Peter Smith

Two years of managed decline dressed as progress. The economics of poverty and rent extraction run on untouched. Keir Starmer stood outside Downing Street and told us Britain is fairer and stronger than it was two years ago. He said wages are rising, waiting lists falling, investment flowing, half a million children lifted out of poverty. He said this with a straight face. He did not mention Gaza. He did not mention the slow erosion of British influence in a world that has become visibly more dangerous. He did not mention that working people are being crushed by a tax system that punishes them for every hour they work and every pound they earn, while the unearned gains that flow to landowners and monopolists accumulate, largely untouched, behind the polished language of “growth” and “stability”. This Substack is reader-supported. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. What actually happened Prime Minister Keir Starmer's resignation sp...

Fred Harrison has identified that the markets rarely name the extraordinary valuations placed on SpaceX, Palantir and ChatGPT reflect not their earnings potential but their structural position as rent-extracting monopolies, the mechanism, he contends, through which future generations may find themselves permanently bound and enslaved. Fred Harrison does not do drama for its own sake. He is a careful man. He works from data, from history, from a body of economic theory that most mainstream commentators have either ignored or never encountered. So when he says something is happening, you should pay attention. This week, I sat down with Fred, and what he told me left me genuinely shaken. We started with the news everyone is now starting to notice. The Halifax, Nationwide and the Land Registry have all been stringing together consecutive months of house price falls. The pundits in the Guardian, the Express and the Telegraph are calling it a blip. A flat-lining. A mild correction before pri...

The UK housing market in mid-2026 is suspended in midair. The fundamental ground vanished months ago. Sellers are simply refusing to look down. In classic cartoons, Wile E. Coyote sprints off a cliff and runs on thin air. Gravity takes hold only when he looks down. We are witnessing a textbook market seizure. Real house prices have been falling almost continuously since early 2022. Nationwide data confirms they are down 17.4 per cent, dragging real values all the way back to 2003 levels. The most recent Nationwide figures, released at the start of June, show a 0.6 per cent monthly fall, the first monthly decline of 2026, with annual growth slowing sharply from 3 per cent to just 1.7 per cent. Yet sellers remain anchored to the peak. Zoopla reports 44 per cent of properties listed in the past three years failed to sell. Rightmove shows live listings at an 11-year high. Buyers are tapped out, affordability is broken, and transaction pipelines are frozen. Residential sales in England just...