Capacity Expansion: Teachers, Buildings, and the School Estate (In Your Voice) Let’s get practical. Money is one thing — but money doesn’t teach children. People do. And buildings do. If we want smaller class sizes, better pastoral care, more support for SEN, modern facilities, and enough physical space to breathe, then the entire system needs to be expanded. Not blown up and replaced — just expanded, strengthened, and modernised. This means: a much larger workforce, a larger school estate, and a lot fewer bucket-catching leaks from classroom ceilings. Let’s start with people.

Now that we’ve mapped the raw cost of funding state education at private-school levels, it’s time to answer the inevitable question: What does this do to the economy? Do we spark a boom? Cause a recession? Redistribute things a bit and move on? Or — as usually happens — a messy combination of all three? This section walks through the economic plumbing behind a 5%-of-GDP shift toward education: why GDP doesn’t suddenly explode just because government spending rises why the short-run effect is a small dip rather than a catastrophe why private-school GDP doesn’t “vanish” in the process and most importantly, why the long-run human-capital payoff dwarfs everything else If Part I dealt with simple arithmetic, Part II deals with the thermostat and electrics of the entire house. It’s where the short-term story gets mildly boring — and the long-term story gets extremely interesting. Onwards.

Lets Rethink Education The Big Proposal What would it mean — really mean — to treat every child in Britain the way private schools treat theirs? Not emotionally. Not rhetorically. But financially, structurally, and systemically? This first part is where we lay out the scale of the idea: how many children we’re talking about, what we spend today, what private schools actually charge, and what the gap really looks like once you strip the politics out of it. It’s the foundation for everything that comes later. Yes, there are numbers (quite a few). But stay with me — this is the easy maths before the complicated bits arrive. And as we’ll see, once you look at the cost properly, the idea stops sounding absurd and starts sounding like something a serious country might actually consider.

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The UK loses an estimated £7.5–£14.5 billion every year through political secrecy: VIP lanes, undisclosed lobbying, overseas donations, and suppressed corruption inquiries. Brexit only promised £18 billion a year in benefit .. this would deliver .. with more guarantee a lot of that. Evidence from Scandinavia shows that public tax and finance transparency reduces fraud, lowers inequality, and saves billions. The real crisis isn’t spending — it’s secrecy.

The UK’s fine system hasn’t kept pace with inflation or income, leading to unfair penalties and huge losses in uncollected revenue. This post explores how index-linking fines and adopting income-based penalties could raise £1.6–£2bn a year, improve court performance, cut reoffending, and strengthen trust in the justice system.

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Ever wondered why UK laws feel outdated the moment they’re written? I’ve been exploring a surprisingly simple fix: write laws around the harm to the victim, not the exact action. It’s a lot less crazy than it sounds…

After over 27 days of digging through inequality, privatisation, democratic distortions, collapsing social care, slashed education budgets, chronic underinvestment, donor capture, and the small matter of Brexit, the conclusion is painfully obvious: The UK’s political system isn’t broken. It’s working exactly as designed — just not for most of us. Yet ask any business leader, economist, or investor what they want and they’ll tell you the same thing: “Please, stop swinging wildly between ideological extremes and give us something predictable.” Please give us BORING politics Boring politics is how countries become wealthy. Boring politics is how crises are prevented. Boring politics is how you attract investment. Boring politics is how you rebuild trust. Yes so at the end of this No wild solutions, just a plea for stability and long term thinking.

Britain is increasingly an outlier in how it funds political parties and election campaigns. While other democracies use public grants, matching funds, donation caps, or voter-controlled democracy vouchers, the UK still relies heavily on private wealth — creating distortions, donor influence, and barriers to participation. This post explores how international public funding models work, how they reduce donor leverage, why they don’t restrict free speech, and what would happen if Britain adopted similar reforms. It also examines the overlooked “loss of deposits” rule, a financial barrier that disproportionately affects smaller parties and independent candidates.

What started out as an interest in whether the sale of the Nation’s assets generated value for the country or not has led me to a nasty discovery. Based on data available from the Office for …