In this podcast, I discuss with John Christensen how capitalism and democracy have come apart — and why this was not an accident.

Together, we explore the growing fracture between democratic accountability and economic power, and the role of James Buchanan in shaping the ideas behind it. Public choice theory, which he created, claims to defend freedom, but in practice, we argue that it works to constrain democracy and protect wealth from challenge.

As a result, we examine the idea of the “night-watchman state,” where government exists primarily to defend property rights, not people. We also look at how tax havens, created in this form, shift power away from nation-states, creating a race to the bottom on tax, regulation, and rights.

Along the way, we discuss how the language of government itself is being reshaped by far-right thinking of the sort promoted by Buchanan, with terms like “fiscal responsibility” being used to justify policies that are deliberately designed to harm the most vulnerable.

This is not abstract theory. These ideas influence governments, institutions, and everyday life.

If you want to understand why politics feels broken, and why inequality keeps rising, this conversation explains what is really going on — and why it matters.

This is not a failure of courage alone. It is the result of a structural failure in neoliberalism. When an ideology reduces all human decisions to those around wealth accumulation and treats morality as an economic externality, like climate change, and so as something to be ignored, it inevitably produces politicians who literally cannot make ethical judgments. Right and wrong become irrelevant categories. Ends justify the means. And the poor pay the price.

The Pope's message is of good news for the poor and freedom for the oppressed. Trump's agenda is the precise opposite. That one religious leader can see this clearly while secular governments cannot tells you everything about what neoliberalism has done to political life, and why reclaiming ethics as the foundation of politics is not a religious question. It is an urgent economic and social issue.

The far-right has a strategy. It is not chaos by accident. It is chaos by design. Disorder is their desire. Crisis creates their opportunity. Division, whether between communities, between religions, or between nations, is the mechanism by which an authoritarian minority dismantles the institutions that protect the majority. And it has been working, not because the far-right is powerful, but because too few are stopping it.

It is something called traditionalism that is driving this. Steve Bannon promotes it. Liz Truss travelled to a US conference to sell it, using the phrase "Europestan" to describe the continent where she lives. Traditionalism rejects Enlightenment thinking. It rejects equality. It rejects democracy. It promotes hierarchy, privilege, and the restoration of a pre-democratic order. It is fascism with better branding. And it is now operating inside mainstream political parties.

In this context, the danger is that democracy in the UK is already weakened by an electoral system that can return governments rejected by the majority of voters, by institutions that were designed for a different century, and by a political culture that mistakes caution for neutrality. The far-right's chaos strategy is not meeting effective resistance as a result.

This video explains how that strategy works, why traditionalism is the intellectual cover for fascism, and what a genuine politics of freedom from fear would look like in contrast.

Defence is not about weapons, budgets, or protecting elite interests overseas. Defence is about protecting people. It is about ensuring people enjoy freedom from fear, including from physical threat, from poverty, from want, and from the social instability that erodes the fabric of a nation from within. By that definition, which is the only definition that actually serves the majority of British citizens, social security is not the enemy of defence: it is the foundation of it.

Consider what a serious defence requires. You need a fit population. You need people who are healthy, well-nourished, mentally resilient, educated, and able to serve.

You do not build that population by cutting the systems that feed children, heat homes, and provide security in times of illness and unemployment. You destroy it.

Cut social security, and you cut the recruitment pipeline for the armed forces themselves. You weaken national resilience precisely when you claim to be strengthening it.

The statistics make the scale of the real threat plain. 14.2 million people in the UK live in poverty. 4.5 million of those are children, which means 31% of children in this country live in poverty, and 3.6 million of those children go without heating, food, a secure home, or adequate clothing on a regular basis.

Britain is not primarily threatened by Iran. It is threatened by poverty, by inequality and by the political failure that allows 3.6 million children to suffer preventable deprivation in one of the wealthiest countries in the world. Robertson's neoliberal framework cannot see this because it fragments defence into a single military budget line, disconnected from the social infrastructure on which any genuine national resilience depends.

The economist John Maynard Keynes also understood something in the last century that Robertson has forgotten. Keynes managed the UK's economy during two World Wars. His principle was clear: in a time of national crisis, the burden of sacrifice must fall on those most able to bear it - who are the wealthy - and not on the poorest. To demand that the most vulnerable people in Britain pay for a defence strategy they will never benefit from, as Robertson is demanding, is not just unjust; it is economically irrational, strategically dangerous, and the precise opposite of what is required right now.

Social security and military defence are not in a political trade-off. They are mutually dependent. You cannot have one without the other. This video explains why Lord Robertson is dangerously wrong, why Britain's greatest threat comes from within, and what a defence strategy that actually defends people, rather than elite interests, would look like.

This is not an accident. Neoliberalism deliberately keeps people unemployed. That is not a side effect - it is deliberate. Unemployment is how neoliberals control inflation, operating through the relationship between joblessness and interest rates. Neoliberalism, by design, chooses to manage an economy suboptimally.

In a crisis of the scale we are now entering, neoliberalism's response will be to further restrict government action and accept failure by design. Poverty will rise. Unemployment will rise. Real resources will go unused. And people will suffer, not because there is no alternative, but because the dominant ideology refuses to see one.

The alternative exists. It is modern monetary theory, or MMT, and what MMT tells us is this: money is not a constraint on government action if the real resources exist to achieve the goals we need to fulfil. A sovereign government that issues its own currency can always spend to the limit where full employment is reached.

The question is never "can we afford it?" The question is always "Do we have the real resources - the workers, the materials, the capacity - to achieve it?" If we have, an MMT approach says action should be taken, and the money to fund it will always be available, as will be the taxation to balance any inflationary consequences.

As a consequence, an MMT economy will, by trying to put all available resources to use, always deliver better outcomes for people than a neoliberal economy can in any situation and will most definitely do so now. That is a simple, straightforward statement of fact.

In a World War-level economic crisis, the question of which economic framework guides government policy best is not academic. It is about which system has the best chance of delivering an economy where people live free from fear.

In this video, I explain why neoliberalism will make the coming crisis worse, and what MMT offers instead, and why the choice between these two frameworks is the most consequential economic decision our society will make.

This was not supposed to happen. Orbán was the template for the global far right. He was the proof of concept; the man who demonstrated that once you captured the institutions, rewrote the rules, and weaponised the media, you could hold power indefinitely. Nigel Farage openly supported him. Reform modelled itself on his movement. MAGA looked to Budapest as a blueprint. JD Vance flew to Hungary to lend personal support ahead of the election. Russia backed him. The US administration backed him. None of it was enough.

The Hungarian people voted him out anyway. And in doing so, they have broken the myth of the far right's invincibility.

The implications are enormous. Hungary's sixteen-year obstruction of EU policy, on climate, on Ukraine, and on democratic norms ends. The policy gridlock Orbán manufactured to serve Russia's interests and his own family's financial ambitions is removed. The path opens for constitutional restoration, judicial independence, and genuine accountability for the corruption that defined his regime. A reckoning is coming.

But the deeper significance is political and psychological. The far-right has spent years cultivating the narrative that it is unstoppable and that history is moving in one direction, and that liberal democracy is a spent force. Hungary has just demolished that narrative. Authoritarianism can be peacefully defeated by voters through democratic means. And that sends a message to every country in Europe and to the United States, where the same forces are at work.

The USA remains the most acute problem. Its democracy is under greater strain than Hungary's ever was, and its institutions are being dismantled with greater sophistication. But the Hungarian result demonstrates that the capacity for democratic correction exists and that the far-right's confidence in its own invincibility is its greatest weakness.

This is a rare moment of political optimism. Orbán's defeat matters. Fascism can still be beaten.

In this video, I challenge the claim that buying shares funds real investment in the economy.

To do that, I explain the crucial difference between the primary stock market, where companies issue new shares and raise money, and the secondary stock market, where existing shares are traded.

The reality is simple: the primary market is small, and the secondary market dominates. Most stock market activity is just the exchange of existing wealth between savers, not the creation of new investment.

I also look at the numbers. Trillions of pounds of shares are traded each year on the London Stock Exchange, but only a small fraction raises new capital for companies. Maybe 98% of all share trading is in secondhand shares, and the companies whose shares are traded get no money at all as a result of that. That breaks the assumed link between stock markets and real economic activity, such as jobs, productivity and growth.

The video also explores what stock markets actually do: they provide liquidity for unnecessary share trading, generate potentially quite misleading price signals about the value of companies, and it enables wealth to change hands and accumulate. What they do not reliably ever do is fund productive investment.

I then consider the policy implications. The UK provides large tax subsidies to pension saving in shares, yet the return in terms of real investment appears to be negative: the subsidy exceeds the sum that reaches businesses for productive purposes. That raises serious questions about whether public policy is directing money to the right place for the benefit of the economy at large.

Finally, I explain what really funds business activity, which is bank lending, retained profits and public investment.

If you think stock markets drive growth, this video will challenge that idea, I hope, because that claim is very largely a work of fiction.

The claim that the UK cannot afford to respond decisively to this crisis is a fiction — a deliberate political choice dressed up as fiscal responsibility. The UK government issues its own currency. It cannot run out of money in the same way that a household or a business can. The real constraint is not financial. It is political will. And right now, Rachel Reeves and the EU are choosing austerity at precisely the moment history tells us governments must spend.

Lord Keynes made this argument during the Second World War. The challenge of wartime mobilisation is not finding the money — it is allocating real resources effectively. That means rationing. It means windfall taxes on the energy companies profiting from this crisis. It means intervening to stabilise prices and guarantee every household affordable access to energy. It means accelerating the transition away from fossil fuel dependence so this can never happen again. None of this requires the government to find money it doesn't have. It requires the government to choose to act.

Instead, what we are getting is tightly constrained, temporary, means-tested interventions — austerity by design. The consequences are entirely predictable. Rising energy and food costs for households. Closures of smaller businesses that cannot absorb the shock. Deepening inequality as energy companies and large corporations profit from the chaos. And for the poorest — suffering that could have been prevented.

The crisis driving all of this was created by Donald Trump's actions against Iran. The economic fallout — rising prices, supply chain disruption, the risk of famine, the risk of refugee flows — was entirely foreseeable. The question was never whether governments could respond. It was whether they would choose to.

Rachel Reeves is making the wrong choice. This video explains why — and what the right choice looks like.