Quietly, quietly, a revolution is taking place in Britain. Its forum is neither the streets nor the barricades, but committee meetings chaired by economists and overseen by politicians. The Bank of England, now in its 25th year of independence from …
Capitalism is dead: long live Technofeudalism
I once heard an elderly Friedrich von Hayek begin a tirade against socialist planning with a charming personal tale. “The other day,” he said playfully, “I went into a shop. I left with an item that, previously, I had no …
Peter Thiel has launched a class war
“We’re building a city,” Dryden Brown declared last June, with the air of a man unfazed by the enormity of his words. “We’re building a city from scratch. Somewhere in the Mediterranean.” Brown, who has spent years explaining to investors …
The cult of CrossFit
What’s the point of physical exercise? What’s the purpose of heaving, puffing and snorting your way around a gym three or four times a week? Personal health, obviously. The opportunity for competition at a demanding level of physical engagement too. …
Digital oligarchs have weaponised the banks
The debanking of Nigel Farage demonstrates the power of a law that is already being enforced without having been formalised. Found guilty of crimes by state censors, secret committees of bureaucrats, or inscrutable algorithms, individuals can be disconnected and de-personed …
Barbie is Fight Club for women
Exactly how old is Barbie, anyway? I speak not of Barbie the product — though her birth in 1959 is a fascinating story — but Barbie the person, the character, the entity who exists in undying hot pink perpetuity, in …
The capitalists are circling over Ukraine
Two weeks ago, thousands of representatives from businesses and governments from across the world gathered in London to “support Ukraine’s recovery”. But was the gathering of all those Western corporate elites at the Ukraine Recovery Conference entirely altruistic? There are, …
How PwC captured Australia
PricewaterhouseCoopers claims it was created to fulfil one purpose: “To build trust in society and solve important problems”. Inevitably, its mission statement contains a list of platitudes explaining how it hopes to achieve this; among them is the insistence that …
The betrayal of white working-class men
Cards on the table: I’m a rampant opponent of white, bourgeois, male privilege. Events such as the Coronation, or another Biden-Trump stand-off, pull this lunacy into sharp focus. Yes, these ludicrous and deranged media-driven circuses may have little to do …
Workers have lost faith in money
Ten years ago, I was in a basement bar in Shoreditch, the fashionable part of London that had adopted the moniker “Silicon Roundabout” thanks to the confluence of tech firms there. I was speaking to one of the many salons …
America’s empire is bankrupt
Let’s start with the basics. Roughly 5% of the human race currently live in the United States of America. That very small fraction of humanity, until quite recently, enjoyed about a third of the world’s energy resources and manufactured products …
The next financial crisis will get ugly
This year’s banking crisis was never going to be 2008 redux — more like 2008, the sequel. And while the immediate crisis initially seemed to pass, as JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon said in his annual letter to shareholders, the …
We must become barbarians
Call me a cynic or an anarchist, but these days I find it impossible to trust anything which comes to me with a seal of authority stamped upon it. I’m not defending this as a healthy response. But it is …
Capitalist radicals will shatter the world
“We are back to the enigmatic pulse-beat of the messianic,” wrote the literary critic George Steiner a few months after the fall of the Berlin Wall. “No economist-pundit, no geopolitical strategist, no ‘Kremlinologist’ or socio-economic analyst foresaw what we are …
Christopher Wren: godfather of the technocrats
“You have, ladies and gentlemen, to give this much to the Luftwaffe: when it knocked down our buildings, it didn’t replace them with anything more offensive than rubble. We did that.” That was the famous barb which the then-Prince Charles …