It is 05.20, I am in Addenbrookes Hospital, awaiting a CT scan for an abdominal issue that in pain terms is at present at least equal to the pain of a large gall stare before its removal 12 years ago. I admit this is a morphine enabled post -  having just had my second shot of the night. I will then be seeing surgeons.

Bizarrely, Thomas is also in this hospital this morning.  He broke three metatarsals last week and is seeing a consultant who will if he needs an operation this morning.

There is a video out this morning in YouTube. I suspect I will be otherwise engaged for a while and so I will get around to posting it here when  I can.

The rest of the week is up in the air. I will let you know more when I can.

An update: pretty impressively, all tests and scans done in 6 or so hours from arrival. But I am being admitted for two or three days for non-surgical treatment, which I am told is not fun, but should work.

Blog posts might happen as and when and videos might not for a few days, unless - if Thomas avoids surgery - we make clipped videos from earlier material. We will just have to do the best we can.

Iranian Forces Say They Closed Strait of Hormuz

Iran’s military command blamed the U.S., saying it failed to prevent Israel from violating the cease-fire in Lebanon. Mediators in Pakistan said “technical talks” between the U.S. and Iran to end the war would be held on Sunday.

As the FT added:

The [Iranian] Revolutionary Guards said on Saturday that the crucial waterway would be closed to all vessels as it accused Israel of “crimes” and the US of a “violation of its commitments” under a ceasefire.

As they noted:

Tehran had agreed to gradually reopen the strait under the terms of a memorandum of understanding it signed with Washington on Wednesday. That was meant to be followed by the start of nuclear talks in Switzerland on Friday. But Iran postponed negotiations because of the fighting between Israel and Hizbollah — its most important proxy — in Lebanon.

And who can blame them? If the US signs a deal and is unable to deliver on it, within hours of it supposedly being in place, what else can Iran do?

If the US is serious about its desire for peace and the need to avoid a world depression, which Trump says will happen without the Strait of Hormuz being reopened, then it has to demonstrate that it has the capacity to deliver on its promises, as the aggressor now seeking peace, or Iran has no choice but to respond. That it has done so is entirely predictable and reasonable.

I noted the euphoric response in markets to this supposed deal last week. When will they learn that all that Trump can deliver is publicity stunts to create market volatility from which his entourage can profit, and that peace in the Gulf is still a very long way off as yet? This conflict is a long way from. being over as yet, and probably won't be un til the US endorses severe economic and military sanctions on Israel, which I think are necessary now.

All my warnings about depression to come do, then, remain in place, only now with US Presidential backing, not that, I admit, such a thing counts for much.

There is, of course, some necessary truth in this. Extreme heat kills. It particularly threatens older people, young children and those with existing health conditions. Adapting to a hotter climate is not optional. If air conditioning is needed to keep people safe, then it has to be used.

But I could not help feeling that the article was both an admission of failure and a failure to recognise a greater truth.

For decades, we have known that climate change was coming. We have known that Europe’s housing stock was poorly adapted to extreme temperatures. We have known that our cities trap heat. We have known that reducing emissions should have been a priority.

And yet here we are. The response being offered is not to prevent the problem, but to consume more energy to cope with its consequences. As an exercise in ignoring the relationship between cause and effect, this takes some beating.

I stress, I am not suggesting that air conditioning is inherently bad. What I am suggesting is that we should not confuse adaptation with a solution. The real challenge is not whether people should feel guilty about cooling their homes. It is how we redesign housing, workplaces, cities and energy systems so that people can live comfortably in a warming world without ever-growing demands for energy and resources.

That means better building standards. It means adopting passive cooling. It means necessary urban greening. It means planning for resilience rather than merely reacting to a crisis. Air conditioning may still be a part of the answer, but the need for ever more of it is also evidence of how badly we have failed to address the underlying problem.

The Economist may be right that Europe needs to rethink its attitudes towards air conditioning, but what Europe really needs to rethink is why it allowed itself to reach this point in the first place.

Europe still needs a Green New Deal. I have been saying so for 18 years now.

The questions need to go beyond personality, competence, or electability. They need to establish what he believes, what he would do, and how he understands the challenges the UK faces.

Here are 52 questions, including one final critical one, I would like him to answer.

The economy

1. What is the fundamental purpose of the UK economy?
2. Do you believe economic policy should prioritise GDP growth, or should it prioritise wellbeing, security and sustainability?
3. Do you believe the UK government is financially constrained in the same way as a household, business or local authority?
4. Do you accept that a government issuing its own currency can always meet obligations denominated in that currency?
5. What role do you think taxation plays in the economy: revenue raising, redistribution, inflation control, market shaping, or all of these?
6. What is your view on the current fiscal rules, and would you retain, reform or abolish them?
7. Would you continue paying interest on all commercial bank reserve balances held at the Bank of England?
8. What is your view on quantitative easing and quantitative tightening?
9. What would you do to improve productivity in the UK economy?
10. How would you reduce Britain’s dependence on rent extraction, financial speculation and asset price inflation?

Wealth, tax and inequality

11. Do you believe wealth inequality is now a greater problem than income inequality?
12. What specific measures would you introduce to tax wealth more effectively?
13. Should income from wealth be taxed at least as heavily as income from work?
14. How would you tackle tax avoidance by large companies and wealthy individuals?
15. What is your view on reforming inheritance tax?
16. How would you reduce regional inequality within the UK?

Housing

17. Do you think housing should primarily be a home or an investment asset?
18. What would you do to reduce house prices relative to earnings?
19. How many social homes would you build each year?
20. How would you finance a large-scale social housing programme?
21. What would you do to reform the private rented sector?
22. Would you support land value taxation, compulsory purchase reform, or other measures to tackle land speculation?

Climate and the environment

23. Do you believe economic growth can be fully reconciled with environmental sustainability?
24. What is your strategy for achieving net zero while maintaining public support?
25. How would you fund the transition to a low-carbon economy?
26. What role should public ownership play in energy generation, transmission and distribution?
27. How would you ensure that the costs of climate transition are borne fairly?
28. What policies would you adopt to restore biodiversity, waterways and ecosystems?

Public services and the state

29. What should be the balance between public provision and private provision in healthcare?
30. Would you reverse NHS privatisation measures introduced since 2012?
31. How would you tackle the social care crisis?
32. What reforms would you make to education?
33. How would you rebuild local government after fifteen years of austerity?
34. What powers and funding would you devolve to local and regional government, and are you open to independence if Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland wish for it?

Work, income and social security

35. What is your vision for the future of work?
36. Do you support stronger trade union rights and sectoral collective bargaining?
37. What is your view on a job guarantee programme?
38. How would you address economic insecurity among younger generations?
39. What reforms would you make to Universal Credit and social security more generally?

Debt, money and finance

40. Do you believe the national debt is a major problem facing the UK? Please explain your logic.
41. What do you understand government debt to be? Should government debt always be reduced, or can it sometimes be increased for good economic reasons?
42. How do you distinguish between productive public investment and current spending?
43. What role should government borrowing play in funding infrastructure, housing and climate transition?
44. Should the Bank of England’s mandate be reformed? Should it pay interest on central bank reserve accounts?
45. What reforms would you make to the banking system?

Britain and the world

46. What should Britain’s economic relationship with Europe be?
47. What industrial strategy would you pursue?
48. How would you respond to increasing geopolitical instability and trade fragmentation?
49. How do we resolve conflicts in the Middle East? What is the UK’s role in that?
50. What role should Britain play in tackling global inequality and climate change? 51. What is the future of our relationship with the USA and NATO? What are the defence consequences of that?

The biggest question

And perhaps the most important question of all:

52. What is your theory of society?

That question matters because every successful political project ultimately rests on an answer to that question:

• Neoliberalism begins with the individual.
• Conservatism begins with institutions.
• Reform begins with belonging and identity.
• The Greens begin with nature and climate.
• Labour traditionally began with solidarity, but that no longer seems to be the case.

Before Andy Burnham can ask people to support him, he needs to tell them where he begins and what his priorities are, because every policy choice that follows depends upon his answer to that question. Isn't that the least we should expect?

Debate Ammunition

What is Truth?

Funding the Future | June 2026

Today’s topic

What Is Truth?

The video which this Debate Ammunition supports is available here.

The core argument

Most of what passes for political certainty is not fact at all: it is belief, shaped by the stories we inherit, the media we consume, and the identities we hold. Because beliefs feel like facts to those who hold them, political disagreement will never be resolved by simply asserting the correct answer; it requires first understanding the narratives that formed the opposing view. A politics of care, therefore, demands intellectual humility, not dogmatic certainty, and that means engaging seriously with views we find uncomfortable rather than dismissing them.

The argument structure

Step 1 — Beliefs are not facts — Most of what we treat as true is actually belief: stories absorbed from family, nationality, faith, and political culture. These narratives feel like truth to those inside them, which is why confident assertions of fact so often produce only deeper disagreement.

Step 2 — Even facts depend on agreed conventions — Using his own birth date as an example, Richard argues that even apparently hard facts are only meaningful within frameworks of agreed definition. Dates, measurements, and statistics are real only within the systems we have chosen to use; strip away the convention and the fact dissolves.

Step 3 — The Ipswich Town test — The analogy is deliberate: Richard knows his belief that Ipswich Town is the best football club in England is not factually true, yet he holds it because it is part of his identity. This is what most political conviction actually looks like; sincere, felt as truth, and resistant to counter-evidence precisely because it is not really about evidence.

Step 4 — Certainty is a barrier; understanding must come before persuasion — The Reform and racism used in the video illustrates the cost of false certainty: the claim that every racist is in Reform is no more accurate than the claim that nobody in Reform is racist. Racism is pervasive, and a politics of care requires engaging with that uncomfortable reality rather than projecting it onto a convenient target. You cannot persuade someone by ignoring the narrative that formed their view.

Their argument → your rebuttal

The one-liner

“If you want to change someone’s mind, you have to understand the story that formed it first: certainty is not a substitute for that understanding, it is a barrier to it.”

Further reading

In this video, I explore the difference between truth, fact, belief and narrative. I argue that our identities are shaped by stories about nationality, faith, politics, family, culture and experience. Those stories help us make sense of the world, but they can also persuade us that our beliefs are facts when they are not.

I explain why certainty can be dangerous, why context matters more than we often admit, and why understanding other people’s narratives is essential if we want to change minds, reduce conflict and create a more caring society.

This is a video about humility, doubt, critical thinking and the importance of recognising uncertainty in a world where everyone claims to know the truth.

Do facts exist? How much of what we believe is actually true? And how should we respond when other people see the world very differently from us? These are big questions. And how do we work out the answers?

This is the audio version:

The Debate Ammunition for this video is available here.

This is the transcript:

What is truth? That is a profoundly important question because most of the time, a lot of us think we know what is true, and much of what we think is true is not. Many supposed truths are actually beliefs, and we often confuse beliefs with facts. Understanding the distinction really matters, and that's what this video is all about.

Beliefs are important. They shape our understanding. There's nothing wrong with having beliefs. Some beliefs support our well-being. Others can cause harm. We need to be able to tell the difference. But we all have beliefs, and we always will. They make sense of our reality, and we can't do without them.

We understand realities through narratives. We make sense of our lives through stories. Stories tell us who we are. They shape our identity. They influence how we see the world. They help define what we think is true.

So identity is built from stories. Stories tell us what our gender, whatever it is, means. They create nationality and identity, and they shape faith, which many of us inherit from our parents as a shared intergenerational story, and that religion can then shape our understanding of the world. These narratives become a part of us. They become our truth.

And this is also true in politics and the media. They not only form their own view of the truth, but they shape ours as well.

Political parties tell stories about themselves. We accept some of those stories. We reject others. That's what politics is all about.

And newspapers also promote particular narratives. We once trusted the BBC because it seemed unbiased. Now we have our doubts.

All of these influences help define our truth or lack of it, and then our suspicions, and that also matters.

Doing so, truth and belief are often mixed together.

We may believe that more state intervention is essential and beneficial. Others may strongly disagree. Each side thinks the other is wrong; beliefs can feel like fact to us. That does not make them real.

The Ipswich Town test explains this.

I, quite irrationally, believe that Ipswich Town is the best football club in England. The evidence does not always support that belief, although this season has helped sustain it. So deep down, despite the recent evidence, I know my belief is not quite true. It's a measure of hope over expectation. It's a measure of who I think I am. I was born and brought up in Ipswich, and that part of it remains within me and will do forever. But it is a belief and not a fact that Ipswich Town is the best football club in England, although I'll argue with you about it if you want me to.

The fact is, this is what gives rise to so many of our disagreements, and even moral absolutes have exceptions. We say some principles are absolute. Not killing people seems to be one example, and yet almost everybody knows of a reason why, on occasion, we must break this rule, even if we don't do so personally.

Context alters our judgment. Certainty is often less certain than we think it is.

Even so, we persist in thinking facts do exist. My father had a simple story about this, and he told it to me when I was quite young, and it was in the context of newspapers with which I was fascinated. He said there were only two things in any newspaper that were facts. The first was the date, and the second was the sports results. And he said that was vital because gambling depended upon it. Everything else, he said, should be doubted about what was in that newspaper, and I think he was right. And the lesson was that I should think critically. I should appraise what they said, and I should decide what was true as far as I was concerned.

And that is true even with those things like facts. I said the date was right. And let's be clear. I can state as a fact that I was born on 21st March, 1958. That is true, but only within our current date convention. It is a fact within the framework that we have agreed to measure dates; otherwise, it's nonsense.

So even facts depend upon agreed definitions, and they aren't always agreed. So facts still require context. And what this means is that most of life is, in fact, about interpretation.

Everything about me since the time of my birth is open to interpretation. My memory can be unreliable. My twin brother says so. And recall can definitely be incomplete. So understanding changes over time; that is part of being alive.

My point is this: we are often too certain. I'm sometimes too certain myself. I know that. I'm guilty of what I'm saying we should do, so I'm trying to teach myself at this moment. It's easy to hold rigid beliefs or seem sure and to overstate our conclusions, which might be conditional, provisional, or simply uncertain because the facts aren't yet established. In that case, certainty can become a barrier, when humility and understanding is often required.

We need to accept a world in which uncertainty and misunderstanding exist, and our education should be emphasising this and not supposed facts.

The example of Reform I think illustrates this. I've been told by several people very recently, that they do not think that everyone in Reform is racist. They're right, but then they go on to say that every racist is in Reform. But even that claim is not true. We know it isn't. Reform now attracts some openly racist people as well, and racists can be found elsewhere, too, in all political parties, and I stress that point, and none. We know that's true, so let's not pretend otherwise. Reform might have some racists in its ranks, but so are they everywhere.

So, we must embrace something uncomfortable and not convenient when we claim a supposed truth. The reality is, in the case of racism, it's a pervasive problem that we need to tackle. It's not just in existence on the far right, although it seems more prevalent there. And we should be talking about prevalence, not facts.

In that case, we also need to do something else, and that is we need to understand other people's narratives.

We need to know how people reach their views.

We need to understand their experiences.

We need to understand their identities.

People often jump straight to conclusions, but understanding and even doubt must come before persuasion.

The fact is, if facts there are, that a politics of care requires that understanding. We must engage with uncomfortable views. We must seek ways to move beyond them by understanding the narratives that are behind them. That process can be difficult, but it is necessary if society is to change.

I think that's worth doing, and I think the effort is worth making. Do you? There's a poll down below. Let us have your views. Please share this video and do like it, if that's what you do. And if you want to buy Tom and me coffee, we'd be very grateful. There's a link down below.

Poll

Those responses made me think that those commenting clearly did not understand the consequences of the debt repayment that they are so keen on, or what that repayment might mean if it were to happen.

The objections

To explain this, let me summarise those objections first. Those seemingly shouting loudest suggest that:

• The UK could not repay national debt in the way that I suggest.
• Alternatively, if it were to do so, then the country would be so awash with cash that hyperinflation would result.
• Thirdly, they are quite sure that this debt, and the interest paid upon it, is threatening our national well-being, without quite being able to explain why. They do, therefore, want it to be reduced, although what mechanism they desire for this purpose is not clear.

So, let me look at the available mechanisms for reducing government debt. There are, in essence, only two.

The mechanisms

Firstly, the government can repay the debt in the way I have suggested.

The mechanism is, in essence, identical to quantitative easing, so we know it works. The government creates new money, or reserves, at the Bank of England and uses that facility to purchase government debt currently in issue at market prices.

In accounting terms, as shown by the UK government’s Whole of Government Accounts, this does effectively cancel the debt in question. In its place, there are the central bank reserve account balances created to facilitate this repurchase, which would be held by UK banks and other financial institutions that previously owned this debt and would now instead hold deposits with the Bank of England. In net terms, there would still be debt, but its nature would have changed from being long-term bonds to short-term deposits.

Secondly, the government could repay the debt by running perpetual fiscal surpluses. In other words, the government would tax more than it spends, taking both current and investment expenditure into account, and use the surplus to make a net repayment of what is called debt, but which are actually deposits placed with the government acting as a banker.

You can play around with alternatives on these themes, but in essence, these are the options available.

Appraisal: Repaying the debt

The first of these options is technically entirely feasible. All that takes place is an asset swap. Government bonds are replaced by balances with the Bank of England held by banks and other financial institutions.

This is the indisputable consequence of this approach. After all, if debt is repaid with newly created sterling, people will have to deposit the funds they receive, because the government will make the payments for the bonds they buy electronically via the Bank of England and its central bank reserve account facility, and the only safe place in which any bank or other financial institution could deposit the sums in question is back with the Bank of England, who are the only people capable of guaranteeing repayment of the sums in question.

In other words, all this ‘repayment’ does is switch the profile of the government’s debt from being on a long-term, fixed-interest, guaranteed repayment and cost basis to being on a very short-term, highly liquid (but actually non-repayable, as far as the financial sector in aggregate is concerned) basis on which the amount of interest to be paid would be determined by the Bank of England.

Given there would be, in this scenario, no long-term interest rates over which the Bank would seek to have influence, the reason for it to pay interest on reserves on most of these balances would in that case disappear, and a Japanese approach would emerge, where most such central bank reserve account balances would not be subject to interest payment, massively reducing the level of overall government debt interest payment, which would, in that sense, achieve the objective of those who are obsessing about levels of government debt and the cost of it.

On the other hand, the slight problem would be that, as a consequence:

• Banks would lack the bonds needed to operate the overnight repo market in the City of London, which would have the net effect of both undermining the credibility of much of the UK banking system and considerably increasing risk for private-sector companies.
• Pension funds would not have the assets needed to underpin the long-term income guarantees they provide to those who have saved with them upon retirement.
• Life assurance companies would lack the investments needed to underpin their liability funding requirements.
• Overseas governments and those outside the UK who wish to save in sterling would lack the mechanisms needed to hold sterling as a reserve asset, significantly imperilling the terms of UK trade.

UK debt could, then, be repaid in this way, and the cost of interest on it could be dramatically reduced, but the consequence would be that the UK financial services sector would be effectively destroyed because it could not provide the services it presently makes available, whilst financial risk in the private sector would increase dramatically.

Would anyone want to do that? No, of course they would not. But what thinking this through shows is just how much the UK government does, at present, provide by way of subsidy to that sector. The payment of interest on this debt is, effectively, a subsidy to the financial services industry, and that is a very good reason why it should be taxed more heavily. The thinking exercise is not a waste of time in that case.

Running government surpluses

Looking at the second alternative to reduce debt, running persistent and long-term government surpluses would be necessary to achieve this goal. That is potentially more disastrous than repaying the debt.

What this would require is that the government extract more money from the economy through taxes than it injects through spending each year, meaning the government would effectively act as a perpetual brake on economic activity in this country. Income, growth, investment, and the size of the UK economy would all shrink annually under this policy.

That would be the inevitable consequence of effectively imposing such a policy on the economy. In addition, all the consequences of reducing the availability of UK debt, noted previously, would be incurred as well, with the impact being spread over a longer period, but nonetheless resulting in the same net long-term outcome.

Repaying supposed government debt would, then, be a wholly destructive activity as far as the UK economy, the UK financial services sector, UK income and UK financial security are concerned. There is literally no other possible conclusion that can be reached with regard to any such plan, meaning that the only question that needs to be asked as a consequence is why anybody would wish to put this idea forward as an economic policy:

• What are they trying to achieve?
• Why are they trying to achieve it?
• Why do they think the only plausible outcomes are desirable?
• Have they thought through what they are proposing?

I cannot answer these questions because I cannot imagine why anybody would want to promote something as destructive as reducing the so-called UK national debt, but it would appear that some seek to do so, and I would be interested to know what they really think.

Debate Ammunition

Education In The Age Of AI

Funding the Future | June 2026

Today’s Topic

Breaking Down Silos: What Education needs in the Age of AI

The video that this Debate Ammunition supports is available here.

The Core Argument

The organisation of education and work into narrow subject silos, reinforced by neoliberal ideology, now leaves people unable to think critically or even with empathy, and AI is now making that failure impossible to ignore.

Specialists whose value rested on stored knowledge face direct competition from machines, which means that curiosity, critical thinking, and the capacity to care are no longer optional extras but have become the essential human skills required for the AI age.

Education must, then, be redesigned around these capacities, or it will continue to produce people ill-equipped for the world they actually inhabit.

The Argument Structure

Step 1 — Silos Are a Structural Problem, Not a Personal Failing: Education divides knowledge into separate compartments: English from mathematics, science from history, arts from everything else. The result is relentless specialisation, populated by people who know a great deal about not a lot and who have lost the ability to create connections between subjects that make knowledge genuinely useful.

Step 2 — AI Has Exposed the Bankruptcy of Narrow Expertise: Machines can now access, pattern-match, and deploy specialised knowledge faster than most human specialists. The competitive advantage that came from holding a stock of stored information is dissolving, and the question of what human beings bring that AI cannot replicate has become urgent.

Step 3 — Curiosity and Critical Thinking Are the Core Human Skills: The ability to frame good questions matters more than readily knowing answers, and in the age of AI that skill is more important than ever because a poorly posed question might produce a useless response from AI. In addition, critical thinking permits challenges to every AI answer, asking what its analysis omits, whilst refusing to accept conclusions without understanding how they were reached. These capacities are the core skills of the AI age.

Step 4 — Care and Interdependence Are Rational, Not Sentimental: Human lives are genuinely interconnected, and other people's well-being affects our own. Neoliberalism treats these connections as sentiment to be dismissed, but that is wrong: to ignore our dependence on each other is not sentimental but hard-headed realism. A politics of care would build education around this reality rather than around the fiction of the self-sufficient individual.

Their Argument → Your Rebuttal

The One-Liner

"If AI can already out-specialise the specialist, the only thing education should be producing is human beings who can think, question, and care: and right now it is producing none of those things."

Further Reading

None of this is an accident. Neoliberalism actively reinforced the silo model because isolated specialists who see only their own narrow domain are far easier to manage, market to, and exploit than people who ask questions across disciplines and understand how the system actually works. The result has been generations of workers and a current political class that knows a great deal about very little, and is now being outcompeted by a machine that doesn't need a salary, a pension, or a lunch break.

The skills that survive the AI age are not the ones Britain's institutions are teaching. They are:

• Curiosity, which is the ability to ask good questions rather than store correct answers.
• Critical thinking, which is the ability to challenge what the machine produces and ask what is missing, and
• Care, which is the recognition that human well-being is interdependent and that no silo ever captured that truth.

A politics of care embraces these ideas. It is not a soft alternative to economic policy. It is the only rational response to the world that is already arriving.

This is the audio version:

The Debate Ammunition for this video is available here.

This is the transcript:

The world is trapped in silos. We constantly ask people what they do. We expect people to define themselves by just one role. We place people into categories and boxes. Some silos are social constructions, others exist only in our own minds. And education is also built around these silos.

Children are taught separate subjects. English is separated from maths. Sciences are separated from history and geography. The arts are treated as another distinct category. And knowledge is divided into compartments, and my suggestion to you is that that is dangerous.

The result is increasing specialisation in education, work, and everywhere. And as a consequence, we create a very large number of specialists; people who know a reasonable amount about not very much, whose expertise becomes narrower over time as boundaries between subjects become stronger and connections between subjects are lost. And AI is going to expose the weaknesses in this model.

Specialists now face competition from machines.

AI can access what looks like knowledge almost instantly.

And AI can find patterns faster than many people.

AI often knows at least as much as specialists now, and the value of narrow expertise is being challenged.

So why have silos failed us then? The age of AI forces us to ask that question.

Knowledge alone is no longer enough. Different human skills are becoming more important. Education needs a new purpose. We need to rethink how and what we teach.

Curiosity should come first in every form of education. Curiosity is about the desire to ask questions, and we need to implant it in young people; we all need to have it.

Curiosity is also about the skill of framing questions in a way that delivers the answers we need. Good questions matter more than stored answers, then in this modern world, and AI makes questioning more valuable than ever. If we don’t ask it the right questions, we’ll never get close to the right answers, and curious people will then be essential in the future. This is the paramount skill that everyone is going to need in the AI age.

And critical thinking also matters more than ever now. AI answers must always be challenged. It’s never okay to accept an answer. The most important thing in life is to have answers that can be questioned, not questions that can be answered. Asking questions of answers is the way in which knowledge is advanced. And so we need to be sure that we understand how AI, for example, reaches its conclusions to be certain that they are right.

We need to ask whether better answers still exist, even though it’s already given us one. And we need to identify weaknesses in any analysis, and most especially that which AI will provide us with. We need to know how those weaknesses can be addressed, and that is why critical thinking matters.

We need to also ask whether the most important questions are missing.

This is a skill I was taught years ago. A wise person told me, whenever you are reading a document, a report, or anything else, ask what isn’t there? What was left out deliberately? What was it that the person who wrote this report did not want you to know or did not want you to ask? This is vital. What is missing? is the question we should always ask.

Every argument always leaves something out. Every analysis has limitations, and critical appraisal requires more than acceptance. Critical thinking begins with the challenge: what is missing?

At the same time, we should teach people to care. This builds on the natural empathy we see in almost every child. Most children naturally care about each other. They share with each other. They play with each other. They’re lifelong friends after three minutes in the same playgroup. Education should nurture that instinct. Care should be seen as a strength, and that’s because our well-being depends on others and our ability to relate to them. Care is not just an emotional response, then. Care is a rational response to a reason for being, which is dependent upon the existence of others.

All human lives are interconnected. Other people’s well-being affects our own. Pretending otherwise is absurd, and yet that is what neoliberalism does.

Neoliberalism reinforces the silos I began talking about at the beginning of this video. Those which force us to be isolated as individuals. Those things which are designed to separate us, to make us look different. That is all about suggesting that personal success is the only thing that matters in a neoliberal system, because that is it.

Because neoliberalism downplays social connection. It ignores our dependence on each other. It embeds silo thinking in education and work, and that’s where this thinking comes from.

I’ve always disliked silos. I’ve always disliked being pigeonholed. I have valued the fact that I’ve been able to work in a multidisciplinary way throughout much of my career. Some of my work is about economics. Some is about accounting. Some is about tax. Some of it is about politics and society. Some of my work is about care and human relationships.

And the interaction between those things is what matters most of all, and that’s why I think people should not be put in boxes. Labels can become constraints. Human potential crosses disciplines. Creativity often comes from connections, the bits between subjects and ideas, and not just from the straightforward observation of a particular fact in isolation. New ideas emerge between subjects and not just in them in that case. Freedom requires the room to explore.

A politics of care would then break down silos. It would recognise our interdependence. It would value curiosity, and it would value questioning. It would value critical thinking, and it would value the challenge implicit within it. It would value empathy, and it would value connection.

It would help us to get beyond silos altogether, and that is what life has to be in the post-AI era. We’re in that era now. Let’s not pretend AI is going away, so let’s talk about what it is that we need to survive in it. And the first thing we need to do if we are to survive in this era of AI is to break down silos and to create a very different form of knowledge. One that cares, one that challenges, one that involves critical thinking and one that is curious. These are the skills we need to survive in this world now.

That’s what I think. What do you think? There’s a poll down below. Let us have your comments. And please do share this video if you like it, and tell us that you do just that by ticking the boxes down below. And if you want to buy us a coffee, we’d be very grateful.

Poll

Starmer is not going. I believe him.

Burnham has no idea what to do, and wants 100 days to work it out. I believe him: he does not know what to do.

The Cabinet are showing no sign of moving. Convictions and decisions are beyond them.

The neoliberal circus is delighted with Burnham’s choice of advisors: nothing is going to change. He has made that clear.

Dithering indifference, incompetence and prevarication  is the order of the day.

True New Labour, then. Everyone, only worrying ability themselves and their CV, too worried to do anything.

Without exception they suffer internalised neoliberalism.  See yesterday's video.

Each of the political parties you have listed has a foe they oppose – the establishment, the foreigner, the hand-wringer

I am wondering if the politics of care has a foe or if it is a system without any. To support something, it is helpful to know what it is not. Or maybe this philosophy is just ‘for’ things

Posting in the spirit of exploration.

I thought that was a good question and had to give the response some thought, and so bought myself some time by saying I would post this response this morning

Having reflected, I do not think the politics of care needs a human enemy in the way many political movements do. There is a good reason for that. As I have often pointed out, much modern politics depends upon identifying a group to blame. The politics of care does, instead, begin from the assumption that most people are trying to make sense of the world as best they can.

That said, it will have opponents, the most important of which is neoliberal-inspired indifference to others.

More specifically, the politics of care inevitably opposes systems, structures and ideologies that deny our interdependence whilst pretending that human beings are isolated, self-sufficient individuals who owe little or nothing to each other. That means that the politics of care is opposed to:

• neglect,
• exclusion,
• exploitation,
• domination,
• and the idea that some people do not matter.

In economic terms, it challenges the belief that markets alone should determine value.

In political terms, it challenges the idea that power is an end in itself.

In social terms, it challenges the notion that success is solely an individual achievement.

But I would not want to turn any of those into a caricatured enemy. The purpose of the politics of care is not to defeat an opponent. It is to create the conditions in which people can flourish.

So if it has a foe, it is not a person, a class, or a nationality. It is, instead, the neoliberal mindset that says, “I am all that matters”, and the institutions built upon that belief. That is the opposite of care. That is the enemy of the politics of care, if there has to be one.

What is the role of the market in a politics of care?

One of the questions that my promotion of a politics of care gives rise to is what role might markets play in that form of political thinking?

The question matters because many people assume there are only two options. They think that either society is organised around markets, as neoliberals suggest, or markets are somehow abolished. I think both assumptions are wrong.

In my opinion, a politics of care would not be anti-market. Human beings are creative creatures. We make things, exchange things, invent things, and cooperate through countless voluntary arrangements, and markets can help facilitate those processes. They can provide a space in which creativity, initiative, experimentation, and innovation can occur.

The problem, though, is that markets have no purpose of their own. Markets are just mechanisms. They have no ethical compass. Left to themselves, they do not know whether they are promoting human flourishing or environmental collapse. They do not know whether they are supporting democracy or undermining it. They do not know whether they are building resilience or fragility.

A politics of care does, therefore, have to provide or identify the purpose that markets inherently lack. Markets can, for example, be useful discovery mechanisms. They can also help reveal preferences, coordinate activity, and encourage innovation. However, what they cannot do is tell us what is worth wanting, what should be protected, what obligations we owe each other, or what sort of future we should seek to create. Those are political and social questions that the politics of care embraces.

It does so by beginning with a vision of a good society and then asking how various economic institutions can help achieve it. In that context, markets must be judged according to whether they contribute to that goal. This means that markets are not merely constrained by care; they must be and are embedded within it.

Markets' purpose, in that case, is to help deliver the outcomes that a caring society seeks. Those outcomes include security, opportunity, creativity, participation, sustainability, belonging, minimum levels of well-being, and people's capacity to live meaningful lives.

This is also why a politics of care has no commitment to markets in the abstract. Where markets help create resilience, diversity, innovation, and the freedom to flourish, they may be valuable. Where they create dependence, insecurity, exclusion, monopoly power, ecological damage, financial instability, or political or social capture, they fail.

The key distinction from neoliberalism is therefore not that one likes markets and the other dislikes them. It is that neoliberalism starts with the market and assumes that social good will somehow emerge from it. A politics of care starts with a conception of human flourishing and asks what role markets might play in helping achieve it.

Markets are not, then, the foundation of society in a politics of care. They are just one institution amongst many within society, and their legitimacy arises from their contribution to the common good, and not from any intrinsic virtue arising from the exchanges they facilitate within themselves.

The contrast can be summarised quite simply in this table:

The differences in approach are profound.

Neoliberalism begins with the assumption that if markets are left alone, desirable social outcomes will follow.

A politics of care begins with the assumption that society has a responsibility to decide what outcomes it values and to then design institutions, including markets, to help achieve them.

Markets may have an important role within a politics of care, but they can never define its purpose. That task belongs to us.

I then added:

Do I need to add a great deal more?

It seems to me that giving in to Trump's demands on defence right now, and the demands of former Labour ministers who have bought into the demands of that military-industrial complex, would be utterly irresponsible and a massive strategic and political mistake.

For the sake of the record, this was the result there:

In Scotland, the SNP held the seat in Arbroath and Broughty Ferry:

They lost that in Aberdeen South, where Stephen Flynn had been the SNP MP:

The first factor that is most obvious in both these other results is the collapse in the Labour vote. The Burnham effect only goes so far, and certainly does not reach Scotland.

The second is the oil effect in Scotland. The Toris will not forget this. Wanting to burn the planet plays well for them.

And then there was a swathe of council by-election results. I cannot show them all, but this was indicative of a trend:

In Essex, the swing back to the Tories from Reform was very marked, having seen how useless Reform had been in office.

The single transferable party is not dead yet.

Reform had a bad night, though. And for other parties, except Plaid Cymru, who hung on to a string of seats under immense Reform pressure, there was little to celebrate. And Labout needs to take note: Burnham is the exception, not the rule.