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You Want to Stop the Boats? Then Stop Causing the Boats.

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They are coming. Across the Channel in flimsy dinghies. Through the Sonoran Desert in crushing heat. Across the Mediterranean on vessels that were never designed to carry a human being. They are coming in numbers that are not going to slow down. They are coming in numbers that will, if history is any guide, eventually become overwhelming. And Nigel Farage is absolutely right about one thing. This cannot go on. The pressure on public services is real. The strain on housing is real. The sense in ordinary communities that something has broken, that nobody in charge is honest about the scale of what is happening, that the political class has collectively decided to look away and call anyone who notices a bigot: that sense is real, and it is legitimate, and it has been treated with contempt by people who should have known better. So yes. Farage is right. Something must be done. Now. Let us talk about what Farage will never, ever tell you. Because what he is selling you is the most expensive...
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The Economic Doom Loop is Here

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Your friend cannot sell his house. Sales are falling through across the country. Estate agents are watching their commissions evaporate. Builders have stopped buying land. The housing market is not slowing down. It is seizing up. And here is the devastating truth that almost nobody in power will say out loud: this is not the usual end of a property cycle. It is not a dip before the recovery. House prices, in real terms, may not recover for a very long time. If at all. I know how that sounds. But the situation demands honesty, not comfort. Five Fires. One Room. What we are living through is not a single crisis. It is something far more dangerous: a  doom loop , in which multiple civilisational crises interact, amplify, and accelerate one another in ways that no government on earth currently has the policy framework to manage. Think about what is already in motion. Trump’s geopolitical adventurism is cutting off food aid to sub-Saharan Africa. That hunger becomes migration. That ...
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Stolen Ground: Land Rent, Gaza's Gas, and Why Ordinary Israelis Are Being Played into Supporting Genocide

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  There is an economic argument about the Israel-Palestine conflict that seldom gets made. Not because the evidence for it is weak. Because the evidence for it is uncomfortable for nearly everyone involved: for the Israeli right, for the liberal Western donors funding the conflict, for the Palestinian leadership, and for the Western left that prefers its analysis simple and its villains easy to identify. The argument is this. The engine driving the dispossession of Palestinians, the rise of the Israeli far right, and the conditions that produced the Gaza genocide is not, at its root, religious or ethnic or even purely ideological. It is economic. Specifically, it is the economics of land rent: who captures the value that communities and public investment create, who gets locked out of it, and what desperate people do when the ground beneath them has been turned into an asset class they can never afford. This is not a comfortable argument for anyone. But it is, I think, the corr...
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The Landlord’s Invisible Hand - What WOuld the UK Look Like with a Sensible Land Policy

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There is a peculiar kind of theft that takes place every single day across Britain, and almost nobody notices it. It happens in city centres where car parks sit on prime urban land, in commuter belts where crumbling houses occupy plots that could house ten families, in rural counties where shooting estates sprawl across hundreds of thousands of acres producing almost nothing, and in market towns where boarded-up high streets rot quietly next to empty plots held by developers waiting for prices to rise still further. The theft is not committed by any single villain. It is committed by the structure of our tax system, which has, for well over a century, systematically rewarded the holding of land over the productive use of it.   Consider the basic arithmetic of Britain’s land. The United Kingdom covers roughly 24 million hectares. Of that, approximately 17 million hectares, around 71 percent, is classified as agricultural land. Urban areas, including everything from city cent...
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