Some establishments didn’t answer the door. Other attempts ended in confrontations with confused Somali women who appeared to have practically no English skills, bewildered by the young man and his old friend and partner in journalism, Dave, who’d just come by asking to see some kids.

In response, the Right-wing echo chamber went wild. “Prosecute @GovTimWalz,” tweeted Elon Musk. JD Vance exclaimed that Shirley had done more valuable journalism than the winners of the 2024 Pulitzer Prize. Before long, the Trump administration froze billions in funds for childcare and assistance to the poor going to Minnesota, and four other blue states for good measure. Rep. Eli Crane (R-Ariz.) has even introduced a resolution to award Shirley a Congressional Gold Medal.

Yet the real lesson of this story is how poorly suited the American Right is to engaging in journalism — and, indeed, the movement’s impoverished understanding of what journalism is all about.

Start by stipulating that there has been fraud involving Somalis in Minnesota. In 2022, the Biden administration charged 47 defendants in a $250 million scheme to exploit a child-nutrition program. This summer, the acting US Attorney for Minnesota said in an interview that his office had prosecuted cases amounting to $500 million in fraud over the past few years, and that in the case of the federal Housing Stabilization Services program, the “vast majority” of the money being distributed is fraudulent.

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It appears that most of this is coming from within the Somali community, and The New York Times in November reported on how Democratic politicians in that state were shy about shining a light on criminal activity in a way that could demonize a minority group or alienate a sizable new voting bloc.

None of this, however, means that Nick Shirley was engaging in real journalism. What he did was the equivalent of a reporter covering the mafia randomly showing up at Italian-owned butcher shops and restaurants with a prefabricated narrative that criminal activity must be going on. Almost immediately, Shirley’s narrative began to fall apart. The Minnesota Department of Children, Youth, and Families last week visited the daycares targeted by Shirley and determined that they were “operating as expected.” Children were, in fact, present at all of the sites, except for one that had yet to open for the day. Apparently, just showing up at a daycare and asking “Can I see the children?” does not get you access to them.

Reporters from the Minnesota Star Tribune visited the 10 facilities in Shirley’s video, and found children in four of them. The other six were either closed or did not open their doors, which would be understandable, given what they had recently been through. At one facility, the paper reported, “the daycare’s phones now ring nonstop from early in the morning to late at night, with people pretending to want to place their children there or threatening harm.”

The Star Tribune reported that some of the facilities had been cited for large numbers of violations in recent years. And the state Department of Children, Youth, and Families is pursuing ongoing investigations of four of the 10 daycares in the video. One of them, Quality Learning Center, closed down after Shirley’s visit. But there is little in Shirley’s video that, without more, qualifies as evidence of wrongdoing.

From the video itself, Shirley appears to not have much understanding of how health-care and government licensing work. At one point, while wandering through a facility of various medical providers, Shirley wonders, “Why would you have the same company essentially inside of the same building?” The kid has apparently never heard of a medical plaza. While visiting an office that appears to have patients in a waiting room, he asks a bewildered receptionist what their “health-care rates” are — a question that no patient in the American health system ever asks a provider. At facilities like the ones in the video, payment is often provided through government health programs, and depends upon the exact services that are authorized. This isn’t like asking for a menu in a restaurant.

Shirley finds a facility that is licensed to care for 102 children, and expects to see exactly that number of kids, not understanding that this is the maximum number they are authorized to serve. When the Star Tribune went to the same place, the paper found around 50 children inside. They simply hadn’t been visible from the door. At another facility, Dave (Shirley’s partner) taunts people standing outside that they might need an Amber Alert for the exact number of kids that they are licensed to care for.

Shirley has inspired similarly ignorant imitators on social media. One December X post, from the sensationalist @WallStreetApes account, declares that regular homes in Minnesota being registered as assisted living facilities is indicative of fraud (it has garnered more than 900,000 views as of this writing). Yet as the journalist Christina Buttons points out, the trend in US policy has been towards encouraging home- and community-based care over large institutions, meaning that these homes could well be assisted-living facilities.

Some have followed Shirley in showing up to random Somali businesses and haranguing the people inside. One video with 16 million views as of this writing involves a YouTuber informing her audience that “90% of small businesses fail, yet the Samara Adult Day Care still has their lights on without having one customer seemingly.” The woman who answers the door doesn’t speak English very well, but communicates that she is waiting for a driver to bring the people they take care of. The lack of assimilation among Somalis clearly does hinder communication, but that is not the point the influencer is going for. Without any evidence that anything is untoward is happening, the woman is smeared as a fraudster based on her ethnicity and line of business.

The episode is another showcase of why the nation needs real institutions, and highlights the failure of conservatives to build or maintain ones Americans can trust. Elon Musk encourages “citizen journalism,” giving the impression that anyone can show up with a camera — without any background knowledge, editorial guardrails, writing ability, or fact-checking — and provide useful information on current events.

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The amateurism is corrosive to Americans’ capacity to reform real problems. Shirley’s partner, Dave, claims at one point that Tim Walz took Minnesota from having an $18 billion surplus to a $6 billion deficit, a swing of $24 billion, of which he attributes 90% to fraud. In fact, Minnesota still has a surplus for the current fiscal year. There is projected to be a deficit of about $6 billion by 2028-2029, but no evidence is provided in Shirley’s video for the claim that fraud will be a substantial reason why.

The only attempt to ground his so-called journalism in empirical data is Shirley’s running tally of supposed fraud uncovered, based on which businesses he considers illegitimate. That determination, in turn, rests on little more than his unsuccessful attempts to locate children or wrangle “health-care rates” out of confused receptionists.

In a sense, Shirley starts with a narrative and then grabs on to whatever evidence he can find in order to tell the story, including short videos and official government numbers provided without the necessary context to understand what is going on. Do mainstream-media institutions sometimes do the same thing? Undoubtedly. But the Shirley version is so much more grotesquely low-quality — and subject to none of the editorial scrutiny and pushback that is routine for institutions like the Times even on their worst days.

To be clear, conservatives have uncovered a real problem in the form of government fraud. There are points to be made about topics such as immigration from clannish, hard-to-assimilate backgrounds, and Democrats letting fraud run rampant to avoid accusations of racism and to curry favor with an ethnic voting bloc. Yet a Times reader could have learned about Somali fraud in Minnesota in late November, minus the encouragement to harass random people who may not have had nothing to do with criminal activity.

Shirley is far from the worst influencer in the new Right-wing media ecosystem. That’s not saying much, however, in a community in which it is completely normal to sit in a podcast studio and fabricate “facts.” What the young YouTuber reveals, however, is in some ways even darker. It is that, even when the Right has a point about a news story, its partisans, and even its leaders, are either unwilling or unable to either demand or adhere to basic journalistic or intellectual norms. Moreover, there appears to be a growing appetite for opportunities to harass minority communities in real life over the sins committed by individuals who share the same background. That is a greater threat to the future of the country than welfare fraud.  

The oligarch was on the run from British justice after being accused of one of the biggest frauds in history. He had fled Kazakhstan in 2009 after being accused of embezzling £3.2 billion from the BTA bank. The loot was hidden in an estimated 1,000 offshore companies and bank accounts of which he was a beneficiary. He arrived in London and spent the money on PR consultants, lawyers, lobbyists, and properties. He bought a nine-bedroom, £17-million mansion on Bishops Avenue, Hampstead, which included a Turkish bath with room for 12, as well as an apartment in Albert Court, Kensington, and a 100-acre estate on the edge of Windsor Great Park.

Eventually the law enforcement authorities caught up with him. He was convicted in 2012 in Britain’s High Court of lying under oath about his assets, forging documents and in contempt of court. “It is difficult to imagine a party to commercial litigation who has acted with more cynicism, opportunism and deviousness towards court orders than Mr Ablyazov,” declared Lord Justice Kay. His contempt offenses were “so serious that nothing less than a prison sentence is appropriate”, said Mr Justice Teare.

An arrest warrant was issued in Britain against Ablyazov, who was sentenced to 22 months in jail. But for the past 13 years he has evaded British justice and been hiding in plain sight in France, where he moves between rented chateaux in Aix-en-Provence and seafront villas in Nice. And yet the UK has refused to extradite him.

The case against Ablyazov remains the biggest civil fraud case in British legal history. It is a cautionary tale about how the UK remains a haven for foreign tycoons, dictators and oligarchs who exploit our compliant judiciary and complacent police and crown prosecution service. While the UK has sanctioned 1,807 individuals in response to Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine, foreign kleptocrats remain unscathed and hide in London knowing the authorities are a soft touch. The UK is their destination of choice to stash their cash and manage their assets. Secret files leaked from the US Treasury Financial Crimes Enforcement Network named more UK companies facilitating the laundering of dirty money than any other country in the world.

In exile in France, Ablyazov portrays himself as a dissident unfairly pursued by the authoritarian Kazakh regime. But behind his carefully crafted mask lies a calculating oligarch who has exploited the supine French judiciary and the gullibility of the European Parliament.

In 2013, French police arrested Ablyazov on the French Riviera, after he was traced there by private detectives working for the company Diligence. The arrest started a 10-year campaign to extradite the oligarch so he would face justice.

Eventually, in October 2020, Ablyazov was charged in Paris with money laundering and embezzling $7.5 billion. Three years later, the court ordered him to leave France within one month. However, Ablyazov’s lawyers appealed every court ruling and the oligarch was allowed to remain in France.

Only one French politician, Senator Nathalie Goulet, spoke up. In April 2024, she asked for the treaty for mutual legal assistance on criminal cases between France and Kazakhstan to be ratified. This would mean extradition requests like Ablyazov’s case would be implemented. But nothing occurred and, earlier this year, the Paris Court of Appeal annulled the embezzlement charges against Ablyazov and ruled that French courts lacked jurisdiction to enforce extradition. It was a legal victory for the oligarch. This ruling turned on a single legal point: the proceedings against Ablyazov were deemed driven by a political motive, disguised as criminal charges.

Today, Ablyazov is no longer under judicial supervision. The money-laundering charges have been dropped and he remains at liberty. Senator Goulet is outraged. “How can a convicted fraudster stripped of his refugee status still reside on French soil?” she declared.

Why has France protected the oligarch for so long? And why has the UK not sought his extradition? One reason is his use of the European Parliament to launder his reputation; another is the lack of cooperation between the UK and European law enforcement agencies.

Ablyazov has assiduously courted European politicians to promote his defense that the fraud allegations are politically motivated because he was an opponent of the Kazakhstan regime. One of his most active supporters was the MEP Antonio Panzeri, who was recently jailed for corruption, and who worked closely with the Brussels-based Open Dialogue Foundation (ODF), an NGO which campaigns against human rights abuses. The MEP hosted events and acted as a de facto lobbyist for Ablyazov. Despite the overwhelming evidence against Ablyazov, the NGO remains a staunch supporter of the oligarch. “ODF has included Ablyazov within our advocacy of defending thousands of victims of political persecution in Kazakhstan,” a spokesperson told UnHerd.

Ablyazov claims the fraud allegations are “the culmination of the campaign by former President Nazarbayev and his allies to wrest ownership and control of BTA bank” from himself. “In Kazakhstan the assets of wealthy individuals such as myself are subject to the threat of unlawful seizure by the authorities,” he said in a witness statement. “This leads to an almost universal practice among high-net-worth Kazakhs of holding our assets through nominees, both corporate and individual.” But BTA bank say they obtained evidence that revealed how billions of pounds were transferred to thousands of offshore companies of which Ablyazov was the beneficiary.

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Ablyazov’s lawyers say he fled London because of “a death threat” and was “constantly in fear of his life” due to the presence of Kazakh intelligence agents. These claims are uncannily similar to the protests of the late Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky, who also fled to London after being accused of fraud. Interestingly, UnHerd can reveal, Ablyazov and Berezovsky met secretly in London between 2009 and 2012.

There is no doubt Ablyazov has been under surveillance by private investigators hired by the Kazakh government. When he lived on Bishops Avenue, operatives were positioned at both ends of the street. “We followed him from his house to his office in the City and at night to casinos,” said one driver. In response the oligarch hired his own counter-surveillance team. “I saw the spies around me and so I hired a group to counter what the spies were doing,” he said.

In 2013, investigators were authorized by the Kazakh authorities to raid a house in Rome inhabited by Ablyazov and his family. The oligarch was in France but his wife and six-year-old daughter were escorted by Kazakh diplomats onto a private plane and flown to Kazakhstan. The Italian authorities were outraged. A criminal case for kidnapping was filed and the Kazakhs were forced to fly the pair back to Italy where they were granted asylum.

Today, political factors continue to influence the courts in France. A source close to BTA Bank told UnHerd that Russia had successfully applied for Ablyazov to be extradited to Moscow because he had hidden assets at Vitino port near Murmansk and a property near Moscow station. The French judges agreed and ratified the application. But then French politicians intervened and stopped the extradition.

The UK remains just as complacent. Despite Ablyazov’s conviction for contempt of court, the prosecuting authorities have been remarkably negligent. The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) reviewed the evidence and refused to act. In 2019, after the second arrest warrant was issued, the UK National Crime Agency had access to all the files but declined to investigate because of “insufficient resources”.

The following year lawyers from Hogan Lovells, representing BTA Bank, held several private meetings with CPS officials. They lobbied for the convicted fraudster to be extradited. But the CPS responded the oligarch was protected by a legal loophole: in France it is not a criminal offense to lie to the courts and so he could not be extradited back to London. The CPS declined to comment on why the UK has not extradited Ablyazov. “Our policy is we neither confirm or deny proceedings relating to extradition,” said one spokesperson.

Today, Ablyazov’s name is on a watch list at airports and ports in the UK. But without political and diplomatic will in the UK, it is unlikely that one of the biggest fraudsters of all time will ever be extradited back to London and brought to justice.

Our higher education system is facing an unprecedented level of fraud, after decades of policy blunders and lax oversight. Organized crime networks are exploiting funding loopholes, using sham students to extract hundreds of millions of dollars in public funds. Thousands of these “students”, many with no intention of ever studying or repaying, have enrolled in degree courses purely to cash in on easily accessible loans, turning a scheme meant to expand educational opportunities into a sordid free-for-all. The emerging picture is one of brazen criminality, with the Student Loans Company (SLC) uncovering at least six questionable college partnerships that facilitate these loans. Over the last academic year alone, the SLC flagged over 3,500 suspicious applications that exhibit clear signs of fraud. That’s equivalent to around $60 million — yet after decades of limited oversight is clearly the tip of the iceberg.

The mechanics of the fraud are shockingly simple. Applicants enroll online in university courses, often never setting foot in a classroom, but still triggering tuition and maintenance loan payments. Because finance applications and course registrations are largely taken on trust, with virtually no in-person verification, fraudsters can game the system remotely. Much of the scam centers around so-called franchised colleges: private institutions that offer degrees on behalf of accredited universities. These smaller colleges have become a weak link in the chain. Showing a willingness to admit candidates with minimal vetting and lower entry requirements, they make it easy for opportunists to pose as students.

During enrollment, proper registration can be bypassed via forged credentials and identities. Organized crime groups submit bulk applications using fake documents or duplicated addresses to meet eligibility checks. Many franchised colleges are also willing to admit individuals who speak little to no English, accepting dubious evidence of English proficiency, including screenshots of Duolingo tests. At one Manchester college, students barely had enough English to understand the onboarding process. Once registered, a large number of the fraudulent students then immediately quit their courses after receiving the first installment of the maintenance loan, around $4,000, before re-enrolling in a new course the following year.

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In fact, these schemes have proven so lucrative that they have led to certain international communities embracing the opportunities en masse, repatriating ill-gotten gains back to their home countries. Roughly 15% of all Romanian nationals in Britain received a student loan in 2023. The number of applicants from the country surged by over 1,500% over the eight years prior. Romanian students now make up over half of all applicants at several franchised college providers. This has been driven, in large part, by a wave of Romanian-language TikTok and Facebook videos that propagandize student loans as free money to be sent back home. These posts could easily be mistaken for those of traditional influencers, with videos showcasing tropical destinations, designer clothes, and a youthful recruiter keen to help you get rich quick.

Even worse, many of these influencers are acting as recruitment agents for franchised colleges, profiting directly from each student they refer. These agents actively coach applicants on how to game the system, often using social media to advertise, recruiting students with poor English skills and explaining that they can get paid just to enroll. These agents also engage in commission sharing, with some offering existing students cash lump sums for each friend they introduce to the course: all with no limit on referrals. This web of kickbacks and profit-sharing creates an incentive pyramid, where all parties make money by pushing more students through the door, leaving the British taxpayer footing the bill for all those unpaid loans.

At the heart of this scandal is a structural weakness caused by the rise of franchise partnerships in higher education, with universities increasingly farming out courses to affiliated colleges. This system was designed to widen access and save costs by using off-site providers. Instead, it’s led to widespread abuse with near-zero oversight. Roughly two thirds of franchised providers aren’t registered with the official regulator of the higher education sector, resulting in hundreds of colleges teaching degree courses with no scrutiny from the Department of Education. As a result, quality controls have been scant. Forget the language issue: there is little accountability around whether students even attend classes, leading to some franchised campuses having course completion rates of just 60%.

All the while, there is a vested interest in keeping this system in place, as the number of students enrolled at franchised providers has almost tripled over the last four years. By 2022, these educational arrangements accounted for just 5% of all student loan borrowers, yet franchised courses made up over half of all detected student loan fraud by value. One franchised college received $234 million in revenue in 2024, with profits increasing 1,200% in just three years. This is despite universities and partner colleges splitting the tuition fees of newly enrolled students, with the lead former typically taking 30% for essentially brokering the deal. For cash-strapped bursars, this provides an uncapped source of secondary income without the need for further infrastructure, teaching staff, or course provisions. For those universities willing to turn a blind eye, and delegate all responsibilities to a college partner, this arrangement can be highly lucrative.

It all speaks to a system utterly unable to keep pace with changing realities. The UK’s student finance model has long relied on an assumption of trust, while funding shifted costs from the state to students and fees continued to rise. Education providers suddenly stood to receive much more per student — yet if loan books swelled, controls have stayed lax. As far back as 2018, a report warned that some private colleges had found a loophole within the funding system. It was hoped that the newly formed Office for Students (OFS) would address the problem. In the years since, however, the regulator has been more focused on political battles in academia than on financial policing, meaning little was done to systematically fortify the loan system against this new type of fraud.

At the same time, government policies inadvertently widened the problem. After Brexit, EU nationals already living in Britain by 2020 retained the right to UK student finance as home students. Despite this being intended as a fair provision for those settled in the country, it also meant that tens of thousands of people from across Europe suddenly qualified for British loans with minimal restrictions. After the Government announced that tuition fees would be frozen at $9,250, meanwhile, universities’ per-student income stagnated, even as operating costs continued to soar. To combat this, institutions sought creative ways to boost enrollment and revenues, driving mass adoption of the very franchise system that’s now proving so vulnerable to abuse.

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To be fair, the situation isn’t totally hopeless, with policymakers are now scrambling to bolster the system. In practice, that means new legislation and tougher enforcement measures on organized fraud. In addition to a dedicated counter-fraud team from the Public Sector Fraud Authority, the Government has announced that any college teaching 300 or more students on franchised courses must register with the regulator or lose access to student finance. There are also proposals to give regulators the power to impose instant sanctions on dubious providers; improve verification of student eligibility; and recover funds from universities that ignore fraud. The Department for Education may also link loan disbursements more closely to attendance and academic progress, while strengthening data sharing between agencies to identify fraudulent students.

Yet beyond these short-term fixes, the scandal has done near-irreparable damage to public trust in British higher education. That’s especially problematic given education is one of Britain’s biggest invisible exports. Almost $22 billion comes from fees and spending by legitimate international students a year. These are students who are willing to pay premium fees far in excess of domestic students: essentially due to an academic reputation built over hundreds of years.

It is, therefore, sadly ironic that widespread criminality risks diminishing the appeal of our great academic institutions. This could justifiably fuel a perception that British credentials aren’t what they used to be, as the perceived value of a university education diminishes with every sham course and low-quality provider. If British degrees can be abused on this scale, meanwhile, it raises uncomfortable questions about how much the education sector has been operating on an honor system too easily dishonored. With over half of franchised providers still unregistered, and therefore free from regulatory oversight, this could easily fuel narratives around a system in chaos.

Either way, the whole scandal once again strikes at the heart of short-sighted policymaking that aims to produce flattering headlines and optimistic metrics — without a willingness to address difficult structural challenges. Widening access to higher education is important, and cutting costs can be helpful. But without the necessary, and far less glamorous, development of a robust regulatory environment for these initiatives to sit in, malignant forces will soon exploit political generosity. This crisis demands a change in mindset from policymakers, and restoring credibility will require more than just one-off raids and attention-grabbing investigations.

Nor, of course, are the lessons here just for vice-chancellors. Time and again we’ve seen well-meaning schemes — from Motability to Covid relief — wrecked by organized fraud. Especially as our high-trust society fades away, it’ll become more important than ever for the Government to build out the actual institutions that prevent graft from occurring. Fail, and the state will continue to crumble far beyond the university gates.

A couple of weeks after the switch, a bill of around £1,000 arrived on her mat. She had only been living in her new home for a few days. For weeks, then months, Jan emailed and phoned. She spoke to customer service bots, payment teams, even engineers. She created accounts and new passwords. At one point a new customer account offered hope, before another £1,000 bill was autogenerated. The Bill remained; nothing could shift it.

The case is unresolved. One computer-literate family member has dedicated dozens of hours to The Bill, but still it looms. Nothing and no-one can win an argument with the automated system. Months of Jan’s life have been consumed by this; and her confidence in dealing with any kind of technology is now irreparably damaged.

Jan is a victim of “techno-admin”: it’s a pervasive phenomenon, whereby we customers are forced into infuriating, confusing, absurdly time-consuming and bleakly unrewarding tasks by a machine. You probably have a similar story. How many incorrect bills, unprocessed address changes, reminder notices printed in error? How many sleepless nights? It is the scourge of our age.

It’s all over the news, too. The energy company EDF recently issued artist Grayson Perry with a £39,000 monthly electricity bill, which to a machine seemed like a perfectly normal £38,700 increase on the previous one. Perry spent three tedious hours fixing it. And of course, there is the Post Office Horizon scandal: techno-admin at its cruellest. At the sharp end, postmasters were incorrectly told by Fujitsu’s accounting software that they were in arrears, and the Post Office subsequently hounded them, ruining hundreds of lives, careers, and reputations. At the softer end, thousands endured hours of stressful, fruitless phone calls and complaints. All because the people in charge found it easier to trust a machine than ask difficult questions of their own organisation.

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These are rarely the consumer’s fault. Companies make errors, which you end up paying for. When Hackney Council was the victim of a ransomware attack a couple of years back, the service disruption was well-documented. Less discussed is the amount of techno-admin imposed on the borough’s 250,000 residents as a result. The fact that legitimate organisations routinely make such enormous mistakes makes it a lot easier for criminals to operate. I know of one person whose number plate was ‘cloned’: someone is driving around with his registration on their car, and this poor chap has spent hours appealing fines because ‘the system’ can’t or won’t recognise that it is not actually his car.

And last week, I spoke to a fraud professional who told me his son-in-law’s identity was stolen by SMS fraudsters who pretended to be his phone provider. They re-registered his number, got into his mobile banking and tried to take out loans in his name. After two months of effort, he still hasn’t got his old mobile number back. It’s unfair to blame the victim: many banks insist on some text-based communications, although they aren’t as secure as people assume. It won’t be long before everyone is terrified of answering their phone, lest it be a sophisticated scam.

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Could the UK’s productivity problem, which has flatlined since 2010, be partly caused by the surge in techno-admin? Large firms use automation and digitisation to cut staff and reduce overheads, especially when it comes to customer service — but what they have actually done is outsource the admin work to us, the customer. We are the ones now form-filling, changing passwords and fixing mistakes. We are the ones paying to sit in a telephone queue for an hour. And don’t forget techno-admin has to be carried out during work hours, because lines close at 6pm.

Forcing us to do techno-admin doesn’t even save the companies much money. One business processes specialist I spoke to explained that the moment things are automated and digitised, complicated software is involved. Which means that whenever there is a problem, you need high-skilled and, therefore, well-paid staffers. Or you need to call on the software providers — the Fujitsus of this world — which just adds more layers and delays and expense. This is probably why the UK’s chief auditor recently claimed that the government could save £20 billion by — among other things — modernising its IT systems. In the NHS, outdated IT systems are thought to have contributed to multiple deaths.

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“Automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency”, claims Bill Gates, but “automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency.” In other words, automation mostly works when you can standardise inputs and outputs. But humans aren’t a Ford factory production line: we’re messy and things go wrong all the time.

In the coming years, more decisions and tasks will be outsourced to ever smarter AI: decisions relating to spending, sentencing, military tactics, housing allocation. But ever fewer people will understand how any of these systems actually work. Staff won’t dare to question them.

Picture the frictionless future of ubiquitous smart machines: you head downstairs in the morning to make a coffee when — oh! The smart coffee machine needs a software upgrade! Unfortunately, you’ve lost your account details, and cannot recall which of your 25 email addresses you signed up with in the first place. But no time to fix that now, because you are struggling to log into the kids’ remote homework platform. Apparently, your laptop needs a new app, which will only work if you download some other software first. In the meantime, the bank’s been in touch with an urgent fraud warning — at least, the voice on the line sounded like the bank, but who can really be sure these days — so now you need to change all your passwords.

It won’t be long before simply living will be a full-time job. And at that point, UK productivity will finally hit zero. Then, and only then, when the economy has collapsed into a black hole of rage and wasted time, might we rebel against the pointless, painful scourge of techno-admin.