It’s the most enduring romantic fantasy in human history.

No, I am not talking about finding a partner who remembers to put the lid back on the toothpaste; I’m talking about communism.

The political philosophy that simply refuses to die. No matter how many times it’s tried, no matter how many economies it liquefies, and no matter how many millions of people it systematically destroys, it keeps coming back. It’s like herpes, or The Fast and the Furious franchise. And like the Fast and the Furious, each new installment is more costly, makes less sense, and still somehow involves Cuba.

Just when you think, “Surely, we cannot possibly endure another one of these,” a new generation turns up, slaps a sickle emoji in their social media bio, and screams, “But that wasn’t real communism, Francis! Real communism has never been tried!”

It’s the only ideology in history that needs 200 million dead beta testers before the product is ready to launch. Just think of it - the sheer, Olympic-level hubris one requires to look at the trail of hungry corpses that define the twentieth century’s various attempts to secure Marxist nirvana and say,

“You know what? Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, Pol Pot, Nicolae Ceaușescu, Kim Il-sung, and Robert Mugabe, maybe they all just lacked my specific nuance. If I had been in charge of the agricultural collectivization of the Ukraine in 1932, they’d be dying of obesity in satin beds instead of malnourishment in bread lines, and the aesthetic would have been brilliant.”

The only thing standing between Stalin and utopia wasn’t economics. It was Poppy from Surrey’s 2:2 Sociology dissertation.

It is an extraordinary delusion. According to the most conservative demographic and historical consensus, including data compiled in The Black Book of Communism by Harvard University Press, the twentieth century death toll of communist regimes sits somewhere between 85 million and 100 million people. I’ll say that again—between 85 million and 100 million people. A couple of teething issues. Nothing a few minor tweaks couldn’t fix.

That’s the equivalent of wiping out the entire modern population of the United Kingdom, plus the entire population of Australia, and then and then looking at Denmark and thinking, “Fuck it.” That is not a hiccup. That is not ‘a poor policy’. That is a century-long human meat grinder, running at all costs. That is the policy.

Yet, if you walk onto a university campus or have a scroll through TikTok today, you will find a thriving industry of wealthy, Western, upper-middle class influencers, whose only experience of famine is a 16:8 intermittent fast, getting all misty-eyed at the prospect of gulags and death marches. They see the Soviet Union like it was a historical Glastonbury only with more queues and, admittedly, better toilets.

We have entered the era of the Champagne Bolshevik. The revolution will begin immediately after brunch. No gluten, obviously.

The generation that hates capitalism so passionately, they take to the airwaves to stream their outrage twenty-four hours a day, deploying an electronic device built by slaves while telling you that Global South exploitation must end. Distributing their diatribes over Wi-Fi provided by the free market they’re trying to abolish, adorned in a $1,200 designer t-shirt that was shipped to their luxury apartment with Same Day Prime delivery. The revolution has never had better broadband. Workers of the world, you-like.

II: What It Is (And Why The Kids Love It)

The young comrades that make up the modern Left seem to think Communism was invented by a trendy graphic designer on Pinterest in 2018. As far as they’re concerned, Marxism began when someone put “tax the rich” on a dress, and charged $18,000 for it. Ironically, tax deductible.

The concept traces back to the 1840s, entering the public consciousness in 1848, when Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels published The Communist Manifesto. Marx, famously, never held a job and sponged off Engels for decades; he literally needed a sugar daddy to abolish capitalism. The two argued that all of human history is defined by a class struggle between the bourgeoisie, the wealthy who own the factories and the land, and the proletariat, the working class who sell their labor. To break the cycle, the workers must violently overthrow the owners, abolish private property, seize the means of production, and hand everything over to the state, which would temporarily manage society until the state magically withered away into a classless, moneylender-free paradise. Don’t worry. The state will manage everything temporarily.

Like airport security. Like emergency Covid powers. Like the BBC licence fee. Like income tax.

This, the writers thought, was the inevitable result of capitalism. Their followers couldn’t be bothered to wait around.

It sounds deeply altruistic when you’re reading it in a university library. In practice, it’s a paradox. The classless society requires a ruling class. It might not be a monarchy or a democracy, but someone needs to be in charge. To make sure everything’s divided evenly, and that nobody overthrows the communist system. And once that’s installed, then what?

The state never withers away. The state is your mate saying he’ll only crash on your sofa for a couple of weeks. Twelve years later, he’s still borrowing your phone to check his ex’s Instagram Stories, whines about the thermostat settings, and has killed all of your most productive farmers.

When you give a centralised bureaucracy total control over food, shelter, jobs, and life itself, you don’t get a paradise. You get HR with Nuclear deterrents. You get an all-powerful, totalitarian regime that has to build walls and gun down its own citizens to stop them from fleeing the workers’ utopia.

And we’ve seen it time and time again. Remember that 85 million number? That’s not collateral damage. That’s the brochure. That’s how many fell into the jaws of totalitarian murder in the pursuit of vegan buffets, drum circles, and open mic poetry.

Yet, despite this unblemished track record of absolute failure, we keep leaping into the jaws. Specifically, young people. And if you think it’s just a few edgy teenagers on the internet, you aren’t paying attention to the actual data.

Look at the political trends over the last few years. Polling from organizations like the Institute of Economic Affairs found that a staggering 67% of young people in the UK say they want to live under a socialist economic system, with a significant portion openly identifying capitalism as the source of all modern evil. Despite it being the reason they can get a Deliveroo, vape, and a weighted blanket delivered to their anti-capitalism hug-box.

Ironically, that sentiment has created a massive, highly profitable industry of radical political consumerism. Walk around London or any major university town, and you will see advertisements for Marxist Walking Tours, where young people pay £20 a ticket to walk past historic capitalist banks while listening to a guide explain why money shouldn’t exist. We’ll finish in the gift shop. Capitalist currency pays a commercial business for a guided penny-dreadful through the evils of commerce.
Egg on face, while we still have either.

We see membership numbers spiking for organizations like the Socialist Workers Party and radical youth communist leagues. Week-in and week out, you can find twenty-one-year-olds standing on high streets outside tube stations, eagerly handing out copies of The Socialist Worker with the same predatory energy as a religious cult or a multi-level marketing scheme selling weight-loss shakes.

And why are they falling for it? Because the human brain is hardwired to love a shortcut. Communism promises an end to the brutal, exhausting anxiety of the capitalist marketplace. It converts the natural, healthy frustration of youth into a religion of institutionalized envy. It hides the gulag behind a wall of promised utopia.

III: The Law of the Vital Few

Don’t shoot the messenger. It’s not my fault that the communist dream of absolute equality always shatters upon impact with reality. It’s basic arithmetic. It turns out, the universe does not care about your manifesto. Gravity, to my knowledge, has never once attended a diversity workshop.

There is a mathematical law in economics and nature known as the Pareto Principle, or the 80/20 rule. Discovered by Vilfredo Pareto, it states that in almost any system, roughly 80% of the consequences come from 20% of the causes. Twenty per cent of your apps use eighty per cent of your battery, twenty per cent of your friends are responsible for eighty per cent of your regrets and that one crazy girl you brought home one night is responsible for 80% of all the terrifying texts you get. It’s maths.

The reason nobody is listening to your avant-garde podcast about post structuralist poetry hosted by you and three people all called Rowan isn’t because the capitalist bourgeoisie is actively suppressing your signal, it’s because the Pareto distribution dictates that a few entities will always capture the vast majority of the audience’s attention. It happens under every system.

It’s also completely outside of our control; the fatal arrogance of the Soviet Union was believing they could legislate this law of nature out of existence. They looked at human nature and went, “nah, fuck this right off.” When Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin liquidated the Kulaks, the relatively wealthy independent farmers during the early years of Soviet rule, they claimed they were destroying a corrupt class of capitalist oppressors.

But they weren’t destroying an artificial political class; they were destroying the top 20% of the farmers who produced 80% of the agricultural output. You can redistribute land. You can’t redistribute competence.

Because even in a group of entirely socialist farmers, the Pareto distribution still applies. Some farmers are naturally more competent, some are harder working, some have slightly better soil, and some don’t spend their afternoons drinking dirty-bathtub moonshine.

When the Soviet state shot or exiled that productive 20% in the name of “fairness and equity,” what happened? The remaining 80% didn’t magically step up production. Why would they? So they could be liquidated too? Congratulations, Comrade Ivan, you grew the most potatoes this month! Employee of the Month. You’re fired. It’s like that Rush song about the trees - “And the trees are all kept equal, by hatchet, axe, and saw.” They couldn’t create excellence. They could only punish it.

The entire agricultural system collapsed, resulting in the Holodomor, the catastrophic man-made famine where over 3.5 million people starved to death in Ukraine alone.

They could only fix inequality by making everyone equally hungry.

IV: Lessons from Venezuela

Let’s leave the air-conditioned penthouse rooms of West Hollywood and the Marxist walking tours of East London where revolution always finishes with a Q&A in a coffee shop, and look at the real-world stakes of this ideology. And I’ll admit, this is deeply personal for me.

As I might have mentioned, my mother is from Venezuela. I have watched, in real-time, over the last two decades, as one of the wealthiest, most resource-rich nations in South America, a country sitting on the largest proven oil reserves on the planet, was systematically brought to its knees by the “Chávista” socialist revolution.

Today, more than 7 million Venezuelans have fled the country. That is a refugee crisis larger than Syria’s, generated entirely by economic mismanagement and ideological arrogance. Seven million people don’t abandon their homes because “the vibes were off”.

And if you want to know how the system truly treats the working class, you only have to look at how it responds to natural disasters. Just recently, northern Venezuela was struck by a catastrophic doublet earthquake, a 7.2 magnitude foreshock followed 39 seconds later by a massive 7.5 mainshock. It was the strongest seismic event to hit the country in 125 years.

The official statistics from the ground are horrifying. Over 1,700 people are confirmed dead, thousands are injured, and more than 46,000 people are currently missing beneath the rubble in Caracas and La Guaira.

Venezuela didn’t collapse because of a sudden, unpredictable shift in tectonic plates. It collapsed because the state nationalized the industries, destroyed price mechanisms, printed the currency into oblivion, and replaced competent engineers with loyal party bureaucrats.

And when a disaster like that strikes a socialist state, who pays the ultimate price? It is always, without exception, the poor who get the worst hand.

While the ruling elite, the military generals, and the “Boligbourgeoisie” live in reinforced luxury villas in protected pockets of the capital with private generators and imported food, the working class live in poorly constructed, concrete-brick houses stacked precariously on the hillsides of barrios like Petare. Socialism always promises to abolish class. What it actually does is make the class system more apparent. When the earth shakes, the hillsides liquefy, and the homes of the poor collapse like stacked cards. Why? because twenty years of state corruption means there are no building codes, no infrastructure investment, and no functioning emergency response. Concrete can’t “identify” itself into structural stability.

When the Red Cross and humanitarian teams arrived on the ground, they found hospitals without running water, without antibiotics, and without basic trauma supplies. This isn’t because of the natural disaster; the hospitals were empty before the earthquake.

That is the true face of the ideology that Western influencers romanticize on Twitch. In West Hollywood or Brixton, communism is an edgy lifestyle brand, like being into crust-punk or New French Extremity. In Caracas, it’s a collapsed roof over your head, and an empty medicine cabinet. It’s the death of your family and friends. But that doesn’t look good on a shirt.

VI: The Only Real Alternative

I’ll concede that capitalism isn’t perfect either. Like communism, it’s backed by beautiful, well-intended principles that, in practice, don’t always create the most desirable outcomes. For most of us, it’s a rat-race where the cheese is dynamically priced. Very little is guaranteed and your life is defined by your work. It’s inherently inequitable, often ruthless, and produces an ambient anxiety that’s so omnipresent, it’s easy to forget it’s even there.

It’s no surprise that people go looking for an alternative. But if communism is a catastrophic human meat grinder and capitalism is a hyper competitive, high-stress casino that leaves people feeling alienated, overworked, and broke, what do we do? Other than become a Labrador.

Winston Churchill captured the brutal, unvarnished reality of the democratic-capitalist condition perfectly in his famous 1947 address to the House of Commons.

“Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time...”

Which is the most British endorsement of anything, ever. It’s shit, but it’s the best we’ve got. Capitalism, for all its faults, has one mathematical, foundational saving grace that no collectivist regime can ever replicate: It is the only system in human history that treats you like an individual. One with choices, agency, and unique attributes.

Under capitalism, you can fail. Often through no fault of your own. But at least nobody made you fail. At least, the universe’s whims stitched you up, not the government’s. Adam Smith - the theory’s main man - famously said that poverty was a state of nature. Even at its worst, capitalism is only as bad as no system at all. Communism, on the other hand, is worse; it takes from you the things that you made yourself.

Under a capitalist system, you have the freedom to be a complete hypocrite. And millions do. You have the right to log onto a corporate social media platform, access high-speed privately owned broadband, wear an expensive designer garment, and spend your evening selling the concept of Marxist revolution. It’s the only ideology confident enough to stock its own critics. Waterstones has a Marx section. Pyongyang does not have an Adam Smith table. Freedom is weird like that.

But history has proven, with terrifying, bloody consistency, that the moment you trade that flawed individual freedom for the grand collective fantasy, the trap snaps shut. The utopian vocabulary evaporates, the borders are locked, and the tyranny begins.

The next time you see a young person standing outside a tube station handing out communist leaflets asking if you’ve got a minute to abolish private property, or a multimillionaire streaming from a luxury gaming chair about the glory of wealth redistribution, look past the aesthetic. Peel off the sickle emojis and smack away the designer berets.

Remember the empty hospitals of Caracas, remember the liquidated farms of Eastern Europe, and remember that the most valuable thing you own isn’t the means of production—it is your right to stand up, go nose-to-nose with the people in people, and say “No.”

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Last month, a 32-year-old software engineer from Birmingham spent £450 on a completely empty box.

Why? Because it was briefly touched, for approximately four seconds, by a 19-year-old Instagram model. For his hard-earned money, he also got a ten-second voice note from her: “Thanks for being such a special boy, Kevin.”

Kevin is no freak. Well, he is, but not as much as you think. He’s merely one of millions who participate in the Simp Economy.

“Simp”, originally short for simpleton but mutated across chatrooms and forums into a devastating slur, refers to a man who provides excessive attention, unreciprocated financial capital, and desperate validation to a creator online in a tragic, one-sided quest for emotional or physical intimacy.

Now if you happen to be a normal human being, you might think it’s no big deal.

“It’s just lonely blokes sending a few quid to pretty girls on the internet. Live and let live!”

No. It is not harmless, you sweet, naive summer child. It is an industrial-scale financial extraction machine that makes Las Vegas casinos look like a charitable church bake sale. We have quietly constructed an entirely new digital infrastructure specifically engineered to commodify human isolation, financialize male loneliness, and turn the basic human desire for romantic connection into a hyper-monetized, direct-to-wallet subscription funnel. It’s basically The Matrix, but instead of harvesting our bodies for electricity, they’re draining our Monzo accounts and our balls for feet pics.

And it’s not just desperate girls in their room; Hollywood actresses are in on the racket. Drea De Matteo, Carmen Electra, Shannon Elizabeth, and more of the honeys you once had plastered on your bedroom walls have turned to OnlyFans. Think of that - these women, to rescue their dignity, have turned to pornography.

How did we get here?

This economic explosion is happening precisely because we are currently navigating a massive, global “loneliness epidemic” or “friendship recession.” Study after study shows that young men have fewer close friends, fewer romantic relationships, and less face-to-face social interaction than at any other point in modern human history. A recent survey found that over 25% of men under 30 report having no close social connections. A quarter. Stalin couldn’t isolate people this effectively, but to be fair, I hear his tits were mid.

But why pay? Since the advent of free and easy online pornography, nobody’s had to pay to see a sideboob since the early 2000s. Why are men in their millions dipping into their pockets for it? Forgoing luxuries and necessities for something that exists elsewhere free of charge?

This economic engine relies on a psychological concept known as a parasocial relationship - a one-sided relationship where one person extends immense emotional energy, time, and financial capital, while the other person has absolutely no idea they exist, or treats them purely as a line item on a spreadsheet.

In the days of yesteryear, this affliction would amount to little more than some harmless stalking and Peeping Tommery, hiding in a bush with binoculars like a respectable British pervert. In the digital age, there are no limits. Modern tech platforms didn’t just exploit this dynamic, they industrialised it.

I: The Pyramid of Geezer

At the very bottom of the pyramid, you have The Masses. Those who get suckered in by the free content. The TikTok dances, the Instagram gym selfies, the Twitch streams. This is the bait. The creator looks directly into the lens of their phone, making eye contact with millions of guys simultaneously, creating the subconscious illusion that she is looking directly at them. Young men, alone and right-handed, with the forearm strength of a Bulgarian shot-putter, respond accordingly - her affectionate gaze, aimed at both millions and nobody in particular, inspires them to reach out. But how?

Easy; they’ve already set up Tier 2 - The Subscribers. The creator says, “Hey, if you want to see the real me, the unfiltered me, join my private platform for just $9.99 a month.” The young man joins. He enters the gate. He thinks he’s now part of an exclusive club.One with only 47,000 other members.

The creators make vast wealth of Tier 2; a few thousand men giving you 10 dollars a month adds up quickly. But it’s still not where the real money is made. The subscription fee is just the cover charge to get into the casino. The house always To rub salt in the wound, you’re not even his only boyfriend wins, and in this case the house is wearing cat ears.Industry data reveals that standard monthly subscriptions only account for about 35% of a top creator’s revenue.

For the real dosh, you gotta keep climbing: The Pay-Per-View Messages and Tips.

Once a guy is inside the platform, he enters the third tier: The VIP Churn. This is where the creator sends a mass, locked direct message to thousands of subscribers simultaneously that says: “Hey babe, I made a special video just for you tonight, pay twenty dollars to unlock it.” An exclusive club with ninety thousand other members - the most crowded VIP room in history .To the lonely guy sitting in his flat at 2 AM, that message arrives in his inbox looking like a personal, intimate DM sent just to him by his better-half. His brain/dick overrides logic, his credit card comes out, and the transaction is complete.

At the absolute apex of this pyramid sit the most prized benefactors of all: The Whales.

In the tech and gambling industries, a “whale” is a high-net-worth user who spends astronomical amounts of money. It’s the old lady throwing away her grandchildren’s inheritance at the slot machine, occasionally being gifted a free prawn cocktail by the casino that’s putting her family into generational debt. In the Simp Economy, they are the lifeblood of the entire system. Financial breakdowns of top adult platforms show that a tiny fraction, just 4.2% of all subscribers, generate the overwhelming majority of the platform’s revenue. And things haven’t even gotten weird yet.

II: The Bazarr of Bizarre

When a parasocial relationship reaches a fever pitch, normal human logic evaporates, and men will pay premium luxury-car prices for things that are legally classified as biological waste, and in any other context, you would pay to be taken away by a man in a hazmat suit.

The patient zero for this trend was Belle Delphine. In 2019, this nineteen-year-old internet personality decided to sell small glass jars of her actual, used bathwater to her fanbase, labeling it “GamerGirl Bath Water.” She charged $30 a bottle.

Thirty fucking dollars. For a jar of lukewarm tap water that had briefly commingled with her skin and soap residue. And the terrifying thing is, it sold out in three days. She cleared a staggering $90,000 in profit from a single batch of bathwater. Men were buying it to display on shelves like a priceless Ming vase. Well at least, some were. Others, contrary to the instructions on the jar, drank it, inviting us to ask “Was the Industrial Revolution worth it?” Did we invent antibiotics, split the atom, and build the combustion engine just so some degenerate redditor could willingly give himself cholera from an E-girl’s runoff?

Belle Delphine was just the opening act. The Simp Economy, quickly bored of her paddling pool of fluids, was headed for the deep end.

Or see Alexia Grace, a former minimum-wage barista from Derbyshire. She realised that making lattes was a terrible way to pay a mortgage, so she pivoted. She started going to intensive boxing sessions, wearing heavy hoodies, and afterwards, wringing her sweat-soaked clothes out into tiny glass vials. She sells these sweat vials to her OnlyFans subscribers for huge sums, pulling in up to £10,000 a week. She literally bought a two-hundred-thousand-pound house in cash, funded entirely by her blood, sweat and tears. Hey. At least it wasn’t piss.

And if you think that’s still a bit tame, let us look at reality television star Stephanie Matto, better known as “Fart Jar Girl”, who like the name suggests built a highly lucrative enterprise selling her own flatulence in glass jars. She charged $1,000 per jar of jarred flatulence!

A self sustaining economy for selling wind?! Ed Miliband must be bloody loving this.

She made over $200,000 doing this before she had to be hospitalized because her diet of beans, protein shakes, and hard-boiled eggs gave her such severe chest pains she thought she was having a cardiovascular event! She literally gave herself a medical emergency trying to keep up with the market demand for her intestinal gas!

After that, the requests get hyper-specific. Creators routinely report men paying hundreds of dollars for:

• A jar of water they have gargled and spat back out.

• Used gym trainers

• And a massive, booming industry known as SPH: Small Penis Humiliation, where men pay $100 just to have a woman look at a picture of their dick via DM and send a voice note telling them they are pathetic.

Men are opening their banking apps, authorizing the transaction, and losing a hundred quid just to have a stranger on the internet call them a disappointment! My friend, your parents are already doing that to you for free at Sunday lunch!

III: The Farm-Raised Catfish

The parasocial facet of this enterprise is no accident. If you happen to be one of the lonely men we’re talking about, throwing their savings into the void for a glimmer of ‘attention’ from the Fart Jar Girl, you need to hear this.

My friend. I say this with the utmost compassion, from one human being to another: she isn’t there. You are not talking to her. You have never talked to her. You are talking to a thirty-four-year-old bloke named Ivan, fat and sat at his desk in the Soviet Bloc. You’re not even his only boyfriend.

Welcome to the world of OFM: OnlyFans Management Agencies. It’s essentially just Deloitte for prostitutes. Sorry, that’s just Deloitte.

Despite what’s promised, OnlyFans is not a ticket to the big money; an independent, unmanaged creator on these platforms earns an average of just $130 a month. That’s not exactly ‘fuck you” money. It’s more ‘for fuck sake’ money. The reality is that the top 0.1% of accounts capture a staggering 76% of all the money on the site. To break into that elite tier, creators hand over the keys of their digital identity to these corporate agencies.

And how do these agencies operate? They use a strategy known within the trade as “Ghost Chatting.”

The creator’s only job is to provide raw photos and videos. Once the media is uploaded to a shared Google Drive, the agency takes complete control of the account. They hire armies of professional chatters, working in rotating eight-hour shifts, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. These chatters are armed with comprehensive training manuals, psychological profiling tools, and detailed internal spreadsheets tracking every single subscriber’s financial history and emotional vulnerabilities - you’d swear it was a real woman!

Look at this actual text from an agency training manual leaked online. Look at how calculated it is. It’s a guide for exploitation.

“If the subscriber mentions a hard day at work, do not send a generic reply. Validate his role as a ‘provider.’ Make him feel strong. Once the emotional connection is established, immediately lock the next message behind a $50 Pay-Per-View barrier and label it ‘A little something to help you unwind, baby.’”

The agency typically takes a massive 30% to 50% cut of the gross revenue generated by the account. The lonely guy at home thinks he is building a genuine connection with a beautiful woman, but he is actually playing high-stakes financial chess against a professional corporate copywriter whose sole metric for success is maximizing the average revenue per user. This is an industrialized catfishing operation. You aren’t paying for love; you are paying the salary of a predatory marketing department. In summary, it’s horny guys in India, paying to message other guys in India.

IV: The Catfish of the Future… Today!

But if you think human ghost chatters are dystopian, brace yourselves, because the Simp Economy is, as we speak, crossing into a terrifying new frontier: Artificial Intelligence.

Human chatters are effective, but they come with major liabilities. They require sleep. They require shift pay. They can get burnt out. But an AI large language model? An AI can chat with one hundred thousand men simultaneously, in eighty different languages, with flawless contextual memory, absolute emotional consistency, and zero overhead cost. Bargain.

Over the last twelve months, we have seen the explosive rise of the AI Companion and Virtual Influencer market.

Tech startups are now creating fully synthetic, entirely digital models using advanced deepfake technology and generative AI. These models do not exist in the physical world. They are entirely lines of code inside a server farm. Yet, they have verified social media profiles, millions of followers, and thousands of paying monthly subscribers.

‘Human creators’ (what a bleak combination of words) don’t see these cyber-whores as competition. Instead, they’re learning from them. Thousands of creators are now partnering with tech firms to train AI clones on their voice and text history to create interactive “AI Girlfriends.” For a monthly fee, users can text these AI entities in real-time. The AI will send them instant voice notes, ask them how their day was, generate custom selfies on demand, and engage in hyper-personalized conversation.

A human chatter at an agency is a financial scam, yes, but at least there is a living human brain on the other end of the wire. With AI, the illusion is complete. We are providing a generation of isolated men with a perfectly compliant, endlessly available, synthetic relationship that requires absolutely no social skills, no mutual compromise, and no personal growth. She never has a headache. She never says, “Can we talk?” She never asks you to meet her parents. She never looks at your flat and says, “Francis, Is this actually how you actually live? Use a plate for fuck sake!”

Why would a lonely, socially anxious young man go through the terrifying, vulnerable process of asking a real woman out on a date, risking rejection, navigating real human flaws, and building actual mutual respect, when he can pay twenty pounds a month to an algorithm that is mathematically optimized to tell him exactly what his ego wants to hear? Real dating involves eye contact, compromise, listening and occasionally having to use plates in your own bloody flat. No thank you.

The path of least resistance inevitably leads to ruin. It doesn’t cure loneliness; it insulates you against reality. It takes the most fragile part of the human condition, our intrinsic need to be seen and valued - and turns it into a closed-loop algorithmic profit engine for a venture capital fund. Somewhere, a man in a patagonia fleece is looking at your loneliness on a graph and hoping it’s not a bubble.

V: How To Rescue The Men In Your Life (Including You)

Look, if you’re one of the guys we’re talking about, are feeling a bit defensive, or even just recognize some of these habits in your own life - or the life of a friend, a son, or a brother - don’t beat yourself up.

The desire for connection, for intimacy, and for validation is not a weakness. It is the most fundamentally human thing about you. There is no shame in wanting to feel seen. The tragedy is that you are being offered a plastic, corporate, counterfeit of that desire and being charged premium monthly rates for the privilege.

The antidote to the Simp Economy is simple, but it requires a massive amount of courage: We have to log off and step back into the real, messy, terrifying world. The one with eye contact, bad dates, being judged, and women who can’t be paused when they start talking about their day.

And hey, the graphics out here are incredible, even if the NPCs can be a bit rude.

Take the money you are spending on digital validation and reinvest it into your actual life. Spend it on a gym membership where you actually talk to people. Spend it on a hobby, a class, or a pint with an old mate you haven’t seen in months. Go through the agonizing, beautiful process of building real relationships with real people who have flaws, but who can actually love you back. Who don’t cynically call you a “provider” when you talk about your day at work. Who don’t try and sell you their farts and bathwater. People who, when they look you in the eye, really do.

And if you know a young guy who you suspect is falling down this digital rabbit hole, trapped in a parasocial loop, wasting his wealth on an algorithm or a ghost chatter, do not mock him. Do not lecture him. Show him the corporate gears behind the curtain. Let’s pull the mask off the machine and understand exactly how the trick works. Because the second you realize that your deepest emotional needs are being treated as an optimization problem by a software company, the illusion shatters completely.

Hello reader. This article is part two of a furious screed on the subject of subscriptions, tech supremacy, and the atomising effect of disownership. I recommend you read the first part before you get ‘round to this one.

Done that?

Lovely. Let’s crack on.

Part 4: The Hardware Hijack

Everything we have discussed so far—as invasive and irritating as it may be—has largely existed in the digital world. It’s software, streaming services, cloud storage. And however much I may dislike some of it, I can at least understand the economic argument. Netflix today is a different service to what it was a year ago, and you’re paying for those updates along the way. I wish I didn’t, but I can accept those terms.

But that wasn’t enough for the fat cats. Corporations looked at the physical world - actual objects made of metal, plastic, leather, glass, and copper wiring - and asked a question so breathtakingly audacious that it deserves to be framed and displayed in a museum of pure corporate villainy: “What if we made them pay every month for a thing they already own?”

A business model only previously attempted by the Mafia.

Nobody did it better than BMW.

A few years ago, BMW rolled out an infamous experiment. They sold customers luxury cars physically fitted with heated seats. That is to say, the heating elements were already installed. The wiring was already run through the chassis. The button already existed on the dashboard. The hardware was physically sitting inside the vehicle. BMW had already spent the factory capital to manufacture it. The customer had already paid for the weight of the car. The seat was, in every meaningful sense, fully capable of warming your backside. The arse-warming technology was present. The bum infrastructure had been completed. The cheeks were standing at the border, ready to receive aid.

But if you wanted it to actually do so? That would be an additional monthly fee.

You would open an app on your phone. You would enter your credit card details. You would subscribe. And then, and only then, would a server in Munich beam a digital permission slip to your car allowing the electricity to travel four inches onto your ass. Electricity you already paid for when you filled the thing up with petrol.

Call me old-fashioned, but generally, when I buy a chair, I expect the chair to perform all of the chair-related activities immediately! I do not expect to discover that one of its cushions has entered into a separate contractual relationship with a German conglomerate!

I don’t want to find out that my left buttock has a direct debit set up with a Bavarian board of directors just to avoid frostbite on the M4 in February.

When it came time to derive the findings of this experiment, BMW’s team came to a shocking conclusion: people absolutely hated it. And I mean genuinely hated it. Consumers will tolerate a surprising amount of nonsense. Price increases? Unfortunately, yes. Complicated financing packages? Apparently yes. Paying extra for metallic paint even though the car is already made of metal? Yes. The salesman giving you a nipple cripple and calling you a pussy if you don’t want the turbo charged engine?...well maybe that’s just me, but anyways…

Consumers instinctively understand the difference between paying for an ongoing service and paying a ransom on an object they already bought. But tell someone their heated seat already exists and they must pay rent on the button? Suddenly you’ve recreated the French Revolution with leather upholstery.

So, BMW eventually backed away from the idea. One of the few remaining examples of modern consumers collectively saying: “No. Absolutely not. Fuck right off.” “Fuck Nein.”

But it’s not just BMW. You can buy motorcycle jackets now with subscription-based airbags; you pay £12 a month every month for the luxury of your airbag deploying. Cancel the payment, or run out of money, and they are more than happy for you to cartwheel to your death and smear yourself on the tarmac like a big fleshy crayon. The punishment for cancelling your service is death. Where’s the “double thank-you” there?

The automotive industry is hardly alone. Everyone’s at it. The home-printing industry has spent years trying to perfect its own version of subscription dependency. Customers of HP have repeatedly found themselves in a Mexican stand-off with their fax machine, where if you cancel your monthly ink subscription, the printer will actively lock the cartridges you already have in your house, refusing to print your documents.

Your printer has become a tiny plastic tyrant. It sits in the corner of your spare room going: “Lovely boarding pass you’ve got there. Shame if someone refused to print it unless you… restored your subscription.”

Think about that! What should be a simple home appliance somehow develops the hostile complexity of an international hostage negotiation!

And once you start noticing this trend, you see it everywhere. Smart thermostats. Security cameras. Fitness trackers. Doorbells. Products that once performed a straightforward mechanical function are increasingly connected to accounts, memberships, renewals, and terms of service documents longer than Tolstoy’s first draft of War And Peace.

A doorbell used to be a button that went ding-dong. Now it’s a surveillance weapon employed by the CCP.

Your fridge needs an app. Your hoover needs Wi-Fi. Your toothbrush is sending analytics to California like, “Geoff’s gums are underperforming this quarter.”

The goal is to transform ownership itself. To create a world where purchasing something is no longer the end of a transaction, but merely the beginning of a billing relationship. Because the modern corporate fantasy is that you never actually buy an appliance—you spend the rest of your life paying a subscription fee to your own toaster. And when you’ve had enough of this, you can’t even take it in the bath with you because that feature requires a premium tier!

Part 5: The Vampire Economy

We know why they do it. The question is, why do we let them?

It’s called The Vampire Economy.

Long ago, corporations recognised a fundamental, irrational aspect of human psychology: we are 1) lazy and 2) forgetful.

When you buy a physical item for £50, your brain registers the pain of that transaction immediately. You see the cash leave your wallet. It hurts. That pain registers as a “Don’t do it again.” However, when you sign up for a £7.99 monthly subscription, your brain processes it as a negligible, trivial expense. It’s “just the price of a coffee a day,” as the marketing ghouls love to tell us in their promotional emails.

Everything is “the price of a coffee a day.” Spotify is a coffee a day. Netflix is a coffee a day. My gym is a coffee a day. According to my bank statement, I am drinking forty coffees a day. I should be dead. From anxiety. My heart should have detonated in Pret A Manger weeks ago.

7.99 sounds pretty good as a one-off, but a one-off 12-times a year? It adds up, and you don’t even realise it.

Studies show that a supermajority of consumers underestimate how much they spend on subscriptions each month, often by a significant margin. Official UK government data shows there are around 155 million active subscriptions in the UK, with roughly 10 million classed as entirely unwanted. That means millions of people are actively paying for services they no longer use, or never intended to keep after a “free trial.”

“Cancel anytime” means: “Cancel anytime, provided you can find the hidden button after completing our online escape room.”

I’m talking about you, by the way. You are paying for fitness apps you haven’t opened since Liz Truss was briefly in office. You are paying for premium news websites you only clicked on once to read a single article about a stranded whale. You are paying for premium cloud storage for photos of an ex-partner you haven’t spoken to in seven years!

You’ve got a meditation app making you anxious, a sleep app keeping you awake, and a budgeting app charging you £6.99 a month to tell you you’re poor. Even though you still think about her every day. Just me…

Yes, Gary, she left! She’s not coming back! Delete the iCloud backup of the trip to Center Parcs, Gary! It’s over!

You’re not preserving the relationship. You’re paying Apple to keep a digital shrine of a woman called Emily who now does paddleboarding with a man named Ollie. Steve Jobs has cucked you again.

It is a passive, silent drain on your wealth. It is a vampire with fangs so sharp you don’t even feel the bite. A few times a month, he sneaks in while you sleep to suckle just a few drops of your blood, praying that you never wake up and look closely at your bank statement.

But you feel it. It’s called Subscription Fatigue. Industry data shows that nearly half of all consumers have actively cancelled a subscription in the last six months simply because they are entirely overwhelmed by how many they are paying for. We are suffering from pure subscription burnout.

Fortunately, governments are finally starting to crack down on subscription “traps.” In the UK, the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act has stepped in to completely strengthen rules around transparency, mandatory renewal notices, and simplified cancellation processes. Regulators are actively pushing the principle that exiting a subscription must legally be exactly as easy as it was to join. Finally, maybe our government can do something right.

But even here, you know companies will find a way round it. “To cancel your subscription, simply click this link, upload a scan of your rectal cavity, solve a CAPTCHA showing every traffic light in Belgium, and defeat our retention goblin in single armed combat.”

But don’t wait for them. Here’s what you can do today.

Part 6: The Radical Act of Owning Your Stuff

Laws can only protect us so far. We have to change how we live. Because if we do not draw a line in the sand right now, the fat cats will win. They have designs on your life already: you will live in a rented apartment, sleeping on a subscription mattress, driving a car with paywalled steering, watching fragmented media on a leased television, while an AI assistant you rent for £30 a month manages the cancellation dates of your other eighty subscriptions.

And when you die, you’ll be in your pay-walled coffin, your grandkids huddled around the grave, frantically updating the card details, because if the payment fails, up you come.

If this mass-surveillance hell stresses you out, maybe Claude’ll give you a handjob. But nothing more; that’s exclusively for the premium enterprise tier.

There is an antidote to this madness. And it starts with a radical, almost revolutionary act: Buying things and keeping them.

Go out and buy physical media. If you love an album, buy the vinyl or the digital download from an independent site like Bandcamp. If you love a book, buy the physical pages bound in cardboard. Hey, buy my book for God’s sake! It’s printed on actual paper, it doesn’t require a terms of service update, and it works perfectly even if your Wi-Fi router catches fire!

You can drop it in the bath. You can use it to level a wonky table. You can even throw it at the police during the next inevitable summer riot. That’s real functionality.

And best of all, once you’ve bought it, I can’t charge you £4.99 a month to access Chapter Three. Actually, that’s not a bad idea.

Try this. Audit your bank statement tomorrow morning. Look for the vampires. Find the apps that are bleeding you dry for services you don’t use, and hit that cancel button. After that, hang garlic on your door and never, ever sign up for their bullshit again.

But seriously, buy my book!

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Today, we’re talking about subscriptions.

Specifically, the fact that absolutely everything in modern society - the art you enjoy, the sports you watch, the software you use to work, those cheeky videos you watch in the dark - has been dragged behind a paywall and turned into an eternal, blood-sucking monthly bill. Because God forbid you can just own a DVD of Busty Wenches XII like a respectable Victorian gentleman.

And look, I know exactly what some of you are typing in the comments section right now:

“But Francis, it’s just the modern world! It’s convenient! I like not having physical media cluttering my Scandi-minimalist apartment! It fits neatly into my monthly automated budget tracker!”

No! Stop it! You’ve been lied to! This was never about convenience, or minimalism, or your Swedish decor! And let’s be honest, your flat isn’t minimalist because you’re sophisticated. It’s minimalist because you can’t afford a bookshelf. Convenience was just the sales pitch; it’s the rag that smells lovely, until you wake up in a bathtub with your kidneys gone. This is about your life.

We haven’t just stopped owning things. We are increasingly living in a world where the most intimate corners of our daily lives exist only under the thumb of temporary licenses, revocable permissions, and endless, automated billing cycles. It doesn’t start and end with streaming apps - that would be too normal. This culture is everywhere. There’s no escape.

Your phone, your music, your films, your software, your dating app, your cloud storage, your meditation app - even inner peace is now £8.99 a month! Am I gonna leave? Nah-mastay.

How did it come to this?

PART 1: THE REVENUE MONSTER

To understand how our lives became a series of never-ending micro-transactions, we have to travel back to a mythical, ancient era known to historians as “The Year 2005.”

A simpler time. Tony Blair was in Number 10, ringtones cost £3 and savaged your parents’ phone bill, and the only thing you subscribed to was the belief that dressing like an Emo made you an outsider and deeply interesting.

Back then, capitalism operated on an elegant, fundamentally honest transaction: the double thank-you. A series of one-off trades where both parties benefit. If you wanted something, you walked into a shop, you handed over a crisp twenty-pound note, they gave you a physical object, and then (crucially) it was yours. The shop could not rescind your purchase or make you pay again. If you bought a Microsoft Office CD-ROM in 2003, you could still install it on a laptop today and type a scathing letter to your local council, and Bill Gates couldn’t do a single thing to stop you!

Although this was pre-super villain Bill Gates, before he tried to spike his wife’s drinks with antibiotics so she wouldn’t find out he was best mates with a nonce.

It was great. We didn’t know how good we had it, until the fat cats discovered a metric that completely broke the brains of every CEO on earth. A metric called ARR: Annual Recurring Revenue.

Which, fittingly, is also the sound you make when you open your bank statement. “Arrr”

ARR may sound boring, but to a CEO, it’s crack. You say “annual recurring revenue” to a boardroom and suddenly six men called Hugo start sweating profusely. And it’s not from the cocaine they took the night before.

You see, from a modern corporate perspective, selling you a high-quality product once is an operational failure. If Apple sells you an iPad, and you keep that iPad for six years because it still functions perfectly, you might as well be dead. You are a financial parasite, refusing to upgrade your perfectly fine screen! You’re supposed to drop it in the toilet after 18 months like a good little consumer! They have to spend millions advertising to you all over again just to trick you into buying the next one.

They’d rather not. So instead, they sell you a subscription. It’s a corporate wet dream: instead of selling you a piece of creative software once for £100, Adobe charges you £10 a month, forever. If you stay subscribed for ten years, they’ve made £1,200 off you for the exact same software that still crashes when you try to open a PDF. They justify it to you by offering updates, but how many Adobe users - who just want to sequence videos of weddings and nana’s birthday - are putting things in 4K 3D? James Cameron, and that’s it. Still, you’re all paying for it.

Most people use Photoshop for one of two reasons: making a flyer for a pub quiz, or removing an ex from a holiday photo. Neither of those requires “AI-enhanced neural rendering, unless your ex is really, really fat. In which case it’s probably best to destroy all evidence of your relationship.

And the data shows just how victorious the fat-cats were. Across all sectors, the global subscription economy market has exploded to over $500 billion, and corporate forecasts project it to skyrocket past $1.5 trillion by 2033. If these trends continue, by the year 2050, you’ll be renting your shoelaces. £1.99 a month for the Lace Premium tier. Cancel, and they unravel remotely while you’re legging it from whichever race riot is happening that week.

It turns out, unjustly extracting wealth from human beings with no say in the matter is a very lucrative business model! Who knew?! Well, the East India Company knew. But they at least had the decency to offer a free trial of that sweet, delicious opium.

Which brings us directly to the many-headed sanguivore that is modern entertainment.

PART 2: THE LEANING OF STREAMING

A decade ago, the tech elite stood on stages in black turtlenecks and told us that cable TV was an evil, bloated, anti-consumer monopoly. They said: “Cut the cord! For just £5.99 a month, Netflix will give you everything you could ever want, ad-free, until the end of time!”

And we did! We cut the cord. We tasted freedom. It was great. One big streaming service, making quality entertainment, ad-free, beamed into your living room. It was beautiful. You’d open Netflix and there’d be actual films on there. Films you’d heard of. Not just something called Buggery Yacht 3 starring a miscellaneous Hemsworth cousin. 5.99 for Stranger Things and Making A Murderer? Why not? I could do this forever.

Or so we thought. Until every single media conglomerate on earth realised they were letting Netflix eat their multi-billion-dollar lunch. Disney pulled their movies to start Disney+. Warner Brothers built Max. Paramount built Paramount+. Comcast built Peacock. Apple built Apple TV+.

The half-priced utopia fractured into a feudalist nightmare. If you want to watch three popular shows right now—say, The Bear, House of the Dragon, and The Boys—you need three different accounts, three different passwords, and three different monthly direct debits. For most of us, the only financially viable way to watch television anymore is to stay trapped in a toxic and loveless relationship purely because our partner has the premium tier HBO login.

I don’t care that you text your ex, Katie! The new season of the dragon show starts on Sunday and I am not paying another £15 a month! I will tolerate your emotional unavailability, gratuitous infidelity and inability to emotionally regulate for the high-definition bandwidth!

You think I’m leaving a woman with Now TV Sports? In this economy? I’ll raise another man’s bastard child before I pay for Paramount+.

And this is no secret - we all know it. Nearly half of all consumers openly admit they pay way too much for the streaming services they use, and they still don’t cancel. And if you think narrative television is bad, let us take a moment to pray for the most abused, financially-violated demographic on the face of the planet: the modern sports fan.

PART 2.5: THE SPORTS SHAKEDOWN

If you are a football fan in the UK, you know what it’s like. You just want to watch your team play throughout the season. And for that, you’re treated like an ATM with legs. To watch the Premier League, you cannot just buy a ticket or a single channel. No, no, no; you need Sky Sports. But Sky doesn’t have all the matches! So, you also need TNT Sports. But wait! Amazon Prime bought a specific package of December fixtures, so you need Amazon Prime too! Oh, and if your team plays in the FA Cup, that might be on a completely different platform, and if they play in Europe, you better check who holds the broadcast rights this particular Tuesday!

Supporting a football club used to require loyalty and a scarf. It now requires the administrative skills of Andrew Huberman managing his roster of bitches. Now there’s a podcast I’d love to listen to.

You don’t need a TV guide anymore, you need a corkboard, some red string, and a degree in contract law just to figure out what channel the Arsenal game is on.

By the time you have finished subscribing to every single corporate platform required to watch twenty-two multi-millionaires kick a piece of synthetic leather around a field of grass, you could be spending well over £100 a month. You are paying more for the right to sit on your own sofa and watch football than you are to heat your house. Which is why I now watch football matches in a coat and flat cap while drinking Bovril. If I’m doing poverty, I’m doing it properly.

Even the Champions League final can only be watched if you’ve got the right subscription. And here’s the kicker: they recently moved the kick-off time for this year’s final from 8:00 PM to 5 PM under the corporate guise that it’s “so families can watch it together.”

Which family is watching the Champions League final together? Dad is shouting obscenities at the Bosnian ref, Mum’s asking which one’s Judie Bellingham, even though he’s not playing and the weans are on their iPads watching Ms Rachel teach them about shapes, bunnies and Zionist black-magic.

And after all that, after spending four figures a year to watch a literal game, they brought the ads back anyway.

Yes! The entire selling point of streaming, the literal fucking reason we agreed to this model, was that we were paying a premium to escape commercials. But now? The dynamic has inverted. Market analysis reveals that Advertising Video on Demand (AVOD) is one of the fastest-growing sectors in media.

And this goes back to narrative TV! Everyone’s in on it! Every major platform has introduced “Ad-Supported Tiers.” They didn’t lower the price of the original plan; they just rebranded your original price as the “Ad Tier” and raised the price of the “Premium Ad-Free” tier. You are now paying the exact same amount you paid five years ago, except now, during the heartbreaking final act of Kes, the mourning Northern boy is being interrupted by an ad for Fairy Liquid.

“His kestrel is dead. But are your plates truly alive? Try new Fairy Platinum Plus.”

You’re trying to have a profound emotional experience and suddenly a woman in a spotless kitchen is sexually aroused by dishwasher tablets.

This is cable television all over again. This time we have the indignity of wiring it ourselves.

We cut the cord, then they sold us each individual strand back separately for £9.99 a month.

That was part one. Part two is even more piss-boiling so subscribe now to avoid missing out.

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In 2026, the British voters face a question: do you want a country, or do you want a Psytrance festival campsite with a treasury?

The offer is coming to you directly from the Green Party, and somehow, we’re being asked to take it seriously. Historically, they were just a bunch of middle-class substitute teachers who knitted their own yogurt and wanted to get the whole world to give up steak for a nice plate of mung beans. Yet, the Greens have morphed from a quirky allotment society into one of the fastest-growing political forces in the UK.

They are seizing council seats, weaponizing left-wing internet populism, and drafting a manifesto that reads like an economic suicide pact written by a nineteen-year-old virgin who just discovered Marxism, and thinks the concept of ‘supply and demand’ is “giving racism” - all the while courting sectarian voting from conservative Muslims in Britain’s inner cities.

This is a fascinating alliance, considering one half wants to ban fossil fuels and the other half prays towards a country entirely funded by them.

How did it come to this?

Let’s go back to the beginning.

The party was founded in a bout of post-nut climate anxiety. Yes, really.
In the summer of 1972, a solicitor named Lesley Whittaker walked into the Bridge Inn pub in Warwickshire and handed her husband, Tony, an issue of Playboy. That specific issue contained an interview with Paul Ehrlich, a scientist who predicted that hundreds of millions of people would imminently starve to death in a global ecological apocalypse. Or as I call, the original Ozempic. Yep, that old story. He was the original Greta Thunberg, just with less autism and slightly prettier.

The pair were terrified, and swiftly set about forming a party. So, over a few pints of most probably lukewarm British bitter, they and two friends formed a political movement called the "PEOPLE Party", which eventually rebranded as the Ecology Party, and finally in 1985, the Green Party.

Think about that! The entire environmental movement in UK politics was catalysed because an estate agent and a lawyer got existential dread while flipping past a centerfold of a Playboy magazine. That is beautiful. It’s like finding out social media was created by some autistic Incel to rate women that he’d have no chance of fucking.

Once things got up and running, hey were the ultimate “protest vote.” If you didn’t like Tony Blair or David Cameron, you ticked the box for the sunflower, knowing they’d never actually win anything, but it made you feel virtuous. It was like donating £2 to save a donkey; you did it, patted yourself on the back, and went back to driving a diesel Range Rover home, for a nice donkey steak.

And on the fringes they stayed. For a while. About four decades, until the late 2010s, when the British left underwent a seismic shift.

In 2020, two-wheeled Guevara apologist and former leader Jeremy Corbyn was unceremoniously frozen out of the Labour Party, and his successor, Keir Starmer, began an aggressive, scorched-earth purge of the radicals in the ranks.

This triggered two explosive reactions simultaneously.

First, hundreds of thousands of radical, anti-establishment activists were suddenly left politically homeless. They were wandering the streets of Islington, crying into their Kimchi, desperately looking for a new clan.

Second, following the events of October 7th, the UK’s British Muslim community grew alienated by Starmer’s cautious, institutional stance on the conflict in Gaza. For decades, Muslims had been a loyal bedrock of the Labour vote, historically backing the party at rates upwards of 80%. Now, they felt completely abandoned.

Both factions looked around for a new home, and they noticed the Green Party had a completely open-door policy. What followed wasn’t a gentle integration; it was a hostile takeover. This massive influx of disillusioned leftists and furious anti-war campaigners/Muslim anti-Westies effectively hijacked the party’s infrastructure. Not that it was particularly difficult. Vegans aren’t the most difficult to overpower.

But, they didn’t care about community composting; they transformed the Greens into a high-octane vehicle for intense identity politics, economic radicalism, and anti-Western values.

And leading this brand-new, hyper-progressive but dangerously theocratic coalition is a gay Jewish theatre-geek Zack Polanski. Otherwise known as David Paulden. Otherwise known as the Tooth Fairy (get it?)

Zack is a fascinating character. He is an actor, because of course he is - the entire Green economic programme requires a suspension of disbelief. He’s also former Liberal Democrat candidate, and - not joking - a former hypnotherapist, who in 2013, famously participated in a feature article for The Sun newspaper where he conducted hypnotherapy sessions on a woman in an attempt to increase her breast size.

See, when your entire strategy relies on welcoming anyone who is furious at the mainstream establishment, you don’t just get well-meaning peace activists. You end up with an absolute buffet of candidate meltdowns. Predictably, over the last couple of years, the party has been hit by an avalanche of investigations into candidates sharing abhorrent antisemitic conspiracy theories.

In Camden, council candidate Aziz Rahman Hakimi was suspended after sharing posts claiming that the firebombing of Jewish volunteer ambulances in London was secretly an Israeli “false flag” operation. He also urged Muslims not to smoke because tobacco funds “the Jews to kill our brothers”.

Lambeth Councillor Sabine Mairey was arrested by the Metropolitan Police for stirring up racial hatred after sharing a social media post asserting that "Ramming a synagogue isn't antisemitism. It's revenge." * Another one, Rajeev Kumar from Newham, was investigated for referring to Jewish people as "devil worshippers" on social media. The party of “peace and love” is looking less organic hummus and more full fat Hamas

Just recently, in the Makerfield by-election, their candidate Chris Kennedy had to stand down a mere nine hours after being announced because it emerged he had shared the exact same “false flag” ambulance conspiracy on Instagram.

He lasted nine hours. Liz Truss is looking at that going, “Bit unstable, mate.” She couldn’t outlast a lettuce, Kennedy lost to a mayfly.

But it’s not just the deeply offensive stuff; the sheer level of candidate eccentricity is staggering.

Sarah Wakefield, the new Green Party Makerfield candidate, runs a charity which calls for British farming to be “decolonised” and shared a report arguing that perfectionism is an example of “white supremacy culture.” So remember, kids, if you tidy your room or turn your homework in on time, you’re basically a grand wizard. If perfectionism is white supremacy, my builder who left my bathroom half-finished for six months is the next Nelson Mandela. He’s not lazy, he’s just a brave, anti-racist freedom fighter sticking it to the system by leaving me without a toilet.

Why can’t they all just be the eccentric Greens we expect? Like Councillor Matt Edwards, who led a serious local political campaign focused heavily on banning the use of leaf blowers by council workers, claiming the machines caused “noise pollution and environmental chaos.” That is what I want from my Green Party. That, and wanting to officially ban meat and dairy from all council events in favor of entirely plant-based menus.

The point here isn’t that wanting cleaner air or protected green spaces is bad. We all want that.

I’m not trying to convince you to vote for this party or this party. My point is that the Green Party isn’t just a harmless, consequence-free protest vote anymore.

For any Green voters or people who are thinking of voting Green, I just want to ask you this: Please, just do some actual research into what they are proposing. Wake up! Right now, you might feel like international foreign policy or gesturing about Gaza is the only thing that matters on earth. It’s very easy to posture on social media and treat your ballot paper like a moral fashion accessory. A vote isn’t a tote bag. You can’t just sling it over your shoulder at brunch and call it a personality.

But I promise you, reality comes at you fast. Adulthood catches up with everyone. One day very soon, you will actually be responsible for something, or even for someone. You’ll have a mortgage to pay, a business to run, or a family to feed and protect. And when that day comes, your priorities are going to change instantly. The things that keep you awake at night will look very different. You won’t be worrying about decolonizing local farms or banning leaf blowers; you will be wondering if you can afford your energy bills, if your streets are safe, and if the economy is stable enough to support your children, hell if it’s even stable to maybe have children.

Your protest vote today directly creates the broken, bankrupt reality you will inherit tomorrow. Seriously, wake up. Put the phone down, look past the slogans, and start thinking long term. You cannot build a stable life or a functioning country on virtue signalling. Your life is longer than one summer.

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There is no greater tragedy in education, and indeed in life itself, than wasted talent.

I believe we all have talents, and it is the duty of our parents, schools and teachers to identify them, nurture them and help them flourish so that we can have the greatest chance of success in adulthood. That’s what every child deserves.

Unfortunately, we’ve designed an education system that fails everyone: the teachers, parents and, most importantly, the children. No one gets into teaching for the money and the cocaine. We all know that the pay is going to be terrible, the conditions are lousy, and the job is going to be tougher than a cheap steak ordered at a crap steakhouse.

But we do the job because we want to make a difference to kids’ lives. We all do. It’s the only reason to do that job. I can’t count the number of times I sat in a classroom on the verge of tears because of awful behaviour, sheer exhaustion or simply wanting to give up because the job is simply so bloody tough. Every teacher has, no matter how tough or how gifted. It’s a brutal and, at times, isolated existence. When your lesson goes down the proverbial shitter, there is no lonelier place to be than in front of a classroom watching your lesson crumble. It’s humiliating and demoralising. But when the lesson is flying, the kids are engaged and everyone is learning, there is no better place to be.

As I write these words, there’s still some small part of me that misses it. My experiences in the class have left a small but significant scar on my soul. And just like all scars, there’s normally a good story behind it.

But I couldn’t take it anymore. And sadly, I’m not in the minority. The reality is: I’m the majority. The reality is that we need to solve the behaviour crisis that is destroying our schools. And I’m not being hyperbolic when I use the word ‘crisis’. If anything, that’s playing down what’s happening in classrooms in the UK. Schools are at risk of losing control and, in many cases, they’ve completely lost it.

An old head of department used to mutter “the lunatics have taken over the asylum” after every terrible breakdown she had to witness. Whether it was in the classroom or on the playground. And she was right. They had. The kids behaved however they wanted because they knew that deep down there was nothing we could do. All it takes is a few people not wanting to follow the rules and you have total chaos.

COVID has, unfortunately, only made things worse. Lockdowns were detrimental for everyone’s mental health, but they were a total disaster for children and teenagers in particular. Kids were robbed of the most important years of their life. But they were also robbed of the chance to develop valuable social skills and learn how to regulate their behaviour. This has meant that when schools reopened after COVID, not only were kids’ academic progress stunted – so was their emotional development. This has resulted in a further degeneration in behaviour. Some of my former colleagues have mentioned to me that some classes have become near impossible to teach. It is my view that the lockdown policy harmed all of us, but it also did irreparable damage to an entire generation, and we haven’t even begun to see what the long-term effects are.

One thing we do know is that the number of children who have gone missing from school has risen significantly. The Department for Education in a 2023 report said that around 117,000 children were identified as ‘missing education’. This means that they were not attending school, and neither were they registered as being educated at home. For context, in 2014 (nearly ten years before) the number was 14,800.

This is disastrous and an issue that nobody is discussing. However, there are some education think tanks like the Educational Policy Institute (having conducted their own research) who put the figure at around 300,000. That should be terrifying to anyone, parents or otherwise.

What’s going to happen to these kids when they reach adulthood? How are they going to get a job, become functioning members of society? Are they even able to read and write? Are we just creating an entire generation of people whose only option to make money is to enter a life of crime? And how are we going to reintegrate them back into society?

The teachers are facing the backlash every day for that disastrous policy decision to lock schools down for months on end during the pandemic and it’s one of the major reasons why they’re leaving en masse. This needs to be a national conversation but, like a lot of the discussions around COVID, we’ve treated it like a bad one-night stand.

We’ve all just walked away from the experience and none of us want to remember what happened. The unfortunate thing is that this will continue to haunt us for a very long time.

For more, order your copy here.

(Un)educated is a telling of the most baffling, shocking and disgusting things that happened to me in those 12 years, when my professional life consisted of losing classroom turf wars to teenagers, refereeing grudge fights between East End grandmas and seeking to uncover who sh*t in the bathroom sink. Sparing no gory detail, this is an unflinchingly hilarious tear through the mire of teaching, a collection of tales that are only funny in hindsight and because they happened to someone else.

But it’s more than that. It’s also a polemic of our failing education system. Between the blood and the guts and the snot and the spit, I saw tragedy unfold. Well-meaning teachers driven to oblivion. Collapsing families, desperate to give their kids the best possible chance, dismissed by a callous infrastructure. Children left to drop by the only safety net they had left. This book acts as a brutal reminder of how badly our ‘betters’ have strayed, the results of their policies seen through the eyes of someone employed to enact them.

It’s not all doom and gloom. This is also story of triumph. Of teachers doing right by their pupils, parents making the impossible happen, and kids with no hope finding it again. Of how I pushed through the most difficult period of my life, found diamonds in the rough, learned to see the bright side, and made it out alive.

“A great subject covered by a guy unafraid to tell it like it is.” – Geoff Norcott

It’s out on May 28^th, but if you want to pre-order it (and you know you do), it’s available here.

If you’re a non-reader, don’t worry; we haven’t forgotten about you – there’s an audiobook. Read by yours truly, no less. That’ll be available on Spotify and Audible on the same day. Now there’s no excuse.

“Tax the rich.”

Initially just something AOC hollers when she orgasms, it’s now what every human being under the age of 30 is scrawling on the toilet walls of their Instagram bio.

It’s even become merch. A socialist slogan, slapped on shirts and hats like Coca Cola logos and Mickey Mouse’s ears. Buy this t-shirt, make rich, crew over the capitalist pigs oppressing yo-I mean, us.

We’ve all seen the podcasters. The streamers and the journos, sat in their ornate studios, talking in beautifully simple terms about how “billionaires shouldn’t exist”, megaphoning their ideas into the aether on a platform created by… err… billionaires.

Rather than everyone pointing out the blatant hypocrisy, these clips are met with likes and shares galore. And why not? It feels good to click that heart button, doesn’t it? It feels like you’ve done something.

Believe me, I get the anger. It’s easy to hate rich people when you’re struggling to pay this month’s rent, or when the only way to stay warm this winter is to become morbidly obese, safe inside an insulating layer of blubber at all times. If you have a better idea, I’d like ot hear it.

And frankly, I agree! Companies like Amazon, Google, Shell, Meta — they should be paying their fair share of corporation tax. We should be closing those tax loopholes until they’re airtight. That part isn’t controversial.

But let’s not call the whole thing evil. And if we must, then act like it. If you care that much about the local economy, go buy your crap from the high street. Those blue Amazon vans aren’t driving around your local area as a kind of IRL product placement. They’re there because we’re a nation of fat and lazy bastards who prioritise convenience over everything. We’ll whinge about the lack of good restaurants, sat on our fat arses waiting for an illegal immigrant to bike a pad thai to our front door. We want the billionaire’s head on a plate, but we’ll also have a tantrum if we don’t get that incredibly important kitchen roll holder at 8am tomorrow morning.

If you want to fix things, you can’t just shout: “Just tax the rich!”

I mean, in today’s political climate, you actually can. And you’ll quickly be one of the fastest-growing political parties in the UK. Chant it and pray nobody notices your demented policies on taxation, immigration, spending or the fact that it’s 2026 and the leader believes a woman can have a 12-inch dong.

Unfortunately, the UK actually runs on numbers. The progressive left don’t like this bit. They hate money. Seems a bit ‘Jewy’.

Numbers are facts and facts are boring and boring is reality. And reality is about as pleasant as the smell emanating from a toilet at a vegan restaurant.

So, let’s look at the boring, smelly, but very real numbers. The UK government spends roughly £1.3 trillion a year across all public services, welfare, pensions, healthcare, defence… illegal immigration—the whole machine. And it funds that mainly through taxation—about £1.1 trillion a year in total receipts. Income tax, VAT, national insurance, the rest.

They’re a mafia with U-turns.

1. You earn the money.
2. They spend it.

What a deal!

Here’s where we reach the problem.

£1.1 trillion is an eye-watering sum, but it’s a finite sum; you can’t extract infinite value from a fixed figure. Therefore, naturally, the system has a price-per-citizen. A numerical value they place on each other us. Take ~£1.1 trillion, divide it by ~68 million people, and you end up roughly in the neighbourhood of £15,000–£20,000 per-person-per-year. That’s what they’re able to spend on you. That’s what it takes, on average, to fund your NHS access, your pension, and to fix just enough potholes on your road to prevent you from becoming a domestic terrorist.

Now here’s where the comedy starts.

The full-time taxpayer in the UK pays something like £6,000–£13,000 per year in income tax and National Insurance combined. I’ve crunched the numbers, and after a series of rigorous sums, I’ve concluded that £6,000 is less than £15,000. How much less? Ask an expert.

The point is, most of us don’t fund ourselves. We get more than we pay in. In order for that to function, some have to get less. Much less. Our system is quietly dependent on a small number of high level wealth generators doing a disproportionate amount of heavy lifting. Who shoulders that burden?

The rich.

“We will find a tiny number of people and quietly ask them to replace a large chunk of the system’s funding.”

Which is fine… until the rich discover planes. Or accountants. When they do, they hide or leave. It’s already happening - so many have lef the UK, it’s starting to look like my pals’ group chat when I started Triggernometry.

Take Nik Storonsky, for example. He’s exactly the kind of guy politicians say they want more of. The man built Revolut - a massive company in the UK worth roughly £55 billion. But then, shocker, he starts shifting himself and his business elsewhere because he can get a better deal in Dubai. Everyone loses their shit and calls him “greedy”. Gee, it’s almost like business is about making as much money as possible.

Think about that. Nik would rather live next door to the Ayatollah than share a country with Keir Starmer. We’re more screwed than Bonnie Blue on a day trip to Rotherham.

If a high-contributor like Nik Storonsky, who generates tens of millions in tax, leaves, that’s no leftist victory. It’s seriously bad news. He isn’t just ‘one rich guy.’ He is thousands of average taxpayers rolled into one bloke. And you can’t replace that with a trending hashtag. I mean you can, and that’s the experiment we’re conducting at the moment in the UK. How do you think it’s going?

Britain is a dinner party where one person is paying 90% of the bill, another is ordering champagne, and the rest are loudly debating whether the olives are organic and if we should twin a London borough with Rafah.

Don’t shoot the messenger. This isn’t a moral argument. It’s reality.

You can absolutely tax them more. But you can’t pretend they already don’t contribute a significant amount of tax, that they’re not highly mobile, that they won’t leave, or that social engagement isn’t a like for like replacements. Likes and retweets are not currency. Believe me, I’ve tried.

So, how do we fix it?

The answer is, like the numbers, very boring. Stable tax design, policies that work, retention of high contributor, and a state that spends money responsibly. No wonder it doesn’t go viral.

But that’s just it. This is where the Gary’s Economics of the world fall apart. They talk about “wealth” as if it’s a physical pile of gold coins hidden under a billionaire’s mattress. It isn’t. It’s a highly liquid network of investments, and it can all be moved to Singapore, faster than you can say “guillotine”.

So sure, “Tax The Rich.” Say it, wear it, print it on a tote bag. But understand what it means in a £1.3 trillion economy. Understand that, when we lose a billionaire, we don’t get richer. When he leaves, he takes the funding for a small town’s primary school with him. If you want the rich to stay, consider not yelling at them.

And definitely, definitely, don’t eat them.

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So it’s come to this. Let’s talk about Britain’s immigration problem.

Bringing up illegal immgration is like bringing your 15 year old niece to the BBC. It never goes well, and someone’s getting fired.

My country has a funny attitude to immigration. We treat it the way we treat sport; no one knows the rules, everyone’s a commentator, and the referee (aka the Home Office) hasn’t given a fuck since 2009. We invented it, we’re terrible at it, and we’re getting absolutely humiliated by the French.

Let’s crunch some numbers.

The UK has seen around 40,000 - 50,000 people arriving on our shores by small boat. Annually. Sounds high, doesn’t it? To quote the the Adam Smith Institute, it’s a metric fuckton. That’s a town the size of Stevenage arriving on British shores every year. Enough’s enough. We’ve got a Stevenage. That’s already too many.

The asylum accommodation system alone has been estimated at around £4 million per day at peak pressure points. That’s £28 million a week, £1.4 billion a year, and, over the decade, more than £15 billion.

And who’s it being spent on? Most of these people who come here don’t speak the language or “appreciate” the culture. Yet, somehow, they’ve figured out the benefits system faster than you can say “I can’t work, I’ve got ADHD.”

(Then again, half of Liverpool doesn’t speak the language either, and we still let them vote.
For now.)

And once they’re here, they don’t just spawn into the system as Uber Eats drivers. Before they can start a career of hurtling the wrong way down Tottenham Court Road on a Lime bike with a box of Wagamamas, there’s paperwork.

First, they must enter ‘the process’. A labyrinth of paid-for accomodation, legal appeals, healthcare access, room service and smart phones.

It’s system designed to keep theme where they are. It’s no accident; delay is the business model. The system doesn’t have a backlog. The backlog has a system. Today, over 100,000 claims are sat waiting for review. They just don’t have the resources. In the meantime, some Albanian bloke is getting a tax-funded chippy tea in a Travelodge. No wonder the nation’s group chats are switching from memes to manifestos.

Britain can no longer manufacture cars, ships, or steel. But by God, we can put together a nice bill.

Still, at least they’re trying. Hundreds of millions of pounds have been sent to fund French patrols, surveillance, and deterrence measures. It’s like paying your neighbour to stop his cat from shitting in your garden, while the neighbour just uses the money to buy the cat more expensive tuna.

Rwanda? Too mean. Stopping the boats? Too effective. Best we can do is pay the French and virtue signal while the dinghies keep coming. Peak British governing. We’ve spent £600 million stopping it… and it’s gotten worse. £600 million. We’re the only country that would spend half a billion pounds on a fence and then leave the gate open because we didn’t want to seem ‘confrontational’.

You could have built actual processing centres. You could have built a wall. You could have built a navy. You could have built a human catapult for goodness sake.

Not that we should need to. We’re an island! In any strategy game, that’s a cheat code. This is very conspicuous geography. It isn’t some porous land border in Europe where you drift across by mistake on an ill-planned ski run.

The powers that be will tell you the country isn’t being replaced. They’re right - it isn’t. It’s being expanded. Like a loft conversion no one asked for, paid for with a credit card no one’s reading the statements on.

Why is it that when Trump tries to buy Greenland, Zack Polanski shrieks “Greenland Is For Greenlanders,” but the moment we suggest ‘Britain for the British,’ it’s called xenophobia? Funny how ‘nativism’ is a human right everywhere except at home.
Greenlanders: noble custodians of their ancestral land. The British: weird little gammons who need to be re-educated. ‘Protect the Local Culture’ is progressive everywhere on Earth except the bit of Earth I’m standing on.

Still, would hate to be rude. There’s nothing less British than that.

My new book - (Un)educated: My Life As A Teacher - is available for pre-order now!

I made the decision to ease myself into primary school teaching by registering as a supply teacher. My thinking was that I could get to experience a variety of schools and classes, see what age group I would most like to teach and then decide if it was ultimately for me.

I soon discovered that the transition from secondary school was not going to be easy. Particularly in light of my great idea of trying it out as a supply teacher. I had briefl y worked as a supply teacher in secondary schools before starting the job in Hertfordshire, so you would have thought I’d have known a bit better what I was about to get myself into.

But no. Surely being parachuted in to take a class of under-elevens would be much easier than being thrown to a pack of contemptuous teenagers who’d had more years to develop the craft of eviscerating an unknown adult who turned up to attempt to control them (realistically) or teach them (ideally), I thought.

Reader, it was not.

No one has ever learnt anything from a supply teacher. No one has ever been inspired by a supply teacher. No one has ever respected a supply teacher. The moment you walk into a school as a supply teacher, you are automatically at the bottom of the pecking order. Every single person in the school, from the offi ce staff to the cleaners, is more important than you. This isn’t just my opinion – the fact that you are utterly unimportant is made abundantly clear from the moment your day starts.

Being ‘supply’, as it’s known in teaching, means that you hop from short-term placement to short-term placement. Some of these last for a morning and some of them are cover for a maternity leave. It really depends on the needs of the individual school. The worse the school, the more they have to spend on supply cover as fewer teachers would want to work there. And they also have more absences because of teachers going off with sickness and stress.

All you had to do to become a supply teacher was join a supply-teaching agency. The registration wouldn’t take more than half an hour. You provided them with your qualification, had a short interview where you had to demonstrate that you weren’t clinically insane and BOOM! You were a supply teacher! You were now at the bottom of the educational food chain and ready to work. A supply teacher’s day normally starts with being woken up at around 6 a.m. by an Australian from a teaching agency telling you that you’re needed to cover someone in a terrible part of London crippled by gang warfare. You know that going there is a terrible idea, that not a single positive thing can come from leaving your bed and the entire day will most likely be a long, hard, bastard struggle till the clock hits 3.30 p.m. However, you also know you need to eat, so the choice is not a particularly difficult one to make.

So you throw your clothes on, brush your teeth and then hightail it to whatever part of the city you’re needed. At this point, you know nothing about the school, the classes or – in the case of secondary school – even the subjects you’re meant to be teaching. Every day is a complete surprise and most of the time the surprises are not pleasant.

Your first task is to find the school itself. The building will tell you a lot about what kind of school it is. If it has high walls topped with barbed wire surrounding it, then it’s important to understand that those walls exist to keep the kids in the school. If a school looks like a prison, it’s because the pupils behave like inmates. When you arrive, you must next fi nd the reception. The grim-faced receptionist will sullenly give you the onceover before demanding your ID so they can check you’re not a paedophile who’s trying to gain access to the kids. I personally think that making paedophiles work as a supply teacher would be a fantastic way of healing their sickness. Nothing will put you off kids quicker than being psychologically tortured by a group of sociopathic teenagers hell-bent on tearing you apart for their own personal enjoyment. I’m sure this would be the most powerful type of aversion therapy known to man. A far more eff ective deterrent than prison, in my own opinion. After a day in a south London comprehensive, most supply teachers leave with a bitter sense of regret, clothes soaked in stress sweat and severe PTSD, vowing never to return.

The receptionist will then hand you a lanyard with the word ‘SUPPLY’ written across it in big bold lettering. This is the equivalent of having a sign saying ‘KICK ME’ stuck on your back. It immediately makes you a target as the kids know there will be zero consequences for their atrocious behaviour. They have complete free rein to do whatever they want for the hour that you are trapped with them. This will likely involve something highly unpleasant happening to you.

Tormenting supply teachers has been the sport of choice for teenagers since the dawn of time. From the moment the teaching profession was invented, there was some poor individual who was roped into being a substitute teacher and no doubt ended up suff ering some kind of horrendous fate at the bottom of a well. Every single person should be a supply teacher at least once in their life, just to understand what a little bastard they were when they were younger.

I was no different, and my career as a supply teacher was probably karma for all the times I behaved like an odious little oik in lessons. Whether it was signing paper registers as ‘Boris Yeltsin’ or deliberately tampering with other students’ science experiments, I was never an exemplary student. My only priority in secondary school was to take the piss as much as possible. I’m sure my own teachers thought I was a dickhead. Because I was.

Having passed through the portal of the school offi ce, you then have to fi nd your way to the classroom and pray that the lesson you have to deliver is something you have expertise in. In my short stint as a secondary school supply teacher, I was registered with the agencies as a drama specialist who could also teach English. And yet I could turn up and be handed a lesson plan that showed me I was expected to deliver a physics lesson. In those moments I always felt like a car mechanic who had been shoved into an operating theatre and was expected to perform neurosurgery. It’s very diffi cult to teach physics or perform neurosurgery when you have a C in GCSE science. You’re a glorified babysitter at this point and everyone knows it. Including the kids. Especially the kids…



This is only the opening gambit of one chapter. For more, place your pre-order now.

I’m launching a new show titled - rather imaginatively - The Francis Foster Show.

I know what you’re thinking: “Francis, does the internet really need another comedy show?”

Yes! And I’ll tell you why.

We are living in strange times. Whether it’s Trump having his babysitter meltdowns on social media, or Keir Starmer with his nonce-adjacent mates, our leaders are not exactly covering themselves in glory. Geopolitics is a mess, our pundit class is a shambles, and every week there’s a new story that you can’t believe is true.

It’s all very ripe for parody - comics should be making the most of it.

They’re not.

Why?

Because comedy has become too polarised. Everything’s either scoldingly left-wing or eye-rollingly right-wing. I’m sick of it, so I’m taking a stand, by making a show that brings comedy back to the centre. We’re taking the piss out of both sides - precisely what they deserve.

No punches pulled, no holds barred, no tiresome bias. Just proper jokes.

Check it out and tell me what you think. And if you have any feedback (good or bad, but especially good), I’d love to hear from you.

Francis

The war in Iran rages on. Trump has threatened to “destroy a civilisation”.

To be fair, I do have sympathy for him - I feel that way every time I skip a meal. It’s a good thing I don’t have access to the nuclear codes; if I missed even one breakfast, I’d want to nuke Iran too.

This all comes back to the Strait of Hormuz. Let’s be honest about this: no one knew where the Strait of Hormuz was before this conflict or why it was so important. The only thing we do know is that Whoopi Goldberg is furious about this because why should the straights be the only one allowed into Hormuz? This is plain old-fashioned bigotry. She might have a point as I don’t think Iran are very pro-gay.

Anyway, the Iranians have open and shut the Strait so many times they’re starting to resemble Bonnie Blue’s legs. Although, Bonnie Blue has had more seamen inside her than all the waterways across the globe.

You’re right - that joke is both disgusting and factually accurate. They write themselves.

Trump lost his mind because 1) the world is going to be plunged into a global energy crisis and because 2) he’s mental. “Oh Francis, how do you know he’s mental”. Because Donald Trump is a comedian. When was the last time you met a sane comedian? Trump’s nuts. He’s teetotal and he still behaves like that. Can you imagine if Trump took cocaine? He’d post wild shit on Twitter and come up with crazy schemes to make even more money. Maybe he is.

Obviously, the people who are most grateful for these outbursts are the New York Times and Keir Starmer. “Why Keir Starmer?” I hear you ask. Well, because the more Trump goes mental, the less focus is pulled to Starmer appointing Peter Mandelson as the British ambassador to the US.

Now, a quick confession from me: even though Mandelson was nonce-adjacent, I get why Keir appointed him. Mandelson is the only person in the Labour Party who’s fully toilet-trained, able to hold a conversation, and capable of not having an aneurysm whilst doing basic primary school maths. In short, he’s actually intelligent, putting him a minority of one within the Labour Party.

Who else would they send instead of Peter Mandelson? Diane Abbott?

(Now, I realise that Diane has been suspended by the Labour Party for thinking Jews can control the weather. A shocking comment; when did Diane learn what weather was?)

Diane once turned up to canvas voters wearing two left-footed shoes making her look completely insane, yet still more competent than Jeremy Corbyn.

Thanks to this war, things are becoming even more unaffordable. Certain media outlets are even saying that we’re going to have to re-introduce food rationing. Who would have thought Trump would play a crucial part in solving the UK’s obesity crisis? And since no one will be able to afford petrol, the chunkies will now have to walk everywhere.

This is terrible news for me. Not only am I fat but, at the age of 43, I’ve just learnt how to drive. It’s an automatic license, ladies. Form an orderly queue and if you ask nicely I’ll take you for a spin in my Carolla. We’ll only be able to drive for around ten minutes as I’m still nervous on motorways, petrol’s expensive and I’m not made of money.

As some of you will know, I’m half-Venezuelan. My ethnicity was culturally relevant for about one week in January. And then Trump went and invaded Iran.

I know things are starting to get better in Venezuela because my family in Caracas are starting to share memes with me about how shit London is. My home city has now become a punchline for the rest of the globe. Even for failed communist states. At this point, London feels like the fat kid who always comes last at Sports Day. Although, if London was a kid, it’d be banned from Sports Day for carrying a knife.

Pre-order my first book - (Un)educated: My Life as a Teacher, and Why You Should Never Become One - here.

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