Marcus Coetzee

I have realised that the UK is run by frameworks, binding legal obligations created by statute, treaty and common law that sit above ordinary politics and constrain elected leaders regardless of their mandate. This essay is my attempt to map how far that constraint actually runs.

I work through a sample of sixteen frameworks across local, devolved and UK government, from homelessness duties in Scotland to the Bank of England’s independence, showing how each strips genuine discretion from politicians rather than simply guiding it.

This is not a partisan argument for or against any one framework. Frameworks work like a ratchet, tightening with each addition, until the cumulative architecture becomes easy to add to and nearly impossible to remove.

Frameworks apply whether a government’s direction is wise or reckless. Until leaders find a way to revise them, they can only tweak the UK’s strategy within a course already set decades ago.

I wrote this essay after a morning spent helping a Scottish food bank with its strategy. It is one of over a thousand outlets now operating across Scotland, run by over 600 organisations, and still overwhelmed by demand.

It made me want to refine my thinking about why this need persists in a wealthy country.

This essay sets out seven economic factors driving food bank supply and demand in Scotland. These include food inflation outpacing benefits, rising unemployment in low-pay sectors, the fragmentation of households into smaller and more vulnerable units, constrained government revenue, declining donations, a shrinking volunteer base, and funders spreading grants more thinly.

I also set out the short, medium and long-term fixes, and why the long-term one, involving a stronger and broader economy, remains unlikely.

My conclusion is that food banks are as much a triumph of community compassion as they are a monument to economic policy failure. Food banks are here to stay.

Over the past decade, I’ve been watching an array of technological trends develop in parallel. Individually. Each seems reasonable in isolation, whether it be cloud storage, subscription software or biometric authentication, AI assistants, data centres, digital ID. Together, they point toward a future that is considerably more consequential than any single trend suggests.

This essay explores a scenario of where these trends might take us in fifteen to twenty years if they continue in their current direction. I am not predicting this future, nor am I alleging any conspiracy. I am simply observing the direction of publicly documented trends. The scenario that emerges has three main features: the end of personal computing sovereignty, the merger of commercial and state surveillance infrastructure, and a two-tier society divided between those inside the approved digital ecosystem and those outside it.

The essay also examines the counter-forces that could slow or interrupt this scenario, including open-source AI, regulatory pushback, and growing public resistance. It is written for anyone who has noticed one or two of these trends and wondered whether they connect to something larger.

A few months ago, Facebook suspended my account and offered to restore it on one condition: a 3D scan of my face. I refused. But the experience got me noticing what else is happening around digital surveillance and control, and I found a pattern that had accelerated rapidly over the past six months, which most people haven’t had reason to notice yet.

This essay documents that pattern. It looks into age verification, digital ID, facial recognition, VPN restrictions, encrypted data backdoors, Palantir, and AI as the accelerant underneath all of it. I also explore why governments are building this infrastructure, why I think the child protection justification is genuine but insufficient, and what kinds of digital control I’d actually support. I end with what I’ve been doing about it personally, which turns out to look a lot like computing in the 1990s.

It is written for anyone who has noticed one or two of these pieces and wondered whether they connect to something larger.

I spent 30 years building a consulting career around a brain I didn’t fully understand. Through trial and error, I made intuitive career choices and developed a set of compensatory systems without knowing why I needed them.

This essay is my attempt to make sense of it all. I try to describe, in plain language, ten distinctive ways my brain works and how I’ve adapted my environment and methods to accommodate them. I write about minimalism, movement, trance states, pattern recognition, information obsession, and the tendency to question every assumption I encounter. I also write honestly about the costs: the career trade-offs, the financial consequences, the persistent feeling of being on the outside looking in.

I have also written it for people struggling to make sense of their unusual thinking and working preferences, and for people close to them. Someone remarked it would make a good teaching case study for therapists, and I’m happy for it to be used that way, without charge.

The UK voted to leave the European Union in 2016. Ten years later, the Labour government is debating whether to rejoin, citing Brexit as a net economic loss. But from my perspective, Brexit never really happened. The UK left its biggest marketplace and made it harder to travel to Europe. The experiment was never properly conducted, which makes it impossible to evaluate properly.

I examine six areas where Brexit should have delivered economic benefit: trade relationships, people and skills, capital and investment, industrial capacity, business environment, and resilience and self-sufficiency. The first two produced immediate consequences, most of them damaging. The remaining four represent a failure to use the freedoms Brexit theoretically recovered.

My conclusion is that Brexit was one of the most spectacular planning and implementation failures in modern British political history. Britain never found out whether Brexit could work, because it never tried to make it work.

I wrote this essay because I kept encountering two increasingly entrenched and opposing views about rich people, and I found both of them inadequate. One treats wealth as inherently suspect, the other treats markets as a cure-all. Neither asks the more useful question: what kinds of rich people does a country actually want?

This essay sets out a framework for answering that question. I argue that rich people are neither inherently good nor bad, and that the debate about wealth is badly distorted by a fixed-pie view of money that does not reflect how modern economies actually work. I draw upon UK and South African tax statistics to demonstrate just how concentrated the tax base is and how reliant public spending is on rich people paying tax.

From this, I propose a set of principles for the kind of wealthy person a country should actively try to attract and retain, covering how they earn, spend, invest and hold assets.

Alongside the Loch Ness Monster, the disappearance of several great industries is one of Scotland’s most intriguing mysteries. This mystery has puzzled me since I moved to Scotland in 2021. I did not expect this long-form essay to emerge from my investigations, nor did I expect it to reach around 25,000 words. Neither did I expect that the factors behind Scotland’s industrial decline over the past two centuries are still in play today, still undermining any attempts to revitalise industry.

Scotland was an industrial giant during the Industrial Revolution and the early 20th century, but now manufacturing contributes only one-tenth of Scotland’s economic output. The Scottish economy is now built on whisky, hospitality, tourism and other services. Traditional industrial activities seem viewed with suspicion.

Yet everywhere I visit – towns, villages, heritage centres, museums – I find the same thing: the memory of great industries and the nostalgia of people whose parents and grandparents worked in them. The question that kept nagging at me was why Scotland had built something so remarkable and then let it go. This makes no sense from an African perspective, where governments are desperately striving to achieve what Scotland had.

I wrote this essay the week after the Defence Secretary revealed that the Royal Navy had spent over a month tracking three Russian submarines in the North Atlantic, specifically designed to survey undersea infrastructure in peacetime and sabotage it in conflict. This news finally pushed me to write something I had been contemplating since the Nord Stream pipelines were blown up in 2022.

The UK depends on approximately 62 fibre-optic cables, six gas pipelines and ten electricity interconnectors running along the seabed to connect it with the rest of the world. More than 95% of our internet traffic, three-quarters of our gas, and a significant share of our electricity all arrive this way. This essay maps that infrastructure, examines a series of real incidents where cables and pipelines have been damaged or threatened, considers how drone warfare is changing the threat picture, and asks what the UK government is doing in response.

My biggest concern, having done the research, is not the threat itself but the gap between the scale of the risk and the seriousness of the response. The UK owns no cable repair ships. It has one dedicated ocean surveillance vessel. Churchill worried about U-boats. The modern equivalent is already here, and we are not yet taking it seriously enough.

I wrote this essay because I kept hearing the same conversation everywhere I went. Charities complaining about local government. Local government complaining about the Scottish Government. The Scottish Government complaining about Westminster. Everyone arguing about their share of the pie, and nobody asking how to make the pie bigger. I wrote the outline one evening at my gym in Paisley, on my phone between exercises, because I couldn’t get the subject out of my head.

This essay is my attempt to explain where government money actually comes from and how the UK might get more of it. I work through the four sources of government income, trace how money cascades through the different tiers from Westminster down to local authorities, and then set out six strategies for growing the overall supply. I also examine the risks that could significantly reduce the money available, from cyberattacks and energy shocks to demographic decline and a loss of investor confidence in UK government bonds.

This is not an essay about balancing the budget. That conversation is already happening elsewhere. This is about the less discussed question: where does the money come from, and what does it take to grow it? My perspective is shaped by 25 years of economic development consulting across the UK and Africa, and by the lived experience of emigrating from a country where these are all very real problems.