Long-form
14 articles tagged long-form.
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UK Migration — The 2022-2024 ILR Cohort
A standalone analysis of the 2022-2024 net-migration peak ("Boriswave" in informal political usage). The cohort that arrived during the 2022-2024 net migration peak (906,000 in 2023) is now reaching the five-year settlement window, which is the source of much of the political pressure on settlement-rule reform. The piece walks the cohort, the route mix, what the evidence says about their fiscal trajectories, and the policy options the master document's options menu attaches to this question.
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UK Migration — Housing Supply
A standalone analysis of the relationship between migration and the UK housing crisis. What the data does show about migration's contribution to housing pressure, what it does not, who actually receives social housing, what the public-opinion data shows about the salience-accuracy gap, and what the evidence implies for housing policy.
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UK Migration — Crime, Trust, and the Debate
A standalone, careful treatment of the topic at the centre of trust collapse in UK migration policy. Confidence labels (high / medium / low) at every claim level. The foundational data gap, what data does exist, the Albanian signal as the strongest finding in the data, the geographic correlation, the grooming gang question, the suppression question, and what the evidence-graded conclusions actually support. Long, deliberate, and uncomfortable in places.
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Should We Build Mars? — A Public Brief
Document 5 of the Building Mars set. A thirty-minute brief for general readers. What is being proposed for Mars, what the strongest arguments for and against the project are, and why people who have thought carefully reach different conclusions. The brief does not tell you what to think; it tries to give you the considerations clearly enough that you can decide for yourself.
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Mars Industrialisation — Investor Memo
Document 1 of the Building Mars set. A decision memo for capital allocators evaluating whether to deploy investment into the operating entity, the supply chain, or adjacent infrastructure. Assumes the reader is making a deployment decision, not weighing whether the project should happen at all. Readers concerned with the latter question are pointed to Documents 4 and 6.
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Mars Industrialisation — Policy White Paper
Document 2 of the Building Mars set. The regulatory and international framework. Written for policymakers, regulators, and international affairs analysts who must take positions on specific questions. Identifies what is decision-forcing and what is not, the positions that exist on each, and the regulatory and international choices implicit in supporting different paths forward.
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Mars Industrialisation — Technical Reference
Document 3 of the Building Mars set. Engineering architecture, the eight specific compression moves that take the timeline from a 50-year baseline to roughly 25 years, the phased plan, the hard problems including the semiconductor wall, and the technical risk register. For engineers, technical analysts, and informed technical readers. Hedged where the technical claims are contested.
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Mars Industrialisation — The Case Against
Document 4 of the Building Mars set. The strongest version of the case against large-scale Mars industrialisation as currently conceived, written as critique rather than balanced analysis. The case against does not depend on the project failing technically; it is largely the case against the project being undertaken even on the assumption it would succeed. For readers who want the structural critique articulated in its fullest form.
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Mars Industrialisation — Ethical and Philosophical Analysis
Document 6 of the Building Mars set. Questions that cannot be resolved by engineering. The moral standing of indigenous Mars life, the ethics of planetary alteration, the longtermist framework and its critics, governance and consent in closed habitats, intergenerational obligations, and the deepest question — whether humans have the appropriate authority to industrialise other worlds at all. Positions presented seriously rather than reduced to slogans.
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Mars Industrialisation — Reference Materials
Document 7 of the Building Mars set. The reference appendix. Full assumptions ledger, target company list with funding status and acquisition rationale, capital sources and investor map, citations with balanced further reading from supporters, critics, and skeptics. The verification anchor for facts cited across Documents 1 through 6.
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The train
A piece from the notebook. About the difference between the people who moan about the destination and the people who keep the engine going. About the driver who does not know where the train is going. About the three kinds of shoveller, and the friendship that is the actual work. About knowing your chair, and getting better at sitting in it. May or may not be connected to the rest of the publication.
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VC: most fail, most suffer, some win lots — does society win or lose?
An open question on venture capital. Seven analytical frames in parallel, evidence labelled by strength, anchored in US/UK/EU as a natural experiment. A short prologue addresses the reader directly: the entire messaging environment around venture capital is engineered to make you, specifically, believe you will be the winner. The frames evaluate the system. Evaluating yourself is a different exercise the document cannot do for you.
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From talent to transaction — twenty years inside an accelerator program
The predecessor synthesis on accelerators, useful for readers interested in how accelerators relate to the broader venture-capital ecosystem. Treats acceptance into an accelerator as a structural moment that reshapes a founder's twenty-year arc — the cap table becomes a moral document, mentorship becomes entangled with deal flow, failure is metabolised as portfolio churn, the grammar of relationships changes. Person-by-person ramifications across founders, employees, capital, infrastructure, and the public.
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Inheritance Tax and the UK Tech Cohort — full version
The complete paper, with international comparators and a detailed treatment of what different evidence would mean.