Upon obtaining my chemistry degree, I got a professional Job at a Pharma company (where I still work). I was unable to afford to move where the job was located, so I got a second job in a warehouse for one month before handing in my notice to move to my desired job in the South of England.

At my first job I had no work experience, not that is mattered: most jobs of that nature can be learned quickly. Within a week I knew how to operate the tills, serve customers, clean screens, deal with customers, handle the day-to-day routine. The same was the case in the warehouse, there was official training. It lasted one week and then for the remainder of that month I worked completely independently showing up for work and getting on with the job.

Today I work as a research chemist. Unlike the cinema and warehouse jobs, this role genuinely requires specialist knowledge. I completed an integrated master’s degree in chemistry before entering the profession. However, in most instances of my work as a process chemist most companies only hire PhDs, my company was willing to take on less experienced people and train them. Although again given the job even those with PhDs cannot enter this role without a period of learning and development – even four years on I am still learning as my company continues to invest in me.

Some of my older colleagues followed a different path. They were hired by companies and then sent to university while employed, not uncommon in the public sector but today very uncommon in the private. Rather than expecting fully formed scientists to appear at the site gates, they developed the skills they needed themselves.

The discussion around young people who are not in education, employment, or training (NEETs) assumes the problem lies with the individuals themselves. We are told they need more confidence, better employability, stronger soft skills, or greater resilience. Countless initiatives focus on making young people more job ready.

But job readiness is only useful if there are jobs available.

Many of the roles I have worked in required very little prior knowledge. The critical factor was not whether applicants possessed years of experience or a long list of qualifications. It was whether an employer was willing to hire them and provide basic training.

This creates a strange contradiction in public debate. Employers frequently report skill shortages, yet many appear unwilling to train people to acquire those skills. Instead, they search for candidates who already possess them. The result is a labour market where young people are told to become more employable while facing a shortage of opportunities to gain the experience employers demand.

Recent government policy reflects this supply-side assumption. Rather than creating jobs, the focus has been on subsidising private employers through apprenticeship incentives, hiring grants, and wage subsidies. Effectively using public money to reduce the cost of labour rather than expanding the overall availability of work. The state pays companies to take on young workers, doing little to address the underlying problem: employers unwilling to create permanent entry-level positions or invest in long-term training. Ultimately, the dominant policy narrative transforms a structural shortage of opportunities into an individual failing. It treats NEETs as a supply-side problem of confidence or soft skills, yet the evidence points to a substantial demand side crisis. When employers genuinely need workers, they lower hiring barriers and invest in training. The persistence of high NEET rates alongside complaints of skill shortages, suggests that many employers simply want fully trained workers without bearing the costs of training them. Soft skills may determine who secures a scarce job, but they do not create new jobs.

For clarity, there is a dual problem: not enough jobs, and employers engaging in the narrativisation of the issue. They frame the claim that the workforce, particularly young people, are insufficiently trained as an opportunity for government subsidy, when government should, in fact, be creating demand rather than subsidising labour.

• The Demographic Distribution: He asserts that London’s social housing has been disproportionately allocated to foreign-born residents.

• The Economic Inactivity Drain: He points to data showing that nearly half of these households are economically inactive, framing them as permanent, non-contributing dependents.

• The Displacement of Productive Workers: He argues that high-earning, tax-paying young graduates are being financially squeezed out to remote commuter zones, while prime, central London real estate is wasted on subsidised tenants.

• The Market Bottleneck: He claims that by trapping a massive portion of London’s housing stock in permanent social tenancies, the state artificially chokes the supply of the open market, directly driving up costs in the Private Rented Sector (PRS).

• The Breakdown of Reciprocity: He argues that the modern allocation of social housing completely violates the principle that you must pay into the system before you can draw from it.

The Demographic Shift:

Milbank does not dwell on this point for long, and with good reason. After briefly conceding that social housing does, for all its flaws, support essential British workers, he quickly pivots to the observation that roughly half of lead tenants are foreign-born. The juxtaposition is clearly intended to encourage the reader to infer that social housing is disproportionately benefiting outsiders. Yet this implication rests almost entirely on the ambiguous rhetorical weight carried by the terms “lead tenant” and “foreign-born.”

A lead tenant may have been born abroad, but that tells us little about the household itself. Their spouse and children are often British citizens, while many foreign-born residents have spent decades in Britain as naturalised citizens contributing through work and taxation. This includes historic waves of migration such as the Windrush generation and Commonwealth workers, many of whom arrived over half a century ago and played a direct role in building modern London. These individuals did not bypass the social contract; they were part of sustaining it.

Finally, under the Housing Act 1996, the vast majority of non-UK citizens including those on standard work visas, student visas, or with no legal status have absolutely ‘no recourse to public funds’ and are legally barred from even joining a social housing waiting list. To secure a permanent social tenancy in London, an applicant must possess settled status or citizenship and demonstrate years of local connection to the specific borough. This fact is notably absent from the article.

The Economic Inactivity Drain:

Having established a misleading demographic framing, Milbank moves swiftly to his next claim: that nearly half of social housing households are economically inactive. Once again, the argument depends on headline statistics presented without sufficient context, encouraging the reader to conflate economic inactivity with unemployment, an unwillingness to work.

Economic inactivity is a broad term that has nothing to do with welfare fraud or a refusal to work. By definition, the largest single bloc within the economically inactive category consists of retired pensioners, who account for roughly 29% of social housing households.

When we apply this reality to his previous demographic complaint the foreign-born tenants he highlights are, in vast numbers, elderly citizens who moved to London decades ago. They spent their entire adult lives working and paying taxes into the system for 40 or 50 years. They have now simply reached the end of their working lives and retired.

The remainder of the inactive statistic is made up of the long-term sick, the disabled, and full-time carers who look after vulnerable relatives (saving the state money in social care costs). The percentage of social housing tenants who are actually unemployed and actively seeking work is miniscule, typically hovering around 5%.

By hiding the faces of the elderly and disabled behind the headline figure of the economic inactivity, Milbank is not engaging in a neutral economic analysis. He is engaging in a calculated effort to make the natural retirement and protection of vulnerable people look like an act of systemic parasitism.

The sequencing of Milbank’s argument is also revealing. The repeated proximity between “foreign-born” and “economically inactive” subtly encourages the reader to associate the two categories, despite the article never explicitly making that claim outright.

The Displacement of Productive Workers:

Having weaponised selective statistics against vulnerable residents, Milbank advances to his third argument: that affluent young professionals are being priced out of central London while subsidised tenants occupy valuable urban land. The implication is that proximity to the capital’s economic centre should increasingly be allocated according to earning power, reducing the city to little more than a residential preserve for high-income professionals.

Social housing acts as an implicit wage subsidy for London’s infrastructure, ensuring that the essential labour pool required to service the city can actually afford to live within a reasonable distance of their jobs. Forcing essential service workers into a multi-hour commute from the Midlands to clear central London for wealthy graduates is inane.

Out of London’s roughly 806,000 social housing households, a substantial proportion fall into the “economically inactive” category Milbank treats as socially suspect. Once translated from abstraction into policy reality, the implication is stark: hundreds of thousands of pensioners, disabled people, carers, and low-income residents would need to be removed from valuable inner-city housing to make way for more economically profitable occupants. The article never seriously addresses either the logistics or the morality of such a vision.

Ultimately, he fails to address the elephant in the room of 40 years of almost no council house building. Nor does he engage with the broader failures of urban planning that have concentrated employment in central commercial districts while pushing affordable housing ever further outward. The result is a city increasingly divided between office centres and distant residential peripheries rather than integrated, mixed-use neighbourhoods

The Market Bottleneck:

The claim that social housing restricts housing supply is parody, given the following facts. Firstly, the majority of social housing was built by the state so this locked away supply wouldn’t exist without said state. Milbank is proposing a zero-sum game of taking existing housing from the ‘undeserving’ and giving it to the ‘deserving’- more rational response would be to expand housing capacity so everyone has access to a home, not just those he has deemed worthy.

This ties directly into Milbank’s final, most morally pretentious argument: the alleged breakdown of reciprocity. He asserts that the modern allocation of social housing completely violates the foundational social contract of the welfare state, the principle that an individual must pay into the system before they are entitled to draw from it. It is an argument designed to appeal to a sense of baseline fairness, but it relies on a deliberate blindness to the actual lives of the people he is attacking.

As established by the government’s official data, the single largest demographic Milbank targets under his economically inactive and foreign-born labels are elderly retired British pensioners. For Milbank to look at a seventy-year-old retired nurse or transit worker and claim they are violating reciprocity because they are no longer actively generating tax revenue is a grotesque distortion of the social contract. Only achievable by viewing people through headline statistics he deliberately obfuscates the fact that the majority of these people have contributed.

Conclusion:

Sebastian Milbank’s ‘taboo-breaking’ critique of social housing is, in reality, an exercise in statistical framing. Once the headline figures are placed back into their proper context, the argument rapidly begins to unravel. The pairing of ‘foreign-born’ with ‘economically inactive’ is clearly designed to encourage certain assumptions in the reader while preserving plausible deniability. Ultimately, the article reveals far more about Milbank’s own ideological preferences than it does about the structural causes of London’s housing crisis.

The British press is obsessed with him. They treat the 60% tax trap like a humanitarian crisis, painting the loss of a personal allowance as a tragedy on par with the 165k children living in temporary accommodation. We are told, through a constant stream of tear-stained opinion pieces, that Henry is a victim of a greedy state that hates success. Henry, bless him, has started to believe his own press. He’s convinced that if the Chancellor just stopped punishing him, he’d finally be able to afford that four-bed detached in a leafy suburb with a driveway wide enough for his ego.

You earn £125,000. You are in the top 2% of earners in the country. Yet, you’re currently in a group chat with four other HENRYs complaining that the 60% tax trap is the reason you still live in a two-bed flat with a damp problem in Zone 3.

It is true that the tax is high and has some quirks; between £100k and £125k, the tax burden increases dramatically. But if you think a tax cut is the solution to your personal crisis, I have one piece of advice: Shut up.

The HENRY mindset is obsessed with individual take-home pay, seemingly forgetting HENRY isn’t a person but a class. They think that if the Chancellor moved a few tax brackets and gave them an extra £800 a month, they’d finally get that garden or the school catchment area they’ve been eyeing up.

This assessment is incorrect. In a supply constricted market like the UK, a tax cut for high earners is not a wealth creator, but landlord subsidy or another equity pump into Britains greatest pyramid scheme, the housing market.

If every HENRY in London gets a tax break tomorrow, you will all take that extra cash to the same three open-house viewings, and you will simply outbid each other with the government’s money. The house still goes to the same person; the only difference is the price tag is £40,000 higher. You didn’t get richer; the seller did.

You likely think social housing is someone else’s problem, a benefits handout which you a higher earner are subsidising. Ironically, it’s the lack of social housing that is currently eating your salary. In more ways than one, in the direct sense because of higher rents and the indirect sense due to tax money being spent on subsidising landlord profits in the form of housing benefit.

The stopping of building council homes didn’t end the need for them. Millions of people have now been pushed into the private rented sector. The result, demand for accommodation has outstripped supply several times over. With an estimated 6 million housing shortfall.

What you are currently paying is a scarcity tax, one only public investment in the construction of housing can solve. A tax cut for you just reduces the states capacity to engage in this much needed investment.

Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is soon to be the biggest NIMBY of them all? The uncomfortable truth is many HENRYs are just Pre-NIMBYs. You spend your 30s complaining that there are no houses, then you spend your 40s protecting the character of your neighbourhood once you finally get a mortgage. Eagerly pulling up the ladder for the HENRYS coming after you.

If HENRYs want to improve their lives, they should stop lobbying (whining) for 1p off the higher rate or some adjustment to the payback of the tax-free allowance. The emphasis needs to be on supply. This means social housing and state investment.

Conclusion

The tax system is annoying, but the housing market is broken. A tax cut is a temporary hit of dopamine that leaves you in the same bidding war with a slightly larger pile of Monopoly money. Ultimately, if this theoretical tax cut helps you squirm your way on the housing ladder, it just makes it more difficult for the next person, should we cut taxes again for that person?

If you want to be rich, stop looking at your payslip and start looking at your outgoings, the endless complaints of the 60% marginal rate, but then silence when you’re paying your landlord £2000-3000 a month in rent for a 1 bed. Taxes pay for all government services, rent pays for your 1 bed flat, one is clearly better value for money. Maybe ask your landlord for a rent reduction – if you think that’s absurd why do you think tax cuts for you are any different?

Until you demand more house building and fewer tax tweaks, you aren’t a victim of the state, you’re just a participant in your own stagnation. Wanting a leg up but not fixing the fundamentals of this broken system just leaves the people after you in the exact same position; this is intensely selfish.

If you believe you are uniquely deserving because of you high earning status, then surely the high earners of the next generation are just as deserving. Yet this policy would only disadvantage them further. So do not pretend your position is just; it lacks any care for others, even those within your own class. It is entirely about advancing yourself over others.

So, please, Shut up.

Post scriptum

There is one exception to this, that being the removal of free childcare as a benefit for high earners. I think this is wrong; while housing is a supply-side failure, childcare should be a universal benefit rather than some humiliating means-test which undermines buy-in from citizens. Universalism creates a shared stake in the state; means-testing just creates a class of people who pay for everything and feel a part of nothing; Especially on a benefit so intimate and at a time where the birth rate has fallen below replacement.

Focusing on making other people’s lives better will make yours better; focusing on yourself will leave everyone else out to dry.

Subscribe now

A degree is perceived as a form of social mobility, a vehicle to a higher social bracket which is an obsession with liberal politics. However, living standards are not measured by accreditations, but your ability to access commodities/assets which are required for a stable life: housing, energy, and transport etc. By fixating on graduate roles as the sole metric of success, the state ignored the looming supply-side crises of these core commodities.

The result is an accreditation trap. We now have a generation of highly educated professionals who either cannot find jobs, or more perversely, hold jobs associated with their qualification but find their disposable incomes consumed by high goods and service prices. A trading of material security for perceived professional prestige, the receipts for that trade continue to be tallied in economic dissatisfaction and worsening living standards.

This vision of a highly skilled highly paid workforce has mutated into something far more cynical. What was supposed to be a ladder for the many has been re-engineered into a mandatory entrance fee for the professional class. Effectively a workforce entrance fee. A fee applied when the government wanted people to access said education and are then charged for the privilege to a tune of £9,535 a year – not inclusive of maintenance fees. This large principal sum coupled with high interest rates translates into a 9% tax on earnings above £28,470.

By framing higher education as a private benefit rather than a public good, the state has effectively outsourced the cost of national productivity to the incomes of the young. It should be noted the UK graduate dividend has fallen significantly since 1997, making us the exception as other comparable countries that have maintained or increased this dividend. So not only have we trained a workforce which increasingly does not have access to basic commodities but have also failed to generate sufficient graduate jobs to meet the supply of new graduates.

We are in the absurd situation of demanding a highly skilled workforce while penalising the very act of becoming skilled – while not having sufficient demand within the national economy to provide jobs for the graduates being generated. This effective tax on graduates has generated a deep-seated social friction that is now being represented on the national stage.

The Political Birth of the professional debtor

For years, the political establishment treated student debt as a quiet tax, a line item on a payslip that graduates would grumble about but ultimately accept and be powerless to do anything about. Although the Liberal Democrats were early victims of this new political faction. We are now witnessing the emergence of a self-aware, highly educated, and aggrieved political grouping that makes up about half of the young electorate.

This isn’t a fringe group of angry students. These are the thirty-something doctors, mid-level managers, engineers, journalists and even MPs, touching every major part of the country. They were promised that their degrees would enable them to access better lives; instead, they’ve found themselves trapped in a stagnant economy where 9% of their income is skimmed off. This frustration is further energised by a cost-of-living crisis.

The catalyst for this awakening has been the vocalisation of a ‘mis-selling scandal’, championed by figures like journalist Olly Dugmore. Olly Dugmore is the embodiment of this cohort; a university educated professional who is himself a product of the Plan 2 era. Has transitioned from a powerless student to a well-known journalist for a major newspaper (The New Statesman) who now uses his position to be a highly vocal critic of the current student loans policy. Tapping into a profound sense of unfairness regarding how the terms of the contract have been changed retrospectively, weaponising it to attack the whole unfair system.

The government froze repayment thresholds, a move that effectively increased taxes on graduates during a cost-of-living crisis. This is not just a fiscal adjustment; it is a continued attack by political parties on graduates assuming they would avoid serious electoral consequence. This assumption was as short sighted as the original policy given that these young graduates are now a major demographic cohort which can vote. Dugmore and others like him have successfully mobilised this sentiment turning individual frustration into a collective political demand for a readjustment.

The 50% target has backfired. By funnelling half the population through the same debt heavy pipeline, the state has inadvertently created a unified voting bloc. This cohort is united by a shared financial burden. Seeing the generational inequity: they are paying for a system that their predecessors enjoyed for free.

As this group moves into positions of prominence and cultural influence, rightly or wrongly this cohort will seek to spread their economic burden across wider society, and they have the power to do so. Originally it was older generations who held state power and did not wish to pay for those who came after them – they had the power, and made the policy which suited them.

Now, the roles are reversing. This brand of zero-sum politics; the act of simply shifting costs from one demographic to another is not just short-sighted; it is fundamentally self-destructive. When a state pits the interests of different groups against one another, it guarantees that as each group moves into prominence, they will use their power to retaliate and readjust burdens.

The duty of the politician is not to referee a fight over who gets the bill, but to balance these competing interests through a universal burden. By failing to treat education as a collective investment, the state has instead created a cycle of resentment. In a democratic society, if you weaponise policy against a specific group, particularly the young, eventually that group will grow up, gain power, and return the favour.

The most persistent counterargument to reforming student finance is the fairness argument. It is a simple, seductive refrain often proposed by or on the behalf of those who didn’t attend university: “Why should I pay for your degree?”. If you didn’t get the degree, why should you get the bill? However, this perspective fails to survive even the most basic scrutiny. It views a degree as a luxury consumer good like a designer watch rather than a critical piece of national infrastructure.

The reality is that in a modern, interconnected economy, no one is an island. A non-graduate benefits from the higher education system every single day. They benefit when they see a doctor trained at a teaching hospital; they benefit when they cross a bridge designed by a structural engineer; they benefit when a life-saving vaccine which is developed by 100s if not 1000s of university educated professionals. Just as university professionals benefit from their non-university educated counterparts. If a graduate earns more, they pay more tax; the same rate applied to a greater sum generates more revenue. Equally, the UK income tax system is already progressive, with several tax brackets. The application of the 9% rate results in the unusual outcome of people earning more having a lower effective tax than graduates earning less.

Table 1 Effective tax rate by income (error ±1-2%)

The current over production of graduates and the corresponding lack of demand are not personal failures, but rather the systemic outcomes of government policy and misaligned incentives, not individual choice. It is unjust to place the financial burden solely on graduates of a system they didn’t create.

Policy changes

A shift has already begun within parliament, receiving criticism within the House of Lords, and more notable leader of the opposition Kemi Badenoch has announced how she would reform the existing system. Of course, in typical conservative fashion they have devised a policy which will only aid the highest graduate earners; the proposed change being reducing the interest rate from RPI+3% to only RPI (currently 3.8%). It simply allows those on high salaries to clear their principal faster, while lower earners continue to see 9% of their income skimmed off for 30 years, only for a slightly smaller (but still irrelevant) mountain of interest to be written off at the end – their total sum paid and monthly payments remain the same as they are unable to pay off the total amount before the cut off.

The jokes right themselves and so does government policy apparently. In the wake of this criticism the government has announced that they will cap the interest rate at 6%, a policy perfectly engineered to be irrelevant, just like Keir Starmer himself. The government claims they are capping the interest rate to protect students, while in reality, the cap only saves money during rare spikes of high inflation, which is the only redeeming benefit. If you work off the government target of 2% inflation the interest should be around 5%. Furthermore, only those who earn ~£53k per year have the full +3% applied so again it circles back to the conservative policy of helping the wealthiest graduates, effectively having no impact on medium or lower earners who will not pay the principal sum. Keir Starmer is often concerned about the pace of change; of course, how can there be any pace when there is no change?

Concluding thoughts

The Student Loan Plan 2 system was never just a financial instrument; it was a political assessment. Politicians didn’t wish the public to pay for the expanded institution they insisted must exist, instead lumbering that cost on graduates; an irony given how many fiscally reserved politicians insist on the national debt being a debt on our descendants yet keen to impose debt on those who have not even entered the workforce. By treating higher education as a private debt rather than a public investment, the state attempted to bypass the collective responsibility of a functional society. In 2026, that assessment is hitting a wall of demographic reality. How this plays out is not clear to me, I am certain of change and its direction but uncertain of how far.

In the context of unaffordable housing, de-formalisation of work, and aging national infrastructure I am not keen to see my student loan go down if that’s at the cost of major state investment. I’d rather pay the sum for a greater collective benefit. My generation is quick to point out the selfish economic behaviour of our predecessors; we should be reflective of that before we propose our own policies. I do not know what the right solution is, but it shouldn’t come at the cost of investment, or we will simply be short-changing our own children’s futures.

Finally, we must address the mental trap for our generation: just because we did everything “right,” it doesn’t entitle us to the same lifestyle our parents enjoyed. Degrees do not build houses or generate power; the economy does. Housing, energy, workforce organisation, and stability are the result of social institutions - formal and informal - these require building. Having a degree alone will not pull us out of this hole, which is getting deeper and harder to climb out of (for example, the average age of a first-time buyer). If we want to make our lives better, we must build that reality; it will not simply materialise.

Rushanara Ali, is a sitting MP earning a minimum of £91,000 a year (more given her ministerial position), with one of the most generous work benefits packages in the country. On top off this sum of monies she also receives rental income. What I cannot make sense of is the following facts: she is a wealthy woman by any metric, a Labour party member and the homelessness minister. One might think that she would be concerned about her public image, yet when given the opportunity she increased the rent by a further £700. Setting the stage for her fall from grace – more greed than sense and morals. This situation is a clear example of how market forces particularly landlordism perverts’ human behaviour, as it incentivises ever more wealth extraction from the tenant to the landlord, irrelevant of the social cost. You would think an economically secure minister would be proud to stand on principle to provide one of their properties at a below market rate (still achieving a profit just not a market maximum) but no there is no principle – if she cannot set an example who can?

This is not the first instance of the best candidates falling short of the ideal, Jas Athwal Labour MP, and you guessed it, landlord. Owner of 15 properties, many of which were infested with insects and mould. Some residents claimed that they had been threatened with eviction if they complained or started claiming welfare. Jas Athwal’s defence – he did not know due to the properties being managed by an agency. The disappointment writes itself.

I have no doubt, sincerely, Rushanara Ali and Jas Athwal have the best of intentions and believe in the Renter’s Rights Bill. Being a landlord clearly compromised their decision-making abilities; even the well intentioned, are unable to make the moral decision choosing economics over people. So, what can we expect from those who are just in it for the money? I think renters can tell you, as this situation plays itself out thousands of times every year. The social cost: over a 100,000 people in temporary accommodation, which costs families secure places to live, and it costs you, the taxpayer, in misappropriated council tax fees going towards temporary accommodation and subsidising landlords in the form of housing benefit.

Why haven’t Rushanara and Jas had the whip removed? Both MPs have clearly demonstrated grievous moral impropriety. Given that a significant part of the Labour voter base are renters, you would think the Labour leadership will at least be sensitive to the optics if not the morality. Yet, both MPs enjoy the Labour whip. Conversely MPs who voted to end the two-child benefit or against the government disability cuts are dismissed, it seems to me a vacuum of moral leadership at the top of the party. Yes-men are protected, meanwhile those who represent their most vulnerable constituents have the whip removed. A contemptable dichotomy.

A Final Comment: I will give credit to the government for enacting the Renters’ Rights Bill into law, which is a step in the right direction. This contrasts with the previous Conservative government, which had also made a manifesto commitment to introduce a Renters’ Reform Bill. They ultimately failed to get it passed due to backbench Conservative MPs who, acting against their manifesto commitment, weakened and ultimately prevented the bill from becoming law. This highlights another reason why, when voting in an election, we should not only vote on a party basis but also check to see if candidates are landlords before casting our vote.

Within England, particularly in the rural South, a sinister cabal has emerged whose religious fanaticism can only be likened to terror organizations such as the Taliban, ISIS, or early church militants. This villainous group has a menacing mission: to enforce their extreme aesthetic beliefs on the taxpayer. Just as ISIS smashed the icons of antiquity, another movement of iconoclasts lies in our midst, presumably with nothing better to do. Their aim is to tear down Britain’s pylons (energy transmission lines) so they may continue their fiendish worship of empty, ecologically sterile fields.

In an era of austerity politics, high energy costs, and dated energy infrastructure that needs to be urgently upgraded for the green transition, one would think putting existing and new pylons underground would be a poor use of time and money.

However, if we consider the eyesore, maybe these fanatics have a point. The three images below show the painting The Triumph of Death by Pieter Bruegel, the Cotswolds with pylons, and a generated image showing how the Cotswolds could be. I know the first two images are almost indistinguishable, but I assure you the first image is, in fact, not the Cotswolds but a scene depicting mass slaughter, whereas the second image is a field. This visual confusion, I believe, speaks to the profound aesthetic offense of pylons—an eyesore so severe that it makes a masterpiece of heinous desolation seem like a pastoral scene by comparison.

Figure 1 Triumph of death by Pieter Bruegel

Figure 2

Figure 3

Demonstrated by the generated image (Figure 3) of an empty field this clearly justifies the cost of underground cables being four times as expensive as overground lines. Once the work is complete, I am sure that day shall be added to the Christian calendar and be likened to the birth of Christ, some say immaculate conception they say immaculate field.

While pylon campaigners may well celebrate this as a significant victory. To my mind, it serves as an example of hyper-localism and superficial climate activism, sadly illuminating how profoundly distorted our collective priorities have become.