🔴 This is extraordinary. Chancellor @JohnHealey_MP says that if Britain had invested its North Sea oil and gas revenues like Norway did, we could now have a sovereign wealth fund worth around £1 TRILLION. Norway turned its energy inheritance into national wealth for future generations. Britain privatised major energy assets, treated North Sea tax revenues as current income, and used the windfall to fund mass deindustrialisation, unemployment and redundancy costs. In 1984–85 alone, North Sea revenues were about £12bn. We had the same geological fortune as Norway. What differed was the political choice, Norway built a national asset and Britain spent the windfall and sold much of the inheritance. Now we face huge public debt, fragile energy security and another geopolitical shock. For long-term resilience, a country has strategic natural assets, the state has to think beyond the next Budget. Food security. Energy security. National wealth. All are about planning for the future rather than assuming tomorrow will look like today.

📊 The 2016 Brexit electorate no longer exists. Peter Kellner has updated the sums using YouGov and ONS data. Since 2016: 🔹 Around 3.8m Leave voters have died, against 2.1m Remain voters. 🔹 Around 7m new voters have reached voting age, overwhelmingly pro-European. 🔹 Around 5m voters have changed their minds 👉roughly three-quarters of them moving from Leave to Rejoin. His estimate of how Britain would vote now: 🇪🇺 REJOIN: 20.0m 👉 63% 🇬🇧 STAY OUT: 11.8m 👉 37% A majority of almost 9 million. Brexit happened. Britain has lived with it for a decade. But democracy does not freeze the electorate in 2016 forever. The question is what Britain wants now not what it indicated in 2016.

🇨🇦 Alberta has overwhelmingly rejected even starting the process towards separation from Canada 🇨🇦 Preliminary results show around 77% opposed holding an independence referendum, against 23% in favour. Trump has repeatedly threatened Canada with becoming America’s 51st state, while Mark Carney has spent months arguing that Canadians are stronger confronting that pressure together rather than fragmented. Carney, Bank of England governor during Brexit referendum, even warned Albertans that many Britons who supported leaving the EU subsequently regretted it. He also addressed some of Alberta’s legitimate grievances: backing a new oil pipeline and changing federal environmental rules that had angered the province. That seems to be the lesson. You don’t solve political frustration by breaking apart the larger structure that gives you economic and strategic strength. At a moment when Trump is openly testing allies, Canadians appear to have recognised that fragmentation would make them weaker, not stronger. 🇬🇧 Britain needs to reflect on that. Because the world is moving towards large economic and strategic blocs and sovereignty without scale can very quickly become dependence on somebody bigger.