Blain’s Morning Porridge June 25^th, 2026 – The Rule of Law, Trust and Democracy: building blocks of the Economy

“Democracy doesn’t collapse when a ruler lies, it collapses when people stop caring that he lies.”

The success of Western Capitalist Economies is founded in the Rule of Law, Trust and competent Democratic leadership. Break confidence is these, and the economy becomes a free for all, with powerful bullies taking all they can while the weakest in society will wither. Is it a film script, or what’s happening now…?

LINK TO PODCAST

This Morning’s Porridge is a little late because I went for a swim again this morning. Delicious it was! The heat dome over Europe has been extraordinary – but hopefully it will break tonight. The swim gave me some time to think after Scotland’s dismal 3-Nil drubbing by Brazil in the World Cup last night. So, today, something a little different for the Porridge…

One of my guilty pleasures over the last few years has been The Boys – a Prime TV series. It’s curious mix of comedy, satire and visceral gore – lots of gore. It makes a Tarantino movie look like a BBC period-drama. Heads explode and bodies are ripped apart every couple of minutes in the most horrible yet surprising ways imaginable. It is sweary, it is improbable, and its utterly compulsive. It is very funny in an urgh sort of a way. The heroes are nearly as bad as the villains. There are lots of in-jokes and references which is great for nerds like me.

Its set in an America very like today, but one where Superheroes walk and live among us. They have a wide (and often hilarious) range of different super-powers but are driven by the same instincts and emotions as normal people – cruel, greedy, callous, cynical, capable of great kindness and great evil. Their powers corrupt them, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. The most powerful Supe is a narcissistic, cruel, mommy-fetishing, superman-analogue called Homelander, (yep, you can see where this is going) dressed in a Stars and Stripes costume with eagle epaulettes and a cape. He is a right-wing bully who can fly, his eyes shoot laser beams, he is enormously strong and impervious to everything, and he is arrogance squared. He desperately wants the people to love him but terrifies them instead.

Homelander leads a group of heroes, The Seven, who present themselves as heroic crime fighters, but they are creations of Vought, a vast media firm that created the Supes by injecting pregnant woman with a genetic enhancement serum. It monetises them through TV shows, films and merchandise – the Supes are its brand. Vought stages fake crime busts to boost the popularity of Homelander’s team and uses manipulation, fake news, and every dodgy corporate trick imaginable to push up the stock price.

Homelander is bored of the adulation and is border-line psychotic. He uses his unlimited powers to take over the firm, and then the country. Soon the Supes are locking up (or simply killing) anyone opposed to them. They create an imagined enemy of deranged anti-supes, Starlighters, seeking to overthrow America. Patriotism is weaponised against them. There are some magnificent parodies – like MAGA-proxy Firecracker. Homelander is de-facto President turning America into a fascist state, culminating in declaring himself God…  And it all ends “happily ever after”?

It’s satire of the best kind – an utterly outrageous premise but very close to the bone.

Yesterday I found myself watching a story about the Washington Reflecting Pool fiasco. I had to laugh. President Trump’s spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt was in full patriotic rant mode as she fumed about how the pool renovation had been deliberately sabotaged and vandalised by “pro-algae”, deranged-democrat, “Obama-supporting”, leftist terrorists… who eat babies for breakfast… or something like that. She sounded just like she worked for Homelander.

Citizens have been arrested for picking bits of the American Flag Blue pool liner out of the scummy water. One bloke has been accused of cutting a 300-yard tear in liner. They are being threatened with long jail-terms. The pool is now surrounded by armed guards and the US military.

As someone posted on Linked-in yesterday: More people have been arrested for touching the peeling paint at Reflecting Pool than the rapists revealed in the Epstein files.

You can threaten to murder politicians, hang the Vice President, and burn down the Capitol and receive a presidential pardon. Or rot in jail for picking some rubbish out the pool.

Karoline Leavitt fascinates me. She is clearly a very clever, smart and effective press secretary for the White House. How much is she paid to say what she does? Could you do it?

But big question for markets isn’t whether Trump tells lies. No Sh*t Sherlock. The bigger issue is: will you ever believe anything a government or White-House Spokesman tells us again? Or will you ever really trust a government appointee who declines to say who won the 2020 US election? Will you believe a Federal Reserve Chairman who effectively said the election results were a matter of debate is truly independent of the president?

That question is related to the issue of the corruption around the White House. Whether it’s the contract for the Reflecting Pool, insider trading or whatever… corruption is cumulative. If one person, does it, pretty soon everyone does.

Markets are largely about the now – what is happening today and tomorrow. They price the future of economies based on today’s news. But they are stable and confident because of the expectation they are backed up by the permanency of the Rule of Law and the system. Markets work on the basis of trust (or at least they did). When law, trust and the sanctity of election results are compromised because someone denies them, that becomes a problem.

Law, Trust and Democracy are the fundamental pillars that have made capitalist economies so successful. They have taken centuries to create. They will take a few years to dismantle.

The confidence that underlies markets is heading south. Politics has become more adversarial, more polarised and electorates angrier. There are lots of reasons why – workers feeling they’ve been left behind, entrepreneurs feeling they are not valued enough, people feeling threatened by change and by other people who are different. All these insecurities can by milked, and they are by populist politicians promising they have all the answers (while being corrupt to the very marrow), and by foreign actors looking to sow seeds of instability. The ultimate crime is to deny elections because the result doesn’t suit – and the only alternative becomes Autocracy.

Look at what’s just happened in the UK – the defenestration of Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer. He wasn’t a great politician or leader, but he wasn’t a particularly bad person or malicious either. Like anyone he made mistakes. His fault was trying too hard to be fair and considered rather than decisive and effective. But the reason he had to go was his crashing popularity – to the lowest level ever seen in Westminster.

Popularity is politicians’ weak spot. Elected politicians fear to lose their jobs. If their leader is unpopular – they are likely to do so. What the Starmer case has shown is that a leader’s popularity can be manipulated downwards through a directed blitzkrieg of media attacks on everything and anything they say or do. It’s negative marketing and it’s an art form. Listening to the vox pox media interviews with the great British Public in recent days, they were describing mild-mannered Keir Starmer in terms of a mad, baby-munching, deliberate destroyer of wealth and prosperity. Starmer was anything but – but that is how a motivated, and politically driven right-wing owned media managed to present him. That’s how modern politics works.

Starmer will not be the last politician hounded from office as a deliberate media choice. And that is the real issue – who controls the Media and would be motivated to do so?

On these crashing major/minor chords… Out of time and back to the day job…

Bill Blain

Author of the Morning Porridge
CEO Windshift Capital
Advisor – Spitfire Strategic Capital

Meanwhile, don’t forget about my new book:

The Battle For Hamble is a proper grown-up examination of how bureaucracy has failed: a tale of Greedy Corporates, Bad Planning and Economic Illiteracy. It explains how a wholly unnecessary Gravel Quarry will be dug in middle of a prosperous village – putting 6000 jobs at risk. The truth is no one wants gravel, and the quarry company understands it’s not what you dig out, but what you stuff back into a hole in the ground that matters. Gravel sells for £30 a tonne – Landfill earns £150 a tonne to bury. Go figure.