For months Paris Shears did not know who was doing it. Someone behind a fake Instagram account was sending her nude images of herself that had been made by AI. Then an article of her own stolen underwear came back to her through the post. Then a package containing male bodily fluids. Then her What3Words location, so she would know he knew where she was. She moved her 3 children from Airbnb to Airbnb and slept with a knife under her pillow. The culprit was Jakob Ward, 28, her ostensible brother-in-law. The police caught him through the DNA in the package. At Winchester Crown Court the judge, Christopher Parker KC, called his actions "despicable, depraved" and sent him to prison for 32 months. But if you follow this account you'll know that 32 months is not what he will serve. Since October 1st 2026, under the government's Sentencing Act, most prisoners are released at a third of their sentence. Ward, with the time he has already spent on remand, could be out in about nine months. Paris Shears walked out of court, in her words, "feeling like another victim of the very system I have spent so long fighting to change." Rapists and the most serious child sex offenders are excluded from the new scheme, and so, more recently, are killers. Stalkers are not. Neither are men convicted of sharing intimate images, nor those convicted of coercive control. In July 2024 the government promised that anyone serving 4 years or more for a serious violent offence would be kept out of early release altogether. But that promise has gone too. So the sentence a judge reads out in an English courtroom is now a kind of public performance. "Despicable, depraved" goes in the newspaper. 32 months goes in the newspaper. Then the Ministry of Justice divides by 3 in private, and the man who mailed a terrified mother her own underwear is home before her children have finished the school year. The ministers who wrote the rule know exactly what it does. They kept rapists out because they knew how that would look. They let stalkers through because a stalker's victim does not, as a rule, have a newspaper column. The belief underneath is the one that runs the whole justice system: that a prison place is the scarcest thing in the country and a woman's peace of mind the most plentiful, and that when one must give way to the other, it will be her. Progress will abolish automatic early release for every indictable offence. The sentence a judge passes will be the sentence served, every day of it. Not enough room in jail? Then we'll build more prison places. There's nothing to it. Anybody who wishes you to believe otherwise is trying to sell you something that's very bad for you. Paris Shears has started her own petition, asking that stalkers and domestic abusers be excluded from early release. She should not have to. She has been made to fight her stalker, then the court, and now the Ministry of Justice, with nothing on her side but her own nerve.

"[In Britain], we treat [entrepreneurs] as a bit of a sideshow." That is Alex Depledge, on how this government regards the people who build Britain's fastest-growing companies. She would know. She built 2 of them herself, Hassle.com and Resi, and since June 2025 she has been the Chancellor's own Entrepreneurship Adviser, the one founder in the Treasury whose job was to tell ministers what founders need. She leaves the job on Thursday, the morning after John Healey's first Budget, a week before her term was due to end, and she has used her exit to tell the Sunday Times what the job was like. Under Rachel Reeves she met the Chancellor every fortnight (to what ends, who knows; Britain remained an exceptionally hostile environment for entrepreneurs under Labour, more even than it had under the risible natural party of business). Under Healey, whose Treasury renewed her appointment this year, she says she had "barely any face time". "With John Healey and Johnny Reynolds, I had to relitigate all the arguments I had already won, and win them again." Scale-ups, she says, are "the main event", and the window to keep them is closing: "The window is 18 months. That's it." The government appointed a very successful founder to explain to it why founders leave this country (usually having sold or tied the fortunes of their businesses to American partners and buyers with an eye on listing on an American stock exchange), and then saw fit to waste her time, where they might productively have sought her input on how to release such shackles as bind British business as must be released if our economic fortunes are ever to improve. The founders won't wait for the Treasury's diary to clear. Between January 2024 and January 2026, according to Companies House filings analysed for Rathbones, 5,940 business owners left the country, with tech founders leading the way out, the UAE, Spain and America being the favourite destinations. In Manchester this week Tom Beahon, who started Castore with his brother Phil, wrote: "When we started Castore 10 years ago, the UK felt like the best place in the world to build a company." Now, he says, "the next generation of talented young people are choosing to leave the UK and build their businesses and careers overseas." Depledge says the Treasury thinks the real economy is "steel, cars and hard hats". The truth is simpler and worse: the people running the country regard any business as a thing to be taxed on its way to a buyer in a fire-sale, with the founder as a flight risk to be monitored and an asset bank to be nicked from, when the entrepreneur is in fact the person the whole tax system should be designed to keep. Progress wants the steelworks and the scale-ups both, and the same things keep both: cheap power, quick permissions and a tax system that rewards the people who stay. Under our Unicorn Farm programme's Empire Builder's Incentive, a founder who builds a company and keeps it for 10 years pays capital gains tax at 10%, and at 20 years 5%, so that building for decades pays better than selling in five. A new company pays no employer National Insurance on its first 10 employees for its first 3 years. The share-option scheme that lets start-ups pay their people in equity is opened to companies with gross assets of up to £200 million, from £30 million today, so that a scale-up can keep its best engineers at exactly the moment Silicon Valley comes calling, and, no less importantly, make those early crew members millionaires to repay the risk they took, the hours they shedded, and the value they delivered to and for the company. Healey will stand up on Wednesday and speak about growth, having never spurred any. The woman he was given to explain where growth comes from will be clearing her desk the next morning, returning to the builders' fields. If you have ever built something in this country and you tired of the sideshow, Progress is the only party that thinks you are the main event.

In September 2025, in the week of the American state visit, Microsoft and a young British company called Nscale announced that they would build the largest AI supercomputer in the country in Loughton, Essex: 23,040 of Nvidia's newest chips, 50 megawatts of capacity rising to 90, switched on in early 2027. "Together with Nscale," said Satya Nadella, "we are proud to announce the UK's largest supercomputer." Keir Starmer said he wanted Britain to be "the destination of choice for companies at the forefront of technological change", and called it "a decisive step towards the UK becoming a world leader in AI". Just thirteenth months later Microsoft has pulled out. It ended its agreement for the Loughton site this month, after reports that the site might not get enough electricity from the grid until the 2030s. Nscale, which has meanwhile filed to float on the New York Stock Exchange - yet another chip lost across the Atlantic that should have listed in London - says it is "exploring alternative power sources for the site". The local network operator, UK Power Networks, cannot discuss the individual connection, but explained that many data centres "are awaiting works on the national transmission network". Nscale itself describes the problem with admirable restraint as "this unfortunate London-wide grid issue". So Britain had the company, the customer, the money and the chips, everything every other country on Earth is fighting to attract in order to make vital headway in this critical industry, and could not supply the cable. Of all the ways to lose the future, it is a peculiar one to lose for want of an extension lead. The government's reply is that it is "delivering the biggest upgrade to the grid in decades", which we greet with a snort of justified derision. Bet you hardly a spare kW is available there within a decade. TechUK put the consequence quite honestly: "If a viable project can't get power until the next decade, the investment won't wait for it." Engineering the solution is, in some senses, easy. The towers for a high-voltage line are manufactured, the cable is strung and the substations are built in months, with steel and skills this country has in abundance. What takes a superfluous decade is the planning application, the environmental assessment, the consultation, the judicial review, the land negotiation and the regulator's approval of the regulator's plan. The British Metropolitan class has built a state in which every one of those stages has a constituency and none of them has a deadline, while the end itself is derided as vulgar growth-ism, and due process considered the priority. The bill for that due process is that we lost a supercomputer that may never be switched on in Essex, a British company floating itself in New York, and the jobs, the tax and the capability that would have come with both. Trust no government-in-waiting that does not treat the grid as the emergency it is. Progress will establish a National Grid Emergency Build Authority with powers of compulsory purchase, put £30 billion into the grid, and impose a statutory maximum of 12 months for major grid reinforcement projects, with any connection offer that breaches the timescale escalated to the Authority for direct delivery. Britain's grid connection system is a national disgrace, and we intend to be the government that ends it. Starmer wanted Britain to be the destination of choice. For 13 months it was. Then someone asked if there was somewhere they could plug in. Such as the straits of the country of Turing and Colossus, reduced to apologising for the wiring. Well, time rewire the whole place.

Michael Ashton was 28, worked for the council, and on the way home from a night out with his girlfriend in September 2025 he was sick in the back of his Uber. Outside his house in Langdon Hills he and the driver argued about cleaning the car. Then, in the words of a witness, the stationary car "suddenly accelerated towards Mr Ashton before driving over him." He died of a brain injury eight days later. His mother says he left handprints in the bonnet trying to push the car away from him. "I wonder if he was scared, so petrified for his life he was able to try to push two tonnes of metal away from him." On Wednesday at Basildon Crown Court the driver, Hayadulla Turkmani, 53, of Hornchurch, was given 5 years for causing death by dangerous driving. He will serve half, less the time he has already spent on remand. The judge, Samantha Cohen, called him the "aggressor", said he could not resist a "parting shot", and told him "you simply refused to pay regard to where he was." The court heard he told Michael's partner that Michael had "jumped in front of" the car. The jury had acquitted him of murder and of manslaughter. In 2022 Parliament raised the maximum sentence for causing death by dangerous driving from 14 years to life. It did so because the country was sick of watching families bury their children while the people who killed them served a couple of years. The Sentencing Council, which writes the rules judges follow, then produced a guideline for the offence. Its list of what makes a case the most serious kind runs to mobile phones, speed, drink, drugs, racing, evading the police, and not paying attention for an extended period. It notably does not contain the words anger, aggression or weapon anywhere. A man who drives 2 tonnes of car over another man in a temper is, as far as the guideline is concerned, just a bad driver who should have been looking where he was going. The top category starts at 12 years. Michael Ashton's killer got 5, and will be out in about 2 and a half, minus remand. This is what happens when the judges write their own rules, when courts are not sovereign. The belief underneath is old and settled in every courtroom in the land: that the offender's interior life is a matter of the most delicate inquiry, that every doubt belongs to him, and that the victim's family is a feature of the proceedings, to be given a seat in the gallery and a leaflet. Parliament said life. The Sentencing Council heard a traffic matter and wrote accordingly. Progress will take the pen away from them. Under our crime programme the guidelines are rewritten within 6 weeks of Royal Assent by a panel appointed by the Lord Chancellor, to reflect the intent of the legislation and not the institutional preferences of the judiciary. And whatever sentence a judge passes will be served in full. If a court says 5 years, it will mean 5 years, and nobody who kills a man outside his own front door will be home again before the family has reached the second anniversary. The Attorney General's office has 28 days from sentence to decide whether to refer the case as unduly lenient. Basildon Council's Labour leader, Gavin Callaghan, called it "a catastrophic miscarriage of justice". He is right, and it is his own party's government that will decide. We will see what that is worth by about November 18th 2026. Michael's mother said the family are now serving a life sentence. Parliament gave the courts that sentence to pass in 2022. They gave it to her instead. And Michael Ashton died with his hands against the bonnet. Pushing at something far heavier than himself. The weight in front of the rest of us is a sentencing system that has priced his life at just a couple of years. It moves the moment enough people lean on it at once. Progress is where they lean.

Among the backers of the most promising quantum computer in Britain, as of this month, are the bar staff and schoolteachers of Australia. Universal Quantum was spun out of the University of Sussex in 2018 by Sebastian Weidt and Winfried Hensinger, and it makes its home in Haywards Heath, a commuter town that the technology press, struggling for something to say about it, describes as halfway between Gatwick Airport and Brighton. That may yet turn out to describe the company's relationship with the country as a whole: a pleasant place it passed through on the way to the airport. On October 8th it closed the largest Series A ever raised by a quantum firm headquartered in Britain, more than $100 million. DCVC, a Californian fund, led alongside Firgun. In came EDBI, the Singaporean state's investment arm; Integral, a Japanese asset manager; the founder of Roblox; and a group the trade press describes as "Australian superannuation capital", which means Hostplus, the pension fund of Australia's hotel and hospitality workers, and NGS Super, the fund of its teachers. Not one British pension fund appears on the list. The money will pay for the company's first research centre outside Europe, in Singapore, and for expansion in America, Japan and Hamburg. Its largest customer is the German Aerospace Center, which handed it €67 million in 2023, the largest contract ever given to a British quantum start-up, from a state that evidently knew what it was looking at. 4 days later it was Cambridge's turn. CMR Surgical, founded there in 2014, builds Versius, a robot for keyhole surgery. On October 12th Stryker, of Portage, Michigan, put £300 million into it, became the exclusive agent for selling the robot in the United States, and took, in the words of its own announcement, "an exclusive option to acquire 100% of CMR Surgical's outstanding equity in the future". A British robot will be sold in America by Americans, and may one day simply be American, and Whitehall, so far as anyone can tell, has had nothing to say about it. Weidt and Hensinger did exactly what any serious founder would do and went where the money was, which, as usual, was nowhere near a British pension fund. British pension funds manage more than £2.5 trillion. In America, Canada and Australia, pension money backs young companies at 5 to 10 times the rate ours does. The Treasury knows this perfectly well. It wrote the Mansion House Compact in 2023 precisely because it knew, and then asked the pension industry very nicely whether it might consider investing in Britain, and the pension industry, having been asked nicely, considered it. The money has yet to arrive in any quantity a newspaper would notice. Underneath the politeness sits a belief, and it is the Metropolitan class's belief, the people who make the rules and never pay for them: that a British saver's money is safest lent to the state or parked in property, that building things is a speculative activity best left to foreigners, and that when a British company becomes valuable the mature thing is to sell it for a premium and congratulate everybody on the exit. The founders pay for that belief by packing for Singapore. The saver pays for it in returns that fund the government's borrowing and nothing else. The country pays for it in every industry of the next century that it invents and then watches leave. Progress's Unicorn Farm programme ends the politeness. Every defined contribution pension scheme above £1 billion will be required by law to put 5% of its default fund into British venture and growth companies within 3 years, rising to 10% within 5. 5% alone releases £125 billion. British Patient Capital will be expanded to £10 billion and will match private investment pound for pound, so that a company like Universal Quantum can raise £50 to £200 million at home rather than in California and Singapore. And a National Technology Interest Test will give the state the power to stop the sale of any British technology company worth more than £500 million where the buyer means to carry its headquarters, its patents or its workforce abroad, with a binding 5-year commitment to Britain from any buyer who is allowed through. At present an Australian barmaid's pension shows more faith in British science than the British state does. She has made a good investment. It ought to have been yours. If you build things, or fund them, or have watched a company you admired bought and boxed up and shipped across the Atlantic, Progress needs you now. Own your country.

I've spent the last few days since the 221st eve of Trafalgar trying to think about what to say of Nelson, and that day when a century of destiny was secured for Britain, beyond the themes regularly rehearsed on that anniversary. I was reminded that in November 1803, less than 2 years before Trafalgar, Horatio Nelson won a lawsuit against his own commander-in-chief. He had sued the Earl of St Vincent in the King's Bench for the flag officer's share of the prize money on a run of Spanish treasure ships, and the judges found for him unanimously. This seems simultaneously entirely rational a course of action for the individual possessed of a healthy self-interest, and yet rather strange in its context. A Victorian would have thought the whole business vulgar, even and perhaps especially of one of the great heroes of their patrie, and a modern admiral who tried it would be sent on a course. But in some ways I think that the lawsuit tells you more about Nelson, the Battle, and the way Britain's Imperial century was secured, than any facet-specific of the battle itself could. Nelson was, above all else, the man his time demanded. He was far more product of 18th century Britain - "hard-nosed, aggressive, and acquisitive" - than he was any kind of progenitor of the 19th century Briton whose interest his life and death secured. The navy he joined paid its fighting officers a share of everything they captured; when four British frigates took a pair of Spanish treasure ships off the coast of Spain in October 1799, each captain came home with more than £40,000 and every seaman aboard with £182. And it had made it very plain what it did to the other sort. On March 14th 1757, the year before Nelson was born, Admiral John Byng was shot by a firing party on the quarterdeck of HMS Monarch for having failed, at Minorca, to "do his utmost". This was so much a custom in the British ranks that Voltaire made a joke of it, about killing an admiral from time to time to encourage the others. These men worked in institutions that were relentless; one's mind wanders to the wretched figure of Admiral Calder, who, for the sake of not making more of a minor skirmish with the French-Spanish fleet off Cape Finisterre on the eve of Trafalgar, was hauled back to England to face court martial, in spite of the imminent threat of invasion across the channnel. Nevertheless, such norms evidently had a motivational value. And thus the 18th century paid for nerve and vision and punished its absence, and it got what it paid for. Nelson really was a man of that century to his fingertips: it is no wonder that he so longed to join the ranks of the peerage, because he was every bit as "hard of mind and hard of will" (in the words of Correlli Barnett) as they were. Their conventional belief was that the national interest was something that ought to be pursued without apology. A fortnight before the battle Nelson wrote to George Rose that "it is, as Mr. Pitt knows, annihilation that the Country wants, and not merely a splendid Victory". Of course, we all know he delivered it. 27 ships beat 33 without suffering a single loss - positively Sunsinnian, to cite the only man in the same field who may be considered Nelson's historical equal - and his defeat of Napoleon at sea cleared the way and quieted the winds for 100 years of British naval supremacy. That supremacy bought something more interesting than a mere empire. Permitted by our extraordinary national character and perhaps more extraordinary consolidation of global position, a very different mentality took hold, which was at its root primarily the work of the evangelical Christians of the Wilberforcian tradition. Sixteen months after Trafalgar the slave trade was abolished, and the fleet Nelson had made unbeatable spent 60 years off West Africa enforcing it, stopping some 1,600 ships and freeing around 150,000 people. It was a magnificent thing that should remain at the centre of our national sense of self, we who freed from bondage those whose chains were otherwise subject to history's manifest indifference. And the new conscience, having finished with the slavers, went to work on the national character itself, and on Nelson's memory with it. By even as soon as 1813, Robert Southey, writing the life every schoolboy would read, felt obliged to "pronounce a severe and unqualified condemnation" of Nelson's conduct at Naples. Appetite came to look vulgar, and the national interest turned into something a gentleman was blase about. The empire that then eastwards took its way was in some ways a stranger thing than the one we associate with the period. For all the bluster about it, it developed, and indeed exploited, the great majority of its dominions to a far lesser degree than it might have; it governed them, policed them and left them under-built. You can see it, if you don't believe it, in the amount that England could harness from the dominions during the mobilisations of the 20th century - practically nothing. And for all Britai's industrial supremacy, it never taught its own governing class to think like the engineers who had fashioned it a hyperpower (which appellation it still bears, and may yet ever bear, alone in all the annals). In 1864 the Clarendon Commission went through the nine great public schools and found natural science "practically excluded from the education of the higher classes in England", which it called "a plain defect and a great practical evil". And while we were long-shot of the spoils-and-favour excesses of the 18th century - owed our victory over Napoleon to such progressivisms, in fact - a gentleman could still buy command of a regiment until 1871. The country ran the world on character and classics, and in the century and more to 1945 the centre weakened, until the country that had swept the seas at Trafalgar ended the Second World War borrowing from America to pay for the victory, and was still paying the loan off in 2006. So the anniversary leaves me with questions I think are the largest in front of us. The first is what Britain's Nelson will look like, when one rises to meet our present straits. I suspect he will look very like the original, and that he will find the modern British state as hostile to him as Georgian England was welcoming to the arcvhetype. Our own state pays for caution and criminalises nerve. The official who does nothing retires on schedule, with a gong; the one who acts and gets it wrong is chummed; and the usual penalty in Whitehall for failing to do one's utmost is reward. If we want a Nelson, we will have to want what he wanted, reward it, and stop flinching at the size of his appetite. The second is what the archetypal Briton of the future must look like, if we are to conquer the challenges of the 21st and 22nd centuries. Here I think the answer is something Britain has never yet produced at the top: the Georgian's hunger and nerve, joined to the scientific habit of mind that the Victorians kept ribald in the appropriate depths of the social fibre, but merely in the form of specialism. Neither century managed to put both moral hunger and moral habit in the same person, let alone in the same Cabinet. The Briton who intends to wrestle down this hostile century will have to carry both, and will have to be made on purpose, which is why the Angliot sits at the heart of Progress' programme for the state: officer cadets trained in the field and in the laboratory, with a course in the discipline of clear thinking running from their first term to their last. But it will have to run much further and wider than that; the instinct of the New Briton will have to burst the banks of mere formal education and flood out right across the land, and inspire men and women to move as floods tend to. We need such people even more than the Georgians did, confronted with their crowded Revolutionary and Napoleonic hours. Our enemies are amorphous, insinuating, and diffuse, but are no less assuredly our enemies for it. And England still expects on this day what it expected on the one here commemorated.

In 1910 a man called Fritz Sauter began making time switches in Grindelwald. This week the company he founded, still owned by his descendants 116 years later and now run from Basel, bought a majority stake in 24-7 Group, a £70 million engineering firm in Knutsford with more than 330 staff. This is the future of British business, as that future has been carefully designed over the past several decades: what is made here shall, in the end, be owned elsewhere. John Healey's budget will be the latest in a long line of Treasury policies in that continuity. The Chancellor is weighing a change for Wednesday's Budget aimed at a common way for a British owner to hand a firm to the next generation. The owner's shares are converted into redeemable shares, and the company buys them back out of its profits over a period of years while the children take over. Today that is taxed as a capital gain, at 24%, or 18% where Business Asset Disposal Relief applies. Under the plan it would be taxed as income, at dividend rates of up to 39.35%. Sell the same firm on the open market, to a private equity fund or a buyer from Basel, and it stays a capital gain. KPMG, not a firm given to hysteria, has "significant concerns" about "discouraging intergenerational transfers of ownership". The Treasury, asked about it, declined to comment on "rumour, speculation or proposals". Put it beside what the founder's own death now costs them. Since April, business relief from inheritance tax runs out at £2.5 million, and the family pays an effective 20% on everything above it. So a man who keeps his firm until he dies will hand part of it to the Treasury, and a man who hands it to his daughter while he is alive may now pay income-tax rates for the privilege. Selling to a stranger, though, that is the one road left in good repair. The Swiss and the Germans looked at the same problem and reached the opposite conclusion long ago. In Basel, children inherit from their parents free of inheritance tax altogether. In Germany, the heirs of a family firm can be relieved of the whole of the tax on it, provided they keep the business going for 7 years and keep paying its workforce, which is the deal a country strikes when it wants the firm and the jobs to still be there in 2040. It's a stunningly beautiful bit of incentive engineering. Of course, the German economy has its own problems - there's a reason why, for all its legendary efficiencies, its rate of growth lagged behind even dysfunctional Britain's up until the beginning of the war in Ukraine and the end of the era of easy money - but this ruling is one reason so much of the Mittelstand is still owned by the families that built it, and how a time-switch maker from a mountain village ends up shopping in Cheshire. Healey's Treasury will present the change as a crackdown on avoidance. To the people who staff it, a father passing his firm to his daughter looks very much as a man with an unusually heavy suitcase looks to a customs officer at Dover. Because they fundamentally do not believe in human beings, nor in the right for human beings to strive and to build and to succeed, they believe inherited ownership is a kind of unearned privilege, that the state - not even the employees of the company - has the prior claim on whatever a family builds, and that a business is a pot to be taxed on its way to a buyer. Family firms are more than 90% of the businesses in this country, have ever and legendarily been part of not just our economic life but our cultural life as well, and nearly 4 in 5 of them sit outside London and the South East, in exactly the towns every government promises to revive and then leaves picking over fishbones. Family Business UK put the jobs at risk from the inheritance changes alone at 208,500 last month. The Treasury has been told all of this, in writing, by everybody, and is proceeding anyway. Our own answer is to take the tax away altogether. Our programme abolishes inheritance tax entirely in the first Finance Act of a Progress government, with no nil-rate band, no taper and no charge, and repeals the Inheritance Tax Act 1984. We do it because the family is an intergenerational institution, and the passing of property, knowledge and work from parents to children is how a civilisation carries itself from one century into the next. A family firm that stays in the family keeps its head office, its suppliers and its apprentices in the town that made it, for reasons no fund manager has ever managed to model. Fritz Sauter's descendants did nothing wrong this week. They are a good family firm, from a country that made it possible for them to remain one, and they spotted a bargain. The bargain was us. If you own a business you hoped to pass on, or work for one, or grew up above one, then you already know what the future ought to look like. And the only truly pro-business organisation in British politics needs your hand.

Late in September, on a disused airfield at Machrihanish on the Kintyre peninsula, a scaled-down orbital rocket was bolted to a stand and fired for 45 seconds, and every subsystem held for the full duration. The rocket belongs to Skyrora, which is the only company in Britain building a vehicle to put satellites in orbit from British soil. The full-size version, the Skyrora XL, is 23 metres tall, 3 stages, built to carry 315kg to orbit, and its 70kN engine runs on hydrogen peroxide and kerosene in a staged-combustion cycle that no commercial engine in history has been qualified on. The engines are made in a factory in North Lanarkshire. The company's chief operating officer, Dr Jack James Marlow, said the thing that engineers say and governments never do: "You don't build confidence in an orbital launch vehicle by waiting until the finished rocket is on the launchpad." The firing is the part of the story Britain can be proud of. The rest is the part Britain should be ashamed of, because at every stage the slowest component in this programme has been a permission. In 2021 Skyrora built what it called the largest mobile spaceport in Europe, in Iceland, for a suborbital flight set for that September. It then waited over a year for the Icelandic government to issue a licence, and when the rocket finally flew, in October 2022, it fell into the sea with a software fault. So the company came home and applied to the Civil Aviation Authority for a licence to launch from SaxaVord in Shetland. It applied in August 2023. The licence arrived in July 2025. 23 months, for a permit that covers suborbital flights only: 1 launch of the small Skylark L, plus up to 15 more inside a year, each of which must go back to the regulator for separate approval before it can happen. The orbital vehicle that fired at Machrihanish has no licence at all yet. The first orbital flight is now pencilled in for 2030. A rocket engine on a test stand in Argyll is a good deal more than a rocket engine. It is machinists in Cumbernauld, a supply chain in Scotland that did not exist a decade ago, a test range on an airfield the RAF left in 1997, and a generation of engineers who chose to build the hardest thing in their field in this country rather than in Texas or Bavaria. Everything in that list is a bet that Britain will let them finish. Nothing in the record of the last 5 years says it will. The engineering was ready before the paperwork every single time. Progress has written the space industry onto the face of an Act. Prosperity Zone 8, Space, Satellites, Critical Minerals and Advanced Materials, is designated in statute, distributed across Cornwall and Devon and SaxaVord, with a Sandpit Authority holding autonomous governance powers so that the people deciding what gets built in the zone are inside it, accountable for it, and measured on it. The principle underneath is the one that runs through the whole of our planning programme: a decision deadline in law, and deemed consent when the state misses it. Permission is the state's job, with a date on it. The rockets are somebody else's, and they are already firing. 45 seconds at Machrihanish. 23 months at the CAA. It can be done; it is being done; the only question is whether the country gets out of the way in time to take the credit.

Regular pay in the public sector rose 6.3% in the year to August. In the private sector it rose 3.0%. Those are the Office for National Statistics' figures, published yesterday, and they are the fairest summary available of how Britain is being run: the state givesitself a pay rise at twice the rate permitted those people who pay for it, and in a year when the people who pay for it stopped hiring. And they have stopped. Vacancies fell to 691,000 in the 3 months to September, the lowest level outside the pandemic since 2014, and the ONS says the fall is "concentrated mainly within smaller businesses", which cite the cost of employing people. Payrolled employment is down 111,000 on the year. Pay growth across the economy, 3.7%, is the lowest since 2020. Among young people not in full-time education, 13.3% are unemployed, 446,000 of them, and the number is rising. Then this morning: inflation 3.5%, above the forecast, with motor fuel up 29.8% in a year and energy up 17.9%. Real pay growth across the economy is 0.8%. For the private worker on 3.0% against inflation of 3.5%, it is a pay cut. You pay more. And everything gets worse. The danse macabre that constitutes the experience of being British in 2026 rills darkly, merrily on. What's happened to our small businesses, the lifeblood of our economy and culture, and to set them so much on the back foot? Well, the burden they are citing has a date and a name. In April 2025 employer National Insurance went from 13.8% to 15% and the threshold at which it starts fell from £9,100 to £5,000, so that the tax on employing someone on £20,000 rose by half. It was sold as funding for the NHS. What it funded, on the evidence of yesterday's release, was a 6.3% settlement for the public payroll and a hiring freeze for everyone else, which is the natural result of taxing the act of giving somebody a job in order to pay people whose jobs cannot be lost. The Budget is days away, and the measure being briefed as its centrepiece is a rise in the bank surcharge from 3% to 8%. The Chancellor's answer to a country that has stopped hiring is a tax on the institutions that lend to employers. Indeed's economist asked this week "whether the Budget gives employers a reason to start swimming". It will give them a reason to keep still. The Progress programme begins where the damage began. The Tax Reset restores employer National Insurance to 13.8% and the threshold to £9,100 from the first April after Royal Assent, which puts the cost of the 1st hire, the 2nd and the 10th back where it was before the state decided that employment was the thing it could most afford to tax. And it requires HMRC to print the True Tax Rate on every payslip, income tax and both National Insurances in a single number, so that the 3.0% worker can see what the 6.3% settlement costs him, every month, in his own hand. The state has awarded itself 6.3% and left the people who pay for it a hiring freeze and a fuel bill. We intend to reverse the old order, here as elsewhere. Join us.

Matthew Caton holds the children's portfolio on Wakefield Council, which makes him the man answerable, in law, for the safety of every child in the district. In that district stands Urban House, an asylum accommodation centre of more than 300 beds, with somewhere between 200 and 260 people inside it on any given day. He does not know who they are. He is not permitted to know. "How am I meant to protect the children and young people of this district," he asked the council last week, "when I have no idea who's coming in and out of this facility?" The council, he said, has not one single eye on them. In under a month West Yorkshire Police have made 5 arrests at Urban House for alleged rape and child sexual assault. Yes, that's right. FIVE. One man has been charged with sexual offences against a child under 13 and will appear at Leeds Crown Court; the others have been released on bail, and nothing more can be said about any of them until a jury has spoken. What can be said is what the council did. Every member of it, of every party, voted to ask the Home Secretary to close Urban House and the Cedar Court Hotel. But the council has no power to close either. The leader, Karl Johnson, put the position in a sentence: "We cannot carry on like this." He cannot carry on, and yet he cannot stop, because the building is not his. The Home Office called the allegations "sickening", said it "will not tolerate criminal behaviour", promised that anyone convicted of a serious sexual offence would have his claim refused and be removed at the first opportunity, and pointed to 80,000 people returned since the election. West Yorkshire Police confirmed reassurance patrols. And yet it keeps happening, doesn't it? More children; more women; more innocent, blameless citizens. And as Gosport shows, you;'re going to have to keep taking it. Because you are, aren't you? The people who govern you reckon that you will. Gosport themselves might resist. So might Wakefield. But who else among you? Perhaps it's because of who this stuff most affects. Asylum accommodation is procured as beds, and beds are cheapest in the towns where wages are lowest, which are also the towns where nobody has a solicitor on retainer and the council leader has to ask the Home Secretary's permission to know who is living on his own streets. The risk goes where the resistance is weakest. The department that decides this does not live next to the result, is never asked to, and has built an entire vocabulary of "dispersal" and "contingency" and "community cohesion concerns" to avoid the sentence that explains it, which is that Wakefield was chosen because Wakefield could be made to accept it. Either way, Progress is going to end the category of building. Under PP1.3 every asylum claim made by a person who arrives irregularly is processed offshore, on British sovereign territory, under British law, with transfer within 72 hours of arrival and a statutory 28-day determination. Arrival on the mainland no longer buys a bed in a Yorkshire town. There is no room for an Urban House in that system, no Cedar Court, and no 260 strangers a council is forbidden to know, and no portfolio holder for abused children. Sod the patrols. It's time the decisions were ours again. Join us and we'll make it happen.