.

Thus did the execution of Charles I give us Oliver Cromwell — initially interred in Westminster Abbey among others honest enough to call themselves kings. The execution of Louis XVI, and the Reign of Terror, gave the French Napoleon. The execution of the Romanovs left the Russians with Stalin. Abdication of the German emperor soon left the people with Hitler. The extirpation of monarchy has quite the form on ‘same shit, different assholes’.

I believe it’s widely lost on republicans exactly what British parliamentarians did with our monarchy. With a bloodline leading all the way back to Alfred the Great, and the record of over a millennium of nation building, there remains no more compelling claim than the Royal Family’s to rally British autocratic fervour; and here it is, in permanent stasis, enslaved in an elaborate constitutional prison. Like Julius Caesar’s treatment of the captured King of Gaul, our elected representatives wheel out the family’s pre-eminent members for special events, for crowds to get their fix of national pride, catharsis for their desire to see nationhood personified — when the personification instead is of the subjugation of autocracy, in perpetuity.

By reign without rule, all is decreed in the name of autocracy, and in the absence of its will. Constitution ended the monarchy not with the bang of revolution, but with an everlasting ceremonial whimper. A zombie institution in a gilded cage, the strongest claimant to the nation’s historic dictatorship is a fossilised cog, on life support inside a 21st Century democratic machine: a living relic too alive to be resuscitated, but too dead to exist outside a museum.

Whatever the cost to us, I disbelieve it to be greater than the cost to them. Some will draw my attention to the family’s purported assets, but they look more fragile to me in royal hands than in any private citizen’s. Some of the nation’s wealthier Russian guests found their London assets to be theirs but for the grace of Liz Truss; the royals’ own are never more than an executive order away from transfer to… whatever might replace the Crown.

The smart republicans among us will be toasting their gains throughout this weekend’s festivities. The autocratic story of yesteryear is the slave of the democratic narrative of our age. Only the ideologues will be bemoaning the work yet to be done; but their agenda — of self-promotion in the language of someone else’s values — is a different brand of perpetual endeavour, and one much less in the public interest.

Taxes may serve other purposes — the redistribution of income and wealth, the discouragement of “sinful” behaviour — but, in the world of MMT, they serve no useful macroeconomic role.

Stephen King, Senior Economic Advisor to HSBC, October 2020

In his eponymous Financial Times op-ed, Stephen King, Senior Economic Advisor to HSBC, stated The case against Modern Monetary Theory, the radical economic theory beloved of the left, and loathed by the right — usually by reference to the Magic Money Tree with which the theory amusingly shares an acronym.

Joining the swelling ranks of economists eager to debunk a theory cited by Bernie Sanders and AOC as a basis for expanding deficit spending, Mr King — by stating that ‘in the world of MMT [taxes] serve no useful macroeconomic role’ — emulates the mistakes of the paradigm’s Democratic allies: passing off an opinion about MMT’s political utility as a test of its veracity.

Under MMT, government spending creates money, and taxes destroy money. The world in which taxes serve no useful macroeconomic role is a straw one, more likely intended to economically undermine the theory than to undermine the theory economically.

That MMT has been politicised by its founding fathers is lamentable, but shouldn’t foreclose consideration of its core claims — which are really only an extrapolation of central bankers’ own accounts for the way that money is created in a modern economy.

We know that most of the money in a modern economy is ‘bank money’: money created by commercial banks, that has its origin in the act of the bank issuing a loan. When a commercial bank issues a loan, it simply credits the borrower’s deposit account with the value of the loan, writing the value of the deposit in the liabilities column of its ledger, and the value of the loan in the assets column.

The stock of bank money in the economy is expanded by the value of the deposit; repayment of the loan unwinds this action, and destroys the newly created bank money. At the end of the banking day, commercial banks aggregate the net transaction values due to one-another as a result of their customers’ payment activities, initiating a net transfer between themselves in a different type of money: central bank money — reserves.

The central bank undertakes to always ensure that there are enough reserves in the system to underpin all interbank transactions, whatever the quantity of bank money in circulation.

Although deviating from the description of money creation popular in economics textbooks, this account is uncontroversial among the central banks responsible for framing the monetary system — and is consistent with the account put forward under MMT.

MMT further claims that, upon very close inspection, governments in modern economies — even when appearing to bank with commercial sector banking institutions — actually initiate payments via the direct creation of reserves, and that a payment from government to a private sector contractor implies, in abstract terms, (a) the creation of an IOU between government and the central bank, (b) a commensurate IOU, denominated in reserves, between the central bank and the commercial bank representing the private contractor, and (c) an IOU, denominated in bank money, between the commercial bank and the private contractor — representing the sales receipts settled by government.

This, the theory claims, represents an expansion of the aggregate money in circulation within the economy. The private contractor’s later settlement of taxes unwinds the chain of IOUs, ending in the tearing-up of the government’s IOU to the central bank, and a contraction in the stock of money.

That government spending might precede taxation is no more eccentric than the accepted account that loans precede deposits. And what follows — that the supply of money is regulated by the confluence of fiscal and monetary policy — has implications that better warrant exploratory debate than blunt dismissal.

MMT seems primarily to be a paradigm in which one relentlessly observes real financial operations through the principles of double-entry bookkeeping, is substantially consistent with the central banking consensus on monetary theory, and illuminates a range of related debates — bringing equal focus upon the role of government debt in the economy not only as a liability for the public sector, but as the most trusted asset for the private sector. One wonders what a pension company’s balance sheet would look like were the public debt repaid, and government bonds ceased to exist.

Questioning, as MMT does, whether the merits of central bank independence are illusory additionally seems increasingly fair game after more than a decade of QE-related asset purchase activities, in which government debt auctioned ostensibly through open-market operations is bought by institutional buyers that know the central bank is waiting in the wings to monetise the debt.

If fiscal and monetary policy are, in the end, both merely tools in the inflation management toolbox, then the debate over government debt, deficit, and spending, does need to be reoriented. Questions might then more profitably be posed not over whether we’re mortgaging our grandchildren’s future, but over the size of the state’s role within the economy. The proponents of MMT would do greater justice to the paradigm by sitting out that debate, rather than adulterating the theory with a certain brand of politics.