Fighting for a Free Future is a new movement to shift the UK’s political debate towards liberty, low taxes, and smaller government in order to avert what they describe as an imminent fiscal crisis caused by state overreach and unsustainable spending, writes Steve Baker
This week, I launch a new movement – Fighting for a Free Future – a bold cross-institutional movement for liberty, low taxes, free enterprise and smaller government.
This country stands on the brink of a fiscal crisis unlike anything we have seen in our lifetimes. The numbers are stark: a projected £41.2bn shortfall by 2029-30; a debt-to-GDP ratio nearing 96 per cent; and interest payments on government debt that doubled in a single year, now topping £16.4bn a month. Despite these warning signs, Westminster continues its ritual of denial, putting off hard decisions in favour of soothing rhetoric and fantasy budgeting. We are living in the Truman Show run by Whitehall. This isn’t some distant theoretical problem – it’s a looming catastrophe that will devastate millions of hardworking families within my lifetime.
Yet where is the urgency from our political class? The government pretends everything is fine when it categorically isn’t. Labour MPs refuse to countenance spending cuts and continue to demand higher spending that they simply cannot fund. The Chancellor raised taxes to record levels and will do so again within months. Can anyone really say that Britain’s problems stem from taxes being too low, the state being too small, government doing too little and there being too few rules and regulations?
The mathematics of collapse
The arithmetic is brutal and cannot be wished away. The Office for Budget Responsibility’s latest projections show that our debt trajectory is unsustainable, with borrowing costs that have become a millstone around the taxpayer’s neck. In July alone, we paid £7.1bn just to service our borrowings, money that could have funded genuine public services instead of paying bondholders to stay out of productive investment.
The OBR’s July 2025 Fiscal Risks and Sustainability Report lays bare the scale of our predicament. Without radical reform, debt will balloon to an astronomical 647 per cent of GDP by 2073-74. But the crisis hits much sooner than that–- the National Insurance Fund, which pays state pensions, will be exhausted by 2043-44 without Treasury bailouts that themselves breach fiscal sustainability. We’re asking working people today to fund promises we know we cannot keep. Unfunded state and public sector pension liabilities are on top of that.
The failure of statist solutions
This crisis wasn’t caused by free markets or capitalism run amok. It’s the direct consequence of decades of state overreach, unfunded spending promises and a bipartisan refusal to confront reality. Every attempt to solve our fiscal impasse by raising taxes runs up against the hard limits of the Laffer Curve. The non-dom crackdown, for instance, is already costing the Treasury billions in lost growth and capital flight.
I’ve watched from parliament as politicians of all stripes pretended Britain’s welfare state and world-class public services could be maintained without limit. The truth is precisely the opposite: we cannot afford the welfare state or our public services, and neither works well anyway.
We must throw out the failed assumptions and institutions that have brought us to this crisis. The Bank of England’s monetary manipulation has inflated asset prices beyond the reach of young families. Decades of expanding state intervention have delivered worse public services at higher costs. The planning system strangles housing supply while politicians promise solutions they cannot deliver.
Fighting for a Free Future recognises these aren’t isolated failures but symptoms of a failing managerial state.
Our battle isn’t between rival parties or fleeting scandals. It’s about whether we can rediscover our capacity for progress before events force change upon us. Argentina may have been in a worse situation than the UK, but like Britain today, Argentina faced a choice between decline and radical reform. Milei chose reform, cutting government departments entirely, slashing public spending and refusing to fund the state through currency debasement.
The results speak for themselves: inflation falling from over 200 per cent to manageable levels, the first budget surpluses in decades, and growing economic optimism. Argentina moved from basket case to economic poster child in 18 months. If that doesn’t prove the case for sound money, small government, and balanced budgets, I don’t know what will.
Fighting for a Free Future
This is why I launched Fighting for a Free Future (FFF). We 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 own radical reformer to emerge at the next general election. We are a bold cross-institutional movement for liberty, low taxes, free enterprise and smaller government, supported by ten of the UK’s leading free market think tanks and institutions.
Our mission is clear: FFF will ensure that the fundamental questions facing Britain are at the forefront of media and voters’ minds at the next general election.
Every government minister must be asked what they’re doing to stop the UK from defaulting on the welfare state. Every government minister must be asked why taxes are rising to record levels while public services are getting worse. Every government minister must be asked why they’re pretending that the UK can afford its current spending commitments.
FFF is also here to make free markets and freedom attractive again. We have conceded to the language of the left for too long. The free market, capitalism and freedom have become almost dirty words. Yet without these, none of us would enjoy the living standards we experience today. They are responsible for lifting billions of people out of poverty. Let’s start speaking about them with the pride they deserve.
Fighting for a Free Future isn’t another lobbying outfit or party vehicle. It’s a force multiplier for those who know that serious reform is both possible and necessary – built on the hard-won lessons of economic history and the urgent practicalities of the present crisis. Our mission is to shift the Overton Window, making it once again acceptable to talk about what Britain truly needs: far lower taxes, far less government, new models for health and welfare and the restoration of self-reliance and dignity to public debate.
The choice before us
The question confronting Britain isn’t about fine-tuning at the margins. It’s whether we will choose voluntary reform or wait for involuntary collapse. If Westminster cannot summon the courage to level with the public, an even sharper economic and political reckoning lies ahead. The mathematics of government debt ensure that change will come – the only question is whether that change will be imposed by crisis or chosen through democratic politics.
We can continue 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.
Fighting for a Free Future isn’t just a campaign; it is a movement to help the UK rediscover the gifts of the free market, of individual liberty, and of a society that flourishes through voluntary cooperation, not bureaucratic coercion. The battle for our free future begins now.
To find out more, visit our website – https://www.fightingforafreefuture.com. To keep up to date with all of our work, please subscribe to Voices for a Free Future – https://voices.fightingforafreefuture.com/subscribe. To make sure you never miss an episode of The Insurgency with Steve Baker, the FFF podcast, please subscribe to our YouTube Channel – https://podcast.fightingforafreefuture.com.