Britain is now forecast to spend nearly £4,000 EVERY SECOND on debt interest.

The Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) has raised this year's bill by £14.5 billion to £124 billion.

That's £340 million a day to service debt we have already accumulated.

Around a third of UK government gilts are held overseas, so some of those interest payments leave Britain, while taxpayers are left servicing a debt that continues to grow.

By 2031/32, the annual interest bill is forecast to reach £160 billion.

How long can we keep borrowing to fund today's spending while passing the bill to future generations?

Source: OBR October 2026 Economic and Fiscal Outlook.

https://obr.uk/economic-and-fiscal-outlooks/

Bitcoin touches money, energy and freedom.

How much control over its future are we prepared to hand to governments, regulators and corporations?

Last week in Amsterdam I moderated three panels at Bitcoin for Corporations and Bitcoin Amsterdam on these ideas.

We discussed:

- post-MiCA clarity and what it means for innovation and adoption
- who controls the mining stack and how open source and home miners push back
- the energy double standard between Bitcoin mining and data centres

Grateful for the organisers, panellists and everyone who showed up.

I ❤️ Amsterdam.

@nprofile1q... @Erik Hersman @nprofile1q... @Bitcoin Magazine @Bitcoin Amsterdam

Bitcoin doesn't have a CEO, a board or anyone who can dictate its rules.

The FCA's proposed guidance leaves room for people who develop and maintain its infrastructure to be treated as financial intermediaries.

If building permissionless technology becomes a regulatory liability, what happens to Bitcoin's future in Britain?

This is why @Bitcoin Policy UK is calling for clarity.

Read the full submission on our website.

https://img1.wsimg.com/blobby/go/aea8e937-fd18-400f-afd9-c3513112c757/downloads/93baf163-b672-49d7-9cf7-77cf35f1f7ce/Consultation%20FCA%20Crypto%20Perimeter%20Guidance%2027O.pdf

Without freedom money we don’t have freedom.

I’m heading back to Amsterdam next week and I keep coming back to what @Edward Snowden said when I was there in 2023.

“We are all part of a bigger game and Bitcoin is one of the strongest levers in that. The systems that we are influencing, payments and finance, will shape what the world of tomorrow looks like.”

Bitcoin touches money, economics, energy, control, philosophy, security and freedom ... which is why it means so much to so many of us.

I’ll be moderating three sessions, details below.

@The Bitcoin Conference

“Pushing the world in the right direction.”

A powerful message from Javier El-Hage of the Human Rights Foundation at last night's event in London, where researchers and democracy activists came together to discuss authoritarianism, the fight for freedom and some encouraging signs of change.

Hosted by the Human Rights Foundation and Action for Democracy at the historic National Liberal Club, the evening marked the relaunch of the Authoritarian Collaboration Index, now drawing on HRF's Tyranny Tracker.

I had the privilege of speaking with Javier, HRF's Chief Legal and Policy Officer, about the rise of authoritarianism, the importance of protecting individual freedoms and the work his team is doing through the Tyranny Tracker.

The project examines 179 countries and territories, assessing electoral competition, freedom of dissent and institutional accountability to determine whether governments are democratic, hybrid authoritarian or fully authoritarian.

Its findings are sobering. According to HRF, around three quarters of the world's population lives under authoritarian rule.

Javier spoke about the importance of protecting individual freedoms and understanding how governments restrict them. Despite the scale of the challenges, he remains optimistic that progress is being made.

I also interviewed Domonkos Kovács of Action for Democracy, whose Authoritarian Collaboration Index uses AI-assisted research to track cooperation between authoritarian actors across borders.

Domonkos pointed out that although authoritarianism has been advancing globally, recent political developments offer reasons for optimism.

Hungary and just days ago, Serbia have both seen entrenched political leaders defeated at the ballot box.

Some of the most moving contributions came from people who have experienced repression firsthand.

A Hong Kong democracy activist, now living in exile in Britain, described the dramatic erosion of freedoms in her home city. Hong Kong's governing authority is now classified as fully authoritarian by the Tyranny Tracker.

Despite everything, her message was hopeful:

“Hong Kong is not a lost cause.”

Then there was Jesús Armas, the Venezuelan opposition activist and former political prisoner who spent more than a year in detention after standing up for democracy.

He spoke with remarkable optimism about Venezuela's future and praised the people who continue fighting for freedom.

“One day Venezuela will be free.”

It's always a privilege to interview people working on questions of freedom and human rights, particularly when those discussions bring you face to face with people who have paid such a personal price for defending them.

Understanding how authoritarianism takes hold, how technology can strengthen state control and how we protect our freedoms before they're lost has never felt more important.

Last night's discussions were a reminder that authoritarianism is not inevitable and neither is its permanence.

Thank you to @HRF and Action For Democracy for bringing everyone together and for the opportunity to hear these perspectives firsthand.

The government is building systems with enormous power over our lives, while making it increasingly difficult for ordinary people to understand or challenge them.

A new Guardian investigation raises serious concerns about the Home Office's use of AI across immigration enforcement, including facial recognition, phone analysis and asylum casework.

According to Open Rights Group, much of this is happening with little public scrutiny, with national security repeatedly cited to withhold information.

Britain was so concerned about the security of Huawei equipment that it ordered its removal from our 5G networks. All the technology our own government is deploying deserves the same scrutiny.

Our recent history gives us plenty of reasons to question government assurances.

In 2020, the Home Office withdrew an algorithm used to assess visa applications following a legal challenge alleging discrimination.

The Post Office Horizon scandal demonstrated the devastating consequences of trusting flawed computer evidence while dismissing the people who challenged it. Hundreds were wrongly prosecuted, with lives, reputations and livelihoods destroyed.

Britain already has extensive CCTV surveillance, expanding facial recognition, growing digital identity systems and documented cases of people losing access to banking services.

AI now gives governments the ability to analyse and connect vast amounts of information about individuals on a scale that would previously have been unimaginable.

Companies such as Palantir are already deeply involved in British public services, supplying technology to the NHS and Ministry of Defence.

Their growing role raises more concerns about how much control does the government retain when essential public systems depend on technology developed and maintained by private companies?

These technologies are being introduced for reasons that often sound perfectly reasonable, including national security, fraud prevention and improving public services.

The danger is what happens when more of our identities, movements, finances and personal information become accessible through increasingly connected systems.

I suspect many politicians truly believe they're making people's lives better. What concerns me is whether they fully understand the technology they're commissioning, the influence of the companies supplying it and the power they're potentially handing over.

A society in which people can be monitored, assessed and potentially excluded from essential services through systems they cannot understand or challenge is a frightening prospect.

Decisions made today could have consequences for individual freedom that future governments struggle to reverse.

If the government uses systems to assess people while limiting what the public can see about how they work, how are ordinary people supposed to challenge them when they get things wrong?

Read the full article here:

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2026/oct/27/digital-hostile-environment-ai-secretly-embedded-home-office-report