Cheap, Sovereign Energy
Without affordable energy, nothing else in this programme works.
British manufacturers pay more for electricity than any of their European competitors. More than double the EU average. Nearly five million households spend over a fifth of their income on energy. Analysts have called this "an existential threat to the economy." They're not wrong.
The cause is structural. Gas-fired plants generate only 30% of UK electricity but set the wholesale price 98% of the time. So even when renewables produce cheap power, everyone pays the gas price. On top of that, network charges and policy levies, now two thirds of the bill, keep rising.
A precision engineering workshop in the Midlands pays £48,000 a year in electricity, double what a competitor in the Netherlands pays for the same output. The owner can't invest in new CNC equipment because the energy bill eats the margin. She's considering relocating to Poland. Multiply this by thousands of firms across the country.
Immediate: stop the bleeding
- Decouple electricity pricing from gas. Split the market so renewables and nuclear are paid their actual cost, not the marginal gas price. This is the single fastest lever to cut bills.
- Emergency industrial energy tariff. State-backed fixed-rate contracts for SMEs at or below the EU median. Fund the gap from windfall taxes on energy trading profits and Crown Estate offshore wind revenue.
- National retrofit programme. Upgrade every home below EPC band C. Saves £10.6 billion per year in energy costs. Creates 400,000+ jobs. Cuts NHS demand from cold-related illness. National Capacity Service provides the workforce.
- Progressive tariffs. Cheap first units, rising cost for heavy consumption. Scrap standing charges for low-income households. Protect the fuel poor, incentivise efficiency.
Medium-term: build the backbone
Nuclear at scale, modular and conventional. Rolls-Royce has won the competition to build Britain's first SMRs. A British company building British technology. Each 470MW unit powers roughly a million homes for sixty years. Three are planned for Wylfa in North Wales, with construction starting this year.
The case for SMRs is the "modular" part, not the "small" part. Factory-built to a standardised design, they avoid the bespoke megaproject cost overruns that have plagued large reactors. Hinkley Point C is now projected at £33bn and counting, years late. Build many identical units, ship them to site, connect them. Learning curve effects mean each one gets cheaper. You can deploy incrementally rather than betting everything on a single project.
To be straight about the risk: nobody has proven SMRs at commercial scale anywhere in the world yet. The engineering is well understood, the fleet economics aren't demonstrated. So this programme backs both tracks: a fleet of 10-15 SMRs within a decade, and continued investment in conventional large-scale nuclear (Sizewell C and successors) alongside. If SMRs deliver, they become the main model. If they slip, the conventional programme is the insurance. Nuclear baseload is non-negotiable either way.
Nuclear is the only proven technology that provides reliable, large-scale, low-carbon baseload. Renewables are essential but intermittent. Storage isn't mature at scale. Energy sovereignty runs through nuclear, and there is no way round that.
Import-dependent. Gas sets the price. Industrial costs 125% above EU. 5,000 cold-weather deaths per winter. No coherent strategy.
Domestic nuclear baseload. Decoupled pricing. Industrial costs at EU median. Zero fuel poverty. Full energy sovereignty within 15 years.
North Sea gas as a transition bridge. Domestic gas extraction should continue and expand where commercially viable. Every cubic metre of domestic supply reduces import dependency, and importing LNG from Qatar is both more carbon-intensive and strategically vulnerable. This is a bridge while nuclear and renewables scale, not a long-term energy strategy, and continuing to explore conventional North Sea reserves is simple pragmatism.
Tidal power. The UK has world-class tidal resources and has done almost nothing with them. Unlike wind, tidal is predictable, and it could carry a meaningful share of baseload.
The Green Party opposes all nuclear power. Their own Young Greens have voted to review this, recognising that "any phase out should only start once renewables can fully meet demand." Nuclear is safer than almost any other energy source. Modern fuel reprocessing almost entirely eliminates waste. The opposition is ideological, not scientific.
Housing as Infrastructure
The UK's most destructive policy choice: treating houses as financial assets.
Housing costs drive everything. Wages have to be higher just to cover the rent. Commercial rents track residential land values, so small firms get squeezed too. Banks lend against property because it's safer than backing a factory, which starves productive business of capital. And cold, damp, overcrowded homes make people ill, from respiratory disease to mental health to child development.
A software developer in Bristol earns £45,000, a good salary. After rent on a one-bedroom flat (£1,200/month), student loan repayments, and tax, she saves £150 a month. A house deposit at current prices would take her 15 years. She's 28. She's thinking about Australia.
Build at scale
Target: 300,000+ homes per year on Crown Estate, Duchy and repurposed public land, where the land cost is near zero. National Capacity Service provides the labour and the British Industrial Investment Bank provides the finance. Everything gets built to Passivhaus or equivalent standard: low energy bills, low maintenance, built to last.
Tax the land, not the labour
Land Value Tax replaces council tax and business rates. It penalises land banking and rewards productive use, and it can't be dodged, because land doesn't move offshore. Over time it pulls house prices down by taxing the speculative premium, and it shifts the tax burden off work and business and onto passive asset holding.
Fix the market
- Long-term tenancy security with inflation-linked rent controls
- Compulsory purchase for institutional landlords who fail building quality standards
- Restrict foreign non-resident ownership in residential markets
- Bank lending reform: mandate a rising share of lending goes to productive business, not property
House prices must fall in real terms. Homeowners lose paper wealth. But wages go further, SMEs pay lower rents, bank capital flows into business, NHS demand drops, and people can move to where the work is. This is the hardest political sell in Britain. It's also the highest-impact reform.
An Economy That Makes Things
Make Britain the best place in the developed world to start and grow a small business.
Capital
British Industrial Investment Bank. A proper state co-investment bank that puts equity alongside private capital into UK-based SMEs. Not a grant bureaucracy. Modelled on Germany's KfW.
Pension reform. Mandate that UK pension funds put a minimum 5% into UK productive equity. Not property or gilts, actual businesses. That redirects tens of billions over a decade.
Fix the tax code. Debt interest is tax-deductible and equity dividends aren't, which biases the whole system toward leveraged buyouts and property speculation instead of productive investment.
A former NCS manufacturing track graduate in Sheffield wants to start a precision components firm supplying Rolls-Royce SMR. The Industrial Investment Bank co-invests £80k alongside a local angel. She gets priority access to defence procurement contracts through her NCS track record. Her pension-fund-backed equity round closes in weeks, not months. Three years later she employs fourteen people.
Procurement
All government contracts above £500k broken into SME-sized lots. Mandatory 30-day payment terms, because late payment kills small firms. Scoring that weights domestic supply chain participation.
Competition
Strengthen the CMA with an explicit mandate to protect market entry. Break up concentrated utilities. Require banks to maintain SME lending ratios. Regulate platforms: no algorithmic suppression, transparent fees, no competing with your own sellers using their data.
Planning and tax
Automatic approval for small commercial builds in designated zones. VAT threshold raised from £90k to £150-200k, which removes a brutal compliance cliff. Employer NI reduced for firms under 50 employees. Corporation tax tiered: lower rate below £1m profit. Capital gains reformed to reward long-term productive holdings.
The UK has a narrow, top-heavy tax base that overtaxes labour and business profits while undertaxing land, wealth, resource extraction, and data harvesting. This creates both capital flight risk and inadequate revenue. The coherent principle running through this programme is simple: tax immovable things more, and mobile things less.
Land Value Tax: land can't relocate to Dublin. Platform and data levies: if you extract value from UK users, you pay here. Energy windfall taxes: resource extraction profits taxed at source. Pollution and carbon pricing: externalised costs internalised. Revenue-based business taxation: corporate profits can be routed through Luxembourg via transfer pricing, but revenue is harder to fake. You either sold groceries in Birmingham or you didn't. Tax the physical footprint, the land and the UK revenue and the workforce, not the paper profit that accountants can make disappear. Meanwhile: employer NI cuts for small firms, lower corporation tax below £1m profit, capital gains reform rewarding long-term productive holdings. You end up with a broader base that's harder to dodge and lighter taxes on the activity you actually want more of. And because the base can't move, capital flight stops being the trump card.
Gary Stevenson and others have made a compelling case that wealth concentration is accelerating: compound returns at the top will eventually hollow out the middle class. This programme agrees with that diagnosis. A person with £1 billion in assets generating a conservative 5% return earns £1 million per week in passive income, largely untaxed. That's a structural problem, not a political one.
But the mechanism matters. Direct wealth taxes have a capital flight problem that isn't theoretical. France ran a wealth tax (ISF) for decades and repealed it in 2017 after an estimated 10,000 wealthy individuals left, taking roughly €35 billion in assets with them. The UK isn't the US. It can't tax its citizens globally. A billionaire can move tax residency to Monaco or Dubai in months. Shares, bonds, and offshore trusts move with a phone call.
Land Value Tax captures much of the same base without the flight risk. A billionaire can move to Dubai but their London property portfolio stays in London, and LVT captures the value. Combined with platform levies, resource pricing, and reformed capital gains, this programme targets wealth concentration through immovable mechanisms rather than a headline tax that sophisticated capital can sidestep.
National Capacity Service
Everyone serves. Everyone builds. The country is a shared project, not a spectator sport.
The US security umbrella that has underwritten European stability since 1949 is no longer guaranteed. This isn't a Trump aberration. US strategic focus has been pivoting to the Pacific for over a decade, under both parties. Whether NATO continues at full strength, evolves into something US-lite, or gradually hollows out, Britain needs to be prepared for all outcomes. That means distributed national capacity: a trained, skilled population with resilience built in. Finland and Switzerland both maintain universal service for exactly this reason: nations in uncertain neighbourhoods that refuse to outsource their security. NCS is how Britain builds that capacity without a standing army of 500,000, and it's worth building whatever happens to NATO.
This is not conscription and it's not military service. It's a universal capacity-building programme in three phases. Think of it as a jobs guarantee that doubles as a strategic reserve, with civic infrastructure as the by-product. Everyone comes out with a qualification, savings and a network. The country gets a trained population, a construction workforce and emergency capacity spread across the map.
Phase 1: Foundation (18-20, 12 months, mandatory)
Six tracks. Defence & Reserve: territorial defence, cyber, logistics. Infrastructure & Housing: construction, retrofit, maintenance. Manufacturing: precision engineering, robotics, defence supply chains. Health & Care: NHS support, elder care, mental health outreach. Cyber & Digital: national cyber defence, public sector software. Agriculture & Land: food security, community farming.
Every participant exits with a vocational qualification, physical fitness benchmark, health screening, and a £5,000 National Capacity Bond, redeemable for a business startup, a housing deposit or further training.
Tom is 19 and from Blackpool, one of the most deprived areas in the UK. He enters the infrastructure track. Twelve months later he holds an accredited construction qualification, is fitter than he's ever been, has built social housing with people from every background, and has £5,000 toward his future. His employer from Phase 2 placement offers him a permanent role before he's finished.
Phase 2: Active Reserve (20-25, 4 weeks/year, mandatory)
Annual refresher and advancement in your track. Infrastructure workers spend four weeks on national projects. Manufacturing graduates rotate through SME placements. Paid at near-market rate. Employers legally required to release participants, offset by NI rebates. Each annual block adds to a cumulative National Capacity Account, a tax-advantaged savings vehicle.
Phase 3: Civic Reserve (25-35, 2 weeks/year, voluntary but incentivised)
Community leadership, mentoring Phase 1 cohorts, specialist deployment, emergency response, international exchange. Tax credits for participants and employers. By 35, every participant has spent over a decade in structured civic engagement.
Sedentary, isolated young people. Skills gap in manufacturing. No civic infrastructure. Class segregation from school onwards. NEET crisis.
Every adult under 50 with shared service experience. Vocational skills normalised. Class mixing structural. Perpetual talent pipeline for SMEs. Emergency capacity distributed nationally.
Universal: no class exemptions, no buying out. If it's good enough for a teenager in Blackpool, it's good enough for one in Kensington. Meritocratic: performance tracked, completion graded, employers see the results. Competitive: regional cohorts compete nationally. Productive: every phase builds something real, whether that's houses, infrastructure, manufacturing output or community capacity.
Exemptions and deferrals: Primary carers of children under 5 get automatic deferral. People with disabilities are accommodated within tracks or assigned to accessible roles, not excluded. Those already in employment or apprenticeships at 18 can defer Phase 1 by up to two years. There is no buy-out. The universal element is non-negotiable. Voluntary schemes self-select for the motivated and miss exactly the people who benefit most.
Fix the Causes, Not the Symptoms
The NHS spends £180 billion repairing a society that makes people sick. Fix the society.
Food
The UK diet is a public health catastrophe. Ultra-processed food dominates, particularly in lower-income households. The downstream costs in obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and mental health are staggering.
- Expand the sugar tax to cover ultra-processed food categories. Ring-fence revenue for school food.
- Mandatory reformulation targets: force manufacturers to reduce sugar, salt and industrial additives on a binding schedule.
- Universal free school meals sourced domestically, tied to NCS agricultural track and Crown Estate land.
- Ban UPF advertising to under-18s outright.
Movement
The built environment determines how much people move. Protected cycling networks. Pedestrianised town centres. Public pools, playing fields and gyms, gutted since 2010, get rebuilt. NCS fitness standards mean 700,000 young adults per year enter the workforce healthier than they would have been.
Mental health
The crisis is real, but it's substantially driven by housing insecurity, financial precarity, social isolation, screen dependency, and lack of purpose. These are structural problems with structural answers: affordable housing, stable employment, community infrastructure that actually exists. Fix the structure and clinical demand falls.
Prevention
Shift NHS funding from acute hospital care to primary and community care. Annual health MOTs for all adults. Dental care properly back in the NHS. Flip the spending ratio from treatment to prevention over 10-15 years.
A GP in Sunderland currently sees patients for ten-minute slots, mostly managing chronic conditions caused by poor diet, inactivity, and housing damp. Under this programme, her practice runs genuine preventive care: cooking classes using NCS-grown produce, exercise prescriptions at the rebuilt leisure centre, mental health support linked to community groups. Her patients get healthier and her job gets better.
Education for Capability
Produce citizens who can think, build and compete, not just collect credentials.
Vocational parity
Germany, Switzerland, and Austria outperform the UK economically in part because their apprenticeship systems are high-status and employer-integrated. The UK has a deep cultural bias that treats university as the only respectable path and vocational work as second-class. NCS tracks feed directly into apprenticeships and employer pipelines. Every region gets a well-funded technical institute focused on local industrial needs. The public sector leads by example: hire on aptitude, not degrees.
Economic literacy
Mandatory in secondary education: personal finance, business fundamentals, economic reasoning. Most UK adults leave education with zero practical understanding of how money, business, or the economy works. You can't have informed democratic participation on economic issues if the population is economically illiterate.
A Green Party deputy leader who can't explain the difference between the national debt and the deficit when questioned by Rory Stewart, confusing £70 billion with the total national debt, out by a factor of fifteen, then admitting afterwards he "wasn't ready for those questions." A Reform Party that promises £90 billion in tax cuts with no credible funding plan. A public that can't evaluate either claim. Economic illiteracy is a democracy problem, not just an education problem.
Critical thinking
Not a vague aspiration but a tested, graded skill: source evaluation, statistical reasoning, argument analysis, propaganda recognition. People who can't evaluate information are easy to manipulate, by politicians, by the media, by platforms, by foreign influence operations. That makes this a national security issue as much as an education one.
Digital Sovereignty
Our data stays here. Our systems are ours.
The UK depends on US tech firms for cloud computing, health data systems, defence platforms, social media, and payment infrastructure. In a sovereignty-first programme, this is an existential vulnerability. It's also an industrial opportunity.
NHS data on Palantir systems. Defence on US platforms. Government on Microsoft and AWS. User data exported. No domestic alternative.
UK Sovereign Cloud. Domestic NHS data platform. Defence systems entirely British. Open-source public tools. NCS cyber track as talent pipeline.
Platform regulation
- Data localisation: platforms store UK user data in the UK
- Algorithmic transparency: recommendation systems auditable by UK regulators
- Revenue sharing: platforms monetising UK content pay into a digital commons fund
- Enforced age-gating for under-16s on addictive algorithmic platforms
- Interoperability mandates to break platform lock-in
Land Reform & the Crown
No institution is above economic productivity requirements.
Abolish the monarchy
This is the most emotionally charged position in this document. It's also the most straightforward application of its core principles: egalitarian, meritocratic, ruthlessly pragmatic. A hereditary institution that controls vast land, receives public funding, enjoys tax exemptions, and exercises residual constitutional power is incompatible with all three.
"The monarchy generates tourism." France gets 90 million international visitors a year. The UK gets 38 million. The gap is geography, connectivity and infrastructure, not the absence of a French king. Versailles gets 8 million visitors a year as a museum. Buckingham Palace gets 500,000 on its limited summer opening. Tourists come for buildings and history, not a living family. The palaces would still be there, and arguably more accessible and more profitable as full-time public attractions.
"The Crown Estate generates money." The Crown Estate is a property portfolio. It generates revenue because it owns prime land, offshore wind rights and Regent Street, not because a monarch exists. Nationalise it tomorrow and the revenue continues. The Sovereign Grant is the public paying the monarchy a cut of revenue from land that is already technically public property. It's not a return on investment. It's a fee.
"Soft power." The vaguest claim and the hardest to disprove, which is why it's always the last resort. But soft power that depends on maintaining a hereditary aristocratic family with medieval land trusts and tax exemptions is a strange foundation for a modern state. Nobody argues we need the House of Lords for soft power. The same logic applies to the Crown.
What abolition means in practice
The Crown Estate is already technically public property. Remove the Sovereign Grant, redirect 100% of income to the Treasury (£300-400m immediately), and reform management: affordable housing on urban land, SME workspace on rural land at below-market rents, accelerated offshore wind with revenue ringfenced for industrial energy tariffs.
The Duchies of Lancaster and Cornwall are medieval land trusts operating as tax-exempt private estates. Over 200,000 acres. Bring into public ownership. Repurpose for mixed-use development with SME-first tenancy, affordable housing, community energy, and NCS training facilities.
Private royal holdings like Balmoral and Sandringham get converted to public heritage, national parks or training centres. Fiscally minor, but the signal matters.
Sovereign Grant savings: ~£400m/year. Duchy income recapture: ~£60m/year. Tax normalisation on Duchy assets. Security cost savings: £100m+. But the real value is the land itself. Repurposed Crown and Duchy estates are worth billions over a decade for housing, industry and food sovereignty.
Institutional Overhaul
If you're redesigning the state from first principles, the architecture matters.
Abolish the House of Lords
An unelected chamber of ~800 people with the power to amend and delay legislation. The problem isn't that a revising chamber exists. Most democracies have one. The problem is how people get in.
Patronage. Prime Ministers appoint peers as rewards: donors, party loyalists, former MPs who lost their seats. There's no application, no qualification, no election. It is the most direct mechanism for the donor class to buy legislative influence: give enough money to a party and you get a seat in Parliament for life. Peter Mandelson, forced to resign from cabinet twice in disgrace, was made a Baron in 2008 and went straight back into government without facing voters. Waheed Alli, a major Labour donor, was given a peerage and a Downing Street security pass despite holding no government role, while providing the Prime Minister with tens of thousands of pounds in undeclared gifts. These aren't aberrations. They're the system working as designed.
Hereditary peers. 92 seats are still hereditary. People legislate because of who their grandfather was. When one dies, the remaining hereditaries hold a by-election among themselves, the most exclusive electorate in any democracy.
Bishops. 26 Church of England bishops sit as Lords Spiritual. No other religion, no other institution, gets automatic parliamentary representation. In an increasingly secular country, this is indefensible.
Conflicts of interest. Peers are not required to declare interests to the same standard as MPs. Many have substantial commercial holdings in sectors they vote on: property, energy, healthcare, defence. When housing reform comes before the Lords, landlord-peers vote on it. When energy regulation comes up, peers with fossil fuel investments vote on it. The register of interests is weak and enforcement is practically nonexistent. There is no recall mechanism.
You don't need to prove any individual peer is corrupt when the system itself is a corruption mechanism. It openly converts political donations into lifetime legislative seats with minimal transparency and zero democratic accountability. Any serious reform programme has to close this door permanently.
The replacement: a citizens' assembly, randomly selected from the adult population like jury service, with fixed terms, proper pay and expert support. It's genuinely representative, and there's nothing for parties or donors to capture. Several countries and regions have trialled this successfully. It isn't radical. It's what democracy was supposed to look like.
- Codified constitution: explicit rights, separation of powers, limits on executive authority
- Proportional representation: FPTP is why UK politics oscillates between two parties serving similar interests. PR gives reformist parties a real chance.
- Recall and referendum: citizens can trigger binding votes and remove underperforming MPs
Civil service
Performance-based with measurable outcomes. Smaller but better paid. Regionally distributed, with departments moved out of London. NCS fast-track pipeline for top performers.
Justice
Restore legal aid for housing, employment, and consumer disputes. Fast-track commercial courts for disputes under £100k, because right now legal costs make it uneconomic for SMEs to enforce contracts. Fully funded anti-corruption enforcement with prosecutorial teeth.
Transport
Renationalise rail and prioritise regional connectivity over London. Active travel infrastructure. Port modernisation and domestic shipbuilding tied to NCS manufacturing and defence.
International posture
The US contribution to European security since 1949 has been enormous. That's a fact, whatever your politics. But that commitment is no longer guaranteed. US strategic interest has been pivoting to the Pacific for over a decade, across administrations of both parties. The bipartisan consensus on NATO is fraying, and recent signals, from burden-sharing ultimatums to territorial ambitions in Greenland, suggest the relationship is entering a very different phase.
Britain should not pre-emptively withdraw from NATO. But it should prepare, urgently, for a range of outcomes: a NATO with reduced US commitment, a European-led successor, or the alliance hollowing out entirely. Preparation means building domestic capacity and deep European defence partnerships now, so that Britain is resilient whichever scenario materialises.
Deep bilateral defence relationships with France (which shares nuclear capability and post-colonial commitments), Germany, and the Nordics. Shared European procurement to benefit from economies of scale. Commonwealth trade partnerships. Maintained nuclear deterrent. Strong domestic conventional forces, underpinned by the NCS defence track and domestic manufacturing.
The shift is to build genuine strategic self-sufficiency while staying a committed alliance partner. If NATO strengthens, Britain brings more to it. If NATO weakens, Britain isn't caught exposed. Call it insurance, not isolationism.
None of this means spending less on defence. It means spending it better. A greater share should flow into domestic capacity (NCS defence track, British-built equipment, domestic shipbuilding, shared European procurement, cyber capability) and less into US-led infrastructure and interoperability requirements that may not serve British interests long term. Every pound spent on domestic defence capacity stays in the UK economy and builds resilience.
A National Identity Built on Agency
Britain's nativist energy is real. The question is where it goes.
Britain is inherently nationalistic, the product of an islander mentality shaped by geography, history and cultural distinctiveness. Japan has the same thing. So does Iceland. It isn't a pathology, it's structural.
What makes it toxic is when it has no productive outlet.
"Stop the boats" as the entirety of identity politics. Military fetishism disconnected from capability. Royal pageantry as national purpose. Nostalgia for a past that isn't coming back. Grievance without construction.
"We all serve. We all build." National pride attached to productive output. "We make our own things." "We feed ourselves." "We power ourselves." Competition between regions on what they've built, not who they blame.
Current British identity politics, left and right, is grievance-based. The right says "we've lost our country." The left says "we've been robbed." The centre says "things used to work." All of it is passive, and all of it positions the public as victims of forces beyond their control.
The framing is pragmatic rather than sentimental, competitive rather than defensive. It's inclusive by design, because NCS mixes everyone and shared service dissolves tribal boundaries better than any diversity initiative. And it's demanding, because people respond to being asked to do hard things. The current political offer is "we'll manage your decline as gently as possible." That's insulting. Ask more of people and most of them will rise to it.
The nativist energy doesn't go away. Without positive-sum rails it finds negative-sum expression: ever more extreme parties, social tension, disorder, brain drain. Capable young people leave. The choice isn't between nationalism and no nationalism. It's between nationalism that builds and nationalism that burns.
A Free Press, For Real
Britain doesn't have a free press. It has a press owned by three companies and policed by two platforms.
Three corporations control 90% of national newspaper circulation: DMG Media, News UK and Reach. That concentration has increased by 20% in the last decade. The same three companies account for over 40% of the reach of the top 50 online news brands. Google commands 93% of UK search and, together with Meta, takes roughly 60% of all UK advertising spend. Nearly 300 local newspapers have closed since 2005. The number of frontline journalists in the UK has fallen from an estimated 23,000 to around 17,000. The infrastructure that was supposed to hold power to account has been hollowed out, consolidated and captured.
This matters for everything else in this document. You can design the best energy policy, the fairest tax system and the most ambitious housing programme in the world. None of it gets democratic consent if the public only encounters it through outlets owned by people with a direct financial interest in nothing changing. Media concentration is the bottleneck for every other reform, not a problem you can park for later.
3 companies control 90% of newspaper circulation
Google & Meta take ~60% of UK ad revenue
Nearly 300 local papers closed since 2005
BBC funding set by the politicians it's supposed to scrutinise
Government offered £2m to address local news crisis
30% ownership cap enforced by Ofcom
Platform levies fund independent journalism
£200m/year Public Interest Media Fund
BBC constitutionally independent from government
Anti-SLAPP laws protect journalists from billionaire lawsuits
The Overton Window is a product, not a natural phenomenon
The range of ideas considered "reasonable" in British public life is extraordinarily narrow compared to other democracies. Land Value Tax is mainstream policy in Denmark, Singapore and parts of Australia, and treated as radical here. Public investment banks operate right across Europe, and here they get called "state intervention." The gap between what works elsewhere and what's thinkable here isn't an accident. It's maintained by a media ecosystem where the people who own the platforms are the people who benefit from the current arrangement.
The BBC: structurally captured, not partisan
The left says the BBC has a right-wing bias. The right says it has a left-wing bias. Both are missing the point. The BBC's funding is set by the government of the day. Its charter is renewed by the Privy Council, meaning government ministers with no democratic oversight. The government appoints half the BBC Board. Every ten years, the BBC goes cap-in-hand to whoever holds power and asks permission to keep existing. The current charter expires in December 2027. The charter review launched in December 2025 is, once again, entirely government-controlled. Whether the bias runs left or right in any given era is a second-order question. The architecture makes genuine editorial independence impossible, because the people being scrutinised are the same people who decide the scrutiniser's budget.
In 2023, the BBC commissioned Michael Blastland and Andrew Dilnot to review its coverage of economics. Their finding: too many journalists lacked basic economic understanding, creating a "high risk to impartiality." Government borrowing was consistently framed as dangerous, all household budget analogies and "eye-watering debt", without presenting the range of legitimate economic perspectives. Academic studies of BBC coverage during the 2010s austerity period reached the same conclusion: spending cuts were presented as necessary and unavoidable, while alternative policy approaches were marginalised.
This is a structural critique, not a left-wing or right-wing one. The BBC's dependence on government for funding and charter renewal creates an institutional incentive to adopt the economic framing of whoever is in power. The review also revealed something even more telling: a BBC insider admitted the organisation is "far too swayed by what's in the newspapers", which means the billionaire-owned press effectively sets the BBC's agenda too.
Big Tech as gatekeeper
Google and Meta took the advertising money that used to fund journalism, and they control the distribution on top of it. Seven of the top fifteen online platforms used to access news in the UK are owned by Meta, Alphabet, or X Corp. Algorithmic curation decides what people see, with no editorial accountability and no transparency about how ranking works. A platform can deplatform an outlet overnight. Novara Media was temporarily suspended from YouTube with no warning and no explanation. This isn't a free market in information. It's a tollbooth.
What emerges when the gatekeepers slip
There is a growing ecosystem of independent media that operates outside these structures: Byline Times, Novara Media, openDemocracy, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, Led By Donkeys, and others. They're funded by subscribers and donors rather than advertisers or proprietors, and they break stories the legacy press won't touch. These outlets prove the demand exists: the public wants journalism that isn't pre-filtered through the interests of three billionaires and two algorithms. But they're tiny next to the incumbents, financially precarious, and permanently one algorithm change away from losing their reach.
Sarah runs a local news site covering council meetings in a northern town. She left the local paper when it was bought by Reach and her newsroom was merged with three others. She now operates on donations and a small grant, covering planning decisions, council budgets, and local health service changes that no other outlet reports on. Last year she broke the story of a £4 million council contract awarded to a firm with connections to a sitting councillor. No national outlet picked it up. Her site gets 12,000 monthly readers. She earns less than minimum wage. Under Build Britain, the Public Interest Media Fund would provide sustainable core funding for outlets like Sarah's: enough to employ two journalists and cover operating costs, with editorial independence guaranteed by arm's-length governance.
In 2019, Dame Frances Cairncross published her government-commissioned review into the sustainability of journalism. She found print advertising revenues had dropped by more than two-thirds in a decade. The number of frontline journalists had fallen from 23,000 to 17,000. Local newspaper circulation had halved. Her recommendations included an Institute for Public Interest News, direct funding for local journalism, new tax reliefs, and codes of conduct between platforms and publishers.
The government's response was a £2 million pilot fund, roughly the price of a terraced house in London, and a refusal to establish the proposed Institute because "it is not for the Government to lead on this issue." Six years later, the situation is worse. The Build Britain Public Interest Media Fund takes Cairncross's diagnosis seriously and funds it at a scale that might actually matter.
What Build Britain would do
- Media ownership caps: no single entity to control more than 30% of national news reach across print, broadcast, and online combined. Existing concentrations above threshold to be unwound over a five-year divestment period. Ofcom to measure and enforce annually.
- Platform accountability: platforms above 10 million UK monthly active users must publish their content ranking algorithms for news, submit to independent audit, and compensate news publishers whose content drives engagement. Australia and Canada have established models for platform-publisher negotiations.
- BBC constitutional independence: replace the Royal Charter model with a statutory framework. Funding, governance, and editorial standards set by an independent commission appointed through a transparent public process, not by ministers. Fund the BBC through a hypothecated levy rather than a licence fee set by politicians. The BBC should be as independent from government as the judiciary.
- Public Interest Media Fund: capitalised from platform levies and digital advertising tax. Supports independent journalism with a focus on local news, investigative reporting, and outlets serving communities that commercial media has abandoned. Administered at arm's length from government. Target: £200m per year, building on the scale the Cairncross Review identified as necessary but the government refused to fund.
- Anti-SLAPP legislation: pass the Strategic Litigation Against Public Participation protections the government has repeatedly delayed. Wealthy individuals and corporations use the threat of ruinous legal costs to silence legitimate journalism. This is censorship by chequebook.
- Right of reply and corrections framework: major outlets required to give corrections equal prominence to original claims. Ofcom's complaints process to be genuinely independent with meaningful sanctions for persistent breaches of accuracy standards.