For a brief moment in the 1990s, Britain’s music industry generated more GDP than steel. At its peak it rivalled financial services as a global export.

Nobody planned that. No stuffy arts councils or elitist government gatekeepers.

It happened because Britain accidentally left room for people to create. The old dole meant anyone with a guitar could share a cheap flat, sign on, and spend their days making something. The state didn’t micromanage creativity. It simply left enough slack in the system for people to be interesting.

From that slack came the British Invasion - The Beatles, The Pistols, Punk, Goth, New Romantic, Britpop— cultural movements that reshaped global music. Britain left its mark as a global creative leader in art, which came from the bottom up - from the streets.

Then we destroyed the conditions that made it possible.

The 1980s replaced industry with finance. The City flooded the country with easy money, masking a dangerous truth: Britain had put almost all its economic eggs in one basket.

Then 2008 happened.

Austerity gutted the safety net. Rents exploded. Rehearsal rooms vanished. Squats were vacated, Venues closed. The ecosystem that once allowed broke young artists to experiment simply disappeared.

A generation discovered that the life which produced Britain’s creative cultural revolutions had been engineered out of existence.

Now here comes the twist.

At Davos this year, Britain was singled out as one of the economies most vulnerable to AI job replacement. Artificial Intelligence is about to dismantle the financial monoculture that replaced Britain’s creative economy.

The very jobs that replaced culture are now the ones disappearing.

Britain doesn’t have oil. It doesn’t have vast farmland. What it has always had is the inventive creativity of its well-educated, exceedingly literate population.

And we’ve been strangling it.

Meanwhile, politics is still fighting a Victorian argument. The left quotes Marx. The right quotes Adam Smith. Both were brilliant — for their time. But these are 19th-century battles unequipped for the 21st century. Neither designed an economy where Silicon Valley trains machines on human culture and sells it back to us.

Because that’s what AI actually runs on.

Our music.

Our writing.

Our images.

Our voices.

The raw material of artificial intelligence is human creativity — and almost none of the value flows back to the people who created it.

That has to change.

Four steps would transform the landscape:

1. Make AI companies pay microroyalties when they use human data - and I mean EVERY BIT, including this post.

2. Turn the data into a public commons, not a private tech monopoly.

3. Build a Universal Basic Income — a streamlined modern version of the system that accidentally funded decades of British cultural dominance.

4. Create shared public creative spaces - neighbourhood studios, communal living rooms and multimedia suites.

Those of us who were young in the 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s remember what this country once produced. We remember being broke — and free to speak, write, play and create. That memory isn’t nostalgia. It’s evidence and proof that a creative economy can work.

We are the ones now in a position to do something about it.

Britain’s next economic foundation will not come from the City. It will come the way it used to — from bedrooms, rehearsal rooms, radio stations, clubs, street art, fashion and world-shattering imagination.

The creative sector isn’t a luxury. It is the last serious economic advantage Britain still has. And the people who understand that best are the generation that watched it happen.

We didn’t just witness Britain’s cultural revolution. We’re the ones who have to start the next one.

Scream if you remember what we lost. Shout if you want it back.