My answer was yes, but I think that answer needs some explanation because the word “revolution” frightens people. It conjures up images of barricades, violence, the overthrow of governments and the destruction of existing institutions. That is one meaning of revolution, but it is not the only one, and it is not the meaning I have in mind.

The word revolution originally described turning or circular movement. That idea survives in the way we talk about something revolving.

Imagine turning something around. Turn it a little, and you see it from a slightly different angle. Turn it through 90 degrees, and the view changes considerably. Turn it through 180 degrees, and you see the opposite side. Turn it through 360 degrees, and you end up exactly where you started. The important point is that revolution can simply mean changing the position from which we look at something.

That is why I think we need a revolution. The worldview that dominates our politics and economics is not working. We know that because the evidence is all around us. We have failing public services, profound inequality, insecure employment, inadequate housing and millions of people struggling to make ends meet. At the same time, we face an environmental crisis that threatens the wellbeing of generations to come. Despite all this, governments repeatedly tell us they can do little or nothing to address these issues because, supposedly, there is no money available.

Changing the view

For decades, we have been told that markets know best, that governments should behave like households, that economic growth is the measure of success and that wealth is evidence of merit.

We have also been told that inequality is an unfortunate but necessary consequence of economic efficiency, while humanity can apparently continue consuming the resources of a finite planet without eventually confronting the consequences.

These ideas have become so familiar that they are rarely questioned. They provide the viewpoint from which much of our political debate takes place. Politicians argue about what should be done, but very often they do so without questioning the assumptions that determine what they think is possible. As a result, apparently different political programmes from supposedly differing political parties can end up offering surprisingly similar answers.

Suppose, instead, that we turned some of those assumptions through 90, or even 180 degrees.

Instead of asking how much economic growth we can generate, suppose we asked what the economy is for.

Instead of assuming that the economy exists to serve markets, suppose we recognised that markets should exist to serve people.

And instead of treating government as a burden on the private sector, suppose we understood that government exists to provide the collective goods and services that markets cannot, or will not, supply adequately.

We could turn our understanding of money around as well. Instead of pretending that money is the ultimate constraint on what a government with its own currency can do, we could recognise that the real constraints are the people, skills, energy and natural resources available to us.

Instead of imagining that taxation provides the money that such a government spends, we could recognise that government spending necessarily puts its currency into circulation before taxation can take it back.

And instead of describing the national debt only as a burden, we could recognise that it only represents financial assets and savings held by people and institutions outside government.

We could apply the same shift in perspective to inequality.

Instead of asking how we can make the wealthy richer in the hope that some benefit might eventually reach everyone else, we could ask how everyone might have the resources they need to survive and thrive.

Instead of treating poverty as an individual failing, we could ask why an economy capable of producing enormous wealth distributes access to that wealth so badly.

The world looks very different when viewed from these angles. Things that we have been told are impossible suddenly become possible, while things that we have been told are inevitable become choices. That is precisely why changing perspective can be revolutionary.

Change is inevitable

There is another reason why I think the word revolution is appropriate. Change is inevitable. No society stands still, and neither does any economy. Technology changes, populations change, political expectations change, and, whether we like it or not, the climate is changing. Our understanding of the world changes as well.

The choice we face is not, therefore, between change and no change. It is between managing change deliberately and having change imposed upon us.

Trying to preserve the status quo is not necessarily the cautious option when that status quo is itself creating instability. An economic system that generates extreme inequality, environmental damage, political alienation and failing public services cannot be made sustainable simply by insisting that there is no alternative to it.

The revolution I want is not, then, about tearing everything down. It is about turning around and looking again. It is about questioning assumptions that have become so familiar that we no longer notice that they are assumptions. It is about asking what the economy is actually for, and recognising that economics should serve people rather than requiring people to serve an economic theory.

Most of all, it is about accepting that our survival and our ability to thrive depend upon respecting the ecological limits of the planet on which every economy ultimately depends. Once that is understood, many of the priorities that currently dominate economic policy have to change.

A revolution

So, do we need a revolution? I think we do.

But the first revolution we need is in the way we think. Change the angle from which we look at the world, and different possibilities become visible. Once those possibilities can be seen, the claim that there is no alternative begins to fall apart.

That change of perspective might be the most important revolution of all.

The philosopher David Chalmers gave this difficulty a name in a lecture delivered in Tucson, Arizona, in 1994. He developed the argument in his 1995 paper, ⁠Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness.

Chalmers distinguished between what he called the “easy problems” and the “hard problem” of consciousness.

That said, the easy problems are not that easy, as far as I can see. They include explaining how the brain:

• processes information,
• directs attention,
• stores memories,
• produces speech and
• controls behaviour.

They are called easy only because they can be investigated using scientific methods.

The hard problem is quite different. It asks why those physical processes are accompanied by subjective experience:

• Why does seeing red feel like something?
• Why does pain hurt?
• Why, in fact, is there a first-person experience of being alive at all?

In other words, science might eventually describe every process taking place in a person’s brain while still failing to explain in any way what it is like to be that person.  That distinction is obviously relevant to discussion on the existence of ADHD.

ADHD as seen from the outside

The public debate about ADHD is dominated by the easy problems such as:

• How many people have been diagnosed?
• What do brain scans show?
• Do diagnostic criteria identify a distinct group?
• Are private clinics diagnosing too many people?
• Do stimulant medications work?
• Could modern schools, workplaces, smartphones or social media be creating the behaviours now labelled as ADHD?

These are all legitimate questions. I do not dispute that.  They are worthy of being investigated. But none of these questions captures the experience of living with ADHD, which is precisely why Channel 4’s programme on this issue failed.

This should be obvious.

An observer can see someone arriving late, but they do not necessarily see the desperate attempt to organise time that preceded it.

They might also see a person who has failed to complete a task, but they do not experience the paralysis of knowing exactly what must be done while being unable to begin doing it, from which I do not suffer but which I know many with ADHD do.

Again, they might see distraction, but they do not feel attention being pulled simultaneously in several directions.

Most especially, and here I refer to what was said about Chris Packham, they might see someone apparently functioning well, but they do not see the exhaustion required to maintain that appearance.

I could keep going: I think you get my point.  The external behaviour is observable. The internal cost is not.

This is why accounts of ADHD based entirely on observed behaviours are inadequate. A person’s visible performance says little about the amount of effort, anxiety, self-monitoring and compensation required to produce it. Success does not prove the absence of ADHD. It may instead reveal the scale of the masking and coping strategies that the person has developed.

The same problem arises when assessing treatment. An outsider may ask whether medication makes someone more productive, but that can be a misplaced criterion for success, since it is externally focused. The person taking a drug might want to do so because they value a quieter mind, a greater sense of choice, or the ability to direct attention rather than being driven by it. Those outcomes are real, even if they are difficult to measure from the outside. Others, more importantly, may use different criteria. Almost by definition, neurodiverse people are not homogeneous.

A social construct is not an invention

This has particular relevance for the suggestion used by some critics that ADHD is a social construct. This is often presented as if it proves that ADHD is imaginary. It proves nothing of the sort.

ADHD is undoubtedly a category created by people. The boundaries of the diagnosis, as is widely recognised, have been agreed by committees. The criteria have changed over time. They may remain inadequate. We can hope they improve. But the reality is, social expectations influence which differences are noticed and when they become disabling.

But every medical diagnostic category is, in this sense, a construct. A category is a tool used to group experiences, signs and symptoms that appear to have something significant in common. This is the most that can be said for the term cancer, as I noted previously. The category is not the person, and the map is not the territory. That, though, does not mean there is no territory.

The demands of a neoliberal society may make ADHD-related difficulties more visible. They may also make those difficulties more disabling. But social circumstances that shape how a condition is expressed do not mean the underlying differences are unreal. As an example, short-sightedness is more disabling in a society that expects people to read. That does not mean short-sightedness is invented by books.

Nor does the hard problem prove that ADHD must have one particular biological cause. That could not settle every diagnostic dispute, validate every assessment or show that medication is always appropriate. Subjective experience has to be considered alongside developmental history, functional impairment, alternative explanations and the available clinical evidence.

What the hard problem does show is the limitation of any account that treats externally observed behaviour as the whole reality of ADHD.

There is no brain scan, blood test or questionnaire that can fully communicate what it feels like to inhabit another person’s mind. That is true of ADHD, autism, depression, pain and consciousness itself.

The unavoidable conclusion is that first-person testimony matters. It is not infallible, but neither is observation from the outside. A serious assessment must bring together what can be observed, what has happened throughout the person’s life, how they function in different circumstances and what they report experiencing.

The debate about ADHD therefore cannot, then, be resolved by standing outside people’s lives and declaring that their experience is merely a product of fashion, social media or inadequate discipline, as some appear to be doing by depending solely on easy questions.

The hardest question is, in fact, not whether an outsider can see ADHD. Those limiting themselves to the easy questions clearly cannot. It is, instead, what it feels like to live with the ADHD mind, every day, over a lifetime, and which explanation best makes sense of that experience. And any debate that refuses to ask that question is not a serious debate about ADHD at all.

Note: I must acknowledge the input of Jacqueline Murphy into this post. I would not have known about the hard problem if she had not drawn my attention to it. This article would not have existed without our discussion of it. 

The question for everyone going to university this autumn is not whether you will get to the end of your course, but whether your university will.

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DEBATE AMMUNITION

Can the USA Go Bust?

Funding the Future | August 2026

Topic

Whether the US government can go bankrupt, and why the real danger is not government insolvency but a financial market collapse that could trigger recession or depression, absent any government plan to prevent it.

The video that this Debate Ammunition supports is available here.

The Core Argument

The USA cannot go bust. Every cent of US government debt is denominated in US dollars, which the US government can always create. Modern monetary theory provides the simple, correct answer here: a currency-issuing government is never technically insolvent in its own currency. Neoliberal economics cannot explain this, but the operational reality is clear.

The real danger is not government insolvency but the impending collapse of US financial markets. Share prices are near all-time highs, investment funds have almost no cash left, government bonds are being sold to fuel share purchases, and the FT has concluded that US markets have lost touch with reality. A US hedge fund lost $15 billion in July, an all-time monthly record for a single institution. These are the conditions in which bubbles burst.

When financial markets crash, 'animal spirits' collapse with them. Spending falls, companies fail, banks need bail-outs, and the real economy is dragged down. Only governments can break that spiral, but governments currently show no awareness of, or preparation for, the coming crisis. Without intervention, a 1930s-style depression is a genuine risk.

The Argument Structure

Step 1 — Currency sovereignty settles the debt question:

Every cent of US government debt is denominated in US dollars. The US creates dollars. It can therefore always settle its debts. This is not a policy choice or a magic trick; it is the straightforward operational reality that modern monetary theory describes. Neoliberal economics cannot account for it, but the fact remains: the USA cannot go bust.

Step 2 — US financial markets have lost touch with reality:

Share prices are near all-time highs. Investment funds hold a near-record proportion of assets in equities and have almost no cash left. Government bonds are being sold to fuel further share purchases. A US hedge fund lost $15 billion in a single month in July, an all-time record for such an institution. The FT has concluded, in its own language, that US financial markets are 'nuts'.

Step 3 — Bubbles always burst; a trigger point will be reached:

The current bubble will burst, because bubbles always do. The trigger could be something Trump does, an Israeli military escalation, the collapse of a major financial institution, a share price correction, or a major tech accounting scandal. The specific cause is unknowable; the eventual outcome is not. The promise that 'this time it's different' is always made and always wrong.

Step 4 — The real risk is a depression, because governments are unprepared:

When markets crash, “animal spirits”, as Keynes called them, crash with them. Spending falls, companies fail, banks require bail-outs, and the real economy is dragged down. In 2008 governments intervened. This time, neoliberal ideology has deepened since 2008, and governments currently show no sign of planning for a crisis. Without coordinated government action, a 1930s-style depression is a genuine and preventable risk.

Their Argument → Your Rebuttal

The One-Liners

“The USA cannot go bust: every dollar of its debt is denominated in a currency it can always create.”

“The risk is not that the US government runs out of money: it is that it runs out of the political will to save us.”

“Every bubble in history has promised that this time it's different. That promise has never once been right.”

“When markets crash, animal spirits crash with them, and only governments have the power to revive them.”

“We are in the summer of 1939: the storm is plainly approaching, and no one in power appears to be preparing.”

Questions to Ask

If the US government cannot go bust because it issues its own currency, why does mainstream economics keep treating its debt as though it could?

The FT has said US financial markets are 'nuts'. If that is true, who benefits from continuing to pretend they are rational and sustainable?

After 2008, governments intervened decisively to prevent a depression. What is your plan if governments this time are ideologically committed to not acting?

If a trigger point for a financial crisis is reached how quickly do you believe the contagion would spread to the real economy, and why?

Further Reading

The programme appeared to set out to prove three things.

The first was that ADHD does not result in identifiable changes in a person’s brain, and as such it cannot exist.

Secondly, and as a result, it suggested that treating what is described as ADHD with drugs is not beneficial. In doing so, it only looked at children. The possibility that ADHD might continue into adulthood and have serious consequences there appeared not to have occurred to those taking part.

The third was to claim that an exploitative industry has developed over the last decade or so, offering ADHD diagnoses to people who do not need them because ADHD is not a neurodevelopmental concern. This was described as neoliberal.

The uncritical viewer might think that the programme achieved its goals. The evidence supporting these hypotheses seemed overwhelming. However, there are very simple explanations for that.

No evidence was presented from anyone who suffered from the condition, except a 10-year-old boy.

Nor was any sought from any psychologist who believes that the condition exists and could explain why.

Nor was evidence offered that shows that, at the population level, evidence for the existence of ADHD does exist, even though it cannot provide a diagnostic test using individual brain scans.

Nor was there any explanation provided for the characteristic traits found amongst ADHD sufferers suggesting differences in how dopamine and noradrenaline systems are regulated and used within their particular brain networks.

In other words, this was an argument won because the counterargument was never presented. It was as if this was a football match that a team was so desperate to win that it inadvertently forgot to invite any opponents. That is how biased the presentation was.

For a regulated public service broadcaster to present such a piece on an issue of significance for so many people, without seeking to offer a balanced view when drawing conclusions, was shocking. This might have been expected of GB News when discussing immigration, but not of Channel 4 when discussing an issue of genuine medical concern. The programme's failure to offer balance may be the best evidence that it did not believe its own arguments.

Some other issues stood out. The first was what I thought to be the abuse of the child on whom an experiment was conducted that required him to go cold turkey on three fronts simultaneously as a result of the withdrawal of his ADHD medication, the denial of access to his electronic devices and a ban on eating sugary stimulants. Could he really have provided informed consent to take part in this way? I question the ethics of that. It is also worth noting that the experiment failed: he ended up back on the drugs the programme wanted to prove he did not need.

The second was the total absence of any discussion on adult ADHD. The issue was totally ignored, except when Max Permerton was diagnosed as having ADHD - evidence for which he inadvertently supplied, in my opinion - but which he denied, and then, unethically, in that case, took the prescribed drugs he had been given for it.

The third was that the possibility of living with ADHD without drugs was not discussed, and yet that is what most people do. The diagnosis is vital to their understanding of their condition, and to their learning how to adapt to it. The value in this was never mentioned. The arrogance in that was staggering. This was an exercise in psychologists granting themselves the power to decide whether other people's lived experiences exist, which they appeared to deny just because they did not have them. I think that was abusive. Just imagine they were deciding instead whether people suffered racism or not, and they were all white. The parallel is obvious, as is the potential for abuse.

But perhaps most staggeringly, the programme did, in reality, and by properly interpreting its proposed closing recommended course of action, conclude that ADHD not only does exist, but requires radical adjustment within society if those with it are to be treated appropriately.

How do I know this? That is because the programme argued that massive reform to the UK education system is required to manage the symptoms that are collectively called ADHD, the existence of which it denied.

It said schools should devote much more time to arts and creativity, to time in nature and on physical activity, and, by implication, reduce the time spent on academic disciplines.

I have sympathy with some of that. I am a critic of the current education system,  because it does not meet the needs of children with autism and ADHD, and of all others as well, as well as the needs of society. But I would not advocate such reform primarily - as this programme did - to manage a condition that I simultaneously claim does not exist. That they did so was quite bizarre.

Conclusions

So, what is there to conclude?

The most obvious thing to say is that this was a massively arrogant and profoundly unbalanced programme, clearly intended to present a biased view on a subject where the opinion presented will cause significant harm to a very large number of people in the UK. That, I think, was unforgivable.

Secondly, we were presented with a range of opinions which were staggeringly ill-considered. The argument that ADHD is just a social construct was presented as if this was an isolated fact, when, as I have noted on this blog, all medical diagnoses are social constructs, as is medicine itself, and as, of course, are both psychiatry and psychology. Those making the claim appeared unaware of this fact. Their lack of awareness shone through their claim and discredited the programme, when much of its argument hung on it.

Third, the programme seemed to argue that ADHD exists to exploit vulnerable people by charging them for diagnosis and drugs, and is, as a result, a neoliberal construct. What no one then mentioned was that the conditions that they suggested create the environment requiring radical reform to our education system, arising as a consequence of people having the characteristics that are described as ADHD, are all caused by neoliberal enterprise. They range from ultra-processed food and electronic devices to social alienation and much more.

The finger of blame was pointed very firmly in the wrong direction in that case. Those who have identified and seek to address issues arising from ADHD were blamed as being neoliberal, when what they have actually identified are faults caused by neoliberalism. A DARVO effect appeared to be in action in that case, which happens when a standard right-wing response of 'denial, attack, and reversing the victim and offender' is in operation.

Fourthly, for reasons I’ve already noted, drawn from the conclusions that the programme itself reached, ADHD is real, and does require accommodation in society, but not necessarily through the use of drugs on all occasions.

Lastly, neurodivergence needs to be much better treated in the media when those making programmes such as this know that politicians intent on abusing minorities in society will use them as weapons against those they deem to be “others”. In that sense, this programme was deeply ethically and politically irresponsible. Channel 4 should hang its head in shame and make amends by offering an informed programme on the reality of neurodivergence and how we should adapt society to assist those with such conditions.

In case you were wondering, the Strait of Hormuz is still closed. The US economy is propped up by an AI buzz that is increasingly fuelled by vast off-balance-sheet exposures. The Fed is possibly going to raise interest rates. China’s economy is still slowing. Yields everywhere are climbing, and Japan is suffering a bond crisis. Private credit is stressed. Virtually every measure of leverage is engorged. Asian geopolitics is messy and getting messier. Europe is Europe, and the UK is being particularly British.

And as they want to show, US investment funds appear to have record-low cash levels at present, record-high levels of exposure to the US equity markets, and without apparent exception, everyone is betting that the euphoric rise in those markets will continue.

The belief is that this time everything is different.

And as the article points out, that's nuts.

This cannot continue. A system put into this state will break. That is not speculation. It is a statement of fact. That only question is when. And as even FT Alphaville thinks, soon has to be the answer to that.

My sense that we are living through the equivalent of the summer of 1939 at this moment, waiting for the storm to break, grows by the day.

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Around 30% of the electorate now supports openly racist political parties that are deliberately threatening many in this country. The rights of disabled and neurodivergent people are being questioned. Hostility toward the LGBTQ+ community is rising. These communities are being targeted.

The resulting fear is not accidental. It is deliberately manufactured by politicians through threatening language and policy. And the people whose job it is to defend us, inclduing the Labour leadership, and Andy Burnham in particular, have met it with silence, inaction, and cowardice.

When Jason Arday died, Burnham offered no condemnation of those who had harassed him and has proposed no new legal or regulatory protections in response. He has not even said he might consider them. That silence is what allows intimidation to become politically normalised.

This video argues we need a radical new definition of defence: one that protects every citizen from fear and intimidation within our own society, not just from threats across our borders. Our current political leadership - from Labour and the Tories - is failing to provide that defence, and it is time that it did.

This is the audio version:

There is no Debate Ammunition for this video. I did not have time to make it,

This is the transcript:

Who is defending the people of the UK? Prime Ministers in this country, and we’ve had a lot of them of late, say that defence is their first duty, and I tend to agree with them. But defence does surely mean more than protection from foreign enemies. Serious threats to people are now arising within the UK. Millions of people have reason to feel threatened. So what does the duty to defend really mean, and who is standing up to do it?

The threat is increasingly coming from within the UK. Racism is fuelling support for significant political movements in this country. Around 30% of people are supporting openly racist political parties, and disabled and neurodivergent people are also seeing their rights questioned, whilst LGBTQ+ people face a culture increasingly hostile to their rights. Other ethnic minority communities are also being targeted. There are therefore millions of people in the UK who are living in fear because of the threats that they face, and I stress we are talking about many millions of people.

Around 15% of people in the UK are thought to be neurodivergent. That’s around 10 million people.

Around 2 million people at least are thought to be in the LGBTQ+ community.

And around 16% of the UK population is from non-white ethnic communities.

There are also white minority communities to consider as well.

There are overlaps between these figures, but without a doubt, we are therefore talking about more than 10 million people who feel threatened at this point in time, and maybe 20 million or more.

Fear among these people is being deliberately created. Politicians are threatening to take away the support from some of these people. Politicians are threatening some people’s rights to live here, and deliberately chosen political language is making people frightened. The result is an intimidatory and hostile environment for millions of people, and that fear exists whether or not every threat is eventually carried out.

In my opinion, defence is about something much more than the freedom from physical threats. It is about the freedom from fear. Any government’s duty is about more than the protection of our borders. It’s about the need to protect people from intimidation. People who are at risk of that need protection from deliberately induced fear. People who are at risk need protection from political cultures that deliberately threaten their security, as many are now doing by threatening to forcibly remove them from the UK.

This makes this a question of UK national defence, but where is our Prime Minister when people are being intimidated? What is he saying, and why is he letting politicians promote openly racist policies? I have no answers to those questions.

At the same time, he isn’t answering questions about the rights of LGBTQ+ people, and he is letting people demonise those with disabilities and those who are neurodivergent and is saying nothing of any consequence in their defence.

Where is then the government plan and the government investment to defend all of those who are under threat at this moment, who are living in this country?

Where is the unequivocal defence from Labour and the Conservatives, the two parties who think they have the natural right to govern this country, when people’s right to live in fear is under threat? Political leadership against these threats is missing.

Those who are threatening people should be challenged by those who are our actual political leaders. Our Prime Minister and the leader of the opposition should be leading those challenges to the racists, but they’re not.

Kemi Badenoch almost aligns with these policies.

Andy Burnham is too frightened to call them out.

They are not calling out intimidation when it is being used as a political strategy. They are tolerating it, and yet millions - more than 10 million, maybe as many as 20 million people - are suffering as a result.

And they are not willing to confront those who are promoting these policies because they themselves are living in fear, and that failure on their part leaves vulnerable people increasingly exposed.

In this context, the response to Jason Arday’s death matters.

Andy Burnham said that we needed time to reflect upon this. He did not condemn those who hounded, abused and harassed Arday, literally to his death.

He did not say that the campaign against him must never happen again.

He did not propose the revival of the Leveson Inquiry into media abuses.

He did not propose new legal protections against such attacks.

He is not then defending the people of the UK. Instead, he appears to be a coward, too frightened to confront those who intimidate. He has let himself be constrained by the right-wing media who have perpetrated many of the abuses about which I am talking. He is then part of the problem.

Meanwhile, threats against minorities are becoming politically normalised and proposals to force people from the country involving coercion are also being normalised. And that threat of coercion is itself a form of violence being threatened against people who live here. But about that, Andy Burnham appears to have nothing to say.

This country is becoming more dangerous as a result. Recent events have exposed the scale of hatred now being expressed. Social media has revealed people doubling down on their extremist beliefs in the aftermath of Jason Arday’s death. Millions of people who have good reason to expect the state to defend them are instead seeing political power contributing to their fear. That represents a profound moral failure in our politics.

Where is the leadership at this moment? That is the question I’m asking. It is not coming from Andy Burnham. He is revealing his true colours. He is one of those who will go along with abuse. It is largely absent as well from his Labour Party colleagues, particularly at cabinet level. We have to rely on people like Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London, and a small number of backbenchers to be the exceptions to this rule within the Labour Party. And amongst the Conservatives, no voice is being raised at all as far as I can hear. Political silence from these people is allowing intimidation to become increasingly acceptable.

Britain now needs a defence policy that protects people from fear, and that defence policy must include protection against intimidation within our society.

The government must defend people’s rights to be who they are.

Politicians who promote anxiety, fear, and dread must be challenged.

Some of their language must be made illegal.

Some of the actions of our newspapers must be prohibited.

Radical change is required to recognise this duty on the part of government. The question is, when will we get the defence policy we actually need in this country? The defence policy that guarantees that people who live here can do so free from fear? And when will we see an end to the dithering of people like Burnham who say they have a duty to defend people, but are letting them live in fear?

That’s my question. What’s yours? What are your comments? There’s a poll down below. Tell us what you think. Please do like and share this video if you do indeed like it. And please do subscribe to our channel and ring that bell so that you’re told when we make new videos. And if you’d like to buy us a coffee, that would be great.

Poll

In advance, and in the now-accustomed fashion whenever neoliberals launch an attack on minority concerns, The Guardian has published a promotional article with these headlines:

Britain’s housing market is locked in its weakest August since 2018, as sellers slash their prices in search of a buyer.

New data from Rightmove this morning shows that the average price of a newly-listed home in Britain fell by 2% this month, to £364,999. That’s a drop of £7,360, much larger than in a typical August.

The decline means average asking prices are now 1.0% lower than a year ago, as mortgage rate rises in recent months have cooled the market.

What is happening? I suggest that three things are.

Firstly, confidence across the economy is falling. This is reducing house prices.

Secondly, credit may be harder to find in a period of uncertainty. I cannot prove that, but I think it is possible, especially if mortgage valuers are downgrading their reports for these purposes.

Thirdly, at the top end of the market, government economic policy around migration is having a significant impact upon the market, not because of anything to do with tax, but because of the creation of a hostile environment. This is being seen in the highest house prices. The average house price in Kensington and Chelsea, which hosts an international community, apparently fell by £95,000 last month alone. This is a case where impacts do ripple down the market.

What is the overall impact of that?

First, this looks like a sign that the recession I’ve been talking about is beginning.

Second, it is a sign that nothing the government is doing is affecting consumer sentiment. If Andy Burnham wants to spend his time playing on the peripheries of the issues, this is unsurprising.

Thirdly, the sign is that racism has a price, and it is going to be very real. Falling house prices are not a disaster, but a hostile environment is.

I stress, these are my interpretations, but nothing here suggests to me that anything good is going on in the UK economy or its prospects.

One response to that came from someone called Lucy Johnstone, who, with John Cromby, has contributed to the debate on this issue through the site ⁠Mad in the UK.  They have questioned the way in which autism and ADHD are understood, diagnosed and discussed, and have explicitly located the rise of the neurodiversity movement within the context of neoliberal capitalism. They suggest that the rapid growth in autism and ADHD diagnoses can, at least in part, be understood as a consequence of neoliberalism, while neurodivergence itself has, in their opinion, subsequently been commodified and marketed, making it in part a neoliberal construct.

Lucy Johntone has asked me to discuss that issue, and I may, but my thinking is taking me in a different direction. The question I increasingly want to ask is not what neoliberalism has done to neurodivergence, which is what she and John Cromby are asking. I want to ask what neurodivergence might do to neoliberalism.

Seeing things differently

Prof Simon Baron-Cohen has recently made the point that autistic people have a particular capacity to see things differently, and that this difference has contributed significantly to human progress. That suggestion matters. If everyone sees a problem in broadly the same way, they are likely to reproduce broadly the same answers. Progress frequently requires someone to notice what everyone else has missed.

This is where I think Claude Shannon's work offers a useful metaphor. Shannon helped found modern information theory. His great insight was into the problem of communicating information when a signal is surrounded and disrupted by noise. The problem is not simply whether information exists. It is whether the information that matters can still be recovered when noise interferes with its transmission. Shannon, who worked for IBM, developed this idea in the context of telecommunications, but it has ramifications way beyond that.

My suggestion is that we live in an extraordinarily noisy society. We are overwhelmed with news, social media, advertising, political claims, economic forecasts, think-tank reports, corporate public relations, government announcements, opinion polls and commentary. There has probably never been more information available to ordinary people.

And yet more information does not necessarily produce more understanding. Sometimes it does the opposite. The problem is that the signal we need to hear can disappear into that noise.

That possibility matters politically because creating noise can be an extraordinarily effective way to exercise power. You do not have to suppress inconvenient information if you can overwhelm it. You do not have to demonstrate that an alternative is wrong if you can fill the available space with claims that it is impossible, unaffordable, dangerous or absurd. This is one of the ways in which neoliberalism maintains its power.

We are repeatedly told that governments must balance their books.

We are told that taxes pay for government spending.

We are told that the national debt is a burden on future generations.

We are told that markets allocate resources efficiently.

We are told that the private sector creates wealth whilst the state consumes it.

We are told that there is no money for the things society needs.

The repetition matters. Eventually these claims cease to sound like arguments at all. They become the background noise of political life. They become what supposedly sensible people know to be true.

And then someone asks, is that actually true? That person can be remarkably disruptive.

Hearing the signal

This is where neurodivergence might have political significance that has been largely overlooked.

I am not suggesting that every autistic person possesses some extraordinary ability to discover truth. Autism is far too varied for any such claim to make sense. Nor are autistic people immune from ideology, error or prejudice. The argument is subtler than that. What I am suggesting is that some characteristics associated with autism can produce a different relationship with information.

There can be intense attention to detail.

There can be a strong desire for consistency.

There can be an ability to concentrate on a subject for extraordinarily long periods.

There can be an unwillingness to ignore an anomaly simply because everyone else appears content to do so.

There can also be less willingness to accept an argument merely because the person making it possesses status or authority.

What looks like an insignificant detail to most people can then become impossible for someone else to ignore.

Why doesn’t that number add up?

Why does today’s explanation contradict yesterday’s?

Why is everyone making an assumption that nobody has demonstrated to be true?

Why are we told that something cannot be done when the evidence suggests that it can?

Why does everyone else seem willing to move on when the question has not actually been answered?

These can be irritating questions for those in authority.

They can also be profoundly important ones.

Pattern recognition is the key to this understanding, not who says it.

In Shannon’s terminology, the noise may have overwhelmed the communication channel for most people, but some can still detect the signal. In this context, the important point is that the signal is unusual and it needs an unusual antenna to notice it. Neurodivergent people tend to have that ability

That might be one reason why people who think differently have contributed disproportionately to intellectual, scientific, artistic and social change. Progress requires somebody to notice that the accepted explanation does not work.

Adding to the mix

ADHD might add another dimension to this. The capacity of those with this condition to make rapid associations between apparently unrelated ideas, combined in some people with periods of intense concentration, means they can see patterns that conventional thinking separates into different intellectual boxes.

The combination of these characteristics in AuDHD might also sometimes produce a particularly interesting combination. The mind notices connections that others have filtered out and then refuses to leave the resulting problem alone.

These characteristics can undoubtedly create difficulties. But describing them only in terms of deficit misses something important. They can also produce knowledge, and that can result in action.

Why neoliberalism should fear difference

That brings me back to neoliberalism. Neoliberal power depends upon much more than markets. It depends upon controlling what can be thought about markets, government, money, taxation, wealth and power. It has created an extraordinarily successful system for doing this.

Universities, economics departments, think tanks, newspapers, broadcasters, financial institutions, politicians and corporations continually reproduce remarkably similar assumptions about how the economy supposedly works. That does not require conspiracy. It requires conformity.

People learn what respectable opinion sounds like. They learn which questions serious people are permitted to ask. They learn which ideas are described as credible and which are dismissed before discussion begins. They adjust what I call their priors to match these expectations. Most importantly, they learn what they are not supposed to notice.

This is why neurodivergent thinking might be much more politically significant than neoliberal accounts of neurodivergence allow.

Someone who does not process social conformity in the expected way can be difficult to discipline intellectually.

The person who notices the contradiction cannot necessarily be persuaded to ignore it simply because everyone else does.

The person who becomes intensely interested in the problem may spend years examining it.

And the person who can still hear the signal when everyone else has become overwhelmed by the noise is potentially dangerous to any hierarchy whose power depends upon maintaining that noise.

This, then, is where I depart from Johnstone and Cromby. Their work asks whether neoliberal society has helped create the circumstances in which behaviours become categorised as autism and ADHD, and whether the neurodiversity movement can, and has, itself reproduced neoliberal ideas.

I want to ask another question. What if some of the differences we call neurodivergence are not products of neoliberalism at all, but are instead amongst the cognitive differences that make resistance to neoliberalism possible?

Then the question changes completely. Instead of asking whether the neurodivergent person can function successfully within the existing system, we should ask what that person might perceive that the existing system cannot, or does not want to, see. That is a very different understanding of neurodivergence.

It does not deny disability. Nor does it deny the very real difficulties that neurodivergent people can experience in a world largely organised around neurotypical expectations. But it does reject the assumption that conformity with those expectations provides the appropriate measure of human capability.

Sometimes humanity needs the person who hears what everyone else hears.

Sometimes it needs the person who hears something different.

And sometimes, when the noise has become almost deafening, progress depends upon the person who can still hear the signal.

That might be why neurodivergence matters much more than neoliberalism would ever like us to realise.

DEBATE AMMUNITION

Where Are the Jobs?

The Truth About Reform's Welfare Policy

Funding the Future | August 2026

Topic

Robert Jenrick and Reform UK claim Britain has a welfare problem requiring millions of people to be removed from sickness and disability benefits. In reality, the UK has an employment problem: there are already too few jobs for those who want them, and government policy is actively suppressing demand for labour.

The video that this Debate Ammunition supports is available here.

The Core Argument

Britain does not have a welfare problem; it has an employment problem. With 5% unemployment, youth unemployment above 10%, and 2.5 unemployed people chasing every vacancy, there are no spare jobs for Jenrick's three million benefit claimants to take.

Encouraging someone to seek work does not create a job for them. The economy must generate sufficient demand for labour before those jobs can exist, a lesson from Keynes that Reform is ignoring entirely.

As the Bank of England deliberately suppresses demand and weakens the labour market through high interest rates, Reform wants to penalise people for not finding jobs that this same policy is preventing from being created. One arm of the state is destroying jobs while Reform's politicians demand people take them.

Cutting benefits does not get people into work; it just cuts their income. Lower incomes mean less spending, weaker local demand, fewer jobs in shops and businesses, and a deeper recession. Reform's policy would make the employment situation significantly worse, not better.

Key Statistics

The Argument Structure

Step 1 — There are no spare jobs:

UK unemployment is already running at around 5%, meaning one in twenty people who want a job cannot get one.

There are 2.5 unemployed people for every single vacancy.

Youth unemployment exceeds 10%.

Adding millions more benefit claimants to that queue cannot shrink it; only new jobs can do that.

Step 2 — Jenrick is confusing micro and macro:

Jenrick is talking about individuals and their circumstances when the problem is economy wide. Blaming people for failing to find jobs that do not exist is a category error. The solution to unemployment is macroeconomic demand stimulus, not microeconomic benefit sanctions. Keynes established this nearly a century ago.

Step 3 — The Bank of England is the hidden actor:

High interest rates deliberately reduce demand, discourage investment, constrain consumption and weaken the labour market. A weaker labour market is part of this policy. Reform is ignoring the fact that government-sanctioned Bank of England policy is actively creating the job shortage it then blames individuals for experiencing.

Step 4 — Cuts destroy demand and make things worse:

People who lose benefits do not find jobs; they lose income. They spend less. Local economies suffer. Businesses face weaker demand and employ fewer people. Far from solving unemployment, Reform's policy risks tipping the economy into a deeper recession and making the employment situation significantly worse than it already is.

Their Argument → Your Rebuttal

The One-Liners

“Getting people off benefits is not the same as getting them into work.”

“You cannot solve unemployment by adding more jobseekers.”

“The Bank of England is destroying jobs; Reform wants to punish people for not finding them.”

“Where there are 2.5 unemployed people per vacancy, the problem is not attitude, it is arithmetic.”

“Threatening incomes does not create jobs; it destroys the demand that sustains them.”

Questions to Ask

How many new jobs does Reform believe the economy will create, and what specific policy will generate them?

If there are already 2.5 unemployed people per vacancy, where exactly will your three million extra jobseekers find work?

Why is the Bank of England being allowed to deliberately suppress employment, while you simultaneously penalise people for not being employed?

What macroeconomic policy does Reform have that supports its microeconomic welfare culture, and why does it not appear in your published programme?

Further Reading

But there is a fundamental problem with that argument: where are the jobs?

UK unemployment is already around five per cent, youth unemployment is higher, vacancies have been falling, and there are substantially more unemployed people than available jobs.

You cannot solve an employment shortage simply by increasing the number of people required to look for work.

There is an even bigger contradiction. The Bank of England has been using high interest rates to suppress demand in the economy. Weaker demand means less investment, lower consumption and, ultimately, reduced demand for workers, as a result of deliberate government policy.

At the same time, just when Reform UK wants to push more people into the labour market while cutting the incomes of those who cannot find work, those benefit cuts would themselves reduce spending and demand, potentially destroying still more jobs.

None of this makes any macroeconomic sense. Getting someone, let alone millions of people, off benefits is not the same thing as getting them into employment. If Reform wants millions more people to work, it needs to explain where those millions of jobs will come from.

Until it does, one question remains unanswered: where are the jobs?

This is the audio version:

The Debate Ammunition for this video is available here.

This is the transcript:

Where are the jobs for the people that Robert Jenrick, on behalf of Reform UK, says should work?

Robert Jenrick has said Britain has a welfare problem. He wants to take maybe three million people off sickness and disability benefits.

He wants those who are not at work to go to work, and the problem is that actually there are no jobs for these people to do.

The truth is that we do not have a welfare problem, as he would put it in the UK. We have an employment problem.

He’s right to say that work can provide some people with an income, purpose, structure, and social life, as long as they aren’t working in the hostile environments that many people on minimum pay now suffer. But encouraging someone to work does not create a job for them, and there are no jobs for those people who are already unemployed in the UK.

So, isn’t Robert Jenrick pointing his finger in the wrong direction when he says we have a welfare problem? We don’t have that problem. We do have an employment problem, and he’s ignoring it.

There are already too few jobs in the UK for everyone who wants one. UK unemployment is now running at around five per cent. That’s one in twenty people in the UK who want a job, can’t get one. That does not include some of those people who are now receiving the benefits that Robert Jenrick wants to cut, and youth unemployment is more than 10%.

At the same time, vacancies have been falling as unemployment has risen. That’s what happens when you are running an economy that is heading towards a recession, as the UK is doing.

And there are now 2.5 unemployed people for every single vacancy inside the UK economy.

Reform will potentially want to add up to three million more people to that queue. Well, maybe a bit less than three million, because some of the people who they would cut benefits from are already working, but some of them would not be able to work if the benefit is cut because they wouldn’t be able to afford to get there. So the point is he would be adding very large numbers of people to that queue, and he is not going to support them with any benefits when they’re looking for a job because that is part of his penal attitude as well.

Jenrick is a deeply confused man.

He is confusing individual circumstances with economy-wide employment.

He’s blaming people for not being able to find jobs, but there are no jobs to be found.

Forcing people to chase jobs that don’t exist cannot create new employment. The economy must generate sufficient demand for labour before those jobs are offered. That’s a lesson that Lord Keynes taught us nearly a century ago, and this is the macroeconomic problem that Robert Jenrick is ignoring.

And he’s ignoring something else as well, and in this regard, he’s like every other politician. On this occasion, I have to admit, there is nothing unique about Jenrick.

He is blaming people for not finding work, and he is not suggesting how employers will create work. But what he is ignoring is the fact that the Bank of England is, on behalf of the UK government, pursuing policy that it is allowed to undertake, deliberately suppressing demand in the UK economy.

The high interest rate policy that it has put in place is deliberately designed to reduce demand in the UK economy to discourage investment and, as a consequence, to reduce disposable incomes and to constrain consumption and all of that is designed to weaken demand for employment in the UK by reducing the number of people that UK businesses want to employ because they haven’t got the demand to justify taking workers on.

A weaker labour market is part of this deliberate policy created by the Bank of England to supposedly tackle inflation. The policy fails to tackle inflation, but it is very effective at reducing the level of employment in the economy. The reason why we have exceptional rates of unemployment at this moment is precisely because the Bank of England is destroying our economy by choice and making us worse off than equivalent nations across Europe.

Government policy is therefore helping create the job shortage that we face in the UK economy at present, and Robert Jenrick is ignoring that fact. One part of the state is suppressing jobs, while politicians are demanding that people find them.

The Bank of England is weakening the demand for labour, and Robert Jenrick wants more people to be compelled to seek employment.

Without Reform changing its policy on macroeconomics, there is nothing to resolve this contradiction, and there is, as far as I can see, nothing in their macroeconomic policy that recognises that this problem exists.

In fact, what Jenrick is proposing would make the macroeconomic situation of the UK very much worse.

People losing their benefits would not find jobs. They would lose income. They would therefore spend less. Their local economies would suffer as a consequence. Lower spending would mean weaker demand in shops and for the businesses that supply them. Weaker demand can result in businesses employing fewer people, and Reform’s policies on removing disability and other health-related benefits could therefore make the employment situation very much worse in the UK rather than improving it, whilst tipping the whole of the economy into a deeper recession than that, which I think it is already facing.

This begins to look like an outright austerity policy in that case. Jenrick must therefore explain where he thinks the additional jobs that will support his policy will come from.

How many new jobs does Reform think that the economy can create?

Why does it think it will generate those new jobs when Reform is doing nothing to stimulate demand?

And how will deep government spending cuts create more employment, because that is what Reform is proposing as well?

Where will these jobs be located, and what will they pay? Those are questions that Jenrick is not answering.

And what macroeconomic policy supports Reform’s microeconomic culture?

These are the issues that Jenrick has to answer, but he isn’t. He is instead talking about people in isolation and benefits as if they are a problem, when they are, in fact, the solution that is keeping our economy going and supplying claimants with the support that they need.

Getting people off benefits is not the same as getting them into work. That is the false claim that Jenrick is implicitly making.

People who can and want to work should be supported to do so. I do not argue with that. That is a perfectly fair and reasonable objective for any government.

But you cannot solve unemployment by adding more jobseekers, and that is what Jenrick is proposing to do.

Threatening incomes at the same time does not create suitable employment opportunities. Instead, it destroys them.

Reform must explain then how it is going to create the millions more job opportunities that will be required for its policies to make any sense. Until then, the essential question remains:

• Where are the jobs that Robert Jenrick thinks people should be taking?
• And why is he going to penalise the most vulnerable unemployed people who are least likely to get a job with his policy?

These are the questions that Robert Jenrick needs to answer, and so far we have no clue at all from him, or anyone else within Reform, that they even recognise that these questions exist, let alone have made attempts to answer them.

That’s my opinion. What’s yours? There’s a poll down below. Let us have your comments. Please like and share this video. Please do subscribe to our channel and hit that bell button so you get notifications when we produce the next video. And if you’d like to buy Tom and me a coffee, because Tom’s the other side of the camera, that would be great, and that would help us make more videos in the future.

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