Funding the Future

Neoliberal politics promised growth, efficiency, and renewal. What it has delivered is inequality, insecurity, and democratic exhaustion. The right has failed. But, as this video explains, much of the left has no alternative to offer. Labour’s fiscal rules, growth-first economics, and treatment of public services as costs are not left-wing ideas – they are neoliberalism with a softer tone. No wonder most people are alienated from the whole political process: it has run out of road. Without care at the centre of economic thinking, markets fragment society, trust collapses, and democracy weakens. Better management is not enough. We need care as a new organising principle.

Is Nigel Farage the strongman who could deliver fascism to the UK? Or is that the wrong way to understand the danger he represents? In this video, I examine what fascism actually requires: ideology, discipline, institutions, and the willingness to rule. By those standards, Farage fails the test. But that does not make him harmless. Farage’s role is not to govern, but to corrode democracy, normalise cruelty, and weaken trust in institutions. Fascism often arrives after the wreckers, like him, have done their work. This is a video about why getting this distinction right matters, and why Farage remains a serious threat even without the qualities of a fascist leader.

A clear dive into how UK pensions are structured and which types carry most risk. It outlines why defined contribution plans shift investment risk onto savers. It examines where pension money is actually placed and argues much of it fuels financial speculation. It highlights how current tax rules and subsidies favour the wealthy and sketches policy changes under discussion.

We are told that artificial intelligence can replace human judgment. It cannot. In this video, I explain why AI does not care, why it cannot exercise judgment, and why deploying it at scale embeds neoliberal values into decision-making by design. Algorithms prioritise efficiency, cost reduction and rule-following. Judgment requires care, context, responsibility and democratic accountability. This is not a technical debate. It is a political choice about the kind of economy and society we want to live in.

Neoliberalism did not just “happen”. It was planned, funded, and carefully rolled out over decades. In this conversation with John Christensen, co-founder of the Tax Justice Network, we trace how the post-war economic settlement worked, why it delivered rising living standards and falling inequality, and how it was deliberately dismantled. We then discuss the role of think tanks, banks, tax havens, the Washington Consensus, and offshore finance in shifting power away from democracy and towards wealth extractors. And we also ask why neoliberalism survived even after the 2008 crash, before addressing what must replace it if democracy, equality and functioning markets are to be restored. This is not abstract economics. It is about power, politics, and the choices we were told we did not have.

People keep asking me what they can do to help change the conversation about economics, politics, and power. The answer is simpler, and more important, than most people expect. Social media now decides what people see, hear, and believe. If our ideas are not present there, they effectively do not exist. Silence is not neutral; it cedes the space to those who already dominate it. In this video, I explain why liking, sharing, commenting, and eventually creating your own posts are now forms of civic action. I also explain how algorithms really work, why perfection is not required, how AI can help without replacing judgement, and why consistency matters more than scale. This is a practical guide to becoming part of the conversation and shaping it.

The world is being shaped by three power blocs: the USA, Russia and China. Their politics look very different, but I  argue in this video that they have something profound in common. They are all built on division. America’s founding constitutional promise of equality was never universal. Marxism defines justice through conflict between classes. Neoliberalism claims wealth is merit and poverty is failure. All these systems end up privileging some people, excluding others, and turning difference into justification for domination. That is not sustainable. If we want a stable world, we need a politics of inclusion, not exclusion. We need a politics of care. And we need the world’s “middle states” to embrace it, because good ideas are the only real counterweight to imperial power.

A wide-ranging look at how a decades-long market-first ideology was built and why it is unraveling now. The conversation traces intellectual origins, the rise of rent extraction and tax havens, and how subscription models and financialisation warped markets. It ends by weighing whether the next era will prioritize care and democratic renewal or slide into authoritarian, extractive politics.

A crisis of preparedness and the collapse of a rules-based order set the scene. The conversation argues that defence depends on legitimacy, not just weapons. It explores what creates legitimacy: ethics, delivery, accountability and inclusion. A politics of care and messy coalition-building are offered as the path to resilient societies.

Donald Trump has declared a trade war on Europe, and he might still be threatening physical conflict over Greenland and Canada. That forces a question most politicians will dodge: how do we pay for a war economy, even if no shots are fired? John Maynard Keynes tackled exactly this issue in 1940. He argued that the real constraint is not money. The real constraints are resources, inflation, and fairness. In this video, I explain why Keynes believed wartime sacrifice is unavoidable, why inflation is a political danger, and why the burden must fall most heavily on those best able to carry it, who are the wealthy, through taxation, organised saving, and controlled interest rates. We are entering an era in which resilience matters more than market efficiency. The neoliberal model cannot survive this transition.