Over fourteen years, Conservative governments reshaped UK defence through a pattern of cuts, delays, and fiscal compression that hollowed out capability across the armed forces. What began with soldiers returning from Afghanistan and being made redundant — “the Army lost approximately 20,000 regular personnel between 2010 and 2016” — became the first sign of a long austerity driven contraction. Defence spending fell, entire capabilities were retired, procurement plans became structurally unfunded, and training collapsed as budgets tightened. By 2024, the Army had fallen to its smallest size since the Napoleonic era, and the Equipment Plan carried a £16.9 billion deficit.

This report shows how these decisions accumulated into a systemic weakening of UK defence: from man-power loss to procurement failure, to readiness decline, to the abandonment of Afghan allies. It is a forensic account of how austerity hollowed out the country’s first line of national security.

UK politics keeps repeating the claim that welfare is driving the debt. The evidence shows the opposite. Welfare spending has been stable for decades. The real pressure on the public finances comes from the cost of money — rising gilt yields, global tightening, and the Bank of England’s QT programme. A one point rise in yields adds tens of billions to the interest bill, dwarfing any welfare cut. QT raises borrowing costs, the yield driven stress is misdiagnosed as “overspending”, and welfare becomes the political target because it is easy to cut. This report sets out the structural case: welfare is not the problem; the cost of money is.

Thames Water: Thirty Years of Extraction, Collapse, and a £3bn Public Rescue A forensic Dyslexic Politics investigation into how the UK’s largest water company was hollowed out by financial engineering — and why essential infrastructure must never be treated as a financial asset.

This report explains how the new “default yes” rule for station zone housing reshapes inequality. By automatically directing high density development into the noisiest, most polluted, highest traffic land, the policy hardcodes a spatial hierarchy into planning: quiet, green neighbourhoods remain protected, while households with least income and least power are steered into the harshest environments. Drawing on evidence from transport associated health risks, transit induced gentrification, and justice focused TOD research, the report shows that this rule does not simply build homes — it redistributes environmental burden, accelerates displacement pressures, and weakens procedural voice. In practice, it embeds inequality into the geography of housing.

Austerity in the UK was driven by IMF forecasting errors that underestimated how much cuts would shrink the economy. That mistake helped justify policies that weakened public services. The outcome was the slowest productivity growth since the early 19th century, collapsing investment, and deep reductions across core services. IMF leadership later softened its public criticism for political reasons, allowing Osborne to present austerity as validated even while internal staff remained sceptical.

Scotland taxes workers, not wealth. Westminster keeps every major wealth tax, so high earners pay more in Scotland while high wealth individuals pay the same as in England. Scotland can tax labour. It cannot tax capital.

Greater Manchester’s growth looks impressive, but the numbers tell a different story: investors take the gains, and the poorest are left behind. If we want real change, we need investment that lifts people, not just profits.

Wes Streeting has warned he could quit as Defence Secretary after discovering a £4.7 billion hole in the UK’s defence budget — including £1.8 billion needed next year. With former Defence Secretary John Healey also resigning over unfunded defence commitments, the new Chancellor must now fill the gaps. Our report shows where that money can be found.

The triple lock guarantees that the UK State Pension rises each year by the highest of earnings growth, CPI inflation, or 2.5 per cent. It has lifted many pensioners out of poverty and rebuilt the value of the pension after decades of erosion. It has also created a volatile, increasingly expensive commitment that amplifies shocks in wages and inflation and makes long term fiscal planning unstable. This analysis examines the structural, fiscal, and distributional consequences of the triple lock — and what happens if it is reformed, retained, or removed.

Nigel Farage’s voting record reveals a simple truth: when Clacton needed an MP to back stronger employment rights, fairer fiscal policy, and investment in a deprived coastal town, he voted against the measures that mattered most.

Scrap Inheritance Tax. Sounds simple—not. In reality, it hands billions to the wealthiest estates, widens the inequality gap, and blows a hole in the public finances: eight billion a year, every year. If we care about fairness between generations, this policy takes us in the wrong direction.

Andy Burnham’s halt to the September early release scheme—and the Prime Minister’s swift exclusion of rape, serious child sexual offences and grooming gang offences from the new sentencing framework—captures a moment where political decision making is forced into alignment with the structural limits of the justice system

Britain didn’t fall behind in AI because other countries were faster. We fell behind because we sold the very systems that could have made us a genuine tech power.
While the US, France, Germany, and China built sovereign compute, protected national champions, and invested at industrial scale, the UK relied on slogans and foreign ownership.
The result is structural dependency: our breakthroughs feed other nations’ economies, and our productivity flatlines.
Sovereign compute isn’t a luxury — it’s the foundation of national economic strength. If Britain wants to lead, it has to stop exporting its future.

UK energy bills have blown past what ordinary households can handle. Profit stays protected while people take every hit. Standing charges bite before you even switch anything on. The system was built for stable profit, not stable bills.
“Built for profit, not for people — that’s why UK energy became unaffordable.”

Cannabis hits the lungs, heart, and brain hard: smoked use delivers heavy toxins, spikes heart strain, and raises risks of psychosis with high potency strains. Long term use is linked to cognitive decline and higher emergency care demand. It’s not a harmless substance — the health load is real and measurable. Cannabis isn’t harmless — it hits the lungs, heart, and brain harder than people think.

Burnham says more local tax will stay local. But under England’s Great Land Uplift Giveaway, public money still clears land, builds infrastructure and absorbs the risk — only for private developers to step in once viability is created. The uplift flows out of the community. Taxpayers fund the foundations; developers take the gain.

Andy Burnham: “I said we’d take power out of Westminster and carry it into every postcode in the country. Today, we make good on that promise”.
A choice now sits at the centre of British government: thousands of nurses, doctors, teachers and police — or a second No.10 the country doesn’t need. The fiscal evidence is clear. Spending hundreds of millions on a second No.10 means fewer nurses for the NHS, fewer doctors in hospitals, and fewer police on Britain’s streets. It is money that could hire thousands of frontline staff instead of funding an unnecessary duplicate Prime Ministerial office.
This is the tradeoff. A symbolic second centre of power, or the measurable public value of thousands of essential workers.