Good Sunday morning to you, I am just on a train home from Glasgow, where I have been gigging these past two nights. I’ve had a great time, as I always seem to do when I go north of the wall. But Glasgow on a Saturday night is something else. My hotel was right next to the station and so I was right in the thick of it. If I ever get to make a cacatopian, end-of-days, post-apocalyptic thriller, I’ll just stroll through Glasgow city centre on a Friday or Saturday night with a camera to get all the B roll. It was like walking through a Hieronymus Bosch painting only with a Scottish accent. Little seems to have changed since I wrote that infamous chapter about Glasgow in Life After the State all those years ago. The only difference is that now it’s more multi-ethnic. So many people are so off their heads. I lost count of the number of randoms wandering about just howling at the stars. The long days - it was still light at 10 o’clock - make the insanity all the more visible. Part of me finds it funny, but another part of me finds it so very sad that so many people let themselves get into this condition. It prompted me to revisit said chapter, and I offer it today as your Sunday thought piece. Just a couple of little notes, before we begin. This caught my eye on Friday. Our favourite uranium tech company, Lightbridge Fuels (NASDAQ:LTBR) , has taken off again with Donald Trump’s statement that he is going to quadruple US nuclear capacity. The stock was up 45% in a day. We first looked at it in October at $3. It hit $15 on Friday. It’s one to sell on the spikes and buy on the dips, as this incredible chart shows. (In other news I have now listened twice to the Comstock Lode AGM, and I’ll report back on that shortly too). ICYMI here is my mid-week commentary, which attracted a lot of attention Right - Glasgow. (NB I haven’t included references here. Needless to say, they are all there in the book . And sorry I don’t have access to the audio of me reading this from my laptop, but, if you like, you can get the audiobook at Audible , Apple Books and all good audiobookshops . The book itself available at Amazon , Apple Books et al). How the Most Entrepreneurial City in Europe Became Its Sickest The cause of waves of unemployment is not capitalism, but governments … Friedrich Hayek, economist and philosopher In the 18th and 19th centuries, the city of Glasgow in Scotland became enormously, stupendously rich. It happened quite organically, without planning. An entrepreneurial people reacted to their circumstances and, over time, turned Glasgow into an industrial and economic centre of such might that, by the turn of the 20th century, Glasgow was producing half the tonnage of Britain’s ships and a quarter of all locomotives in the world. (Not unlike China’s industrial dominance today). It was regarded as the best-governed city in Europe and popular histories compared it to the great imperial cities of Venice and Rome. It became known as the ‘Second City of the British Empire’. Barely 100 years later, it is the heroin capital of the UK, the murder capital of the UK and its East End, once home to Europe’s largest steelworks, has been dubbed ‘the benefits capital of the UK’. Glasgow is Britain’s fattest city: its men have Britain’s lowest life expectancy – on a par with Palestine and Albania – and its unemployment rate is 50% higher than the rest of the UK. How did Glasgow manage all that? The growth in Glasgow’s economic fortunes began in the latter part of the 17th century and the early 18th century. First, the city’s location in the west of Scotland at the mouth of the river Clyde meant that it lay in the path of the trade winds and at least 100 nautical miles closer to America’s east coast than other British ports – 200 miles closer than London. In the days before fossil fuels (which only found widespread use in shipping in the second half of the 19th century) the journey to Virginia was some two weeks shorter than the same journey from London or many of the other ports in Britain and Europe. Even modern sailors describe how easy the port of Glasgow is to navigate. Second, when England was at war with France – as it was repeatedly between 1688 and 1815 – ships travelling to Glasgow were less vulnerable than those travelling to ports further south. Glasgow’s merchants took advantage and, by the early 18th century, the city had begun to assert itself as a trading hub. Manufactured goods were carried from Britain and Europe to North America and the Caribbean, where they were traded for increasingly popular commodities such as tobacco, cotton and sugar. Through the 18th century, the Glasgow merchants’ business networks spread, and they took steps to further accelerate trade. New ships were introduced, bigger than those of rival ports, with fore and aft sails that enabled them to sail closer to the wind and reduce journey times. Trading posts were built to ensure that cargo was gathered and stored for collection, so that ships
