The Real Story
Amongst much of the tosh that came out of HM Government last week, Pat McFadden, the Business and Pensions secretary, announced that as part of a plan to ameliorate Britain's dire youth unemployment, which currently sits at 16.0%, up 14.5% from last year, firms will receive a £3000 grant for every person aged 18-24 who is on benefits and has been looking for a job for six months. McFadden, who himself has never run a business, had to make cuts or had to grapple with the notion of incentive-driven policy, as in usual Labour fashion, pointed to the "deep rooted" idleness of Britain's increasingly unproductive youth, citing actions of previous government failure. Well he's at least right about one thing.
Nonetheless, if we are to believe that youth unemployment is a serious issue of the day, and according to the startling figures, it most assuredly is, how can we take Labour's decision with any degree of seriousness? Did the government seriously expect rises in the minimum wage to not hasten youth unemployment?
So here we are, not six months on from the chancellor's budget, with, would you believe it, higher unemployment figures than where we started. Yet, instead of lowering the burdens on employers, the government has calculated that the solution to more government is, (yep, you guessed it)...more government. More and more of the population's increasingly taxed money will now be redistributed to one of the seven firms still left in the country who are actually looking for new workers. And what of the government's deficit, which sits at close to £3 trillion pounds-nearly 100% of GDP? That's a trillion with a T by the way. Are there any brains left at the Work and Pensions Office? Or, hell, Westminster? I'll wait.
Oh, and on the deficit for a minute:
UK borrowing costs hit highest since 2008 as markets expect up to three interest rate rises
...but we can afford £3000 subsidies? Interestingly, the current 30 year gilt for government bonds is higher than what ousted Liz Truss as PM. Remember her?
Be that as it may, one realises that, given the current fiasco in the Middle East, about three people on this increasingly benighted island take notice of the consistent ill-handling of public money by the British state. So while Starmer may take umbrage at the president's "No Winston Churchill" remarks, Trump's unhinged, press-pulling verbal punches nonetheless provide useful broadsheet space to cover for Starmer's treasonous performance in office.
With everything that's going on, one should note how across the Western World, far less media space is attributed to articles of news which actually matter. You know, like the demographic shifts of the western world:
Or, perhaps one of the most important news headlines since, maybe 9/11?
Wars come and wars go, particularly when it comes to that part of the world. This kind of stuff though, is a once-in-a-generation story. To be clear, I'm not making the point that Trump launched the war merely to temporarily distract much of the American population from his thoughtless malfeasance some twenty odd years ago. As of yet, nothing has directly incriminated or implicated Trump. That said, the war has provided, as in the case for both Starmer and Trump, a useful story to divert the press' attention.
There are many oddities with the constantly evolving Epstein drama though. Like, for example, notwithstanding the millions of files released on Epstein with your-favourite-musician/prince/president-here, much still remains redacted:
Of the documents that have been made available so far, many of these have been heavily redacted with black bars covering names, addresses, emails and photos. In some cases, it is clear why this had happened. In others, the absence of any reason for the redaction has simply added fuel to the fire, with spectators filling in the blanks themselves.
Which is why the article's opening assertion must be met with grave skepticism:
One of the hardest tasks of any government in a democracy is balancing the right to know against the need to know.
The above statement applies only to a government that fears making plain to the public, the extent of its wrongdoing. The right to know what one's government is engaging in is needed to hold politicians accountable. They go hand in hand. So with all these worries over supposed 'democratic backsliding' in the US, one wonders what the point of democracy is in the first place. When both sides of the political aisle offer equally poor solutions to policy issues, or, in this case, party with pedophiles, why have the right to vote in the first place?
Much more is to come from the Epstein files, or at least that's what the story has us believe. So far, only three people have been arrested as a result of their release: Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, Peter Mandelson, and Ghislaine Maxwell. Oh, and by arrested, I mean that the former prince has been arrested and released "under investigation"; the "Crown Prince of Darkness" similarly so, meanwhile just the latter languishes in a New York cell. That's justice in a western panopticon state for you.
Meanwhile, the lines on the map move from side to side...
©Tom Large 2025
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