Britain stands on a precipice. Not of a recession or political upheaval, but complete systemic collapse. The arithmetic is clear and unforgiving: the implication of the last Government Actuary’s Department report is that the UK will default on welfare commitments, including all pension commitments, by 2043-44, as the National Insurance Fund runs dry. With debt approaching 96% of GDP and interest payments consuming £16.4 billion monthly, we have perhaps 20 years to prevent a pre-Javier Milei Argentine-style meltdown. Sickness benefit claims rose from 2.8 million to 3.4 million, with 9.3 million economically inactive Britons – 713,000 more than before the Covid pandemic. These numbers represent not temporary difficulties, but full-blown structural breakdown.
This crisis demands radical honesty after decades of delusion. Since 1945, no government has shrunk the state below 34% of GDP. Even Thatcher’s supposed revolution merely paused the relentless expansion. David Cameron and George Osborne’s austerity, which supposedly ‘gutted public services’, managed to bring its size down to only mid-Tony Blair premiership levels. The fundamental architecture of social democracy and the managerial state we have been living under – unlimited promises funded by unlimited spending – is now collapsing under the weight of its own contradictions.
The Illusion of Moderate Statism
British politics suffers from a catastrophic failure of imagination and honesty. Politicians privately acknowledge the NHS is broken beyond repair, our pension system is unsustainable, and welfare has become a dependency trap. Yet publicly, they persist with cosmetic reforms while the edifice crumbles. Rachel Reeves discovered this harsh truth as she has been forced into trying to cut government spending, despite Labour’s decades-long claims that such measures were merely ‘political choices’.
This extends across the political spectrum. Many on the Right recognise the problem but lack the courage to articulate the radical solutions required. The Left live in a fantasy land, believing somehow public services lack money despite record levels of state funding, taxes are too low despite reaching record highs and spending can solve the very problems that have been created by state profligacy. Both paths lead to national collapse.
We need a British Javier Milei
Argentina provides both a warning and hope. Prior to Javier Milei’s election to the Presidency, monthly inflation reached 25% and fiscal deficits persisted for 123 years. Their economy had collapsed, and regular hard-working people were suffering the result of decades of economic vandalism. President Javier Milei’s radical free market programme slashed inflation to 2.7%, achieved fiscal surplus and delivered the first balanced budget since 1900.
Britain need not become pre-Milei Argentina, but without dramatic reform, this is our path. Our borrowing costs already exceed our G7 peers, reflecting what the OBR terms our ‘relatively vulnerable’ fiscal position. When creditors lose confidence – and they will – we face the stark choice between default and hyperinflation.
Rediscovering the Free Market Miracle
The answers to how we avoid this are actually quite clear. Slash government spending, significantly reduce the number of regulators and regulations, abolish government departments that should never have existed in the first place, dramatically lower taxes and most importantly, re-embrace the free market.
For too long, we have allowed the free market, capitalism, and freedom to somehow become dirty words. We must make them attractive again. We must speak about them with the energy and enthusiasm that they deserve. They have lifted billions and billions of people out of poverty throughout history. Let’s speak about how the free market and freedom can do so again. We are often guilty of speaking about the economy in purely dry economic and technical terms. This kind of analysis is important, but it must be combined with a relentless positivity and optimism for the answer: the free market and freedom.
As Leonard Read’s ‘I, Pencil’ demonstrates, no single person possesses the knowledge to manufacture something as simple as a wooden pencil; yet, millions are produced daily through voluntary cooperation across the globe.
This miracle occurs because markets capture and coordinate dispersed knowledge through price signals. No bureaucrat understands local conditions, immediate needs or particular skills scattered among millions of individuals. Yet the price system processes this information instantly, directing resources where they’re most valued. This is Friedrich Hayek’s great insight: the knowledge problem makes central planning impossible and markets indispensable.
The free market represents spontaneous coordination of millions of individual decisions, creating prosperity without central direction – involuntary harmony amongst chaos. It is miraculous that such a thing exists, but the regulatory state crushes it. Every intervention distorts price signals, misallocates resources, and reduces prosperity. The planning system that created our housing crisis, the welfare state that traps people in dependency, and the NHS that rations healthcare whilst consuming ever-greater resources all represent the same fundamental error: believing politicians can override economic reality through legislation.
We should celebrate markets with the enthusiasm socialists reserve for spending, taxation and regulation. The spontaneous order that transforms individual self-interest into collective benefit deserves recognition as one of humanity’s greatest discoveries. Making freedom attractive again requires passionate advocacy from all of us.
Fighting for a Free Future
Britain’s crisis demands radical institutional change, but institutions reflect ideas and these ideas must be within the Overton Window to be implemented by a government. Until the radical ideas necessary to fix our country are within the Overton Window, serious and lasting political and economic reform remains impossible. The last Conservative government’s failures demonstrate that occupying office without controlling the debate achieves nothing lasting.
This is why Steve Baker has launched Fighting for a Free Future. As Director of the group, I am proud of the bold new cross-institutional movement we have created to fight for liberty, low taxes, free enterprise and smaller government. We will not get bogged down in day-to-day politics, but instead fight in the battle of ideas, work to shift the terrain of debate and set the conditions for Britain’s Milei to emerge at the next general election.
The Fighting for a Free Future Community brings together leading free market and freedom-oriented institutions alongside a network of politically influential figures, amplifying each other’s voices in the fight for economic liberty. Voices for a Free Future with Steve Baker lifts the veil on Westminster’s inner workings to help us understand the roots of our economic crisis and illustrates how to overcome the political obstacles to meaningful free market reform. Through our Educational Initiatives, we work to equip emerging pro-freedom leaders with the knowledge and confidence needed to champion free market principles throughout their careers.
‘The Insurgency with Steve Baker’ podcast debuts on Friday September 12; it will feature high-profile politicians, journalists and thinkers from Westminster discussing how and why things have gone so wrong, and how we can fix them. We have launched Fighting for a Free Future merchandise that we hope many will proudly wear as part of the fight to make freedom and free markets attractive again.
The choice confronting Britain is existential: voluntary reform or involuntary collapse. Argentina shows that transformation is possible even in seemingly hopeless circumstances.
Britain once led the world in embracing economic freedom. We can do so again. The alternative – joining history’s catalogue of once-great nations destroyed by fiscal irresponsibility – is too terrible to contemplate. The free market offers salvation, but only if we possess the courage to grasp it.
We are in the midst of the battle for Britain’s future. The question is whether we’ll fight for a free future or surrender to decline. I know what I will be doing. Let’s fight for a free future, together.
You can visit Fighting for a Free Future’s website here.
