Former senior politician, Steve Baker, writes for PopCon about his new project - FFF - a non-partisan project in public policy, ideas and strategy. 

This Labour Government is terrible. Worse than we could have imagined. Britain needs to radically alter its path. It is time to fight for a free future - our new movement will do just that.

Last week, the circus came back to town - Parliament returned, and I have no doubt that the upcoming Autumn Budget will be as disastrous for the economy as the Chancellor's previous one. As I said the morning after the GE, the Chancellor was always going to have to make unavoidable spending cuts, but these Labour MPs were never going to allow them, having told their voters “austerity" was a choice.

The political establishment continues to live in denial while Britain hurtles towards fiscal collapse.

The numbers are stark and undeniable. The OBR's September 2024 Fiscal Risks and Sustainability Report confirms what honest observers have long known: government spending continues to soar well above revenues, placing unsustainable pressure on current and future generations. Even more damning, the implications of the latest Government Actuary's Department report is that the UK will effectively default on its welfare state commitments, including pensions, within the next 20 years. This isn't some distant theoretical problem; it's a looming catastrophe that will devastate millions of hardworking families.

Yet where is the urgency from our political class? Labour MPs refuse to counteract spending cuts and want higher spending that they simply cannot fund. The Chancellor raised taxes to record levels and will do so again in only a few months.

Can anyone really say that the problems of the past decade have been that taxes have been too low and that the state has been too small? The Conservatives and Reform have made some small, minor steps towards recognising these problems - on Net Zero, on taxation, they have finally started to say some of the right things. Yet, they are still making promises that simply cannot be kept. Kemi has claimed that she wants to be Britain's Javier Milei, and yet the Conservatives have not confronted the scale of spending cuts required - or their role in creating our current economic mess. Reform has proposed mass tax cuts, and yet they want to continue to balloon our welfare bill with policies such as scrapping the two-child benefit cap.

This is why I have launched Fighting for a Free Future (FFF). We are living in The Truman Show run by Whitehall and the whole political class is complicit.  This isn't mere rhetoric. It's an accurate assessment of a system that creates housing targets it cannot meet, promises pensions it cannot pay, and raises taxes on working people while claiming to be on their side.

FFF will not get bogged down in day-to-day politics but instead fight in the battle of ideas, work to shift the terrain of debate, and set the stage for Britain’s Javier Milei to emerge at the next General Election. But who can it be?

Fighting for a Free Future is a bold cross-institutional movement for liberty, low taxes, free enterprise and smaller government. Groups like PopCon are doing excellent work in this area too. We will complement them, amplify their voice, and use the strategies and tactics that I deployed in Parliament, on Brexit and Net Zero for example, to shift the Overton Window and ensure that politicians can no longer live in this fantasy they present to us.

The Fighting for a Free Future project includes:

• The Fighting for a Free Future Community, which brings together leading free market and freedom-oriented institutions and a curated community of politically influential figures to amplify one another’s voices in the cause of fighting for a free future. It is supported by ten of the UK’s leading free market think tanks and institutions, and political influencers who have a track record of advocating for free markets and freedom.
• Voices for a Free Future, a digital publication which lifts the veil on how Westminster operates so we can understand why we are in such a serious economic mess and illustrates how to defeat the obstacles to lasting free market policy reform.
• The Fighting for a Free Future Educational Initiatives, which equip the next generation of pro-freedom leaders with the knowledge and confidence to champion the free market in their careers.
• The Insurgency with Steve Baker, a new political podcast that will interview the leading politicians, journalists, and intellectuals to dissect how things have gone so wrong in Britain and the radical and serious change that is necessary to fix it.

Britain stands at a crossroads. We can continue down the path of managed decline, pretending the welfare state is affordable and public services can improve through higher spending. Or we can embrace the radical honesty that Argentina found under Milei, acknowledging that the current system has failed and building something better in its place.

The question isn't whether change will come: the mathematics of government debt ensure it will. The question is whether that change will be imposed by crisis or chosen through democratic politics.

The time for half-measures and political games is over. It is time to start fighting for a free future. To find out more, visit our website and to keep up to date with all of our work, please subscribe to Voices for a Free Future. 

Let’s fight for a free future, together.

Rt Hon Steve Baker FRSA