The Productive Pessimist

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Rights, Bins, and NEETS - How Are These Things Connected?

Image shows the UK Houses of Parliament shot across the river Thames . The EHRC guidance on several groups' rights - not just the "headline" of trans peoples' rights, and the entitlement to violence and abuse it has given people who aren't (yet) having their rights "discussed" at government level. . "Simpler Recycling", and the "You're getting more bins! We will leave you with stinking, rotting refuse, and fine you if you make one single mistake about what goes where, or some passerby dumps a crisp packet in your cardboard bin! No, we don't care how little space you have to actually house all these bins!" . Constant media frothing about "young people who are unemployed and aren't even in any kind of training scheme!" and "how much it's costing the country!" These things seem very different and distinct from one another - just as many of the problems we face in business, or in our individual ...

How This Happened, and What Happens Next

(Image shows a white woman's hand reaching over a paper notebook to a laptop, holding a pen.) This piece will be discussing the UK Local Authority Elections which took place on May 7th 2026; in that sense, it is "political." However, political positions and political judgements will not form part of this post. In the course of my work identifying the overall problem (it usually only is one problem, just with many presentations) facing organisations, teams, and individuals, and working through the worst-case-scenarios to effective solutions, I've worked directly with serving Conservative councillors whose views very much aligned with the most right-wing positions in that party, and active members of Extinction Rebellion; my personal politics are irrelevant, the politics of the people I'm working with are irrelevant; there's a problem. My job is to solve it. Sometimes, political attitudes add to the problem, but they have never actually been the proble...

Mental Health Issues Don't Come With a Blank Cheque

Split image on a blue background. Left side shows a white woman with long red hair, wearing a pinstripe suit, sitting at a desk with her head in her hands. Right side shows a man slumped forward with his head in his hands, setting across a table from an older woman. Tony Blair's centre-left think tank wants people with conditions like ADHD, depression, and anxiety to be actively prevented from claiming welfare assistance for unemployment. These conditions, the think-tank believes, are "not work-limiting." As someone with lived experience of severe depression with suicidal ideation, generalised anxiety disorder and social anxiety, who has never claimed any of these conditions mean I "can't work", and who generally takes the view that you "may as well go to work depressed and anxious - at least you get paid for it", I'd like to agree. I've been into work the morning after a failed suicide attempt. I've had a full on psychotic episode...

A Paycheque Isn't Compensation

Image shows a white male in a black hoodie, who looks unhappy A recent article found that 80% of British workers report experiencing violence or abuse in the workplace. Eighty. Percent. Eight out of ten people are made to feel some level of non-task-related concern for their personal safety when they think about showing up for work. I wonder if that might have any connection with the "endemic state" of "people claiming they're too mentally unwell to work" that the UK government keeps throwing shade about? Might the "failure to cope with normal human experience" that snide, comfortably-financed, well-protected MPs snarl about and threaten to reduce people to absolute poverty for "not just getting over" actually be a much more understandable cognitive block around putting oneself in a situation where you are at risk when you did not expect that kind of risk? Employers nope out on dealing with workplace aggression, whether from colleagues or...

On Pensions, Productivity, and Fairness

Image shows an elder man in a turquoise shirt sitting at a wooden table, working on a laptop The UK Parliament - not simply the current party of government, but the majority of the House of Commons - are, according to an unnamed whistleblower, and the I Paper of Thursday 16th April 2026, all in agreement that the UK State pension triple lock - the requirement that UK pensioners with at least 35 years' National Insurance contributions benefit from increases in the amount of pension they receive as a taxpayer-funded benefit rises each year by whichever is highest; inflation, average earnings, or 2.5% - needs to be reformed, but are equally all afraid to come out and talk about even the concept of reform, much less how it could look in practice. UK State pension provision currently accounts for 55% of the UK welfare bill, at £146.1billion per year. This is nearly double the £77billion pounds annually spent on supporting disabled people through St...