Rob’s comments below are in italics.Derek’s comments below are in normal font.
The UK budget was announced on 26th November 2025, which we broadly regard as a PR exercise for the powers that ought not to be. The budget isn’t really a budget because they don’t break down where the money comes from and where it’s going. Could you elaborate on that Derek?
A good starting point would be this post that you forwarded to me from someone you’re acquainted with on Facebook. He’s apparently been an engineer and gone into property development, and is quite wealthy. He’s got his own perspective and his own views. The core of his perception is really along the lines of something that John Kenneth Galbraith put in his 1958 book, The Affluent Society. What Galbraith said is that the proportion of people in society doing anything really tangibly useful and productive is very small. The rest of the population, one way or another, is being carried by them.
Your friend had some numbers in his post that are worth chewing over. He started by saying that the non-working-age population in Britain was 27 million. What he means by non-working age is under-16s and pensioners. Out of a population of 70 million, the working-age population is 43 million. Then he goes on to say that every working-age person must support just over half of a non-working-age person. But actually, that’s sadly wrong.
He goes on to break down the working-age group into several categories. He says there are 9 million who simply choose not to work, and that fewer than 2 million people are seeking work.
Then he goes on to say there are six million people in the public sector. Although he isn’t claiming they don’t do anything useful, I’d agree with his implied point that we don’t get much value for money from the public sector as a whole. I’d hate to offend anybody who’s a civil servant or a local government official or something. Obviously, there is quite a bit that the government does which is worthwhile. We could certainly do with more people filling the potholes in the roads. Also, a lot of the people doing the most valuable work, such as nursing, emergency services, or teaching.
But his point is that they’re all paid from taxation. So the people who are actually generating wealth are those in the private sector. Of course, if we wanted to be brutal about it, there are a great many people in the private sector whose work isn’t necessarily generating value.
So where is the value being generated? Well, the people who are actually working on the farms, the people who are actually working in factories and workshops. This is a small proportion. I’d say that even people who are cooking or serving tables in a restaurant are providing something of value to their customers. It’s obviously transient value, but we’d all agree that at least some of the time, going and having a meal that we haven’t had to cook or clear up is something we’d like to do. The people doing it are at least producing value.
Gainfully employed, I’d argue.
Yes. So, anyway, summarising all that, what he said is that of the 43 million of working age, there are 28 million private sector workers that generate profits to pay for the rest of the population via taxation. In other words, every private-sector worker must generate income to pay taxes that cover 2.5 other people.
This is one of the reasons why the money you’re managing to bring in for your own efforts doesn’t produce nearly as much effort from other people when you pay it out. That’s the way it looks to me. Would you agree with that, Rob?
I’d agree with that, yeah.
However, a few things are missing from this picture. One of them is that a very tiny proportion of the population are clearly coining it on a grand scale. That seems to be an increasingly large amount going to an increasingly small number of people.
Millionaires are becoming billionaires, billionaires are becoming trillionaires. To paraphrase Caitlin Johnstone, we’re feeding the world’s ecosystem to the wood chipper in the process.
Yeah. Of course, another thing that is particularly relevant at the moment is the purchase of weaponry by governments. We really need to have some analysis of this, particularly when we’ve got situations like the war in Ukraine. I’d really like to know how much equipment, ammunition and material that we, the British people, have sent there. How long does it actually last before it’s destroyed?
There are tanks, artillery pieces, and armoured personnel carriers that are destroyed sometimes within days of arriving. There are explosives and ammunition, which if they actually reach the battlefield, are instantly auto-destroyed and cause a great deal of damage in the process. But there’s a great deal of ammunition that is destroyed before it even reaches the battlefield. Clearly, these are objects which have been built, manufactured, and created; however the energy put into them produces no useful benefit to anybody.
It seems to me that they talked about the First World War being the war to end all wars, which logically ought to have been.
The war to start all wars is actually what happened!
But I wonder whether, if we survive this era we’re going through at the moment, we’ll see that the Ukraine war really was the war that indicated the sheer futility of it. Whatever you put into the battlefield, something is so asymmetric.
Now that drones have become so ubiquitous on the battlefield, some of them are little more than £50 or £100 hobby drones that people play around with. Those can be arranged to drop a hand grenade. You know, even the more exotic and sophisticated ones that we’ve got out there now are still in the range of a few hundred pounds up to a few thousand pounds. Each of those can do multi-million-pound worth of destruction to enemy equipment.
At this rate, it must soon reach the point that even within the internal logic of people who are not morally horrified by the whole nature of warfare, it must increasingly begin to look like a futile exercise.
So there again, he made some predictions. This letter was penned just before the budget. He suggested that we would see numerous small tax rises across many areas. In many cases, they would not actually produce much more income to the government, but would upset a lot of people.
He didn’t expect there to be any significant government spending reductions. As we know, there never is. There’d be more tax rates on the private sector. I don’t know how those have worked out. We’ll see how this is spun in the media. We’ll see how things work out in the future.
Against this, what I’d be inclined to say myself is that the structures within which patterns of work and patterns of taxation have been set up are really from years gone by. With the technological developments we’ve seen over the last 50 years, there is no longer any need to expect that everybody works a 40-hour or longer workweek.
The total amount of work that actually requires a human interaction to deliver the things that we really want delivered in society, once we’ve cut out the unnecessary burden of having to replace your washing machine and your refrigerator every five or ten years, when there’s no reason why it couldn’t have been built to last a lifetime.
But even within that, once we get rid of all of the unnecessary make-work which is merely done to justify people collecting a paycheque and just concentrated on what was necessary to provide us with the material basis for living our lives, the amount of work that was required to be done would, as I say, be maybe ten hours a week, maybe five hours a week on average.
Most people would be quite capable of doing that. There’d be a lot less resistance to it. There’d be no actual unemployed people. If they were paid a commensurate proportion of what they’re generating in doing that work, it would be enough to provide them with the exchange wherewithal to purchase what they wanted in return.
Of course, people who wanted to acquire more, or live a more extravagant lifestyle, could actually work more than that. They could actually create more. It’s entirely possible, but it requires a complete change of mindset to achieve it.
What we’re looking at here is not something that could be fixed by making minor tweaks to the way the present situation works. It’s something that will necessitate our stepping back from the entire thing, taking a look at it and totally redesigning the way that human society works. That will only be possible if there is a radical reorientation of our philosophical and, indeed, spiritual outlook and approach.
This is as we shift from the totally individualistic mindset we’ve been steeped in, particularly over the last few hundred years, to one that’s truly universal. But certainly a far more widespread understanding that we are all part of one and the same global cosmic system and part of the web of life, which actually supports our existence. Not something aloof from it. So this is a much bigger issue.
Our education system turns out workers. It sets in stone this mindset that you should be working half eight to half five, five days a week, with 20 days of holiday a year. That’s normal.
Yeah. Doing things that you’re not particularly interested in and not particularly keen on.
For me growing up in the North, there was this unspoken narrative that jobs are scarce. You’re lucky to have a job. You have to do things you don’t want to do. Keep your head down. Don’t complain. Work hard. Whereas we need people who are more creative, who understand themselves better, who ask more questions, who maybe do things differently. Who collaborate with like-minded people. We will see that eventually, but there are major problems with the education system. We need to encourage more people to actually understand themselves. We need to teach things like finance, which we don’t do at the moment. There are glaring holes in the project of producing sovereign humans, but the goal of the system is not to produce sovereign humans, it’s to produce dependent humans.
It’s quite the reverse, yeah
I also think it’s natural for people to have fallow periods as well as productive ones. I don’t think we’re meant to just work constantly until a set age. Retirement’s dying anyway, as a thing. People will just work on what they want to work on. I don’t currently envision ever retiring and putting my feet up and waiting to die. It’s not really on my agenda. But if you’re doing work that aligns with your core essence, interests you, and so on, why would you stop?
So yeah, we’re due an overhaul.
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