We need good people to have good government… The single decisive factor that made for Singapore’s development was the ability of its ministers and the high quality of the civil servants who supported them… I concluded that it was more important, though more difficult, to assess a person’s character.

We noted by the 1970s [in western Europe] that when governments undertook primary responsibility for the basic duties of the head of the family, the drive in people weakened. Welfare undermined self-reliance. People did not have to work for their families’ well-being. A handout became a way of life. The downward spiral was relentless as motivation and productivity went down. People lost the drive to achieve because they paid too much in taxes. They became dependent on the state for their basic needs… We thought it best to reinforce the Confucian tradition that a man is responsible for his family.

You can galvanise people easier when they’re in a state of fright.

LKY

There is nothing more difficult to carry out, nor more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to handle, than to initiate a new order of things. For the reformer has enemies in all who profit by the old order, and only lukewarm defenders in all those who would profit by the new order.

Machiavelli

I think Singapore is the single most successful governmental system that exists in the world… If you will make a study of the life and work of Lee Kuan Yew, you will find one of the most interesting and instructive political stories written in the history of mankind.

Charlie Munger

A decade after the referendum, I re-read notes from LKY’s memoirs (references at the bottom). LKY was an inspiration for doing Vote Leave and for ideas on how to change the British regime — which is deeper than, and a condition for, changing ‘policy’. Both Leave and fundamental regime change — so a government controls the government and can execute priorities — were and are necessary conditions for a general British revival.

For those reflecting on the last decade and wondering how we reboot regime change after the disaster of the Trolley-Carrie abandonment, LKY should be a source of tremendous inspiration — though also a slap in the face concerning the scale of what’s needed, how hard building a new regime is, and how far beyond our current leaders LKY was in virtue and character.

The Westminster crowd that told you Trolley hiring Dan Rosenfield represented ‘the return of the serious grownups’, then that Sunak’s appointment of Cameron represented ‘the return of the serious grownups’, then that Keir Starmer and Sue Gray represented ‘the return of the serious grownups’ who would ‘show Whitehall works’ after ‘Brexit madness’ — this crowd also believes that Singapore holds no lessons.

This is partly because they’re obsessed with scale over institutions and character (‘it’s tiny!’); partly because they dismiss on principle foundational regime issues particularly elite talent (‘Rolls Royce civil service!’); partly because these people have deranged ideas about communication and voters, so babble ‘the Leave coalition never wanted dynamism, it’s politically impossible to sell it to voters, blah blah’; partly because of the fusion of SW1’s intense parochialism and intense anti-learning culture; and partly because ‘the mainstream’ in SW1 has polarised very hard away from their 90s view (tech is great, go Obama using Facebook!) to ‘AI is totally fake and we must totally control it to stop the fascist tech oligarchs’. Anything seen as taking technology seriously, such as Singapore, is seen as somewhere between suspect and fascist.

All wrong.

A/ They shout ‘but it’s a tiny island, nothing to learn!’, ignoring that Deng Xiaoping thought the exact opposite and applied lessons to the most populous country on earth! SW1 has been obsessed with scale since the transition from Empire to EEC. It’s forgotten our own history. We dominated the world despite being small because of institutions, ideas and character — and the luck of being an island so we could develop very differently to Europe. Institutions, ideas and character repeatedly dominate scale. The EU has shot itself in both feet with AI/drones because of its bad ideas and institutions and its scale has not saved it, its scale spread dud centralised entropy across many countries.

Joining the EEC shattered MP responsibility and gave them fairy tales to babble while real decisions and power were exercised outside Parliament, in Whitehall and Brussels. Leave made MPs responsible again. The MPs of both old parties loathed this responsibility for our multi-decade institutional rot returning to Parliament.

(Ironically, Europe flourished because of the combination of common culture with political decentralisation while China suffered under political centralisation/uniformity. Now, China has dramatically advanced on technology while the home of technology has turned against it and used its Single Market/courts to suppress it— just as I said would happen in 2015-16 and predicted Britain would reap huge advantages in AI, robotics, life sciences etc from Leave.)

B/ Particularly after the referendum, it became a widespread meme to claim that ‘Singapore-on-the-Thames is politically impossible’. This communication/campaign advice comes from people who are always wrong about communication and voters. What’s impossible for the rotten old Tory Party proves nothing about communication. The fact that Tory leader after Tory leader can’t communicate is evidence for what’s possible for clowns in a clowncar, not what’s possible for a serious political effort.

You could win a big majority here with an agenda including some of LKY’s big ideas: recruit talent, huge focus on infrastructure and skills, huge focus on attracting global investment, personal accounts for health/welfare that can be passed on with zero inheritance tax, stop all boats with the navy as LKY did etc.

The ‘right’ hasn’t done these things because it became uninterested in policy and power, it’s a shambles at organisation and communication, it’s not had an actual ‘strategy’ (or a culture which can generate it), and it could only act out its role as Old Media News Cycle Entertainment Service. (To the extent ‘the right’ has thought about Singapore, it’s been purely in terms of ‘free trade’ which is much less important than the things discussed below.)

C/ When reading about LKY, it’s important to consider how Remain-y Whitehall is intensely parochial and loathes the suggestion of learning from foreigners generally and Asia/Singapore in particular. This was dramatically shown in 2020. Vote Leave was constantly pushing ‘learn from what works abroad’ against Whitehall parochialism, which was so powerful that officials cancelled a trip I organised for officials to fly out to Asia to learn how Singapore and Taiwan were dealing with things like border control and data-sharing. It was Remain-y Whitehall which claimed to be ‘the best prepared in the world for a pandemic’, as it said to us in No10 repeatedly Jan-Feb. (You can see on the Fake Inquiry website references to Singapore in my WhatsAps of Feb 2020 and Wormald’s responses.) I found the same thing in the Department for Education 2010-14. What, learn from Germans or Swiss? Balliol-Remainer noses wrinkle with distaste.

Whitehall is now dominated by officials who read the Guardian and write scripts for ministers to apologise for our history while literally giving away British territory because of Chinese-Russian propaganda campaigns, yet they also perpetuate the worst aspects of imperial hubris, as if they’re dealing with the Boer War.

D/ The ‘AI is totally fake … we must totally control it’ meme has become a core identity element for the very online ‘mainstream’, beyond reason, beyond ‘discussion on policy’, as I’ve explained many times. ‘It’s totally fake’ because those doing it are evil/despised, and evil/despised people couldn’t be building something very valuable. Elon is evil so AI must be fake, as they say on Bluesky. And ‘we must totally control it’ because you can’t let the tech fascists control technology — they will do misinformation to fool the plebs into ‘voting against their interests’!

You saw this response demonstrated again in recent days in the deranged responses from ‘the mainstream’ to Blair telling SW1 to take AI seriously. Because anti-AI is now an identity and has polarised-radicalised (like ‘destroy our own borders’ became an identity beyond reasoning and polarised-radicalised), ‘the mainstream’ ignored all substance and just bleated ‘he’s a shill for the Silicon Valley fascists, he’s evil’. Ironically, the mainstream, which is temperamentally Blairite and is defined by its desperate desire to turn the clock back to 1998, attacked their own exemplar for ‘being stuck in the past’ because of his attitude to technology! Literally as they were bleating ‘Blair’s a shill, AI is fake’ on Bluesky at each other, over on X mathematicians were announcing the use of AI to solve important mathematics problems. This contrast could not have been put in a novel or movie a decade ago: clearly too mad to be real.

The ‘AI is totally fake … we must totally control it’ network are also almost all super keen on ‘more strikes on Moscow, nukes are irrational so we can chill’, and they’re also the same network who most fell for the ‘trans rights human rights’ cult (which united networks from Antifa street thugs to Blackrock). This is our timeline, the timeline in which the most moronic views increasingly correlate. The ‘mainstream’ radicalised on immigration, BLM, transing kids, treating the grooming gangs as ‘a far right conspiracy theory’, Greta etc: LGBTQH(amas)+. Next will be radicalisation on a renewed drive for real socialism combined with state control of technology, ‘to fight fascist billionaires’.

LKY’s lessons point to a different path we could take…

In 1942 LKY faced the collapse of old apparent certainties including the presence of the British Empire, apparently so enduring, and suddenly he had to live on his wits to survive Japanese barbarity. He and his friends had to create a new regime out of the rubble of war and the end of empire.

LKY is the closest thing I’ve seen in the 20th century to Bismarck-level performance. You don’t feel the same absolutely stunning impression from LKY that you get from watching Bismarck’s diplomacy, for which there is no equivalent since. But in many ways he’s even more useful for those thinking about how to execute some sort of western renaissance.

Why? Inter alia —

1. He had to grapple with America vs China and the Taiwan issue, the equivalent of Belgium 1914 today in terms of a Great Power flashpoint and debate over deterrence and ‘what justifies a war’. NB. His advice to the West was: negotiate peaceful reunification, do not try to fight it and absolutely do not suggest you might fight a nuclear war over it.

2. He watched China’s growth for decades and studied Deng carefully.

3. He had to deal with the intersection of politics and technology/investment much more than Bismarck.

4. He had to deal with modern issues like health services, welfare, women joining the workforce etc.

5. Unlike Bismarck, who inherited the Prussian bureaucracy then had to shape it, LKY had to build a new governing regime with a new talent network and new bureaucracy practically from scratch on the crumbled foundations left by Britain.

While Bismarck’s diplomacy and approach to war remain of fundamental importance to us and studying general lessons of how he did politics are the best apprenticeship, LKY’s domestic policies are more relevant today.

For example, in No10 we set up the Office for Talent to change policy on immigration, talent, eliminating visa friction etc. We started setting up the Office for Investment to create a LKY-style one-stop shop for investors where they could call and get dedicated support in smashing barriers to action, in the spirit of LKY’s office. Neither were properly reinforced by the PM after I left, both were soon seen as no longer priorities so were sidelined, scuppered and shuttered. MPs didn’t care and SW1 continued the trajectory of decades: pointless meetings and failure. Similarly we started implementing LKY’s ideas on bringing top talent into government. This was reversed, brilliant people were pushed out of government and off to companies like Anthropic rather than serving Britain, and Whitehall returned to business as usual: keep power with its closed caste and exclude talent on principle. Despite all three things supposedly being ‘priorities’ for Tory and Labour MPs, they wouldn’t and won’t use the constitutional authority of the PM to execute them and force Whitehall (particularly HMT and CO) to accept change, with the consequences we see all around us. Starmer watched post-Vote Leave Trolley, Truss and Sunak then copied them.

If you are thinking about how we can escape from this cycle of collapse, there are few more useful things to study, arguably in particular on health and welfare, than LKY. We have embedded deeply pathological systems which kill thousands a year and suck in more and more money on an unsustainable trajectory. We need new approaches such as LKY’s individual savings accounts and his health system, which has neither the pathologies of the NHS nor those of the American system. There are also deep reflections on Western individualism vs Chinese Confucianism, welfare and family, and government and technology.

Also to ponder: the radicalisation of the Remainer-SW1-NPC world to ‘everyone who disagrees with us is fascist’ means that advocating views expressed by LKY is now ‘fascism’ for much of SW1. You dissident elites — and those pondering joining them — hoping you can ‘just make sensible arguments’ and avoid being attacked as ‘fascist’: you do not have this option. Nothing worthwhile is easy — in startups or politics — and if you want Britain to recover, you will have to get over fears of name-calling. Name-calling is not as bad as most of you fear and life is much easier in many ways once you realise it doesn’t matter if irrelevant NPCs call you names, and, if you have any character, you’ll be mad thinking back from your rocking chair near death’s door if you got put off by that. (Also, four years of a serious regime plus AI means the NPC class will be >95% retired/replaced and irrelevant.)

Would-be PMs ‘must have that iron in him’, as LKY said. You do not have to be +4 standard deviations in intelligence to have effects like LKY but you do have to be +4 standard deviations in character. (SW1 both over-rates the importance of intelligence to achieving things in politics and under-rates the other qualities that make people practically effective, and has made SW1 a place where it’s practically impossible to bring people with +4 SD in intelligence.) An advantage of Britain is that for centuries we generated such people among elites at maybe the highest rate on earth, though for decades they’ve abandoned politics, with disastrous consequences. We don’t need many but we need a handful and the chief must be one of them. This is more important than ‘policy plans’, which are relatively easy to figure out in most areas (because they mostly do not require ‘radical new ideas’), or ‘political strategy’/campaigning, which is relatively easy to figure out if you have the character to ignore conventional wisdom and the judgement to hire a few great people on Skunk Works/ARPA principles (below).

You cannot be another cosmopolitan at home with modern Whitehall in siding with foreigners against this country (hence our need to exclude much of the FO and CO from Brexit negotiations). We need someone who is with Leeds, Manchester, Newcastle, Northumberland, Cornwall, Yorkshire — not with Davos-Brussels-Harvard. You must really truly be on the side of the people, going to Westminster to champion the best of the nation against those who came to dominate Westminster. Britain’s revival needs organisers but is not mainly a technocratic project. It’s mainly a spiritual project defined by whether you’re on the side of those who’ve dominated SW1 and academia for 50+ years and destroyed so much, or taking back control of Parliament for the nation, from the two rotten old parties, from rotten Whitehall, from a rancid London political culture which waged jihad on our old character and gradually ostracised it from SW1. This old character must be restored at the centre of power with new institutions. A coalition of great people who still make the things that work work must put aside their chosen paths, take over SW1, and spend some years on this restoration. Great people, our old character, new institutions, new technology.

As Colonel Boyd would say to people about the choice of careerism (To Be) or doing something worthwhile (To Do):

To be somebody or to do something. In life there is often a roll call. That's when you will have to make a decision. To be or to do. Which way will you go?

To brush up on this old character — which the Northcote-Trevelyan system has systematically excluded over generations while sanctifying the most depraved aspects of modern culture — read memoirs from Alanbrooke and RV Jones and study how Pitt organised to beat Napoleon.

The sections below are:

1. Deep lessons on high performance applicable everywhere always.

2. Core policies.

3. Core principles, e.g handling a multi-ethnic country, Confucian values etc.

4. Views on important subjects like EEC, Deng, Taiwan, future of China.

5. A few thoughts re SW1 views on LKY and lessons for the future.

This blog will soon have to return to the new SW1 farce and where it’s all going. And Ukraine — by far the worst and craziest thing I’ve ever experienced in politics, the cursed, absurd, lying, monstrous, comic, shameful expression of our Idiocracy. It’s tragic that the MAGA White House didn’t pull the plug on the UKR disaster and focus on internal regime change, dismantling the left-NGO networks, the cost of living, immigration. Meanwhile Europe’s Idiocracy has encouraged the reality TV star with alpha Twitter skills to escalate strikes on Russian civilians, and he is sending drones through NATO airspace to hit Russia hoping to provoke our Idiocracy into getting entangled in the war.

Zelensky recently organised honours for a famous Nazi collaborator. Given his political skills, he clearly thinks this is a powerful domestic message and his international Idiocracy bankrollers, who keep the supply of gold toilets and Monaco Ducatis flowing, will ignore it. After all, it used to be illegal to fund Ukraine’s Nazis then in 2022 they were rebranded ‘freedom fighters’ and sent money and weapons. And of course he’s been proved right. No coverage, totally ignored, more money to the regime honouring literal Nazis. It used to be uncomplicatedly bad to be pro-Nazi but such is the derangement of our Idiocracy that the Ukraine war swept even this simple principle away and we now have full LGBTQH+ professors re-Blueskying the Azov Nazis, alongside re-Blueskying Greta and attacks on JK Rowling, and this is ‘mainstream’ in SW1…

We’re experiencing both AI progress and Idiocracy on exponential curves. Peace abroad, regime change at home…

Why more SW1 NPCs will pivot to ‘REJOIN’ (March 2025)

What are the core things needed to change our trajectory? (Feb 2025)

Whitehall and Starmer, why he’s failing and will keep failing (Feb 2025)

Insider attention and why No10 can’t get things done (Feb 2025)

Why the Kemi project is a farce (2025)

What Farage could do to finish the Tories and win the next election (and why it’s psychologically very hard for him to do it) (2025)

Personality types, coordination problems, and why changing Whitehall is so hard and so misunderstood (2025)

The Pathological Simulacrum, the Cycle of Narrative Whiplash and the collapse of consensus reality (2024)

The series on People, Ideas, Machines

I’m going to do a summary of summaries of this series then a summary of the summary of summaries in pursuit of the greatest simplification/compression to high value tokens as possible, but no simpler! It’s the highest value tokens that stop wars and genocide and may stop a billion dead in a pandemic…

XV: TS Eliot on culture, religion, class, elites, education, ‘progressives’.

The culture of Europe has deteriorated visibly within the memory of many who are by no means the oldest among us… There is no doubt that in our headlong rush to educate everybody, we are lowering our standards and more and more abandoning the study of those subjects by which the essentials of our culture … are transmitted; destroying our ancient edifices to make ready the ground upon which the barbarian nomads of the future will encamp in their mechanised caravans.

XIV: Lessons from preparing for government in 1979 & how No10 worked in the Thatcher regime. Hoskyns’ Just In Time.

XIII: The origins and evolution of the Cabinet Office, the heart of darkness in the permanent government. How was the CO set up? How did it evolve? What critical lessons and questions for the next regime? E.g to ‘reform’ the CO or close the CO? (Close.)

XII: Theories of regime change and civil war. Notes on Turchin’s book. And on Timur Kuran, preference falsification/cascades, how sparks start prairie fires.

XI: Leo Strauss, modernity and regime change — and an update 20/5: Notes on: On Classical Political Philosophy

X: Freedom’s Forge — the story of American business and industrial production in World War II. Incredible contrast between the America of WWII and now viz building things. Highly relevant to current debates on tariffs, supply chains, AI/drones/robotics etc.

IX: A) Britain’s ‘Organization of Victory’ under Pit 1793-1815 and B) Metternich & European Community. How Whitehall-1795 was more like SpaceX-2025 than Whitehall-2025 is. Real meetings. R&D taken seriously. Procurement and infrastructure taken seriously. Over 230 years, Whitehall has gone backwards.

VIII: CIA counterintelligence chief James Angleton, ‘a wilderness of mirrors’, covert operations, assassinations, moles & double agents, disinformation. A blog on Angleton and the broader history of the CIA and US elites’ attempts to understand the political world. The long-term failures of the CIA on critical geopolitical issues, their security failures and penetration by the KGB, the fundamental problems of building effective intelligence agencies and integrating their work in an overall institutional structure — these deep problems are all extremely relevant to today as Washington increasingly can align on just one thing, hostility to China. Given this history we should not bet on the Washington deep state outperforming the PRC on intelligence and in many areas it seems the PRC has learned lessons from America’s victory over the Soviet Union better than Washington learned them.

VII: On RV Jones, Scientific Intelligence in World War II, how Whitehall vandalised the successful system immediately after the war. Many issues explored in the RVJ blog are relevant to those interested in the future of AI, ‘safety’, and security.

VI: Alanbrooke diaries, incredibly relevant to today’s problems and what military ‘strategy’ really is.

V: Colin Gray and defence planning. What’s the difference between ends, ways, means? What’s the difference between strategy, tactics, operations? Why such confusion? What is defence planning, how does it fit with strategy?

IV: Notes on The Kill Chain — US procurement horrors, new technologies, planning for war with PRC.

III: More on fallacies of nuclear thinking / strategy / deterrence. If you read this and the earlier one you’ll see that almost everything the media says about Putin and nuclear threats is wrong / misguided and, worse, so is much of what is said by international relations/historians/military academics.

II: Thinking about nuclear weapons

I: On innovation in militaries, when does it succeed/fail — e.g why US got ahead on aircraft carriers, RAF defence in 1930s.

[March 2022] Prediction: 1) lessons from UKR will overwhelmingly support the arguments of those who in 2020 argued for radical MoD changes (including taking money from old tank projects that everybody privately admitted were a multi-billion pound disaster) and 2) the correct criticism of the review and connected documents will be seen as a) they did not go nearly far enough, b) the collapse of No10 follow through on defence reform in 2021 was — like the collapse of 2020 plans for planning reform, tax cuts, deregulation, Project Speed, intense focus on R&D and skills etc — a disaster for the country (and a political disaster for the Tory Party).

Other related stuff…

On rationalism and politics (2022)

On high performance government, ‘cognitive technologies’, ‘Seeing Rooms’, UK crisis management (2019)

On AI, nuclear issues, Project Maven (2019)

On the ARPA/PARC ‘Dream Machine’, science funding, high performance, and UK national strategy (2018)

On ‘systems engineering’ and ‘systems management’ — ideas from the Apollo programme for a ‘systems politics’ (2017)

On China vs US, the ‘Thucydides trap’ book (2017)

If you’re thinking through AI and geopolitics you should study, or at least skim over a few weekends, my chronology of Bismarck (2023). A month of study and you’ll be in the top 0.01% of people who really understand high performance politics, an incredible shortcut! If you take this path, you will have a great advantage over your competitors.

And the use of AI to analyse this Chronology (2026)

On Tolstoy and War and Peace (2022)

2014 speech on what’s wrong and what to do, including make science/technology central to British national strategy after we leave the EU.

Deep ‘unrecognised simplicities’ of high performance

Read more

I simultaneously feel like I’m talking to an extremely brilliant PhD student who’s been a systems programmer their entire life, and a 10-year-old.

Andrej Karpathy, one of the world’s leading AI researchers, explaining the ‘jaggedness’ of AI performance, March 2026

My information consumption is now 1/4 X, 1/4 podcast interviews of the smartest practitioners, 1/4 talking to the leading AI models, and 1/4 reading old books. The opportunity cost of anything else is far too high, and rising daily… Honestly, I know I should only be doing one of these at this point, but I can’t quite bring myself to shed the other three.

Marc Andreessen, creator of first web browser, co-founder of a16z VC company

All AI amounts to is plausible nonsense.

Former senior GCHQ official, Ciaran Martin, 2025

Images: Bismarck walking on his estate pondering politics; Peter Steinberger creating Clawdbot/OpenClaw, the fastest-growing Github repo in history (NB. for the EU optimists/nationalists among you, note how as soon as his triumph went public he moved to the Bay Area and slammed EU regulations on his way)

Introduction

I put Volume I of the Chronology of Bismarck, from 1815 to August 1867, on here in 2023.

I’m skipping finishing Vol. II for now and will do Vol. III next — 1871-1879. Vol II is more useful today if you’re looking at the origins of war but Vol III will be more useful for those considering how to build a new political regime. After peace with France in 1871, Bismarck had to make many crucial decisions which shaped the Reich’s institutions across the economy, law, finance, military, state bureaucracy, as well as international relations. And then around 1877-79 he changed direction in many crucial ways in foreign and domestic policy, and switched from supporting the liberals on free trade to protection.

As I do this I’m running experiments with AI models and because of other projects I’m spending more time generally thinking about the models.

How might the rapidly improving AI tools help us (1) explore and learn from history and (2) improve performance in politics?

I started doing this Chronology 15-20 years ago after seeing so many discrepancies between all the major books. I wanted to track the different claims about what happened when so I could figure out a more accurate picture. As I went along, it turned into a fascinating story of an extraordinary political development which shaped world history: if these events 1862-6 had worked out differently, maybe no Britain v Germany world wars. Having a chronological record helped understand the twists and turns and to consider classic general questions about history and politics. (I’ve done the same for 1914 for the same reason.)

I thought it would be useful to explore the models in an area I’ve been interested in for decades, spent years reading about, and have a lot of background knowledge and context. This allows me to get a sense of the models’ capabilities for research tasks in history and politics such as collecting facts, assessing evidence, analysing decisions, and exploring fundamental questions like agency vs system, ideas vs material forces, causation etc. If I get a sense of what they’re like in an area where I have a lot of context and don’t have to exhaustively check everything, I can get a sense of how useful they’d be in things where I don’t have much context.

I also explored a fascinating question — if you try to make the models think hard about Bismarck’s diplomacy and extract lessons from it, how do they apply what they learn to current problems like western policy in Ukraine, strategy over Iran/Hormuz or how Xi might think about an invasion of Taiwan? How interesting is it? How does it compare with bog standard people in politics and the best people? How useful could they be now to someone going into crisis meetings, for example in providing a ‘red team’ steel-man of counter-arguments?

I am not an expert in using AI nor an expert prompter. That’s part of the experiment — I want to help show what you can do with these models if you are a) very curious about a political subject and want to research it, but b) *not* an AI expert. Although some of what I do below is affected by discussions with experts/lab insiders, I have not involved experts in it. After it’s published, I’ll ask some experts what they think and build this into the followup. I have used the Bismarck prompts with the models to write documents for a couple of people working at the frontier of AI and their responses have been ‘that’s a very good strategy!’ I will try more such experiments.

If you’re an MP, an official, a researcher, a journalist — and you are not an expert in use of these models — I hope you will find this useful and interesting.

A weird fact about the world is that political research is amazingly underrated as a force which can change history. Put another billion or ten into a normal company, little really changes in terms of world history. But just thousands wisely deployed on political research can change history. I’ve explained this at length (e.g here) and won’t rehash. Politics does not focus on the most high value tokens. People repeatedly communicate without figuring out if what they’re doing is counterproductive. They fail to do the most basic research on opponents. People fight entire election campaigns without understanding what dominates the thinking of crucial voters. People with money rarely understand politics well and don’t realise politics does not focus on the most high value tokens. So vast amounts of money is wasted on ‘campaigns’ and ‘think tanks’ while the search for the most high value tokens is unfunded. The models will affect politics partly because they will radically reduce the cost of finding high value tokens, so people with little cash won’t have to find 500k plus to do a project. The potential leverage of political teams with a very small number of able relentless people will grow enormously. This isn’t speculation, I can see it on projects I’m working on / helping with.

A conclusion from my experiments: you’re better off having the paid versions of Opus or GPT work for you than ~99% of MPs. Question to ponder as reading: how many MPs’ working 12 hours per day for you would be roughly as valuable in political research as paid-Opus or GPT working for you, with token limits set to the cost of the MP salaries pro rata? Would 5 MPs working full time be better than Opus with a token budget of 5 MP salaries (i.e ~£500k p/a or ~£40k per month)? What if you could hire just five extremely able people and given them the MP salaries for token budgets: could all the MPs combined, without model help, compete?

Some questions about using models to explore history and politics

• Model performance is, per Karpathy above and discussed below, very ‘jagged’ — their performance and usefulness is simultaneously very high in some areas and awful in others, and the patterns are not the same as with humans. How useful/reliable are models for detailed historical/political work? What are they best/worst at? What are their strengths and weaknesses?

• What level of human performance do they approximate in fact checking?

• What level of human performance do they approximate in weighing evidence?

• What level of human performance do they approximate in reasoning about causation and counterfactuals? Can they apply ideas from the likes of Judea Pearl about causation and counterfactuals?

• What level of human performance do they approximate in reasoning about historical explanations? Can they find and curate evidence and use it to analyse competing explanations? For example:

  • The causes of war.

  • Diplomatic contests.

  • Political campaigns success/failure.

  • The relative weight in different case studies of agents (e.g Bismarck, Franz Joseph) and systems (e.g the Great Power competition), about ideas (e.g nationalism), material forces (e.g automation) and institutions (e.g an intelligence agency).

• What level of human performance do they approximate in discovering hidden but valuable signals? E.g if you ask a model to consider hundreds of pages of evidence, can they extract the sort of signals that an intelligence agency would find valuable to know, something hidden but valuable? Can they pick out evidence relevant to a problem like ‘to what extent did false intelligence contribute to mobilisation decisions which in turn contributed to a war starting’? Can they detect conspiracies?

• What level of human performance do they approximate in analysing war and operations like war, such as insurgencies and coups? Can they analyse ends, ways, and means? Can they analyse strategy? Can they assess the risks of war? Can they assess capabilities? To what extent are errors in such analysis because of a) irreducible complexity/nonlinearity which makes errors inevitable for highly competent entities versus b) repeated standard bureaucratic errors among normally competent entities? What’s the frontier of analytical performance? E.g In 1866 European experts almost all expected Austria to win. In 1870 they expected France to win. Why were most wrong in 1866, why did they make similar errors in 1870? What lessons does this have for us? (In 2022, most western experts including the CIA and MI6 thought ‘Russia will quickly win’ then flipped to ‘Russia is collapsing’. Both were wrong. This is a perennial problem.)

• What level of human performance do they approximate in sensing changes in compressed foundational ideas over time? If you look at any year you will see a collection of critical players who believe certain things with little or no reflection — they are the accepted idea of their time. E.g In 1850, it was thought among British elites that obviously we should maintain the two-power standard for the Royal Navy. In 1950, this idea was dead. In 1750, Europe elites saw written constitutions as an idea of the devil. In 1850, European elites felt that written constitutions could hardly be resisted. In the mid-19th century, European elites had come to see free trade as mutually beneficial and the future. By 1900, protection had spread and free trade ideas were under attack everywhere. Can we a) identify deep critical ideas among ruling elites which are influential because hardly questioned, b) trace how and why they change, c) identify transitions between slow changes in the background to sudden changes in crises, d) see how such a shift affects critical decisions such that history goes down one path instead of another? This is very hard and controversial. It’s not a science. In practical politics it’s barely discussed other than in periods of revolution and chaos. (This paragraph is turned into a prompt below.)

• What level of human performance do they approximate in applying historical analogies to contemporary problems? E.g Many discuss the US vs PRC competition in comparison with Britain vs Germany and Athens vs Sparta. How good are the models at doing this?

• What sort of prompts work well/badly? People discovered ad hoc improvements in prompting such as, with maths, telling models ‘think step by step’. Recently it was reported that just repeating instructions to models — equivalent to telling your child ‘stop doing X now, stop doing X’ — works.

• What do experiments suggest about possibilities for new tools? E.g Can models extract information which states think is secret?

• If you put the Chronology into the model’s context window, with all the twists and turns of Schleswig-Holstein and the Austrian diplomacy 1863-6 — i.e a lot details about the most detailed extremely high performance diplomatic case study in history — and ask it to apply what it’s learned to problems like, say, the West’s approach to Ukraine or how Xi might plan an invasion of Taiwan — do they generate interesting ideas? Can models extract principles of use to humans from detailed information?

• Why do humans find it so hard to learn from historical examples of brilliant (rare) and relatively terrible (common) performance in diplomacy, war, government planning and execution, political campaigns and so on?

• Can models spot emerging crises? Can models identify some highly non-linear and consequential decisions amid the vast majority of irrelevant actions in ways that we can use to make predictions? Can we apply these lessons to other crises?

• How can models be used to improve training?

• Can models make useful predictions about future news? (Yes.)

• Many experts say that as models improve and more tasks done by humans today become automated, two things will remain for humans longer than most — taste and long-term planning? To what extent do the models demonstrate or learn either now? Bismarck said to Busch in 1870 that the hard thing about the 1863-66 struggle was how so many different things connected over years — how many somewhat discrete (but subtly connected) delicate operations over different timescales, any of which might go kaput for reasons outside his control, connected to his priorities. Repeatedly when asked about things, he’d reply along the lines of ‘it depends how the cards fall’, but this was in the context of very clear — and much clearer than all his opponents’ — crucial priorities. A great art you see in very rare people brings together taste and long-term planning, but the word ‘planning’ is tricky because there are a few things that don’t/hardly change (e.g another independent state under Augustenburg is bad, we should try to grab Schleswig Holstein and use it to change the power balance in Germany) and many things that do change, including always shifting internal and external hostile coalitions. He left many deep comments about these fundamental uncertainties and ‘planning’ and ‘decisions’, and many rebukes to ‘professors’ and rejections of ‘political science’. Part of my interest is trying to see what happens if you make models focus on such comments and weight them over other tokens they learn.

It was impossible during the animated and sometimes stormy development of our politics always to foresee with certainty whether the road which I took was the right one, and yet I was obliged to act as though I could predict with absolute clearness both coming events and the effect which my decisions would have upon them… It is just as impossible to foresee with any certainty the political results at the time when a measure has to be carried, as it would be in our climate to predict the weather of the next few days. Yet we have to make decisions as though we can do so, often enough fighting against all the influences to which we are accustomed to attach weight… The consideration of the question whether a decision is right, and whether it is right to hold fast and carry through what, though upon a weak premise, has been recognised as right, has an agitating effect on every conscientious and honourable man. This is strengthened by the circumstance that often many years must elapse before we are able in political matters to convince ourselves whether our wishes and actions were right or wrong…

Politics is a thankless job because everything depends on chance and conjecture. One has to reckon with a series of probabilities and improbabilities and base one’s plans upon this reckoning… As long as he lives the statesman is always unprepared. In the attainment of that for which he strives he is too dependent on the participation of others, a fluctuating and incalculable factor… [One] has to expect random disturbances like the farmer does with weather conditions. Even after the greatest success he cannot say with certainty, ‘Now it is achieved; I am done with it,’ and look back at what has been accomplished with complacency… One can bring individual matters to a conclusion, but even then there is no way of knowing what the consequences will be… In politics there is no such thing as complete certainty and definitive results… Everything goes continually uphill, downhill…

A real responsibility in high politics can only be undertaken by one single directing minister, never by a numerous board with majority voting. The decision as to paths and bypaths often depends on slight but decisive changes, sometimes even on the tone or choice of expressions in an international document. Even the slightest departure from the right line often causes the distance from it to increase so rapidly that the abandoned clue cannot be recovered and the return to the bifurcation, where it was left behind, becomes impossible. The customary official secrecy conceals for whole generations the circumstances under which the track was left, and the result of the uncertainty in which the operative connection of things remains, produces in leading ministers … an indifference to the material side of business as soon as the formal side has been settled by a royal signature or parliamentary votes.

Experiments below, conducted with a variety of free and paid models

#1 Fact checking my ~400 page Chronology.

#2 Analysing Bismarck’s diplomacy 1862-6, looking at it from the perspective of Austrian intelligence.

#3 Austria’s biggest errors, Pearl counterfactuals.

#4 What happens if you ask the models to study the Chronology, extract lessons, then apply those lessons to analysing the West’s policy on Ukraine?

#5 Investigating the widespread confusion over dates and decisions across secondary sources regarding Prussian/Austrian mobilisation spring-summer 1866. Can the models find primary sources, translate them, and resolve disputes between professional historians?

#6 Analysing military experts’ predictions. An interesting aspect of 1866 is that the vast majority of military experts predicted Austria would win. Then in 1870 few updated and most predicted France would win. The improvements made in the Prussian General Staff, training, planning, decentralised infantry etc have been deeply studied post-1870 but at the time were largely overlooked or misinterpreted. Can models read the Chronology, pick out references to this issue, and report back? This is the sort of task that is done a million times a day in SW1. Can models do such a thing with a 400 page report at ‘roughly the normal performance level in politics’ but in much less time than a human?

#7 Analysing the Austrian intelligence coup of 22/5/1866. Can models explore an obscure reference to a potentially history-changing intelligence coup, research it in primary sources, and do a useful report including counterfactuals?

#8 How good are models at detecting evidence of and analysing conspiracies? Much of politics, and arguably the most important bits, intrinsically involves things which can hardly be said, outside very tightly held circles. The longest chapter in Machiavelli’s writing is Book 3, Chapter 6 of Discourses of Livy — a chapter on conspiracies. A highly useful application would be detecting signals of conspiracies amid vast noise.

#9 Can models identify changes over time in basic ideas believed by elites? I asked the models to read the Chronology and extract deep foundational ideas barely questioned in the era of ~1815, how they shift over decades, slow then fast, and how this shift suddenly shows up in decisions. This is something I think more and more about regarding politics. In 2017-19 I and a few others built something we never published to see if we could measure the attention of the SW1 bubble and make predictions about the focus of this attention and how it would change over time. Advances often come from measuring things previously considered only qualitatively. We showed to our own satisfaction that Yes, we can. A few similar projects have published similar results. Westminster, and as far as I can see politics generally in the west, has ignored such experiments (because of the ‘demand problem’ below). But there’s a connected question about the long-term. I’ll return to this.

#10 Bismarck’s career as analogy for humans maintaining control of AI. Bismarck optimised for maintaining wide future options and to avoid constraints and control, in a style analogous to how the best computer chess programs quantifiably choose moves which widen their options and close opponents’ options. Many supposed ‘safety features’ of politics were tried and failed, including ‘switch him off’. What do the models think of this analogy in the context of discussion about how to control models/agents as they surpass human performance in more and more ways?

I give Verdicts as I go along then at the end I give some overall impressions.

If you’re particularly interested in Bismarck/19th century history and AI research, you can read the whole thing but you can also skim and read the summary at the end.

This blog does not use fancy agents but I’m experimenting with fancy agents and will report soon. There’s no hideous gimmick where at the end I reveal the AI wrote this, everything is clearly separated between me/AI.

A few points on AI & politics/government, ten years after the referendum

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On the whole, it would appear to be for the best that the great majority of human beings should go on living in the place in which they were born. Family, class and local loyalty all support each other; and if one of these decays, the others will suffer also.

(p52)

Culture can never be wholly conscious — there is always more to it than we are conscious of; and it cannot be planned because it is also the unconscious background of all our planning. (p94)

The disintegration of class has induced the expansion of envy, which provides ample fuel for the flame of ‘equal opportunity’…

Instead of congratulating ourselves on our progress, whenever the school assumes another responsibility hitherto left to parents, we might do better to admit that we have reached a stage of civilisation at which the family is irresponsible, or incompetent, or helpless; at which parents cannot be expected to train their children properly; at which many parents cannot afford to feed them properly, and would not know how, even if they had the means; and that Education must step in and make the best of a bad job.

(p104)

The culture of Europe has deteriorated visibly within the memory of many who are by no means the oldest among us… There is no doubt that in our headlong rush to educate everybody, we are lowering our standards and more and more abandoning the study of those subjects by which the essentials of our culture … are transmitted; destroying our ancient edifices to make ready the ground upon which the barbarian nomads of the future will encamp in their mechanised caravans.

(p108)

It is against the background of Christianity that all our thought has significance. An individual European may not believe that the Christian Faith is true, and yet what he says, and makes, and does, will all spring out of his heritage of Christian culture and depend upon that culture for its meaning. Only a Christian culture could have produced a Voltaire or a Nietzsche. I do not believe that the culture of Europe would survive the complete disappearance of the Christian Faith… If Christianity goes, the whole of our culture goes. Then you must start painfully again, and you cannot put on a new culture ready made. You must wait for the grass to grow to feed the sheep to give the wool out of which your new coat will be made. You must pass through centuries of barbarism…

The Western world has its unity in this heritage, in Christianity and in the ancient civilisations of Greece, Rome and Israel, from which, owing to two thousand years of Christianity, we trace our descent… This unity in the common elements of culture, throughout many centuries, is the true bond between us. No political and economic organisation, however much goodwill it commands, can supply what this culture unity gives. If we dissipate or throw away our common patrimony of culture, then all the organisation and planning of the most ingenious minds will not help us, or bring us closer together.

(p122-3)

The rich class did not hold the empire so long as the ancient hereditary nobility had held it. Their title to dominion was not of the same value. They had not the sacred character with which the ancient Eupatrid was clothed. They did not rule by virtue of a belief and by the will of the gods. They had no quality that had power over consciences, that compelled men to submit. Man is little inclined to bow, except before what he believes to be right, or before what his notions teach him is far above him. He had long been made to bend before the religious superiority of the Eupatrid, who repeated the prayers and possessed the gods. But wealth did not overawe him. In presence of wealth, the most ordinary sentiment is not respect; it is envy. The political inequality that resulted from the difference of fortunes soon appeared to be an iniquity, and men strove to abolish it.

The Ancient City, de Coulanges

Homo homini deus est.

Feuerbach

Kirilov: Then history will be divided into two parts: from the gorilla to the annihilation of God and from the annihilation of God to —

Narrator: To the gorilla?

Kirilov: To the physical transformation of the earth and man. Man will be god. He’ll be physically transformed. And the world too will be transformed… Everyone who desires supreme freedom must dare to kill himself… He who dares to kill himself is a god… All my life I think of one thing. God has tormented me all my life.

The Devils, Dostoyevsky

The nature of the breakdown of civilisations can be summed up in three points: a failure of creative power in the minority, an answering withdrawal of mimesis on the part of the majority, and a consequent loss of social unity in the society as a whole.

Toynbee

This blog explores ideas about culture, religion, class, education and politics of the twentieth century’s most influential poet, T.S Eliot. In the 1940s he wrote some essays which were published in 1948 as Notes Towards the Definition of Culture.

Here is a link to a free internet PDF. It’s in the official Collected Works which also has some drafts.

Eliot was both the century’s most influential literary modernist and one of the most influential conservatives. He described himself as ‘classical in literature, royalist in politics, and Anglo-Catholic in religion’. It’s fascinating to see such a combination analyse culture and politics. Walking down the street thinking about this book, into my head popped, as it often does, the scene in Spinal Tap where Nigel, looking at Elvis’ grave, says ‘It really puts perspective on things, doesn’t it?’, and David replies, ‘Yeah, too much perspective’.

Here are some of the big questions he addresses:

• What do we and should we mean by ‘culture’?

• What are the conditions for the development of culture? How has it evolved?

• What is the relationship between ‘culture’ and religion? How important is Christianity in the growth of Europe’s civilisation? What are the implications of its disappearance? If Christianity perishes and the old European education is destroyed, what next — ‘centuries of barbarism’ until something new eventually grows?

• To what extent can conscious human decisions ‘change culture’? How realistic are progressive-socialist-communist hopes they can ‘build a new better culture’? For example, central to any culture is the tension between centralised and decentralised power, and the tension between unity and diversity in religion. How much can these things be shaped by individual decisions? To what extent are even the most powerful individuals almost entirely a ‘sorcerer’s apprentice’, that is, most of their influence is unintended and unpredictable? (Modern political theory teaches its elites both that a) the future is inflexibly determined by ‘forces’ and b) we’re almost entirely free to shape history and human nature as we wish in accordance with our progressive emotions and ‘ideas’, so it’s not surprising these elites try to enact disastrous schemes — a point made by Eliot and Leo Strauss.)

• How do political progressives think about culture, class, elites, education? What does the idea of a ‘classless society’ mean as an ideal and if pursued as a political project? Does the progressive dream of a classless society inherently mean the dominance of a new sort of elite? How will the elites of progressive politics, of communism, differ from the old elites of aristocracy and the upper middle class? What does government by elites, rather than class, mean for culture and education?

• Does high culture — defined by art such as Antigone or Dante — need a class based society where culture is passed on via partly hereditary, though organic, classes? British culture evolved with the aristocracy playing a crucial role including in providing ideals and criteria for others — can high culture survive without such an aristocracy? What happens if this role is taken by elites selected by politics who then try to shape culture for politics?

• Does a mass society — capitalist or socialist — inevitably destroy education standards?

• Can high culture and/or a class system survive a capitalist society with technological change? Is a capitalist society inherently self-destructive because, inter alia, its incentives for individuals over time destroy families and classes needed to preserve and pass on critical elements of the culture on which it relies? Is the modern idea of ‘meritocracy’ (i.e society and incentives should allow each individual to ‘progress’ to whatever role ‘best suits their abilities’) — central to modern Anglo-American capitalism — actually long-term self-destructive? Might the instincts of the old aristocrats pre-1848 be right — that the great local mason should stay a local mason, and a society which puts him on the train to the university in the city, because ‘he’s intelligent and would benefit from education’, is a society killing itself in a few generations? Over 500 years, there has been a transition from aristocratic to bourgeois to democratic society and a transition in the importance of blood, money and achievement — but what if a shift to elites based on some definitions of achievement has (somewhat paradoxically?) led to a decline in creative elites?

• What are the connections between the decline of European culture ~1850-1940 and the emergence of totalitarian politics? For example, Eliot thought that the rise of fascism and communism was accompanied by a growing isolation of Europe’s creative elites and a decline in sharing of ideas between them — both domestically, observable in England and elsewhere, and internationally — a decline partly responsible for Eliot closing Criterion in 1939. Is totalitarian politics attractive partly because the shift from primitive to advanced culture meant a shift from an unconscious identity between religion and culture to conscious exploration of the tensions, and this is a psychological burden — a burden which totalitarian politics promises to remove or relieve?

• This relates directly to what I’ve described as elite fragmentation and polarisation. In one sense the internet makes it easier for creative elites in one area to see, appreciate, and interact with those in other areas. If you look at early optimistic internet predictions, you will see many hopes for what this would bring (and great naivety, cf. Eric Schmidt on politics and internet pre-2016). And with some unusual individuals this has happened and particularly some very young people seem to have developed internet superpowers in this regard. But overall the opposite has happened as I’ve explained. It is strikingly illustrated by how the majority of the old ‘mainstream’ political-pundit world, with its centre of gravity in the New York Times and FT etc, have made the Trump-supporting subculture of Silicon Valley into caricatured hate figures — fascist, selfish, lying and fake. The loathing is such that this ‘serious mainstream’ has had to convince itself that ‘AI is fake’, ‘like a crypto scam’ etc because it’s impossible to face that this subculture might be building things worthwhile. No, everything about them must be bad. The pundits extended their ‘everyone against us is an idiot’ to the people building the most advanced companies and technologies. The guy who figured out how to catch spaceships with chopsticks is, as AOC said — ‘this dude is not smart’. Far from creative elites sharing ideas more than in the past, they seem to be moving away from each other, faster than efforts to reverse the process can take effect. This is entangled with and compounded by the way in which different elites increasingly see each other as delusional and/or evil, therefore discussion between them has declined. (It’s also connected to the effects of the left’s cancel culture because the costs — to family, career, business, social network etc — of being seen to stray from acceptable opinions seemed so high that many withdrew from public debate and institutions swiftly radicalised, driving more out etc.) Instead of arguing, elite groups WhatsApp screenshots of each other’s tweets to like-minded WhatsApp groups and discuss the other’s disintegrating sense of reality and morality. So the process Eliot saw in the inter-war period, but which began before 1914, has accelerated with the internet even though the internet makes it possible for the opposite to happen. See below viz AI/Silicon Valley.

• What are the connections between progressive politics and the relentless attacks on the family, the core unit of cultural transmission?

• What are the connections between the development of western philosophy, including rationalism in all its forms, and the decline of religion and growth of progressive politics?

Rationalism, progressive politics, modernity

Reading Eliot’s book invokes many of the same fundamental issues described by Leo Strauss and Oakeshott. So this blog connects to the blog on Oakeshott and rationalism, the blog on Leo Strauss and philosophy, and the blog on Dostoyevsky. Much of what Eliot reflected on in the 1940s was predicted by Dostoyevsky and Nietzsche.

Eliot, Strauss and Oakeshott all trace the rise of Rationalism in the West, its effects on philosophy, on politics, and on culture. All trace the rise of the individual from 13th century Italy and the counter-forces. All examine Nietzsche’s view on the story of the West and his predictions of how European rationalism was poisoning itself and would end in ‘immense wars of the spirit’, in anti-rationalist movements, cults, and politics. All consider how else we might respond to the fundamental problems of modernity and technology. Survival requires technology. Developing technology imposes restrictions on politics, and, Strauss agreed, made it impossible to return to living like the ancients, even if we want to reject aspects of modern philosophy.

All three are trying to consider the interaction of ideas (e.g rationalism and its opponents such as Rousseau, of Descartes versus Pascal, of Machiavelli against Plato), of material forces (e.g industrialisation), of the relationship between culture and politics including the development of ‘mass society’ and democratic politics, of the effects of modernity on education. All three examine how these things came together in the catastrophe of world wars and totalitarian politics — and how we might escape repeating the nightmares of the 20th century.

Strauss wanted us to revive classical rationalism, take seriously the ancient perspective on philosophy and reject aspects of modern philosophy, not because we can reject modernity — technology makes that impossible — but because we must find a way through it other than repeating the horrors of the 20th century. Eliot wanted Christianity and other aspects of old Europe’s culture to revive and warned that without them we would not resist barbarism. Eliot agreed with Nietzsche’s prediction that the liberals who thought they could ditch Christianity but keep Christian morality would be proved wrong, and the effects would be quite different and very much worse than they expected if those deluded liberals prevailed politically.

Eliot takes it for granted that most people will continue living where they were born and this is good. What are the implications for our culture if our political regime comes to believe that importing millions from the Third World who believe in other gods is good in every way (for culture as well as the economy), while increasingly seeing the original population, and its resistance to being replaced physically and culturally, as a problem to be managed in similar ways to how the old imperial administrations viewed native populations? What if governing elites in the West come to define its own moral hierarchy — because of mutant strains of rationalism — in terms of replacing, rather than nurturing, its own culture? What if ancient churches echo with the chants of Islam, as the rainbow flag of LGBTQH+ hangs behind? Eliot’s perspective on ‘diversity is our strength’ is ‘fascism’, according to the output of the median MP, and PM, of the last 20 years. The gentle old conservatism he represents is long dead, killed by the mutant rationalism he deplored. Is he right that to overcome this mutant rationalism, we must restore parts of Europe’s pre-democratic culture, and if so, how could this happen? Any revival will be a long slog over generations, so what are the first tasks…?

The series on People, Ideas, Machines

XIV: Lessons from preparing for government in 1979 & how No10 worked in the Thatcher regime. Hoskyns’ Just In Time.

XIII: The origins and evolution of the Cabinet Office, the heart of darkness in the permanent government. How was the CO set up? How did it evolve? What critical lessons and questions for the next regime? E.g to ‘reform’ the CO or close the CO? (Close.)

XII: Theories of regime change and civil war. Notes on Turchin’s book. And on Timur Kuran, preference falsification/cascades, how sparks start prairie fires.

XI: Leo Strauss, modernity and regime change — and an update 20/5: Notes on: On Classical Political Philosophy

X: Freedom’s Forge — the story of American business and industrial production in World War II. Incredible contrast between the America of WWII and now viz building things. Highly relevant to current debates on tariffs, supply chains, AI/drones/robotics etc.

IX: A) Britain’s ‘Organization of Victory’ under Pit 1793-1815 and B) Metternich & European Community. How Whitehall-1795 was more like SpaceX-2025 than Whitehall-2025 is. Real meetings. R&D taken seriously. Procurement and infrastructure taken seriously. Over 230 years Whitehall has gone backwards.

VIII: CIA counterintelligence chief James Angleton, ‘a wilderness of mirrors’, covert operations, assassinations, moles & double agents, disinformation. A blog on Angleton and the broader history of the CIA and US elites’ attempts to understand the political world. The long-term failures of the CIA on critical geopolitical issues, their security failures and penetration by the KGB, the fundamental problems of building effective intelligence agencies and integrating their work in an overall institutional structure — these deep problems are all extremely relevant to today as Washington increasingly can align on just one thing, hostility to China. Given this history we should not bet on the Washington deep state outperforming the PRC on intelligence and in many areas it seems the PRC has learned lessons from America’s victory over the Soviet Union better than Washington learned them.

VII: On RV Jones, Scientific Intelligence in World War II, how Whitehall vandalised the successful system immediately after the war. Many issues explored in the RVJ blog are relevant to those interested in the future of AI, ‘safety’, and security.

VI: Alanbrooke diaries, incredibly relevant to today’s problems and what military ‘strategy’ really is.

V: Colin Gray and defence planning. What’s the difference between ends, ways, means? What’s the difference between strategy, tactics, operations? Why such confusion? What is defence planning, how does it fit with strategy?

IV: Notes on The Kill Chain — US procurement horrors, new technologies, planning for war with PRC.

III: More on fallacies of nuclear thinking / strategy / deterrence. If you read this and the earlier one you’ll see that almost everything the media says about Putin and nuclear threats is wrong / misguided and, worse, so is much of what is said by international relations/historians/military academics.

II: Thinking about nuclear weapons

I: On innovation in militaries, when does it succeed/fail — e.g why US got ahead on aircraft carriers, RAF defence in 1930s.

Prediction: 1) lessons from UKR will overwhelmingly support the arguments of those who in 2020 argued for radical MoD changes (including taking money from old tank projects that everybody privately admitted were a multi-billion pound disaster) and 2) the correct criticism of the review and connected documents will be seen as a) they did not go nearly far enough, b) the collapse of No10 follow through on defence reform in 2021 was — like the collapse of 2020 plans for planning reform, tax cuts, deregulation, Project Speed, intense focus on R&D and skills etc — a disaster for the country (and a political disaster for the Tory Party). [Me, 3/2022]

Other related stuff…

On rationalism and politics (2022).

On Lee Kuan Yew’s brilliant, fascinating, extremely valuable Memoirs.

On high performance government, ‘cognitive technologies’, ‘Seeing Rooms’, UK crisis management (2019)

On AI, nuclear issues, Project Maven (2019)

On the ARPA/PARC ‘Dream Machine’, science funding, high performance, and UK national strategy (2018)

On ‘systems engineering’ and ‘systems management’ — ideas from the Apollo programme for a ‘systems politics’ (2017)

On China vs US, the ‘Thucydides trap’ book (2017)

And obviously I think that if you’re thinking through AI and geopolitics you should study, or at least skim for a weekend, my chronology of Bismarck. A month of study and you’ll be in the top 0.01% of people who really understand high performance politics, an incredible shortcut! If you take this path, you will have a great advantage over your competitors.

On Tolstoy and War and Peace.

‘Italics inside quotes’ is Eliot, all bold is me.

There is a summary if you don’t want to read it all, click to the bottom then scroll up.

Reading Eliot’s ideas while also watching the unfolding AI/agents developments naturally makes one think about artificial cultures the agents will create, how Silicon Valley is thinking about politics and culture etc. A few thoughts at the end.

If you feed Eliot below into any models and get interesting outputs, please post in Comments or WhatsApp me.

I’ll post shortly about developments with yookay politics, Farage’s very clear decision on Reform’s direction, Iran etc.

Introduction

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Yeah it’s harder to get a GP appointment than tickets for One Direction back in the day, you call in and you’re 55 in the queue, then it’s cancelled, it’s insane.

I don’t think he’s [Farage] Far Right, I’m branded Far Right but I’m not, I’m Right, and he’s just Right too, I feel moderate but the left has gone so far left it makes anyone seem like we’ve changed but we haven’t, and the BBC lies about it and calls us all fascists. But there’s not enough of a team. My worry is we have a split and we’re stuck with Labour.

We’re reaching the point where Labour got in cos the Tories were a disaster then we’ve had a disastrous Labour government, so give Farage a go just cos we need any alternative. The Tories are irrelevant, on the sidelines. Would it be good? Are any of them?! He’s different to the other two. But his Party isn’t up to being a professional government yet.

He’s convincing [Farage] but I question if he’s a team player, he’ll find it very hard to be PM, how will he run all the departments? I can see him winning but then failing as PM.

I live in a village called [X], in ten years it’s been overrun, we now call it Halal [X], it’s a small English village but it’s now got mosques, there’s rows and an edge, and there’s white flight, I‘m selling my house and I’m leaving, the people who’ve arrived don’t want to live by our rules and they’re not working. I work, my kids work, the immigration system is out of control. [And he UNDERestimated the level of immigration by a lot]

It’s like they [MPs] hate us, they’re not on our side.

Swing voters in swing constituencies…

The culture of Europe has deteriorated visibly within the memory of many who are by no means the oldest among us… There is no doubt that in our headlong rush to educate everybody, we are lowering our standards and more and more abandoning the study of those subjects by which the essentials of our culture … are transmitted; destroying our ancient edifices to make ready the ground upon which the barbarian nomads of the future will encamp in their mechanised caravans.

TS Eliot, Notes on Education and Culture

Nihilism has become the American way, which is a fatal shock to cultural development and the American spirit… If the value system collapses, how can the social system be sustained?

Wang Huning, close adviser to Xi

What has driven the rise of the French far right in the past 20 years?

“Immigration and also the total scorn of the elites. In France, immigrants from northern Africa, who are usually Muslim, don’t integrate well.”

Doesn’t integration take time?

“In France, it’s the reverse. It’s the second or third generation that is making trouble. We are witnessing a dis-assimilation. It’s a catastrophe.”

Houellebecq interview

I said last year I would spend less time this year on SW1 until the old system cracks open. This blog is finishing off a 2025 project. It has two sections.

1. A summary of a deep market research project I did in October/November. Voters’ top priorities? Views on Starmer, Kemi B, Farage, Jenrick and the parties? Views on Net Zero and conservation? The NHS? The cost of living? Immigration, boats, communities shifting ethnically? Welfare/benefits? The aesthetics of rightwing videos? (Aesthetics polarise emotionally even when people agree on facts/problem/policy.)

2. Some sketches of how SW1 Insiders are likely to respond to opinion. What will they absorb or distort, how will their behaviour change? How will the SW1 system evolve 2026-29?

It’s not about what I think should be built. I’ve explained that many times. The question is whether people with talent, money, ambition and willpower will decide to cross the Rubicon instead of fish in it. There’s a policy agenda which, with the right leadership and campaign, would deal with most of our most acute problems and have the support of a majority in Parliament — but the existing parties repulse, like an immune system repulsing an invader, the combination of the plan, the detail, the talent, and the campaign, and the combination doesn’t make sense to how Westminster en masse thinks of ‘politics’.

As you watch Starmer collapse, remember — SW1’s experts, heads of TV news, FT pundits, the Institute for Government etc told you Starmer and Sue Gray were ‘the serious grownups’ who would bring ‘calm stability’ after ‘Brexit chaos’. As Andrew Marr, ex BBC political editor put it:

We have to be optimistic. Just having a stable government there for five, ten years. With ordinary down-to-earth serious people talking like the rest of us in charge of the government. A plan that doesn’t shift very much. A wall of money coming in from around the world… A little haven of peace and stability…

MPs are hysterical over Epstein after spending 20 years suppressing investigation and reporting of industrialised child abuse here because it undermines their cross-party consensus on immigration policy. Outside SW1 you might think that the Epstein affair means they’ll now have to deal with the grooming gangs differently. After all, Epstein is an American paedo scandal but the gangs is a domestic paedo scandal on a much vaster scale, right? No, dear reader, Epstein will blow over, SW1 will move on to the months of soap opera over Starmer’s replacement and will continue ignoring the gangs, which will continue to operate, meanwhile Whitehall is incinerating documents over child abuse before it becomes a criminal offence when the new fake Inquiry starts… The system will continue working as intended… (Look at how much the BBC covered Rupert Lowe MP trying to uncover the gangs this week: 0.)

British politics is in a doomloop similar to many western countries:

A. The deafening verdict of voters in election after election (Brexit, Trump 1 and 2 etc) and the drop in support for old parties everywhere is that Insiders have failed and voters want change — a failure of ideas, institutions, and operational competence, a failure to take or impose responsibility for failure (cf. Iraq, Afghanistan, financial crisis, covid, Ukraine etc). Old parties, old state bureaucracies, old institutions of all kinds — from the EU and NATO to the media and universities — have seen an epic collapse of trust.

B. Insiders’ response to this repeated verdict is a) doubling down on more of the things voters keep rejecting, especially importing men from the worst places on earth, b) an increasingly deranged discussion among themselves that ‘the real problem’ is actually the voters, because — fooled by disinformation, ‘Russian interference’, tech oligarchs etc — they have embraced populism, racism, fascism, and c) the solution is to ‘restore trust’ in Insiders’ ideas and institutions and give them more power and money.

C. Those Outsiders who want to replace this doomloop between voters and Insiders can’t coordinate to build a political entity to do it.

To voters, Insiders are the villains and Insider failure is the cause of the collapse of their trust. To Insiders, they are the traduced victims and the cause of the collapse of trust is the evil treachery of other elites, the interference of evil foreigners (‘Putin did Brexit!’), and the ignorance and stupidity of voters.

Insiders destroyed their own OODA loops. They radicalised Left but can’t see it so their entire orientation is off kilter. Ironically it wouldn’t be hard to be a popular government — but the changes needed are fiercely resisted in a pathological self-defeating pattern by political-bureaucratic elites, because of the stories they believe, the powerful forces of mimesis which surround them, and the disintegration of feedback mechanisms. E.g ‘Stopping the boats’ is operational childsplay, doable in days according to UK forces asked to plan to stop them — not even in the 100 most complex/difficult government problems — and the entire problem is Insiders’ determination to prioritise keeping the legal barriers to solving the problem particularly the ECHR/HRA.

Voters think, ‘we keep voting for change but they won’t change’. When politicians try to change even modestly, they find it almost impossible to make the state bureaucracies evolved since 1945 follow orders. Officials across the west have dug in and grasp that the collapsed talent level of modern politicians, their incentives etc mean that officials can just refuse to change and almost always win. After covid, the old parties everywhere united in supporting the very bureaucracies responsible for killing millions and widespread disaster. Sunak and Starmer supported and empowered the precise Cabinet Office system which destroyed their ability to do what they said they would do, then both were totally bewildered by their political collapse then continued babbling support for what killed them.

These processes are part of a long-term cycle of regime change, very similar to the 1840s-70s.

So we’re in a holding pattern. The long-term entropic forces of Westminster’s pathological vandalism demonstrate themselves weekly in a torrent of humiliation — Westminster has made us a tragi-comic global internet meme. Westminster watches itself to see how it will react to the uselessness of two more duds in charge of the two old rotten parties — duds much of SW1 tried to elevate as ‘serious people’.

Farage tells people ‘after May’ Reform will start showing a transformation yet he’s spent his time recruiting some of the worst Tory dregs to help him persuade voters to vote for ‘change’. The voters are more angry and desperate than ever, but Westminster can’t cope with the feedback.

Elites have fragmented and many now also want something radically different, but this process is different in different countries. In America it’s been accelerated by Elon and the MAGA Silicon Valley network. In Britain, there’s a lot of private whining at dinner parties but very little public action. Most people with money and/or talent have kept hoping vainly that the old system might fix itself and don’t want to make enemies. Starmer has scuppered that hope but there remains no clear solution.

The gap between a) what’s really needed to solve our problems and b) what’s acceptable in Insider dinner parties is relentlessly growing — it’s much bigger than it was in 2020 and ‘what’s needed’ will seem more inconceivable for the median SW1 character the longer we continue on the Brown-Osborne-May-Sunak-Starmer trajectory. As this gap grows, elite fragmentation grows and it becomes harder for people to have meaningful discussion. Insiders seem more and more determined to try to drag what they think of as ‘the progressive arc of history’ back towards 1998, their comfort zone between the fall of the Wall and the fall of the Towers. They quote Blair on ‘open vs closed’ and ‘radical centrism’. They speculate on rejoining the EU and other changes to squash pesky demands for change — we had it cracked in the nineties, we just need to find our way back, they tell each other at Lake Como conferences on ‘alienation and populism’. This seems more and more delusional to Outsider elites who in turn seem more and more ‘extreme/fascist’ to Insiders. Bridges between networks become harder to maintain socially as informational lightcones separate on WhatsApp groups, X/Bluesky etc.

I think it will be resolved this year whether: A) Starmer and Kemi are binned as I said would happen last year, and the two old parties are irreversibly splintering, B) Farage’s promises are true or the cynics are right and it’s clear that a Reform government would be just another SW1 clownshow, C) whether elite fragmentation generates a serious alternative, or D) if not, then the rush to the exits — of talent and money — will accelerate as people realise that the next election is heading for either a Farage clownshow or a red-green-yellow-Hamas-troon-ScotNat-rainbow coalition, raising the probability of financial crisis and street violence, which may arrive anyway before then given SW1’s disintegration.

Westminster can’t solve the problems caused by Westminster and broader cultural forces acting over many decades. The historical solution is a section of elites allying with a majority of voters but it’s intrinsically hard for elites to coordinate before collapse given the asymmetries of risk and rewards, hence the pattern of regime collapse. Elon’s historic decisions changed America’s trajectory partly because huge errors by the Biden White House provoked a critical mass of dissident competent elites to take the plunge and coordinate. What would something similar here look like? And if it becomes clear all options in 2029 are worse than today, where does the energy and talent that does not emigrate go?

Everything will be under more pressure because SW1 united behind escalating the dumbest war in recent history and won’t be able to hide the disaster — or the vast historic prize NATO has given China — for much longer. The psychic nightmare for SW1, and the entire ecosystem which peddled Ukraine fairy tales, as they’re forced to confront this will generate more pathological responses. Tories and Reform will support mad ideas which emerge from the deep state to be burbled by Starmer as he fades out — a PM who at international meetings increasingly resembles a mentally impaired hobbit at a Gondor wedding staggering around in terror of being trampled by the Big Folk. Awful as things are, they can get much, much worse fast.

Such exercises in examining voters’ beliefs always generate many interesting things. One concerns immigration which I explore in detail below.

Those who consider themselves the ‘serious sensible people of SW1’ — i.e those who radicalised sharply Left post-2015 towards Greta-Gaza-‘trans’, but think the problem is voters radicalising Right — have continued their post-referendum doubling down and persuaded themselves of new fictions regarding immigration including the idea that the polls showing voter concern over immigration reflects media coverage which makes them greatly over-estimate the scale of immigration. If you believe this then you naturally believe other things about what’s happening and what political entities should do.

I suspected this is delusional so decided to see what voters think about this hypothesis. I was surprised by how deluded. It turns out that the mainstream voters I explored actually greatly under-estimate the scale of immigration — and not by 10% or 30% but by a factor between 5X and 30X. Over and over, normal voters estimate the scale of immigration since January 2021 at ‘200,000, 50,000, 300,000, 100,000, 700,000, 250,000’ — i.e roughly 5X and 30X times lower than it is. And when they are shown the real numbers and graphs since 1997 and 2021 — million after million after million — they are almost all ‘shocked’. They aren’t buying ‘diversity is our strength’. They are much more hostile to Labour and Tories and much more supportive of much stronger measures than most Tory MPs.

The lack of voter knowledge combined with what voters do think and know is an indictment of the SW1 Right but also a) a sign of where opinion will go as awareness of reality spreads and b) a huge opportunity. A competent campaign — think ‘£350 million’ but on immigration today — driving carefully chosen numbers and stories to jiujitsu SW1 fear and rage against themselves and hence build support to solve the problem, would be disastrous for Labour, Tories and Whitehall.

How could this be true when ‘the right wing media constantly exaggerates the problem’, I hear you ask?! I explain this and other interesting things below.

When I do these exercises on voter opinion, I’m trying to figure out the truth and avoid confusing a) what voters really believe, b) what I want them to believe or not believe and c) what I/others could persuade them to believe. Politics is plagued by research efforts that really are done to make money, produce evidence to support arguments/action people already want to make/do, curry favour, build relationships, get promoted etc.

I try hard not to kid myself about the difference between my views and normal voters. As I live mostly in London this has got harder, compounded by becoming famous so talking to people directly is refracted through a fog. I was surprised by lots of what we found. If you’re reading this blog, probably your life is financially easier than the median voter and you spend a lot more time looking at politics than the median voter. If you spend most of your time talking to comfortably off graduates, I urge you to discount what you want to be true, the emotions of your social network and how you and they feel about ‘political identity’, when you read what voters say below. Our first job is ‘not to fool yourself, and you’re the easiest person to fool’.

How to summarise what I found?

Voters are angrier and more fearful and more hateful of Westminster than ever before.

On the other hand, they greatly under-estimate the real scale of immigration; they are almost totally unaware of the insane immigration cases regarding sex criminals and murderers and terrorists; they do not understand the scale of the debt; they’re mad about the scale of benefits cheating but greatly under-estimate its scale; they don’t understand the depth of vandalism of the armed forces; they understand problems with the police better than MPs but still under-estimate them; they’ve become more realistic about the NHS and the implications of immigration and ageing for it but don’t trust any mainstream political force to make significant changes; they’ve become much more hostile to SW1’s consensus on Net Zero but don’t realise the scale of mad costs SW1 locked us into and how hard it will be to change to sensible policies on energy and environment.

Although voters are more pessimistic than ever and more realistic than Insiders, they are not realistic enough about the extent of the rot so there is scope for hatred of both old parties to grow a lot and desire for something new to grow a lot — and this dynamic is demonstrated in groups when one talks them through various things.

Further, consider that what you read below about voter hate for the old parties was before the resurrection of the Epstein scandal in the last week. Already record lows of trust and record highs of hate will be even worse now and, given the inevitable continual crumbling of SW1 in coming months, even worse by summer.

Another ‘conspiracy theory’ comes true

I’ve written many times how our political crisis is illustrated by how often high status Insiders, including people who present ‘the news’, describe something as ‘a conspiracy theory’ then it turns out to be true. Those people mostly fell hook, line and sinker for the actual big conspiracy theory of the past 20 years — the Russiagate hoax on Brexit and Trump, created by the likes of Jake Sullivan to undermine the legitimacy of Trump.

Here is another good example.

Last May I wrote on this blog about UAE bigshots appalled at how we’re dealing with Islamic nutjobs. I had just talked to a) a CTO of a tech firm who’d just been there and b) a British soldier who’d just been there. Both had been to dinners with bigshots and both told me, within a few weeks, the same story about their conversations. So I wrote this (bold added):

Aspects of the situation are tragi-comic. E.g if you talk to senior people in places like UAE, they tell you that bigshots in that region now tell each other — don’t send your kids to be educated in Britain, they’ll come back radical Islamist nutjobs! Our regime has spent thirty years a) destroying border control and sane immigration (including the Home Office’s jihad against the highest skilled, whom they truly loathe discussing and try to repel with stupid fees etc) and b) actively prioritising people from the most barbaric places on earth (hence immigration from the tribal areas most responsible for the grooming/rape gangs keeps rising) and c) funding the spread of those barbaric ideas and defending the organisations spreading them with human rights laws designed to stop the return of totalitarianism in Europe.

At Christmas, the UAE finally got sick of complaining in Whitehall and briefed that they are limiting students coming because of our problem with extremist radicalisation and mad universities.

People pointed out how my original blog had triggered The Rest Is Politics. Rory ‘Kamala will win easy’ Stewart and Alistair ‘45 minutes’ Campbell did their show about my blog last May, describing it as ‘a conspiracy theory’ and how it illustrated generally I’m a psycho who spreads ‘bullshit’ to cause chaos, that’s ‘very very Cummings’. You can see a clip of Rory here which they tweeted out.

In the clip they tell their fans that I claimed this information came from organisations with ‘ludicrous acronyms to sound like he’s on the inside line … and classified information nobody else knows about’ etc. As you can see above, I didn’t say anything about classified information or ‘acronyms’, I just stated it as a fact. Rory also repeats the myth that I write Elon’s tweets, which for some reason No10 spread a year ago and is also ludicrous, and claims I’m in the pay of the Emirates (just like I was ‘in the pay of Putin’), while I’m one of the few senior people in SW1 who has never taken a penny from them or even been there — Rory and AC cannot say the same! SW1 invents things about me then believes their inventions, a constant process.

Apart from the general process of elite polarisation and the collapse of consensus reality I’ve written about a lot — and touch on below — their claims about ‘conspiracy theories’ is connected to the radicalisation of SW1 on Islam illustrated by one of many dismal Christmas stories.

Over Christmas, it turned out that most of SW1 — Labour and Tory MPs, the FO etc — and much of luvvie world had mobilised to give an Egyptian nutjob British citizenship and lobby the Egyptian government to release him from jail, which they finally did. Already, characteristically pathological of SW1. But then it beautifully turned out that the nutjob had said all sorts of nutjob things on Twitter including open calls for violence against Jews.

The PM welcomed his release and described bringing another nutter to Britain as one of his ‘top priorities’. No10 therefore had to scramble to the ‘we were useless’ defence and claim the entire campaign over years — which they said was ‘top priority’ for No10 and the PM — had never involved anybody ever doing any checking on the nutjob before mobilising SW1 and Hampstead. So No10’s defence was — neither the PM, any other minister, or anybody else in Whitehall involved in the campaign to release this guy and bring him to Britain ever checked why the Egyptians might have jailed him. Forget all the capabilities of the deep state, nobody — from the Foreign Office to The Times leader writers — even did a quick google search. Absurd as it it, they had to say this as the alternative is ‘we knew what he said and that’s why we made him a priority’. (Obviously some people in Whitehall did know he was a nutjob but they couldn’t admit that.)

These two stories are related. Middle East regimes see Britain as a dangerous source of radicalised nutjobs and decades behind them in dealing with this problem. It’s similar to how Middle East regimes have leapfrogged European regimes in many technology areas and are now more important to Washington and Beijing than Europe is, but the European/yookay story is in a timewarp where obviously we are more advanced than them.

(At roughly the same time as No10 was tweeting that it’s their ‘top priority’ to import more Islamic maniacs, Whitehall was also banning this white Dutch young woman politician from entering the yookay because she tweets stories of illegal immigrants killing Europeans and criticises yookay immigration policy. More very logical government from a government giving away the Chagos islands, importing terrorists and giving them millions, and using government lawyers to attack British special forces via lawfare using lawyer friends of Starmer and Hermer, both friends of the disgraced lawyer who invented abuses by British soldiers and, obviously, escaped jail.)

The phenomenon whereby the authorities define something as a ‘conspiracy theory’, and the old media especially the BBC reinforces the claim, then it turns out to be true is particularly striking regarding stories about extremism/Islam.

For example, in 2024 much of SW1 supported Starmer attacking those claiming the killer of the three school children was connected to Islam — ‘dangerous disinformation’ and ‘a conspiracy theory’ they screamed, and used this to justify jailing people. Then No10 admitted weeks later the PM had been told immediately the killer had been downloading Al Qaeda manuals on terrorism.

In January 2025 as the grooming gangs story resurfaced, the PM gave a speech claiming ‘the real story’ was not the gangs themselves but the radicalisation of the far right, ‘disinformation’, and Elon spreading ‘conspiracy theories’ about Islam. The BBC and much of SW1 cheered Starmer. ‘Best PM speech’ said NPCs like Lewis ‘what’s Article 50’ Goodall. A few months later, SW1 had to do Narrative Whiplash and finally accept the need for an official gangs inquiry — which, obviously, they have delayed and delayed so that Whitehall can destroy documents and ensure that it drags out like the fake covid Inquiry for years, while the gangs still run riot.

SW1 cross party consensus has normalised weekly marches by Islamic nutjobs calling for another Holocaust — ignored in SW1 but watched around the world. This week the marchers are cheering Iran’s slaughter of 20-40 thousand. And in the background, the PM, Attorney General, the Cabinet Office and MoD send their lawyers to wreck the lives of British Special Forces who risked their lives to stop Islamic nutjobs killing us. Tories like Ben Wallace signed this off, Labour continued and sharpened it — and this is watched carefully around the world by people who understand what this means about our political elite. We will all pay.

The SW1 characters who live through cycle after cycle of Narrative Whiplash never face the cognitive dissonance. At the same time SW1 was praising Starmer for rejecting an inquiry into the gangs a year ago, its pundits were also herding to a) Starmer is doing brilliantly with his ‘coalition of the willing’ on Ukraine where Russia’s offensive has failed, and b) MAGA hostility to Zelensky is a disaster for Farage, ‘populism’s peaked’ etc. Remember that? No, neither do they…

Also bear in mind when you hear ‘conspiracy theory’ a new trend on the Left. For many years they described the Great Replacement as a ‘conspiracy theory’. But there is a growing trend for left politicians to adopt the term and argue — yes, we want to replace the old whites, replacement is good, replacement is inevitable, if you don’t like it you are fascist! Check out this Spanish politician. The Spanish government legalised 500k illegals last week. She took to the stage to state that they will then give them a vote to make real ‘replacement theory’, and this week the same government announced a big set of censorship measures to ‘counter hate’ from the natives. She is not a freak. The same dynamics are at work across Europe and in SW1. Our own NPCs have got a software patch and many are shifting this way…

Read more

Some Governments are in office but not in power; the Civil Service is always in office and always in power.

Prime Minister Baldwin, 1925

From the decision to elevate the general administrator, the mandarin, and grant to his corporation supreme influence, much of the present discomfiture of the country has followed. Hardly ever has so anachronistic a change occurred in a vital organ of a great empire at a worse moment. The discrepancy between tasks and means is still steadily increasing.

Thomas Balogh, The Apotheosis of the Dilettante, 1959

The British have formed the habit of praising their institutions, which are often inept, and of ignoring the character of their race, which is often superb. In the end they will be in danger of losing their character and being left with their institutions, a result disastrous indeed.

Lord Radcliffe, Reith Lectures, 1951.

The failings of the upper echelons of the Civil Service were an important part of the British sickness. The Civil Service helped to shape, and was shaped by, Britain’s post-war malaise.

Hoskyns

Why did the politicians and civil servants seem so completely out of their depth? Were we in the grip of some historically inevitable process about which we could do nothing? Was some new political coalition … a necessary preconditions for any cure?…

They [SW1 discussions] did not start from a shared understanding of the problem. The discussions would therefore range haphazardly over problems, causes, symptoms and possible solutions, getting nowhere…

All big problems in human affairs have these characteristics. They are not problems of the kind one deals with in day-to-day life. They are systems problems in which complex processes are beginning to go wrong, where destructive chain reactions run out of control.

Hoskyns’ reflections, mid-1970s

A tiny incident but it told me a lot and suddenly made me feel, more completely and irrevocably than ever before, that the Civil Service are the real enemy of hope for the future and they are therefore my enemy.

Hoskyns on a personnel dispute with the Cabinet Secretary, 1979.

In a job like mine, experience of politics was less important than experience in getting difficult things done.

Hoskyns re the value of normal SW1 experience

A country’s history is not changed by politicians who are unable to control their own diaries.

Norman Strauss

The actions and style of the Major-Heseltine-Hurd-Clarke-Patten team, almost a counter-revolution, indicated that large parts of the Conservative Party had been unable to internalise the new politics… The long march back through the semi-socialist institutions never happened.

Hoskyns reflecting on the Thatcher project and Major

UPDATE: 28/11, finished. JH leaves and reflects.

I’ve added a Summary and some Questions for those thinking about how to be the next PM.

Plus some corrections, minor edits of main text.

In 2026 this blog will steer clear of these SW1 issues. I’ve done this to death and it’s time to move on. Starmer’s replacement will be another iteration of the broken system with added farce, chaos, and financial market involvement. The issue is how fast that implodes and whether anyone embarks on trying to hire a team such that the PM after Starmer’s replacement ditches Northcote-Trevelyan and we have the first government that controls the government in living memory.

The Covid Inquiry publishing a Report which systematically lies and deliberately did not ask dozens of witnesses for evidence to make their lies easier to tell — and most of the legacy media repeating lies as truth — is a perfect end stage story for the old regime, while the lawyers build themselves country houses with the cash they’re looting and Whitehall expands its HR empires as ‘lessons learned’ from covid. No blog of mine can compete with this. Like importing jihadis actually called ‘Jihadi’ while conducting lawfare against the SAS, the end stage of Whitehall is beyond any satire.

The dynamics of the old system’s failure are all now clear for those who want to see. The old system will dig in, loot more money, destroy more and more, until financial crash and mass violence or it’s replaced. Those who want to replace it have to focus on specific people, legal changes etc while building a mass movement.

In 2025 I mostly abandoned explaining the Narrative Whiplash and comic punditry of the old system. In 2026 I will abandon my long running explanations of the pathological institutions. I am thoroughly sick of the sound of my own voice on the subject.

Here are three amazingly deep delusions in SW1 that together help explain how reality bounces off that community and why it’s become normalised among Insiders who self-describe as ‘liberal’ to call for the banning of social media and state control of news:

1. AI is fake, just plausible nonsense as a former senior GCHQ official recently declared, accidentally illustrating why the yookay deep state is in such a dire state on technology. It has become conventional wisdom to think that political pundits with zero management/entrepreneurial/technology experience of any kind are much deeper experts on running tech companies than Elon.

2. Voters rating immigration as a top 3 priority is ‘because of media coverage and if MPs and newspapers stop talking about it voters will stop saying it’s a big deal’. I’m ashamed to admit that I predicted a decade ago this delusion would not survive the referendum. It survived not just the referendum and three years of constitutional conflict but the Trolley and Sunak and Starmer importing many millions more and expanding the benefit system to encourage the immigration of Somalis, Pakistanis etc to have more children, all paid for by rising taxes, and cross party consensus that discussing the rape gangs is a ‘racist conspiracy theory’. And it’s even more firmly believed today by many in SW1 than a decade ago. The Great Replacement Theory went from ‘racist conspiracy theory’ to ‘replacing a majority white civilisation with the Third World is a good policy and you’re racist if you don’t like it’ with almost no intervening stage in the Narrative Whiplash.

3. The UKR disaster can be salvaged. Close to 100% of SW1 swallowed the entire propaganda whole. Every aspect of conventional wisdom has blown up on them but such is the modern Insider ecosystem that they still refuse to face it. Outside the NATO media ecosystem they are stunned by what they see. China is the huge winner, as I said would happen in Q1 2022. The PRC deep state has been given a vast, vast historic present and they laugh deeper and deeper every day. Brussels says their 139th round of sanctions will finally crush Putin’s war machine and our MPs nod along. Meanwhile we import Russian oil via India — take that Putin!

I’ve been working with some people to explore the use of AI models for political projects. If you know of particularly good things on ‘how to use the models’ — for text, video, anything — please post links in Comments.

My time will be spent differently in 2026. Please leave any suggestions on what you’d like to see more/less of as I ponder the future of this blog…

UPDATE: 23/11/25: the 1980 ‘you turn if you want to’ speech, realising their errors and changing course in the famous 1981 budget, reshuffle with Prior et al out, Hoskyns and Wolfson wrote a memo on her failings which failed to land, Hoskyns decides to leave.

UPDATE: 16/11/25: Hoskyns goes into No10, they make big early economic mistakes because of lack of preparations and grip of the system, interaction of the failures of civil service with inadequacies of MPs to organise themselves. Course correction in Q1 1980…

And some Snippets:

• Senior generals go over the top on lawfare against Special Forces, pressure builds on General Roly Walker, and generals finally focus on the core issue: the Human Rights Act.

• Great interview by my wife with a legend of the SAS, former RSM of 22 SAS George Simm.

• Russiagate hoax, highly relevant to the near universal madness on Ukraine. NB. Most SW1 hacks think the truth is ‘disinformation’ and the disinformation is true.

• Legacy media hacks defending the lies and corruption of the BBC.

This blog is for the overlapping networks thinking:

How could the next No10 not be like the post-Thatcher No10s and instead be at least as important as the Thatcher project and ideally on the historic scale of Lee Kuan Yew genuinely transforming a country’s political economy and governance?

There have been successful political/electoral projects after Thatcher but there has been no other No10-government project successful on anything like the scale of the Thatcher project, able to combine:

A. A real leader. Thatcher had flaws and some of them are characteristic of the MPs who select into modern SW1 such as a lack of skills seen in great CEOs — prone to hopeless chairing of meetings, difficulties running a team etc. But she also had genuine leadership abilities, she had moral courage, she was very determined, she was interested in ideas and power, and she was focused on the real job, she’s the last PM who did *not* see No10’s core job as Content Provider for Legacy Media Entertainment. No Pitt but obviously more consequential than her successors.

B. An accurate map of the core problems.

C. Agreed goals and a plan for how to get there including changing Whitehall.

D. A team with the skills to get it done.

E. A story for the country.

F. The leader, map, goals, plan, team, story and execution etc sort of (barely) coming and holding together for years such that a real transformation happens.

The story is told by John Hoskyns (JH) in his memoir, Just In Time.

Hoskyns’ father was killed in the defence of Calais to buy time for the Dunkirk evacuation. JH served in the army then created one of the very first British software startups in 1964. Dealing with the disintegration of the British economy in the 1960s-70s as an entrepreneur, he became obsessed with the complex causes of the problems and how to fix them. He sold his company so he could pursue politics. He set out to become friends with the people around the IEA and CPS in the 1970s and through those networks got to know Thatcher, Howe and Keith Joseph. He wrote plans, including the Stepping Stones memo, and tried to corral leading politicians to consider a systematic explanation of the problems and therefore an agreed step-by-step plan for fixing them. When she won the 1979 election he went to No10 to run the Policy Unit. He worked with her through the first tumultuous critical years until resigning in 1982. His Memoir draws on a detailed diary he kept.

For all those thinking about the next regime, Hoskyns’ memoir will be fascinating and rewarding. It is amazingly little known in SW1. I think that of MPs I’ve asked ‘have you read it’, only one or two have said Yes. There is no other post-1979 British book like it partly because there has not been since then a combination of a) someone with his training and intellectual perspective at the heart of power working for b) a real political leader trying to change deep things. (The best example of something modern written in another country is Lee Kuan Yew’s memoir which I did several blogs on in 2021.)

I had the privilege of writing to JH before he died and he sent me thoughts and some old things he’d written about Whitehall. Many of the things I’ve said since 1999 were more elegantly explained by him decades ago.

Hoskyns’ situation obviously rhymes with today:

• A failed economic consensus which has produced stagnation, misery, investment fleeing and a doomloop of negativity.

• Whitehall stuck repeating the failed consensus and resisting change. Senior civil servants strongly resistant to outsiders explaining their mistakes and showing how to do things better, a determination in Whitehall to continue with what they’ve been doing and how they’ve been doing it which seems increasingly crackers outside SW1.

• Parties struggling to find new ideas or explain them.

• Parties struggling to make Whitehall act differently even when they came up with new ideas.

• MPs unwilling to take responsibility for governing and impose their will on the civil service then blaming officials for failure while the officials blame the MPs — as they say in Moscow, ‘everyone’s right and everyone’s unhappy’.

• Very powerful self-reinforcing elite networks across politics, civil service, academia, and legacy media telling themselves that the answers to everything are essentially: higher taxes, more state control, ‘trust and support the civil service’, and all alternatives to SW1 consensus are ‘extremist’.

• A growing feeling of a ‘systems crisis’ in which many different failures interacted with each other to make it very hard to see how to escape and what to focus on first, so many things feel like a precondition for other things.

• MPs lacking the skills to cope with a systems crisis so they go around in circles and default to focus on the legacy media news cycle and diaries organised by officials (often to keep them out the way).

• Widespread assumptions that attempts to break out of the doomloop were doomed.

• Talent, especially young talent, leaving for America in despair. Talent which talks to senior SW1 figures rapidly becomes more despairing of the prospects of recovery!

• Declining international confidence in SW1 and the capacity of UK elites to bootstrap themselves out of perpetual crisis.

Some of you reading this will find particularly striking in the Hoskyns-Thatcher story the combination of:

• One of Britain’s very first software startups.

• A nuclear physicist.

• A causal wiring diagram of Britain’s core problems. (Imagine what LLMs could do with this concept now, see below.)

History doesn’t repeat but it rhymes…

The country has been living off the wealth generated by the Thatcher project ~1976-1985 which turned many things around and put us on a different path. That project had economic momentum which carried us through the failures of Major, Blair, Cameron etc. But Thatcher’s successors have cumulatively done so much damage to infrastructure, regulation, capital budgets, critical capabilities etc — while in parallel very long term dynamics with elite talent and SW1 played out, rotting the system — such that the economic momentum of the Thatcher project has run out and left us stalled with unprecedented stagnation in productivity and wage growth. The economic stagnation is a big cause of our rolling political crisis.

Hoskyns makes clear that the main failure of the Thatcher project was her failure to face the reality of modern Whitehall and how the senior civil service had evolved. If she had done, history would have been very different. This failure led to other failures including Thatcher getting conned over the Single Market and other aspects of the European project which Insiders successfully misled her about (and later bragged about).

Much of recent history has been driven by the country and its political elites struggling to cope with the effects of the errors and delusions of Tory politicians between the 1940s, when the appalling FO dismissed Monnet’s plans for supranational European institutions as fantasies, and the 1980s, when the appalling FO fooled Thatcher and itself and the rest of Whitehall about the next phases of the Monnet-Delors European project. It’s a story of conscious deliberate deception by a tiny subset of elites (e.g some senior officials in the FO) and 99% of the rest of SW1 Insider-world swallowing the propaganda, deluding itself and parroting errors and delusions to each other, the media and the public (similar to Ukraine). Like all such elite projects, those engaged in the pro-EEC/EU lies saw themselves in Platonic terms — noble lies for the greater good.

The history of 2015-25, with Cameron’s fateful decisions over the referendum and how it played out, are downstream from Thatcher’s inability to face a) the reality of modern Whitehall and b) the reality of the Monnet-Delors project as its own advocates conceived it.

Brexit, Whitehall and another chance to face reality

The chance to get to grips with the cancer of Whitehall didn’t come again until forty years later in 2019-20 when Brexit and the collapse of central institutions in the pandemic provided the sort of opportunity that takes decades to appear. It was blown again.

I saw the combination of Leave winning the referendum and a new government with a new team and plan as the way to do something historically even bigger than the Thatcher project:

• to change the economy deeply,

• make science and technology and the R&D ecosystem a core priority for economic and security policy and for the PM’s weekly diary,

• replace the broken civil service model,

• psychopathic focus on building critical capabilities,

• force the parties to change radically or be replaced,

• change the core of No10 and the Cabinet Office etc.

I saw the referendum partly as a chance to fix the two core failures of the Thatcher project: delusions on Whitehall and delusions on the Monnet-Delors project.

My hopes partly happened, partly stalled. Leaving the EU has, as intended, been a huge discontinuity exposing the rot of the old system, which spent three years after the referendum showing how little it grasped, even after the referendum, about what EU membership truly involved and how much power had been given away, hence partly why they couldn’t cope with the result, and both parties plus Whitehall drove themselves into a cul-de-sac.

So a new project was begun in fits and starts 2016-2020. But then it stalled in Q3 2020. The senior civil service, shocked by their own collapse, surrendered in summer 2020. The whole space opened up for a historic shift: an 80 seat majority, four years to an election, the system accepting radical change because of its collapse, massive public demand for huge changes in the aftermath of the spring nightmare, a supportive network of Outsider talent (partly mobilised by covid).

Then the Trolley rejected the surrender and surrendered himself and told the old system ‘business as usual’. Tory MPs mostly cheered the Trolley when he sank back into the warm embrace of the Whitehall deal — you leave us alone to run things and control real power via appointments and we’ll pretend to the legacy media you’re in charge and indulge you on the small things. The old system’s momentum re-asserted itself and has carried it forward through a pandemic and the Ukraine war and unprecedented productivity stagnation, regardless of the change of three PMs and a change of party.

Starmer was elected promising again to ‘change’ yet has presided over the continued momentum of the broken old system — a lost, broken lawyer with the mentality of the worst officials looking around blinking in bafflement with nothing to do but read out scripts providing content for the old media’s new cycle, self-contradictory content which rarely maintains narrative coherence for even 24 hours.

But the continuity of Sunak-Starmer driven by their shared determination to do as advised by the senior civil service, despite the overwhelming desperate desire of voters for discontinuity, has stunned many MPs and forced many to re-evaluate core beliefs. This will grow as the old parties continue to fragment and lose support to Outsiders.

A big and important difference with 2015-24 today, near the end of 2025, is that the world of ‘mainstream’ SW1 is being forced to face that it told itself and the country that the problem was ‘Brexit’ and the ‘mad Brexit people’ and the old system would work great once ‘serious people’ like Starmer, Sue Gray and Reeves were in charge of it — then the Starmer project has imploded and the so-called ‘grownups’ look just like the end of the Trolley, Truss and Sunak.

Whitehall’s pathological institutions generate an accelerating news cycle of failure and despair. Scandals and disasters hit the news so fast that none of them leave any trace on consciousness — elite or general public. Almost nothing gets coverage for more than a day or so combined with the collapse of audience for the old ‘news’. Whitehall institutions have learned to just keep moving safe in the knowledge that no force in British politics can maintain focus for a week. Nobody has to resign, nobody has to explain. It’s guaranteed there’ll be another debacle along in the next 24-48 hours to move the SW1 herd attention on to the next debacle.

Andrew Marr’s comments last year on how Starmer and Sue Gray would be a ‘serious’ government with ‘stable’ plans and make the system work etc was the conventional wisdom among the NPC army last year. Click here to watch 90 seconds:

Optimistic looking forward… A stable government… Serious people in charge… A plan that doesn’t shift… Britain will look a haven of stability relative to Europe and America…

Then a fortnight ago, he wrote the New Statesman cover story in which he repeats some arguments I’ve made for 20 years.

Shot/chaser — as they say on the line!

Such delusions were very widespread in pundit world as it was axiomatic that Starmer is ‘a serious person’ just as for me it’s axiomatic that he embodies the precise opposites of what I consider ‘a serious person’.

The SW1 mainstream’s delusions are no longer completely sustainable even in the closed world of Parliament, never mind in wider elite networks. Business confidence in the old political system has quickly collapsed and the appetite for radical measures outside SW1 is through the roof. The so-called Overton window has shifted fast and hard on Whitehall itself such that some who described things I said even 2 years ago (never mind 20 years ago) as ‘mad’ now talk like it’s ‘just obvious’ fundamental changes are needed such as dramatic PM use of his full power over appointments and ending the Whitehall hiring/firing/HR system.

So there is now a profound crisis of confidence in mainstream political world, as in the late 1970s. Also like the late 1970s, there are numerous groups running around with ‘ideas’ and ‘plans’. But so far the groups are mainly focusing on specific policies. There is no (public) equivalent to the Hoskyns-Price-Strauss analysis which developed a map connecting the root causes of the crises, showing how they interacted with each other, and providing a true strategy for solving them in a systematic manner.

In order to do regime change properly next time, there must be something resembling Hoskyns’ wiring diagram and Stepping Stones plan which also sets out the core things which must start changing together from Day 1 and a plan for dealing with Whitehall, without which all policy work will prove pointless. Policy is not strategy and a government strategy is not a collection of policies, however important. Thousands of pages of interesting, thoughtful, detailed policy cannot amount to a true strategy. A true strategy needs, inter alia, defined goals, a plan for controlling the government and building a team, a story for the country and a communication machine which can function in the rapidly changing information ecosystem. It must connect ends, ways and means. It must connect leader and policy with story etc. It should include action like writing key primary legislation well in advance of an election, as we did for school reform pre-2010 which was critical to progress.

Much, much more important than any individual policy is a team determined that, for the first time since Churchill, from Day 1 the Prime Minister’s Office controls the centre of government, not vice versa. This means, for example, immediately transferring control of 99% of the Cabinet Office to the PM Office and out of the control of the Cabinet Secretary and immediately replacing senior officials. Without this — which needs a major project of elite talent recruitment — all big policy changes, however well thought through, will not happen.

The thing which is starting to make me a little hopeful is that realisation of this is spreading fast outside SW1 for the first time in living memory. It will not take much for it to be an accepted principle of a mass movement propelling regime change. It’s important to grasp how big a deal this is. The system evolved without elites really noticing, partly under the impetus of two world wars and the Cold War, as I described in the big summer blog on the Cabinet Office which acquired over 50 years a load of powers which it was explicitly agreed would be disastrous for it to acquire when it was created in 1917 — yet the MPs were boiled like frogs and barely noticed. The centre of government moved from the PM and Chancellor in charge to the PM’s Office being treated by the Cabinet Office as a sub-division under their control. All without a master plan and in many ways counter to intentions. Anybody who complained about this and suggested change was seen as at least half-mad. The Hoskyns story is central to understanding this.

But no longer! Now, finally, crucial arguments about this are going mainstream in elite circles and it has quickly flipped from ‘mad/fascism’ to ‘obvious’ with many elites in a very short period. This is important!

In some ways, the next regime change project will be easier than the Thatcher project. In other ways, it will be harder.

The rot of Whitehall is deeper, more profound and more existential. Much of Whitehall and the BBC radicalised to a set of extreme Left views which they have defined as a new ‘mainstream’ since the West generally went through this radicalisation process from ~2010-12 — a process so big and powerful it’s almost invisible inside SW1, which is almost totally baffled about why it’s been acting as it has. (E.g Tory MPs now routinely denounce the trans-psyop madness after defending and entrenching it in Whitehall themselves as ministers just a few years ago.) Per Marshall McLuhan, such huge events tend to be largely invisible to those living through them, other than to a few artists — hence why Rick Rubin could see it clearly while DC, Brussels and SW1 appeared in the grip of a mass psychosis.

Elite fragmentation/polarisation is critical and can only continue. On one hand, more and more elites defecting from the Insider to Outside camps — particularly elites connected to entrepreneurs. On the other hand, the core of the old system can only dig in for another round of doubling down, as it has since 2016.

You can see this psychology at play in the last few weeks.

The latest ‘serious gronwups’ to go into No10 are making a tragi-comic attempt to try to shift the blame for the public finances and stagnation off Labour and Tories and onto Nigel Farage, who has never been part of any government. It’s the latest instalment in SW1’s 70 year fairy tale about the EEC/EU.

The way in which the most delusional parts of SW1 can come up with no other plan than to reopen the Brexit debate and blame Farage for Tory and Labour failures since 2015 is part of the general phenomenon we can see across the West. The old parties and old bureaucracies and their supporting elites cannot see our crises as the result of counter-actions to how they governed 1991-2015 and the ideas they enshrined as ‘mainstream’. They cannot see Brexit and Trump as generated by the failure of their ideas and institutions. After the initial shocks of 2016, these elites developed a story for themselves in which Brexit and Trump were malign creations of a secretive evil elite, ‘the fascist tech-enabled oligarchs in league with fascist Putin’. They can only dig in, deeper and deeper.

The attempt by No10 to ‘blame Farage for tax rises’ will obviously fail in one sense. It will not persuade swing voters because it’s ludicrous. It will fail in terms of No10’s immediate political objectives of escaping blame for the disastrous economy and finances. And it won’t even keep the Bluesky nutjobs happy because they’ll just say ‘the new plan is failing because half-hearted Starmer isn’t embracing Rejoin which is the only solution to our woes’ (alongside censorship). But it will succeed in one limited way: it will meet the emotional need in SW1 to vent about a hated enemy, the Tories are too irrelevant for this, and Farage works as a hate figure for pundits and MPs. Overall, it’s a sign of how intellectually and politically bankrupt the old Insider world is.

We must build counterforces and, after we win, retire this Insider network — forcefully but not violently. (Forcefully is the opposite of violently, done right.) Stop trying to think ‘debate’ will persuade them. Focus on building forces outside SW1 that will retire forces inside SW1. As these forces build, there will be more elite defections to the Outsider forces but this will rarely be because of any ‘rational debate’. That’s not how history works. It will mostly be because of the spreading feeling, hard for most to articulate, that the creative power of the political elites has dissolved and the public has, in response, withdrawn mimesis and obedience. This is the classic condition in which new elites step forward and make new offers to engage the energy of the masses.

It’s a good time to consider the last successful British ‘government transformation project’.

As usual, at the bottom is a summary and big questions for a new PM. All bold is me.

Below the blog are some random thoughts on recent news.

The series on People, Ideas, Machines

XIII: The origins and evolution of the Cabinet Office, the heart of darkness in the permanent government. How was the CO set up? How did it evolve? What critical lessons and questions for the next regime? E.g to ‘reform’ the CO or close the CO? (Close.)

XII: Theories of regime change and civil war. Notes on Turchin’s book. And on Timur Kuran, preference falsification/cascades, how sparks start prairie fires.

XI: Leo Strauss, modernity and regime change — and an update 20/5: Notes on: On Classical Political Philosophy

X: Freedom’s Forge — the story of American business and industrial production in World War II. Incredible contrast between the America of WWII and now viz building things. Highly relevant to current debates on tariffs, supply chains, AI/drones/robotics etc.

IX: A) Britain’s ‘Organization of Victory’ under Pit 1793-1815 and B) Metternich & European Community. How Whitehall-1795 was more like SpaceX-2025 than Whitehall-2025 is. Real meetings. R&D taken seriously. Procurement and infrastructure taken seriously. Over 230 years Whitehall has gone backwards.

VIII: CIA counterintelligence chief James Angleton, ‘a wilderness of mirrors’, covert operations, assassinations, moles & double agents, disinformation. A blog on Angleton and the broader history of the CIA and US elites’ attempts to understand the political world. The long-term failures of the CIA on critical geopolitical issues, their security failures and penetration by the KGB, the fundamental problems of building effective intelligence agencies and integrating their work in an overall institutional structure — these deep problems are all extremely relevant to today as Washington increasingly can align on just one thing, hostility to China. Given this history we should not bet on the Washington deep state outperforming the PRC on intelligence and in many areas it seems the PRC has learned lessons from America’s victory over the Soviet Union better than Washington learned them.

VII: On RV Jones, Scientific Intelligence in World War II, how Whitehall vandalised the successful system immediately after the war. Many issues explored in the RVJ blog are relevant to those interested in the future of AI, ‘safety’, and security.

VI: Alanbrooke diaries, incredibly relevant to today’s problems and what military ‘strategy’ really is.

V: Colin Gray and defence planning. What’s the difference between ends, ways, means? What’s the difference between strategy, tactics, operations? Why such confusion? What is defence planning, how does it fit with strategy?

IV: Notes on The Kill Chain — US procurement horrors, new technologies, planning for war with PRC.

III: More on fallacies of nuclear thinking / strategy / deterrence. If you read this and the earlier one you’ll see that almost everything the media says about Putin and nuclear threats is wrong / misguided and, worse, so is much of what is said by international relations/historians/military academics.

II: Thinking about nuclear weapons

I: On innovation in militaries, when does it succeed/fail — e.g why US got ahead on aircraft carriers, RAF defence in 1930s.

Prediction: 1) lessons from UKR will overwhelmingly support the arguments of those who in 2020 argued for radical MoD changes (including taking money from old tank projects that everybody privately admitted were a multi-billion pound disaster) and 2) the correct criticism of the review and connected documents will be seen as a) they did not go nearly far enough, b) the collapse of No10 follow through on defence reform in 2021 was — like the collapse of 2020 plans for planning reform, tax cuts, deregulation, Project Speed, intense focus on R&D and skills etc — a disaster for the country (and a political disaster for the Tory Party). [Me, 3/2022]

Other related stuff…

On rationalism and politics (2022).

On Lee Kuan Yew’s brilliant, fascinating, extremely valuable Memoirs.

On high performance government, ‘cognitive technologies’, ‘Seeing Rooms’, UK crisis management (2019)

On AI, nuclear issues, Project Maven (2019)

On the ARPA/PARC ‘Dream Machine’, science funding, high performance, and UK national strategy (2018)

On ‘systems engineering’ and ‘systems management’ — ideas from the Apollo programme for a ‘systems politics’ (2017)

On China vs US, the ‘Thucydides trap’ book (2017)

And obviously I think that if you’re thinking through AI and geopolitics you should study, or at least skim for a weekend, my chronology of Bismarck. A month of study and you’ll be in the top 0.01% of people who really understand high performance politics, an incredible shortcut! If you take this path, you will have a great advantage over your competitors.

On Tolstoy and War and Peace.

JUST IN TIME

Introduction

…

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The nature of the breakdown of civilisations can be summed up in three points: a failure of creative power in the minority, an answering withdrawal of mimesis on the part of the majority, and a consequent loss of social unity in the society as a whole.

Toynbee

I’m speaking at an LFG event at the O2 Arena on 23/10 with:

• Liv Boeree, physicist, one of the world’s best poker players, podcaster particularly on technology, I did her podcast earlier this year here. Her substack/podcast here.

  

• Matt Clifford, an investor who tried to help Sunak and Starmer make AI a priority for the British state. He left government recently. He helped the government negotiate the Microsoft data centre in the North East and other things just announced in Trump’s visit.

• Chris Curtis MP, a Labour MP fighting a lonely battle with some Labour MPs for the government to do anything useful before 2029. Experience in government has radicalised many on the Left to realise the official story Starmer believed about Whitehall is wrong and this blog is right — the Tory MPs mostly just sat uselessly for 14 years telling themselves fairy tales, importing jihadis and defending the Human Rights Act prioritising jihadi human rights over the safety of British people, spending taxpayers money on weddings for child killers ‘cos human rights’, repeating NPC scripts on definitions of ‘a woman’ suddenly being ‘really complex’, covering up the Grooming Gangs, and marching to destruction.

• Katie Lam, a new MP who did a lot of brave pushing on the grooming gangs when the official Starmer line was ‘the real story is tech oligarch fascists spreading conspiracy theories about grooming gangs’, which the BBC and NPC army amplified. She’s been helping the LFG campaign and is one of the handful in Tory world who can communicate.

There’ll be other interesting things at this event including those who wrote the Foundations paper. BOOK NOW, see you there.

Info page. (Become a subscriber and get a free ticket.)

Also I’ve been impressed by the guys who set up Pharos. They aggressively get on with things. If you’re rich and looking for something which will DO SOMETHING rather than just babble into the dread void of SW1, call them.

It’s finally clear even to some of the blindest in SW1 that both old parties are disintegrating, with failed leadership and their voters fragmenting all over the shop (but not to each other).

It’s pitiful watching the old regime die, unable to muster any sort of coherent anything on anything. Unable to tell a story. Less than one percent able to give a serious speech or write a serious essay or even do a three hour podcast without exposing themselves as empty/idiotic/useless. Uninterested in even pretending to be interested in policy and how government works and the extraordinary things happening across the world. Unable even to pretend to campaign, because a campaign means defining then maintaining focus on priorities, which has become inconceivable in SW1. Unable to master the 75 year old TV technology and unable to execute the basics of 1990s media management, never mind the new technologies shattering the media ecosystem.

Just mindless chasing their own tails providing content for the legacy media news cycle generated by a pathological Whitehall system the government doesn’t understand, never mind control. An NPC PM living out my golden rule of modern SW1: the government doesn’t control the government, isn’t trying to, and couldn’t if it tried — and pushing it to a grotesque demonstration by writing newspaper articles begging terrorists and their sympathisers not to go on marches demanding a second Holocaust — and having his begging ignored as the No10 press office bleats pitifully ‘but we don’t have any powers’. (NB. when they want to shut down a ‘far right’ protest they suddenly do have ‘the powers’.)

No10 acts as if it studied post-Vote Leave Trolley and Sunak and thought — yes, that’s how to do government, that’s how to do politics, that’s how to communicate, let’s copy all that, zero priorities, ‘respect the institutions’ and leave Whitehall to run itself, machine-gun the entire electoral coalition, defend the old system instead of delivering the change we promised, and spend our days spouting contradictory nonsense in the news cycle, brief ‘major reset’ each month, shuffle NPC jobs, that’s the way.

Meanwhile we import jihadis called ‘Jihadi’ who sing about jihad on the boats then do jihad here and our MPs babble ‘diversity is our strength, behold the British integration miracle success story’.

Voters look on in horror and despair. International investors text each other: ‘not investable, what the fuck happened over there with the troons, commies and jihadis’.

What happened?

The creative power of the minority deserted SW1, there has been an answering withdrawal of mimesis from those outside SW1, and social unity is imploding. Collapse of the old regime is following the normal pattern: slow rot, elite blindness, fast crisis, sudden collapse, regime change. Elite fragmentation, collapse of consensus reality, OODA-loop-as-denial-of-service-attack such that the more NPCs act, the more they self-harm but are baffled as to why everything they do fails, so they conclude they should do more of it. Cf. blog in spring, talk in summer.

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Bureaucracy is a bad European system of government, created by the use of permanent public officials, a system that does not, should not, and cannot exist in England.

Palmerston to Queen Victoria, 1837

He is very depressed about the hopelessness of the present system of governing by 22 gabblers round a table with an old procrastinator in the chair.

Edward Carson, recorded by Leo Amery, 21 July 1915

[W]hen he joined Asquith’s Cabinet [5/15] he was astonished at the lack of method, the absence of any agenda or minutes. He told Asquith this. The latter said that everyone who joined the Cabinet made the same observation but speedily became reconciled to the method of doing business…

Bonar Law

The Cabinet often had the very haziest notion as to what its decisions were.

Curzon, 1918

[The Treasury] had shown neither foresight nor organising capacity, and had plunged the country into something like administrative chaos until the War Cabinet machinery came to the rescue.

Maurice Hankey, the first Cabinet Secretary, 27 October 1922

Unlike Cabinet Ministers who have their fame entombed in rows of bulging biographies, the great Civil Servants often hardly attain to the humble dignity of a footnote to history. A Civil Servant does good by stealth and would blush to find it fame; a Cabinet Minister does good by publicity and would resign if he failed to secure it! It is easy to decide which is the more indispensable to a nation’s welfare. The country easily survives the frequent changes of ministries; it hardly moved a muscle when a Labour Government climbed for a moment to office; but it would receive a staggering blow if the Civil Service suddenly took it into its head to resign tomorrow. Some Governments are in office but not in power; the Civil Service is always in office and always in power.

Baldwin, talk to the Civil Service 1925

The function of the Cabinet Office is essentially one of machinery of Government and not of policy. It cannot be too strongly emphasised that the Cabinet Secretary has no duty of offering advice in any matter of policy or of interfering in any way with the functions of responsible Departments in this respect.

Maurice Hankey, the first Cabinet Secretary

The Secretary of the Cabinet is, in a sense, the ‘prime minister‘s permanent secretary’, to use a phrase of the … Secretary’s predecessor [Sir Burke Trend] on handing me my first brief in 1964; but his loyalty is, no less, to the Cabinet and the doctrine of Cabinet government... He advises also on the practices and conventions about the conduct of ministers in relation to collective Cabinet responsibility, as well as on other matters affecting collective responsibility and loyalty.

PM Wilson reflecting on the role of Cabinet Secretary in retirement (NB. the phrase about loyalty being no less to the Cabinet, this is important as it is used by CO officials to justify not doing what they know the PM wants)

I think it is a good idea to reassert the Civil Service being in the lead in Number 10.

Jeremy Heywood, Cabinet Secretary, 2010.

There are not two departments. I stress there is one department. There is one Cabinet Office of which Number 10 is a subset ... a business unit.’

Gus O’Donnell, Cabinet Secretary

From the decision to elevate the general administrator, the mandarin, and grant to his corporation supreme influence, much of the present discomfiture of the country has followed. Hardly ever has so anachronistic a change occurred in a vital organ of a great empire at a worse moment. The discrepancy between tasks and means is still steadily increasing.

Thomas Balogh, The Apotheosis of the Dilettante, 1959

Bob, this setup is all wrong. The joint ought to be jumping — and it’s not. Your office ought to be quiet as a grave. Instead your office is jumping and the plant looks like a graveyard.

Harriman, The Man Who Sold the Moon. (Analogy: the problem with a permanently ‘jumping’ PM Office while the entities that should be jumping are graveyards.)

This blog concerns the heart of power in the British state — the PM’s office in No10 (PMO) and the Cabinet Office (CO) created in December 1916 out of the crisis of the Somme. The story of the CO’s creation 1916-39 helps enormously if you want to understand how and why core institutions of the British state became pathological, and what could be done to turn the dismal tide.

It’s written not for the political class of SW1 generally, which (unlike the deep state) has demonstrated an intense anti-interest in these things, but for those few aspiring to be the next PM or helping the next PM, taking power amid the wreckage of both the domestic system and the post-1945 international security system and its institutions. In other words, it’s written for a tiny subset of the political class (Insiders) plus a subset of the deep state (Insiders) plus those Outsiders thinking about how to break the grip of Insiders, how to do regime change properly, and what a once-a-century burst of powerful, thoughtful energy looks like in detail.

The most hopeful aspect of our deepening crisis is that crises also push elite talent into rethinking their priorities and this is happening in Britain among Outsiders. Money, talent and ideas are moving fast. The SW1 mainstream is almost entirely unaware, just as they didn’t see the spectral WhatsApp groups signalling the dramatic Silicon Valley shift 2021-3, but NPCs increasingly display blind panic: they can feel their loss of narrative control though their own information ecosystem acts as a multi-billion dollar denial-of-service attack against themselves, so they can’t see straight why their narratives are sinking.

It will be interesting for those working in No10 now but I continue to think it’s extremely unlikely that Starmer will break the pattern of modern PMs: go along with the system, whinge more and more but do nothing more than tinker and shuffle NPCs and spin, then write the usual paragraphs of post-Thatcher memoirs about their ‘frustrating search for the levers of power’, then urge their successor to ‘respect our institutions’, i.e repeat the same pattern of uselessness, moral cowardice and failure. Yes, McSweeney and others would like to do more but the guy who promoted the guy responsible for pandemic preparations and response to be Cabinet Secretary is not the guy to do what’s needed. But 2-4 more years of our present disintegration may well generate a PM and team who return to the Vote Leave premise: tinkering and ‘respect the institutions’ is doomed, our institutions need profound regime change and this is fundamentally entangled with delivering what’s promised to voters, you can’t deliver for voters without regime change because the old Whitehall/Westminster regime will sabotage execution of priorities consciously and unconsciously.

Perhaps the most interesting and deepest lesson from the history of the CO is how a) the players who set up the CO agreed it must *not* do a range of important things — such as control personnel, give policy advice to the PM, interfere in ministerial responsibility etc — yet b) it evolved so the CO now does all of those things they agreed in 1916-17 it would be disastrous for it to do, and c) there has been close to zero focused, knowledgeable, honest Insider discussion about the role of the CO for decades, so much so that MPs aren’t embarrassed to say ‘I don’t really know anything about what the Cabinet Office is and does’, and most ministers leave their pointless career without ever grasping the CO’s role in the pointlessness of their meetings.

Ironically, the main criticism in the CO’s first years was that it would lead to too much power for the PM. But although it started out as the PM’s Office controlling the CO, the PM’s Office gradually dissipated its power to the CO which now controls the PM’s Office. If you watch modern meetings between the PM and Cabinet Secretary, they often involve the PM meekly asking for something and the Cabinet Secretary politely brushing them off. The body language and spoken language has shifted so the PM sounds like the supplicant and the Cabinet Secretary the chief.

Over many decades, the system has evolved an emotional miasma around the PM’s Office to conceal the reality of the PM’s power and on occasion to suggest, subtly, that it just wouldn’t be proper for the PM to do X: well, theoretically PM, but in practice it would be seen as, well, ummm, undermining our institutions. Cue: startled panic — oh oh ok, sorry, I see, yes, well we can’t have accusations like that, I must follow the advice, but … there’ll be the devil of a row, still … nothing for it I suppose… And this pressure is applied with force when the system has to defend itself over its most stupid and indefensible actions, including promoting people for failure, one of its crucial functions and the defence of which is the clearest signal of whether you’re a true Insider or not.

I vividly remember when I got the Trolley to reject various personnel appointments sent for his ‘approval’ — the usual sort of farce where the science guy in HMT dealing with the deep state was suddenly shifted to deal with cows in DEFRA, in the finest traditions of the meritocratic ‘Rolls Royce civil service’. The CO sends appointments in a clever psychological package: bishops etc, which no PM has actually decided in a century, go on top to condition the PM into mindless tick, tick, tick, on a Friday night. Then, after this set up, the operations of the deep state, logical only in its mad closed world, are there to be ticked with the same level of thought and interference as the Bishop of Coventry.

When I suggested to the Trolley that he reject the mad appointments rather than tick them, he was startled: can I do that, Martin [PPS] gives me these as if I have to just tick everything?! Yes Prime Minister! He scribbled ‘No!’ instead of a tick. The PPS was called by the Cabinet Secretary: WTF is going on?! And the PPS said to me, ‘what’s going on you can’t do this?’ And I said, do you mean the PM does not actually control these appointments, it’s just a Potemkin constitutional convention now like bishops, because if that’s what you and the Cab Sec mean you should explain this to the PM…?Long stare… No, I don’t mean that, but, well, it’s highly irregular and although the PM can theoretically reject these appointments, it’s very unwise, and … YOU CAN’T! (See my covid testimony for other examples. My second covid testimony has not been published by the Inquiry because it criticises the Inquiry: logical.)

One of the most interesting things about working in No10, something which really needs an artist’s eye to describe properly — historians cannot do it fully, see blog on Tolstoy and politics — is the subtlety of how this ecosystem has evolved and plays out in meetings, the courtiers of the CO and the modern, all too modern, sensibility of the characters who now become ministers and PM, the former weaving psychological spells and the latter conditioned to want, to need, to believe in them.

Nothing was ready for the war which everyone expected… The longer the Emperor remained at Vilna the less did everybody … do to prepare for the war. Every effort of the men who surrounded the Sovereign seemed directed solely to making his stay as pleasant as possible and enabling him to forget the impending clash of arms. (War and Peace, p723)

Previous PMs would be appalled at the impertinence of Gus O’Donnell’s candid statement about how the PM’s Office is seen as a subset ‘business unit’ of the Cabinet Office (above), and appalled at similar comments from other Cabinet Secretaries (below) — but most appalled, and amazed, at the MPs who let this happen, who proclaim their own castration as a ‘jewel of our constitution’, who rebaptise their castration as ‘defence of our meritocratic institutions against extremists’, when the system is, for example, promoting and honouring officials who should have been fired for killing people in covid.

A PM could reverse this fast. A highly underrated fact about Britain is that, because of our unwritten constitution, a Live Player PM could change things faster and more effectively here than any other western country. And the crisis to motivate such change is deepening every day and will continue to deepen until the election because the old institutions are in a classic systems crisis, the normal historical cycle of regime change, in which they make their own problems worse, including by reinforcing memes among Insiders which stop them seeing reality. It’s a grander version of the Cameron-Osborne OODA-loop-as-denial-of-service-attack-on-their-own-perceptions-of-reality when they responded to ‘Turkey is joining the EU’ by calling their press conference on the roof of the hotel in summer 2016 to denounce ‘lies’ and thus spread like wildfire the meme that ‘Turkey is joining’.

The story of the CO’s creation is told in A Man and an Institution: Sir Maurice Hankey, the Cabinet Secretariat and the custody of Cabinet secrecy, by John Naylor.

At the end is a) a summary of crucial points and b) questions for an aspiring PM determined on breaking the cycle of regime failure, to ponder deeply before the next election. I explore the concept of ‘regime completeness’ — i.e the combination of things in a system (Leader, plan, team etc) which is needed — because identifying point solutions for particular problems cannot work in the systems failure we’re experiencing. For non-British readers, you can skip the main part of these Notes and look at the analysis at the end for some things relevant to all modern governments.

Today there is a card-activated connecting door, about 20-30m from the Cabinet room, connecting No10 and 70 Whitehall (70WH) where the CO lives (which most people enter from the main entrance). If you’re standing in Downing Street looking at the famous No10 door, the Cabinet Room is straight ahead behind that door and this internal connecting door to the Cabinet Office is, say, about 50-70m away in a sort of 1 to 2 o’clock direction. No10 staff passes let you through to the CO and some CO passes let you into No10. (It’s also a security risk because if someone smuggled a weapon into 70WH all you’d need to do is take someone’s No10 pass, walk through the unguarded automated door, walk 20-30m and kill the PM: there’s no intervening security. You’d have a decent shot of then getting over the garden wall onto a waiting motorbike. Though the continued lack of drone defences for the PM, five years after I raised the issue and was told ‘there’s nothing’, provides easier methods.) Below 70WH are the COBR rooms and below them is access to tunnels that connect different parts of Whitehall. One tunnel runs from below the CO to the MoD and is used when demonstrations block Whitehall so the PM can walk through the connecting door, down the CO stairs, through the tunnel, then walk from the MoD to the Commons without leaving the secure bubble. Below all this are the nuclear bunkers and a list of people with access to this is known as the ‘Pindar’ list.

The CO was born in the crisis of military failure in World War I and the widespread agreement that both a) the PM, Asquith, couldn’t do the job and b) the ‘machinery of government’ around him had proved deficient. The institutional structure that developed after the Northcote-Trevelyan ‘professionalisation’ of the civil service in the 1850s failed in important ways in the war, see Hankey’s excoriating comments on the Treasury (above) and similar comments about the Foreign Office by many.

This story is connected to the debates in Whitehall from the 1890s through to 1914 about the rising German threat, the need to expand armed forces and the navy, changing technologies, the competing demands of imperial defence far from Europe versus the threat of a European hegemon and invasion, the tensions between defence spending and domestic politics and the reluctance of the rich to pay more taxes, Whitehall arguments over the Belgian guarantee which echoed the arguments of the 1866-7 crisis and 1870 crisis when Bismarck exposed the dilemma over deterrence — threaten, and perhaps deter but perhaps get embroiled in a war, or don’t threaten, and perhaps watch Belgium get snaffled. I can’t go into all that here too but cf. The Weary Titan which explores these themes (part funded by Andy Marshall of the Office of Net Assessment). This period (1848-1914) is a critical case study for everybody in politics as it brings together most fundamental themes of modern politics, including the failure to create institutions able to think through crises of modern speed and scale as technology transformed politics and war and the spiritual crisis of modernity first and best described in Dostoyevsky and Nietzsche (blog).

Deeply frustrated by these debates, Lord Roberts, last to hold the title Commander-in-Chief of the Forces, said to Balfour in July 1904 a decade before the war, ‘At times I despair of any improvement without some national disaster.’ British elites proved unable to create the right institutions to enable better thinking. The institutions which evolved after Northcote-Trevelyan hobbled and disincentivised better thinking. As I’ve pointed out many times, there was only one serious discussion between soldiers and politicians about the connection of military strategy and the Belgian guarantee (CID, 23/8/1911) and it was rather shambolic and definitely inconclusive. Asquith was extremely unsuited to what’s needed for getting to the heart of such a problem: relentless realistic probing about core priorities without wishful thinking and/or prevarication — are we prepared to see Belgium occupied, it yes/no then what does this imply, are we prepared to see France crushed like 1870 again, how do we deter Germany etc? The failure of Asquith and others to face these trade-offs persisted into summer 1914 and caused a fatal paralysis in British statements intended to deter. The result was the worst of all worlds: Germany thought we were making clear we would stay out, so we did not deter, then we felt so entangled we fought, so we fought without even the counter-factual benefit of possibly deterring and therefore avoiding the need to fight.

The institutional failures continued into the management of the war. The crisis of WWI did not produce a political leader close to the abilities of Pitt a century earlier (see blog last year on Pitt and Metternich). In 1915 Asquith complained that the war had produced no great generals and Lt-General Wilson shot back, ‘No, Prime Minister, nor has it produced a statesman.’ Asquith embodied characteristics that have come to typify senior British politicians including a sensibility pathologically prone to push off thinking about the hard questions while avoiding organising things.

Our party system had already evolved to promote people who are adept at schmoozing the party in-group to rise in its ranks but can’t do the job of PM which requires the art of schmoozing and, sometimes, its exact opposite: facing reality, focus on priorities and disciplined execution of complex coordination — all of which becomes more important as the scale of a crisis grows with technology’s development. Asquith had risen through the system to its pinnacle but was out of his depth from summer 1914.

In 1916, the evolving crisis finally spat out Asquith and replaced him with Lloyd George (LG). LG had got to know Maurice Hankey (MH) well and they had much discussed the organisation of government.

NB. The quality of people and institutions — and the underlying seriousness of our political culture — was much higher then than with Ukraine and they failed then. A fortiori Outsiders should not be surprised at the delusions and disasters of SW1 over Ukraine.

I won’t repeat here what I’ve said many times about the deep reasons for the Westminster rot. See recent Oxford speech and my Q&A page (including how I actually spent my time in No10 versus the fake stories told about it). It is a systems crisis as I’ve said for twenty years and only systems politics, working on all of these, can fix the rot. Though I think I might have accidentally made ‘systems politics’, the right way of thinking about this, a sort of anti-meme among Insiders— ‘an idea with self-censoring properties, an idea which, by its intrinsic nature, discourages or prevents people from spreading it’ (cf. this interesting sci-fi story).

There are many Labour MPs and spads now in the same insane meetings as 2010-24. Many have quickly grasped that the NPC official story — Rolls Royce machine, only problem was Brexit and Tories, just needs grownups in charge — is junk. And they grasp that if they stick to it and, Sunak-like, try to pretend to voters and themselves that ‘the system works’, their project will cave in as Sunak’s did. Hence Labour ministers and spads, shocked by their crazy meetings, briefing the BBC that it ‘turns out Cummings was right’ about Whitehall.

Someone will have to rebuild the PM’s office and the core of power. And this necessarily involves the critical question: do you try to ‘reform’ the Cabinet Office, or do you close it? I think all Labour attempts to reform the CO 2024-29 will fail, its horrors will continue to metastasise, and ideas such as simply closing the CO and the PM actually controlling the centre of power — a ‘crazy extremist’ idea — will become increasingly ‘mainstream’. (There is an intense power struggle underway now (summer 2025) between Wormald, other parts of the deep state and political forces. Some want rid of Wormald. Others want to reinforce him and extend their control of No10, including by manipulating the appointment of a ‘No10 Permanent Secretary’ — which could easily be one of those things spun as ‘the PM gripping the operation’ which is actually *the operation gripping the PM*. Little of this power struggle has leaked out other than No10 spad unhappiness with Wormald.)

It will greatly help those working on a potential serious regime to understand why and how the current system was built. The current system, obviously, is not what LG and MH built in 1916-18. It’s constantly evolved. It changed a lot under Cameron-May when officials grabbed a lot of power for themselves while pushing ministers and spads away from involvement or even sight of the CO machine, especially with the National Security Secretariat which is now over 500 officials with effectively zero ministerial responsibility.

Our ancestors who built functioning institutions which preserved our civilisation would be amazed to wander around the complex today, through the connecting door, and watch all the meetings of officials only. The officials took over, they run the place, the Cabinet Secretary took the politicians’ power, they use pre-meetings to control the Potemkin meetings with the politicians, they just give scripts to the politicians to read out while decisions are taken elsewhere, ministerial responsibility is now all fake — and the politicians barely seem to notice, never mind care — they would say to each other in amazement. Then they would look at institution after institution outside Westminster and it would all make tragic-comic sense.

To those thinking about 2028/9, remember — our biggest allies in radical change in 2020 was a subset of deep state officials themselves. A serious regime will have unexpected allies as well as bitter enemies.

Comments [in square brackets] from me, bold is my emphasis…

(I won’t here go into the ravings of SW1’s NPCs in recent weeks as they thrash around in every more absurd Narrative Whiplash. Their cycle will continue to deepen and accelerate as it has since 2016: radicalise to the Left, tell themselves fantasies about public opinion and ‘the centre ground’, blame their problems on a) techbro-driven fascist radicalisation and b) idiot voters fooled by fascist disinformation, and demand louder and louder a return to pre-democratic ideas of censorship of political news ‘to defend democracy from fascism’. It’s inherently comic yet also worrying because the heart of it is the collapse of consensus reality among elites as technology breaks the old centralised information ecosystem, and the emerging political struggle between networks who each think of the other as a mix of delusional and evil is a struggle with a tendency to violence. Cf. The pathological simulacrum and the cycle of narrative whiplash. Also cf. Jon Askonas on modern media, on consensus reality, and on conservatism and technology.)

Series on People, Ideas, Machines

XII: Theories of regime change and civil war. Notes on Turchin’s book. And on Timur Kuran, preference falsification/cascades, how sparks start prairie fires.

XI: Leo Strauss, modernity and regime change — and an update 20/5: Notes on: On Classical Political Philosophy

X: Freedom's Forge — the story of American business and industrial production in World War II. Incredible contrast between the America of WWII and now viz building things. Highly relevant to current debates on tariffs, supply chains, AI/drones/robotics etc.

IX: IX: A) Britain's 'Organization of Victory' under Pit 1793-1815 and B) Metternich & European Community. How Whitehall-1795 was more like SpaceX-2025 than Whitehall-2025 is. Real meetings. R&D taken seriously. Procurement and infrastructure taken seriously. Over 230 years Whitehall has gone backwards.

VIII: CIA counterintelligence chief James Angleton, 'a wilderness of mirrors', covert operations, assassinations, moles & double agents, disinformation. A blog on Angleton and the broader history of the CIA and US elites’ attempts to understand the political world. The long-term failures of the CIA on critical geopolitical issues, their security failures and penetration by the KGB, the fundamental problems of building effective intelligence agencies and integrating their work in an overall institutional structure — these deep problems are all extremely relevant to today as Washington increasingly can align on just one thing, hostility to China. Given this history we should not bet on the Washington deep state outperforming the PRC on intelligence and in many areas it seems the PRC has learned lessons from America’s victory over the Soviet Union better than Washington learned them.

VII: On RV Jones, Scientific Intelligence in World War II, how Whitehall vandalised the successful system immediately after the war. Many issues explored in the RVJ blog are relevant to those interested in the future of AI, ‘safety’, and security.

VI: Alanbrooke diaries, incredibly relevant to today’s problems and what military ‘strategy’ really is.

V: Colin Gray and defence planning. What’s the difference between ends, ways, means? What’s the difference between strategy, tactics, operations? Why such confusion? What is defence planning, how does it fit with strategy?

IV: Notes on The Kill Chain — US procurement horrors, new technologies, planning for war with PRC.

III: More on fallacies of nuclear thinking / strategy / deterrence. If you read this and the earlier one you’ll see that almost everything the media says about Putin and nuclear threats is wrong / misguided and, worse, so is much of what is said by international relations/historians/military academics.

II: Thinking about nuclear weapons

I: On innovation in militaries, when does it succeed/fail — e.g why US got ahead on aircraft carriers, RAF defence in 1930s.

Prediction: 1) lessons from UKR will overwhelmingly support the arguments of those who in 2020 argued for radical MoD changes (including taking money from old tank projects that everybody privately admitted were a multi-billion pound disaster) and 2) the correct criticism of the review and connected documents will be seen as a) they did not go nearly far enough, b) the collapse of No10 follow through on defence reform in 2021 was — like the collapse of 2020 plans for planning reform, tax cuts, deregulation, Project Speed, intense focus on R&D and skills etc — a disaster for the country (and a political disaster for the Tory Party). [Me, 3/2022]

On rationalism and politics (2022).

And some other related stuff pre-No10…

On high performance government, ‘cognitive technologies’, ‘Seeing Rooms’, UK crisis management (2019)

On AI, nuclear issues, Project Maven (2019)

On the ARPA/PARC ‘Dream Machine’, science funding, high performance, and UK national strategy (2018)

On ‘systems engineering’ and ‘systems management’ — ideas from the Apollo programme for a ‘systems politics’ (2017)

On China vs US, the ‘Thucydides trap’ book (2017)

And obviously I think that if you’re thinking through AI and geopolitics you should study, or at least skim for a weekend, my chronology of Bismarck. A month of study and you’ll be in the top 0.01% of people who really understand high performance politics, an incredible shortcut! If you take this path, you will have a great advantage over your competitors.

Introduction

The government tried to stop Crossman publishing his Diaries in 1975. The case illustrated the inevitable tension between a) ‘government needs secrecy’ and b) ‘in a democracy the voters have a right to know a lot about how government works’. The Cabinet Secretary gave evidence.

The courts allowed the publication. The Labour government responded by strengthening ‘closed government’. Naylor writes of the prevalent attitude among senior politicians and officials that voters have little business in knowing about how they’re governed. One big question is: How and why has secrecy come to envelop the practice of modern Cabinet government?

Ironically Hankey himself was not allowed to publish his memoir of WWI, based on diaries, because of the development of secrecy he drove. For 20 years two of his successors and three PMs refused to allow publication.

Churchill obtained a suspension of the usual canons of Cabinet secrecy to write his memoirs of WWII. But Hankey only got permission in 1961. It was partly convention (e.g not to undermine the confidential relationship between ministers and officials) and partly legal, particularly the Official Secrets Act of 1911 and 1920. The Crossman affair was a denouement of the old system and attitudes. After, more was published.

But Naylor did not start his research with the theme of secrecy, he was looking at the whole story of the creation of the institution, the people who shaped it, and the domestic and political forces that influenced it.

The book considers:

• The pre-history to the crisis, the Committee on Imperial Defence, failures in WWI etc.

• The creation of the CO and Secretariat after the crisis of 1916.

• The Lloyd George regime.

• The crisis when LG fell in 1922.

• The Secretariat post-1922 until Hankey left in 1938.

• The custody of Cabinet secrecy from Hankey to John Hunt.

Cabinet minutes, when they started with the CO and Secretariat, were prepared to record agreement, not promote controversy.

The CO started keeping its own records. Cf. Wilson’s The Cabinet Office to 1945 — which I’ll cover next.

Hankey and his deputy Jones kept diaries available for inspection though their successors did not (or did not admit it).

A large collection of documents Hankey organised, intended for a book he never wrote, are in the PRO.

Ch1: The origins of the Cabinet Secretariat

[These notes are chronological, the chapter isn’t. It’s much easier to understand chronologically so I’ve jiggled some stuff between chapters. I’ve added some background to make the story easier to understand.]

The Committee on Imperial Defence (CID)

There was a Cabinet Defence Committee (CDC) set up in 1895. Little is now known about it because, like Cabinet, it kept no records.

There were two main criticisms of the CDC .

1. Poor use of intelligence sources.

2. Failure in defence planning, i.e how to settle the broad principles of national and imperial defence upon the basis of information from all the interested Departments, and set out in principle the size and composition of the military and naval forces necessary for such a defence policy. Those who set up the CDC had assumed a measure of inter-departmental coordination was possible without agreed upon records of planning and in the absence of any permanent staff.

In 1900 there were complaints that a lack of records meant a failure to apprehend decisions. These complaints were fended off by the service departments who argued that records would turn the CDC into a ‘court of revision’. The Admiralty and War Office resisted surveillance by other Cabinet members.

The CID was set up in 1902 in the aftermath of problems in the Boer War.

By 1902 the First Lord of the Admiralty thought that a stronger committee that backed more naval spending would help get the money so the Admiralty changed position. Balfour set up the CID.

• Regular meetings.

• Limited membership. PM, First Lord, SoS for War, four military advisers.

• It circumvented established conventions of Cabinet secrecy which prevented businesslike processes. It had a clerk from the FO to keep records.

The Esher Committee reported in December and recommended a full time staff. Esher wanted to strengthen the CID into ‘a department under the PM’ acting as a General Staff for the Empire. In May 1904 the PM authorised this but called it a Secretariat. It was intended to provide continuity in defence planning regardless of changes to the government: ‘it is not safe to trust matters affecting national security to the chance of a favourable combination of personal characteristics’ (Esher report).

So record keeping and a permanent staff were accepted for defence planning by 1904 but it took more than a decade to establish a similar need for the conduct of Cabinet business.

NB. CID was explicitly the PM’s entity, not a Cabinet (or Cabinet Office) entity. This distinction is very important. Balfour insisted that CID was formally advisory but it inherently eroded departmental autonomy and enhanced the super-departmental authority of the PM.

BUT CID did not become the powerful agency Esher had hoped because Balfour did not insist that CID conclusions should be the basis on which the War Office and Admiralty shape their roles and plans.

• So, for example, the CID conclusion in 1905 that Britain need not take seriously the prospect for invasion did not influence services’ military planning.

• CID made inquiries, wrote documents, made conclusions year after year but the government did not force the military to plan accordingly.

• CID staff played no part in staff discussions with France and the CID did not learn of such discussions until 1911.

• The first senior defence planner, George Clark (later Lord Sydenham), tried to play the role envisaged by Esher but was frustrated under Tories and Liberals.

CID therefore did not solve the fundamental issues of defence planning — the tension between policy and capabilities.

Naylor writes the CID’s failure was determined by the departmentalism inherent in 19th C government. But I would add — Balfour and Asquith could have insisted on CID operating differently but chose not to, they allowed the normal departmentalism to continue and did not exert their authority to enforce change on the critical things.

Hankey became secretary to the CID in 1912, aged 35. He would be at the heart of power from 1912 to 1938. He worked with the system as it had evolved for a decade and accepted its limits.

The processes and structure of CID for a decade provided an institutional model that would be considered and adapted by ministers and Hankey during the war.

Asquith appointed Hankey secretary to the War Council formed in November 1914.

Failure in WW1

In 1915 Asquith complained that the war had produced no great generals and Lt-General Wilson shot back, ‘No, Prime Minister, nor has it produced a statesman.’ Many complained about the ragged discussions in Cabinet, Asquith’s prevarication and lack of energy. Leo Amery recorded Edward Carson’s contempt:

He is very depressed about the hopelessness of the present system of governing by 22 gabblers round a table with an old procrastinator in the chair. (21 July 1915)

When Bonar Law had joined the Cabinet he told Asquith he was ‘astonished’ at the system:

[W]hen he joined Asquith’s Cabinet [5/15] he was astonished at the lack of method, the absence of any agenda or minutes. He told Asquith this. The latter said that everyone who joined the Cabinet made the same observation but speedily became reconciled to the method of doing business and saw its advantage for the special purposes.

Asquith continued to oppose even having minutes.

Years after Hankey’s innovation of Cabinet minutes (below), a historian wrote to him referring to 18th Century secretarial practices. George III was sent a frequent Minute back when the Cabinet’s location was often a private house. Hankey did further research and found traces of minutes going back to medieval years and the Privy Council in the 14th C. He was unaware that records of Cabinet discussions were kept for private purposes by several ministers in the Gladstone/Disraeli era. Salisbury would often gather papers and burn them in the fireplace in the Cabinet room. [I checked and confirmed the fireplace is no longer operational, just as the clock no longer works.] In fact the Minute turned into a ‘PM letter’ in the 19th Century. Hankey thought the last Minute of the old type was Melbourne’s in 1839. The Royal archive’s collection of PM letters starts in 1868. [Naylor implies there is a gap of decades in the records between the old Minute and the new ‘letter’: true?] It seems copies were not kept by PMs.

The most famous expression of frustration with the lack of clear records comes from the 1882 inquiry of Lord Hartington’s secretary directed to Gladstone’s PS:

Harcourt and Chamberlain have both been here this morning and at my Chief about yesterday’s Cabinet proceedings. They cannot agree what occurred. There must have been some decision, as Bright’s resignation shows. My Chief has told me to ask you what the devil was decided, for he be damned if he knows. Will you ask Mr G [Gladstone] in more conventional and less pungent terms?

Some ministers would return to their departments and give a note to officials but this was entirely ad hoc.

The first attempt at change was the War Council established as a supplement to the Cabinet. Then there was the Dardanelles Committee and the War Committee. Both failed. Part of the problem was size. Kitchener and others were understandably reluctant to discuss military secrets ‘with twenty-three gentlemen with whom he was barely acquainted’. Naylor says gossip was rife, security lax and the Times routinely published breaches of Cabinet secrecy. The Cabinet either duplicated the work of its War Committee or engaged in arguments based on limited military appreciations.

Even before the Somme, LG told CP Scott of the Guardian, ‘We are losing the war if we have not already lost it.’ Hankey was appalled at Cabinet dithering over Dardanelles and Gallipoli, recalling in his diary:

The Government are really dreadfully to blame. They put off decisions, squabble, have no plan of operation, and allowed themselves to be dragged into this miserable Solonika affair at the tail of French domestic politics. I can see only one solution — to suspend the constitution and appoint a dictator. (12/15)

[Sounds just like covid and Ukraine.]

And the War Committee was no solution:

The War [Committee] work is hopelessly congested, great questions all urgently awaiting settlement. Yet I could not get a meeting for tomorrow because Runciman was going for a day’s shooting, Lord Curzon for a week-end, and Lord Crawford to address his former constituents. I managed to get a meeting for Monday but the PM said ‘You won’t get anyone.’ Today's meeting had to end soon after 1 pm to enable ministers to attend official luncheons. Thus and thus is the British Empire governed at a critical stage of the war. I’ve done all I can to get meetings; crystallise woolly discussions into clear-cut decisions, and to promote control — but the task is a Herculean one! (11/16)

Even Asquith accepted the War Committee failed. He thought it:

1. Too big.

2. ‘There is delay, evasion, and often obstruction on the part of the Departments in giving effect to its decisions.’ [An often heard phrase among deep state officials is ‘it’s the usual — consent, delay, evade’.]

3. It’s often ‘kept in ignorance by the Departments’ of vital information.

4. It’s ‘over-charged with duties’.

Asquith though did not make any serious attempt to improve the bureaucracy and himself was a block on conveying vital information.

An insight into the evolution of the system is the Dardanelles Committee (May-Nov 1915). It was a Cabinet Committee so supposedly should not have had records but the ministers appointed a secretary and Hankey ‘succeeded in gradually infiltrating it with the Chiefs of Staff and all the procedure of the CID’. Some of these documents were used by LG when he attacked Asquith at the traumatic meeting of the War Committee on 1/12/16.

Crisis, November-December 1916

As the Somme continued in November 1916, allied leaders gathered in northern France. LG, now SoS for War, and MH were there. LG later said that MH took the initiative in discussing a major reorganisation:

We both felt that nothing in the way of a change in the conduct of the war had been accomplished and that in the absence of some dramatic coup things would go on as before until we slide into inevitable catastrophe.

LG wanted to resign. MH opposed and instead suggested that LG insist on a ‘small War Committee … for the day-to-day conduct of the war with full power’, independent of Cabinet and not managed by the PM who has a ‘very heavy job looking after the Cabinet and attending to Parliamentary and Home Affairs’. The Chairman must be ‘a man of unimpaired energy and great driving power’.

By the time of the Somme, influential Tories such as Earl of Derby and former PM Balfour were prepared to withdraw support from Asquith and even support Lloyd George. By the time of Asquith’s fall there was also an appetite for a serious change of institutions.

Curzon said that when the old system collided with the war it ‘crumbled into dust at once’.

I do not think that anyone will deny that the old Cabinet system had irretrievably broken down, both as a war machine and as a peace machine.

There was no agenda, there was no order of business… No record whatever was kept of proceedings, except the private personal letter written by the Prime Minister to the Sovereign, the contents of which, in any case, were never seen by anybody else. The Cabinet often had the very haziest notion as to what its decisions were. (1918)

Lloyd George’s first move was not to remove Asquith but to demand a new War Committee with full powers and a general reform of the constitutional machinery. Asquith would remain PM but direction of the war effort would shift to others. LG, MH and some Tories worked on the proposals and negotiated with Asquith. MH was ambivalent — he wanted Asquith to stay as PM and was nervy about LG’s character and methods (‘brilliant but often unsound’!) but also wanted a fundamental change in the war’s direction. A leak to the Times of Asquith’s imminent neutering scuppered the deal. Asquith resigned, Bonar Law deferred to LG who became PM.

The re-organisation based on Asquith remaining was dropped. From 7 December 1916 the old system was replaced with what LG described as ‘virtually a new system of government in this country’:

1. A War Cabinet of five including the PM. Only Bonar Law had departmental responsibilities. Milner, Curzon and Henderson had no executive tasks. Milner said the group would have to ‘do a lot of Thinking and Deciding’ and have precious little else to do. For MH, it all depended on LG — no one could say these four were ‘the wisest hands to win the war — two are really feather heads’, it’s a ‘mere political expedient of the most transparent kind to tide over a difficult crisis’. Carson said of its first meeting — which he attended but was not a member — that it did more work in 7 hours than all previous meetings together. It often worked from 11ish until the evening.

2. Hankey was Secretary to the War Cabinet. A duty was to write a record of proceedings and decisions. He was the first outsider to attend a Cabinet meeting to record its proceedings (see caveat below).

3. A Cabinet Secretariat to support Hankey and the War Cabinet. It prepared the agenda, organised attendance and papers and records of meetings. It communicated between the War Cabinet and the departments. Hankey had four Assistant Deputies. Young, Tom Jones (a Welsh confidant of LG), Clement Jones and L.C Amery. Staff from the late War Committee were transferred over. Tom Jones became Deputy Secretary until 1930 and was the most important official other than MH. TJ’s role was to act as ‘a fluid person moving about among people who mattered and keeping the PM on the right path’. MH did not try to deny Jones the wide scope the PM had given him. [Such ‘fluid people’ are critical and much depends on their talents and character. TJ was an official but his job was more like a modern special advisor and he did things for PMs which today would not be allowed for an official, such as helping with ‘political’ work.]

4. A network of Cabinet Committees.

MH set out early an important principle:

It is of the upmost importance that the responsibility of the Departments should be in no way weakened or overridden by the development of the Secretariat … [which] is neither an Intelligence Department nor a General Staff, but a machine for the service of the War Cabinet in co-ordinating the action of the responsible Departments.

MH initially envisaged a functional division of responsibilities along lines of machinery (e.g records) and ideas — ideas beyond the scope of ministers constrained by departments to help discussion in the War Cabinet by people without ministerial responsibilities. But this was short-lived and instead the Secretariat was divided along lines of military and civil with no ‘ideas’ function.

Instead ‘ideas’ were to be in a new PM’s Secretariat, an entirely new organisation to be housed in the No10 gardens (and nicknamed ‘the Garden Suburb’) while the Cabinet Secretariat was housed in beautiful houses in the Whitehall Gardens cul-de-sac. This looked broadly at issues other than military. The two Secretariats worked closely but in time MH grew unhappy.

(Whitehall Gardens, built in 1808, had beautiful houses where Disraeli and Peel lived which had gardens leading down to the Thames, until they were cut off by Victoria Embankment later in the century. It was built in the old Privy Garden of the Palace of Westminster, painted by Canaletto in 1747: see below, Montagu House, on the right overlooking the Thames, (Whitehall, looking north), and Whitehall from Richmond House. The CID had been quartered in Disraeli’s old house (No2). Hankey commandeered some more of the houses and set up his offices, separated from the Embankment and Thames by long gardens — ‘no pleasanter spot for an office in the whole of London’. Whitehall Gardens was demolished in 1938, the same year Hankey retired, to make way for new government buildings, a ‘monstrous act of vandalism’.)

Whitehall and the Privy Garden looking north from Richmond House, 1747

Residence of Peel, 4 Whitehall Gardens (and where he died after falling off his horse)

Secrecy and distribution. MH did not use shorthand but did make detailed notes. There was wrangling over the years as ministers adapted to some records being kept and there were arguments over the extent to which individual comments should be recorded or only decisions etc. MH opposed a full record of comments because, e.g a function of the minutes was to give to other officials and they should not see that minister X said Y in opposition to the agreed decision (or collective responsibility was undermined).

You can see the power of the notetaker in reflections upon how MH did the job — he could elaborate a conclusion ‘which had not been expressed in so many words by anyone at the meeting but which was accepted afterwards as representing the outcome’, and people would joke that they couldn’t tell what decision had been reached but must await MH’s minute. There was new formality around papers submitted to Cabinet and inevitable problems of balancing the need for security with the need to share with senior people responsible. And MH was inevitably caught between the PM not trusting people and those people badgering him for more information.

In 1889 HMG passed legislation (Official Secrets Act) to protect official secrecy, prompted by a 1878 incident in which a FO clerk memorised the text of an Anglo-Russian treaty and sold it to a London newspaper for £40. Over 20 years only one prosecution brought under the OSA was for a matter other than military/naval affairs. Complaints about leaks by Cabinet ministers was regular, including by Asquith during the war.

MH’s general approach was to err on the side of sharing too much rather than too little with ministers. But he also guarded Cabinet secrecy. The addition of notes and better communication did not mean the end or dilution of Cabinet secrecy. In 1916 there had been a formal investigation into the Dardanelles disaster. The inquiry requested notes of War Council discussions. MH got Asquith to refuse handing them over, though in the end a compromise was agreed after some threats of imprisoning ‘in the Tower’ from the Inquiry commissioners — the lead of the inquiry was allowed to peruse the documents to satisfy himself that nothing substantial had been hidden. MH’s argument was that release of the Notes from a sub-Cabinet body would compromise collective agreement — secrecy must be preserved so people could continue to talk freely unafraid their comments would be used as evidence against them. MH also kept his own detailed diary which LG was aware of. (There were odd occasions in the past when outsiders had been let into Cabinet, e.g 26/11/1882 when Sir Edward Hamilton attended.) [See below for reflection on my experience of this.]

Even good institutional mechanisms cannot solve fundamental political and strategic issues. The business of No10 and Whitehall improved. But the high level strategy of the war did not change much, attrition continued in Flanders. LG did not feel able until spring 1918 to replace the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, Robertson, and even then he did not dare replace the commander of the BEF, Douglas Haig. The friction around Cabinet and meetings was largely fixed but the friction between politicians and generals continued and relations deteriorated in 1917. The War Cabinet did not include representatives of the service departments and could not bridge differences between politicians and generals/services.

The military was frustrated that despite its advice the politicians kept questioning the ‘Westerner’ approach of Robertson and Haig. MH summed it up in December 1916 when he wrote that the War Cabinet was ‘really up against it as they don’t believe in Robertson’s ‘Western Front’ policy, but they will never find soldiers to carry out their “Salonica” policy’. The difference was not institutional, it was political-strategic, and could not be solved by ‘better process’. Naylor writes that LG did not have the political support from Tories to reject the military preference. The soldiers therefore continued with their ideas until LG demanded a change in spring 1918.

Hankey’s verdict on the change with LG and the new War Cabinet:

Gone were the scramble of Ministers to get their pet subject discussed at Cabinet meetings. Gone were the endless rambling discussions with no one to give a decision. Gone was the exasperating waste of time while the affairs of a department were discussed by people who knew little of the matter and had received no Memoranda on the subject. Gone were the humiliating and dangerous doubts of what the decision was, or whether there had been a decision at all. (Supreme Command)

Ch2: The Lloyd George regime

Asquith did not make much trouble for the new regime.

• The new Secretariats started work.

• LG spoke to Parliament less.

• There were more reports to the nation rather than reports to Parliament.

• One minister was not in Parliament (John Maclay).

The shift was shocking enough that AJP Taylor said ‘parliamentary government, as it had been known for the last century or so, ceased to exist’.

LG stressed that ministers remained responsible for departments to Parliament in ‘exactly the same way’.

Media criticism often confused responsibilities between the PM and Cabinet Secretariats.

Naylor writes that the ‘Whig theory of British history’ was a belief that the pattern of Cabinet government which had operated in the Victorian period represented the culmination of 1,500 years of progress towards representative government. The LG changes seemed to run contrary to this. And by spring 1918 when the war reached another crisis, many argued the changes had not been vindicated by improved performance. And, per above, the improved machinery had not solved the core political-strategic problems.

There were still often problems stemming from the inherent difficulty of problems, the characteristics of Ministers, and the disagreements over military strategy. On 18 March 1918 amid the military crisis, MH wrote of how the ministers kept avoiding the questions on the agenda, getting side-tracked, LG not initialling conclusions nor allowing MH to act without them, such that everything was getting clogged up and No10 a bottleneck.

Hankey personally was seen as contributing both to the development of the convoy system and the tank, two of of the most important innovations and both of which required overcoming strong Whitehall inertia. At the end of the war the Cabinet granted him £25,000 for his services and it was widely seen as reasonable. MH himself recorded that ‘I did as much to win the war as any of the Admirals and Generals’.

He went with LG to the peace talks where he was also widely praised for bringing order to the chaos of political meetings.

Now there came the question of how the wartime system would change with peace.

MH favoured maintaining a small Cabinet over a reversion to the old system. He thought the small size ‘coupled with the elasticity which enabled the arbiters to hear all sides of the case’ was crucial to the wartime success. He wanted to call the new variation ‘the Reconstruction Cabinet’. The Milnerites wanted to keep the war system and have an Imperial Cabinet. MH thought a Cabinet of 22 divided into imperial and domestic was a possible compromise but preferred the small option.

After the Versailles conference was over the Commons insisted on a change to the wartime system and in November 1919 normal Cabinet was restored quickly with the big departments returning to the Cabinet room.

Once the war system of a handful was politically impossible, MH preferred to revert to ~20 on the basis that 10-12 would just cause endless rows and whinging.

The Machinery of Government Committee chaired by Haldane recommended the continuation of the Cabinet Secretariat. MH’s own role continued. Suggestions about a new staff for the PM merging the two secretariats went nowhere for the moment and MH was opposed. (There were ideas about such a staff being an Intelligence organ. Naylor says in the long run this concept emerged again with the Central Policy Review Staff under Heath, although that was for Cabinet not the PM alone and it sat in the Cabinet Office. Cf. Stacey, 1975.)

Fascinating — Hankey was not made a Privy Councillor nor asked to swear its oath and he recorded in his diary that this meant although he would maintain secrecy ‘for so long as necessary’, he did not regard himself and his heirs ‘bound by an oath that I have never been asked to take’, ‘my memoirs will be the more interesting for my not having taken the Oath’, and if he had taken it ‘I am not sure that I should feel free to keep this diary’!

Minutes now were called Conclusions and were supposed to be shorter — MH assured Churchill that he would destroy his ‘pencil notes’ of discussion once the formal Conclusions were drafted. His assistant was banned from the room then readmitted. [The beginning of the creep towards ~10 non-ministers who now sit ‘against the wall’.] Specific conclusions were sent to Departments for action or information. Secret documents were circulated to named individuals. MH had tried to get the Cabinet to agree to return papers to the CO for him to keep in the event of resignation or death, but they refused and instead said that ministers could not make public use of documents without the permission of the King. The ‘immemorial custom’ (MH) of Cabinet had been that papers remained the personal property of Ministers on vacating office. In wartime it had shifted because of the number of secret documents. But now ministers reverted to the old rule. (CID in 1908 stipulated that keeping private files of CID papers was not allowed. CID continued this approach and ministers complied.) Remarkably, when LG left office he took with him the Irish Treaty of 1921 and kept it until the CO recovered it in 1945 after his death — and nobody had ever asked to see it!?! (And Naylor implies it was the only copy!?)

The OSA presumed guilt until innocence was proved and could be used in extremis. It was widened in 1911 and 1920 but it was a grey area the extent to which the OSA applied to ministers (see below).

Also in 1919 the Treasury’s role was strengthened and the Permanent Secretary of HMT was made Head of the Civil Service. This proved MH’s ‘most daunting problem in the immediate post-war years’ (Naylor). HMT officials claimed a precedent going back to 1867 but this was a formal specified statement. Both the creation of the CO and the HMT takeover of the civil service reduced the powers of departments and strengthened the powers of the PM over and concerning them.

HMT seconded an official to sit in the CO to resume ‘the old established arrangement’ of departments thrashing out with HMT ideas with spending implications. MH agreed.

In 1921 HMT proposed shifting budgetary provision for the CO from within Treasury to a separate status. MH opposed as he wanted the CO to stay hidden from Parliamentary scrutiny but he lost the argument. MH viewed the PM as Head of the CO as well as First Lord of the Treasury and said he should have only one department, accepting a view of HMT as a foster parent of the CO. His fear of scrutiny was clearly substantial given he objected to more theoretical autonomy. (Naylor does not explain why Fisher wanted this, given Fisher’s desire to take over the CO, see Ch3.)

The post-war Cabinet Office consisted of:

• Cabinet Secretariat

• a much smaller Secretariat for CID

• an office responsible for publishing Official War Histories (the CO kept the documents so it was natural)

• an office responsible for communication with the League of Nations [moved to the FO shortly but an early sign of the post-1918 tendency for the PM to encroach on the old duties of the Foreign Secretary].

Functionally it was divided into home (led by Tom Jones) and external affairs covering imperial, foreign, and defence affairs. MH tried hard to get the CID restored and it met in June 1920 [edited from 2020, thanks to commenter] for the first time in 5 years.

There were 123 staff in 1922, a score less than 1919. [The CO cannot tell you today how many people work there but they had a communications office about as big as this recently.]

In autumn 1922 the LG government fell. There were rows over foreign policy and the PM’s style. The SoS at the FO, Balfour, had been excluded from the War Cabinet. The FO had been diminished. There was FO resentment at MH’s role and influence. (MH was also a student of phrenology which influenced him particularly on the characteristics of the Poles!) LG had resented FO secrecy pre-war and now often left diplomats in the dark about his activities. Curzon was not much of a check as he wanted to stay in office and deferred to LG on many issues but their relationship deteriorated.

A crisis blew up over Turkey in what came to be known as the Chanak crisis. LG was pro-Greek. Baldwin was appalled at LG’s Cabinet and watching its meetings, ‘I felt I was in a thieves’ kitchen’, nobody seemed to have any principles and there was ‘the most awful cynicism’; LG’s methods were ‘a profound threat’ because of ‘the wide appeal which apparently easy, authoritarian solutions had over the slow processes of democracy’. Cabinet was divided. The PM’s Secretariat was in chaos with no effective head. The public was indifferent. The press was hostile. Much of Parliament was critical. Public statements from No10 were seen as reckless. Handling of the Dominions was poor.

The Cabinet Secretariat got some blame for some for the debacle. Naylor says this was unfair: Curzon lost the argument in Cabinet, there was no secret cabal in the CO. The fall of LG was for deeper political reasons. Curzon summed up the situation as there being ‘two Foreign Offices’ and the No10 one did not communicate with the other. Underlying everything was that LG’s conduct of affairs was personal, secret, arbitrary. People disliked his handling of the press and personal corruption including sale of honours. While much could be swallowed during the war crisis now people were fed up of it. LG joked that while he could ‘conceive of circumstances arising in which I might be compelled to act on principle’, nobody could say that of FE Smith or Churchill! (LG said it was better to sell honours than policies like Tories and Liberals.)

LG recognised the shifting political sands and could have resigned and made it easier to make a comeback but Beaverbrook said ‘the glitter of his supreme office held him in chains and he could not bear to give up power and patronage’, it was a weakness ‘and he knew it was weakness’. Although LG maintained his grip on Cabinet, the lower ranks of Tories had had enough.

My experience is that all Prime Ministers suffer by suppression. Their friends do not tell them the truth; they tell them what they want to hear. It was so with Asquith… George was also misled. People are always apt to think that what had been will be. (Bonar Law)

The fate of the Cabinet Secretariat now hinged on Bonar Law’s attitude to whether it had contributed to this ‘suppression’.

CH3: Crisis 1922

Parts of the press had started criticising the Cabinet Secretariat — ironically some criticism for supposedly encroaching on policy but some for failing to coordinate policy and allowing a shambles! MPs gave speeches in 1922 about the dangers of the Secretariat and the growth of the PM’s power, the dangers of ‘the Presidential system’, which threatened Parliament and the constitution. It was defended by Austen Chamberlain as the mechanism of Cabinet control — it ‘has no executive function, has no administrative function, displaces no other Department’. LG described it as ‘a communicating Department, they are a means of transmitting to Departments the decisions’, it is ‘purely a recording machine’ and has ‘nothing whatsoever to do with any question of policy’. And LG explicitly linked the ‘old dignified ways’ to ‘the cataract of 1914’ and said ‘the world wants a change from the old methods’.

[Obviously the development of the CO has proved critics right in the sense that it has usurped ministerial powers, it very much is involved in policy, it has gone far beyond secretarial work etc.]

The PM’s Secretariat also caused trouble with Cabinet and press. Beaverbrook ran a campaign against MH and deliberately confused it with the Cabinet Secretariat. It was not popular with departments because LG used it to fend off ministers who wanted to talk to him.

MH had a strict policy of the Cabinet Secretariat having no contact with the press. Ministers still sometimes blabbed and the departments had bigger press offices so more leaked out there. And there were suspicions and worries that a new government might use records from the previous government to discredit them.

Overall, the new institution was associated with LG’s leadership and habits therefore there were questions about whether it would survive his departure.

Balfour dismissed much of the criticism of LG’s ‘personal rule’ — PMs are always attacked either for being ‘figure-heads run by abler men or tyrants. There has never been a middle position.’

After the Carlton Club revolt and the collapse of LG’s position, MH thought a reduction in the Secretariat’s staff inevitable. MH quickly divested himself of things like the League of Nations to the FO. (He retained some loyalty to LG. Tom Jones said of LG that one could say fifty things about LG, all true and contradictory.)

There was a lot of press speculation on the end of the LG ‘system’. And MH wrote that ‘the whole hierarchy of the civil service’ is trying to ‘down me’. MH had to persuade Bonar Law to keep the Secretariat and defeat Warren Fisher, Permanent Secretary at HMT who wanted to absorb the Secretariat. [No surprise, a Treasury power grab!]

Bonar Law told him that he wanted the recording of minutes to continue but the expense of the Secretariat to be reduced. MH agreed. Fisher argued that HMT was ‘the central Department of the Government’ therefore the Cabinet Office must be an integral part of HMT. MH argued that the Cabinet Secretary often had to deal with disputes between HMT and departments and had to be seen as independent, not a Treasury official. They came to a deal. But Bonar Law gave a speech, in the election campaign, in which he said the Secretariat ‘must come to an end’ — but we must retain an agenda and ‘a definite record of our decisions’. The Cabinet Secretary and ‘whatever help he needs’ should be part of the Treasury which is ‘the central department of government’. This confirmed exactly what MH had wanted to avoid — the Secretariat being absorbed into HMT.

Then Fisher proposed that MH continue as secretary to the Cabinet and CID and become clerk of the Privy Council (this role being suddenly open as the previous Clerk had been convicted of ‘bothering women’ in Hyde Park and ‘even if he wins his appeal will probably have to retire’!).

The proposal eases everything. The Cabinet is constitutionally a Committee of the Privy Council, as the CID is of the Cabinet. The whole arrangement is symmetrical and logical but one that I have often thought of. Fisher then astonished me by saying it had been in his mind throughout…

[HMT] had shown neither foresight nor organising capacity, and had plunged the country into something like administrative chaos until the War Cabinet machinery came to the rescue. This he [Fisher] did not dispute and even strengthened what I said.

This arrangement also meant that MH would brief the king (as he had about CID pre-LG) and it would solve the issue of someone being in Cabinet who had not sworn the Privy Council oath of secrecy.

MH spoke to Bonar Law with a prepared resignation statement. Bonar Law read it, said he was ‘too sensitive’, and agreed MH’s requests:

• to defend him in Parliament against the many attacks,

• the Secretariat would not ‘be swallowed by the Treasury’ and

• he should have his own staff which would be reduced to a minimum.

Fisher largely surrendered, asking only that MH move office from Whitehall Gardens which MH agreed to but then did not do. Fisher officially noted that he regarded the logical step to be the absorption of the CO into HMT but he would not push it while MH was in post.

Fisher consistently held that he had deferred to MH’s personal position and he did not accept the Secretariat’s status long-term. But the matter was essentially closed until MH stood down in 1938 and the fight resumed. The two worked together in important ways on rearmament in the 1930s.

HMT maintained that a Blue Note in 1887 had made clear the role of the HMT Permanent Secretary as also head of the civil service but Baldwin had to admit in Parliament (24/2/1926) that while the association of the two functions dated to 1867, the file containing the Minute and associated papers had been lost for fifty years! [Has this Blue Note ever been found?] But the 1919-20 reorganisation and confirmation of Fisher’s dual role helped put things on an official footing. Bridges, a later Permanent Secretary of HMT who also became Cabinet Secretary, took a different view to Fisher and thought the Secretariat should be independent of HMT because of its role in handling disputes with HMT.

Fisher saw the civil service along with the Army, Navy and Air Force as one Service of the Crown with four Divisions. He also abolished the Home/Foreign Civil Service distinction in the pursuit of a unified Civil Service —

… a single efficient entity, a unified machine in which advancement came by merit, whose standards of conduct were of the highest and whose administrative capabilities would not be impeded by jealousies or red tape.

Many saw in Fisher’s general bureaucratic victory and the departure of LG a win for the Insiders against the Outsiders. Thomas Balogh, in The Apotheosis of the Dilettante (1969), said of Fisher’s vision that when during the war something hard had to be done to avert disaster, outsiders invariably had to be brought in!

Bonar Law drew an analogy with Rome which had two different modes for government — peace mode and war mode. During the war, they had had to centralise with the War Cabinet etc but now it’s peace we should ‘do as the Romans did’ and go back to the old peacetime ways. But after the election Bonar Law tempered his criticisms and the Secretariat carried on much as before though a bit smaller (102 to 63 staff). Bonar Law also described his view of the PM job as different to LG who had decided most things himself — he would act more like the head of a large business where most things are done by others and he would provide ‘general supervision’.

MH would have a run-in with Curzon who attacked the Secretariat publicly then asked for their help in providing support because the FO couldn’t do it promptly — ‘You abuse us like that then sponge on our efficiency because the rotten Foreign Office cannot provide an efficient stenographer’.

[NB. Naylor barely mentions it but another important report was the Haldane report on government machinery handed down in December 1918.]

CH4: The Secretariat in the 1920s: policies and procedures

Hankey was seen as impartial by key players. E.g he could be asked for records to resolve disputes and people trusted him to be straight.

MH had to deal with a slew of memoirs of the war and disputes. Ministers and soldiers wanted to rebut charges. There was no formal system for reviewing ministerial memoirs. Churchill discussed his account with Asquith and this approach became institutionalised. MH pointed out to people that he had no formal role and could exempt nobody from either the Official Secrets Act nor their Privy Council oath. He suggested that only the serving PM could absolutely OK revelations about Cabinet discussions.

He also had many problems with the Official Histories of WWI.

In 1889 HMG passed the Official Secrets Act (above). Over 20 years only one prosecution brought under the OSA was for a matter other than a British citizen disclosing secrets. It was widened in 1911. The first section concerned espionage. Section 2 construed as an offence the action of any person who, having any information obtained ‘or to which he had access owing to his position’ in office, ‘communicates the information to any person other than a person to whom he is authorised to communicate it’. In the cursory debate of 1911, S2 was never discussed. In 1919 the courts ruled that it applied to any information, not just secret data, obtained through an official position. The 1920 OSA amendment was largely about espionage. Naylor writes that the Attorney General made a hash of explaining it in Parliament and this reverberated for decades. In 1972 the Franks Committee claimed that it had always been the intention for the OSA to operate against leaks of all kinds. [This wide interpretation clearly extends extremely far from a measure to stop espionage or the disclosure of secret and important information.]

It was a grey area the extent to which the OSA applied to ministers. Many ministers and PMs (including Asquith and LG) acted as if it clearly did not apply to them. The OSA was not invoked to stem the flood of wartime memoirs. And it has not stopped the flow of ministerial memoirs since.

From 1934 ministers have supposedly not retained comprehensive collections of Cabinet papers, as was normal pre-war.

Bonar Law dispensed with the PM’s Secretariat and reverted to the Private Secretary system. BL got throat cancer and was replaced by Baldwin. There was no warm personal relationship between Baldwin and MH but there was mutual respect and the Secretariat survived another change of PM.

MH was not consulted about the snap 1923 election over Protection and Baldwin consulted with no officials on the matter before launching the campaign. Tom Jones stayed on as a speechwriter for BL and Baldwin. He opposed the policy — was a fierce liberal and a free trader professor of economics — yet wrote SB’s campaign speeches on Protection, a partnership MH thought ‘the most extraordinary feature of the election’.

In June 1920 CID met for the first time in 5 years. A Standing Defence Sub-committee was charged with surveying defence commitments and this committee in effect carried on CID’s business. The Standing Defence Sub-committee was tasked in March 1923 with a review of the co-ordination of the three Services. This committee spun off another sub-committee chaired by Balfour on whether the Navy would gain complete control of the Fleet Air Arm or whether it would remain part of RAF. (It was given to the RAF but the Navy fought on.) The Sub-committee recommended that the Chiefs of Staff of the three Services constitute a committee of the CID to discuss questions affecting their joint responsibilities. The COS Sub-Committee thereby acquired functions which had been intended but never secured for its parent, the CID. It was a victory for Air Marshal Trenchard who had pushed for this since 1919. MH became Secretary to the COS committee too. Chiefs of Staff came and went — MH remained!

MacDonald continued the work of the Secretariat and CID in 1924. This brought MH into contact with the Webbs. Beatrice Webb recorded her impression:

An attractive personality, trusted and liked by all Cabinets in succession for the good reason that he likes them and is absolutely loyal and amazingly appreciative of the different statesmen he serves. A simple-minded soldier of the conventional type, devout Christian, a puritan in habits, a perfect gentleman in manners. He assumes that the men he serves are public-spirited however they may differ in opinion and capacity. He has plenty of shrewd intelligence, but no intellect; abundance of good temper but no wit; irony or sarcasm would, I think, be inconceivable on his own part and somewhat unintelligible in others. Hankey, like other simple-minded persons, mistakes power over other people for real distinction of thought and feeling. But this lack of censoriousness – this slightness of critical facility, combined with absolute integrity, kindness and loyalty and quickwitidness, make him an ideal secretary to Cabinets. If ever a man was perfectly suited to his job, it is Maurice Hankey.

Little changed. MacDonald asked the CO to inform the media of the topics discussed at Cabinet, which MH didn’t like and after Labour fell the practice was stopped.

The Campbell affair brought Labour down. The details are tortuous and not relevant (pp141ff). Nutshell:

• A journalist published a piece in the Communist Party paper Workers’ Weekly calling on the armed forces to organise to smash capitalism. The DPP and Attorney General agreed it was a crime. The DPP secured a warrant for Campbell’s arrest, then after publicity the AG thought he’d made a mistake and wanted to u-turn.

• Now he brought in the PM and Cabinet. There was a Cabinet discussion. Cabinet decided that ‘political’ prosecutions should not proceed without Cabinet agreement. And it agreed with the u-turn on the basis of AG comments on a letter from Campbell (which turned out not to exist!). The entire discussion sounds shambolic and just like a modern Cabinet discussion of legal advice!

• There was then a political furore in which MacDonald claimed to MPs he had never been involved and the entire matter had been at the discretion of the Law Officers.

• But many people knew it had been discussed in Cabinet. MacDonald challenged the note of Cabinet by Tom Jones. But Jones also had original verbatim notes which he had not destroyed (interesting too!). MH thought the PM’s statement to Parliament ‘a bloody lie’! So a classic political problem was entangled with the duties of the new Secretariat to record Cabinet discussions and the records might lead to the fall of a government.

• In the tortuous argument, MH went into great detail and tried to persuade the PM his memory was mistaken and he had indeed approved the Minute he now said was wrong, and MH could prove that the Minute had been circulated to Cabinet and nobody had disputed the record.

• The PM would not admit error. He lost a vote. The government fell.

• MacDonald maintained the whole affair was an ‘extraordinary series of muddles’ which was true! But he also never admitted some established facts and he blamed the Secretariat to others after his fall.

Interestingly, Jones suggested to MH that MH try to influence the King NOT to grant an election — an example of how already the Cabinet Secretary’s position was informally accumulating power in ways unintended by LG or other PMs.

In the election that followed MacDonald was undone by the infamous Zinoviev letter. This is also too complex to go into in detail. Nutshell:

• On 10 October a document arrived at the FO purporting to be from Zinoviev, head of the COMINTERN, to the head of the Communist Party of Great Britain outlining a plan to use a new Labour Government for a Bolshevik revolution.

• It took days to wind through the machinery to the PM who asked for views on its authenticity. The Permanent Secretary, Crowe, said it was genuine, others were unsure.

• As Whitehall deliberated and planned an official response, a copy was leaked to the Daily Mail which threatened to publish it. Crowe decided on his own authority to publish immediately along with the official government protest without the PM’s agreement. It was published four days before the election leading to a great scandal. MacDonald later claimed he could have been reached by phone.

• The Soviet government said the document was a forgery.

• MacDonald told his colleagues he felt like he’d been ‘sewn in a sack and thrown in the sea’.

• MacDonald’s campaign sank. He had no clear answer to the accusations.

• Labour ministers felt with justification they were the victims of a very dirty trick.

• The new Tory government assured the Commons it was genuine.

• Naylor writes that a) Hankey accepted the letter as genuine all his life, b) now the authenticity of the letter remains in dispute but c) there is no doubt the letter was planted in the press by the intelligence community and there was a ‘sordid’ intrigue between that community and the Tories.

• In 1999 a report was published with supposedly full access to MI5, MI6 and other secret files. It concluded it was probably a forgery written by White Russians and probably leaked to the Mail by MI6. There have also been suggestions it was an operation conducted by George Ball, MI5 agent and Conservative supporter.

A legacy of the red scares was the Chancellor of the Duchy drawing up secret plans to deal with events like a General Strike. MH played a role drafting Emergency Regulations 1926 (under the Emergency Powers Act 1920) issued by Royal proclamation at the end of April 1926 when negotiations over coal miners’ pay and conditions collapsed. However the courts declared the General Strike illegal — only the coal dispute was covered by the 1906 Trade Disputes Act — and the TUC folded. [The unions involved in the General Strike became liable by common law for incitement to breach of contract and faced asset seizures. The Trade Disputes and Trade Unions Act 1927 banned sympathy strikes, general strikes, and mass picketing, creating a system whereby trade union members had to ‘opt-in’ to paying the political levy to the Labour Party.]

The Baldwin Cabinet renounced the precedent that prosecutions of a political character required Cabinet sanction. Baldwin described it as ‘unconstitutional, subversive of the administration of justice and derogatory to the office of the Attorney-General’. The parliamentary debate on this created the modern understanding of the constitutional position of the Attorney-General. In exercising the enforcement of the criminal law the AG is wholly independent of the Government and responsible only to Parliament.

MH drafted departmental staff to help with Cabinet Committees. This cut down the need for more central people and ensured departmental experts were involved.

At this time the CO had three main functions:

1. The Secretariat, Cabinet records etc.

2. The CID.

3. Cabinet Committees.

MH repeated a critical point:

The function of the Cabinet Office is essentially one of machinery of Government and not of policy. It cannot be too strongly emphasized that the Cabinet Secretary has no duty of offering advice in any matter of policy or of interfering in any way with the functions of responsible Departments in this respect. (CAB 63/37, The British Cabinet Office.)

A fourth function was assigned to the CO in 1925 — the Committee of Civil Research (CCR), an effort intended to mirror the CID, operating neither as a Cabinet Committee nor a department. It could only investigate and recommend and had no fixed numbers or procedures, no executive office was under its control, no department was in obedience, nobody sat on it of right except the PM. Its function was to give ‘connected forethought from a central standpoint to the development of economic, scientific and statistical research in relation to civil policy and administration and it will define new areas in which enquiry will be valuable’. It had been foreshadowed in the Haldane report. It was set up under Labour but then Baldwin gave it to Balfour who understood CID and was also a patron of science and a pioneer in the coordination of government scientific research. Industrial research should not be seen as ‘a desirable luxury’ but essential said Balfour. 1925-30 it investigated many topics including the steel industry and electricity and nuclear research. It was the first attempt to create a research department at the highest level of government to recruit economic and scientific specialists outside departments.

It was closed in 1930 as it became caught up in the creation of the new Economic Advisory Council (EAC) by the Labour government in 1930 and power struggles with the Treasury.

NB. CID and CCR were not strictly speaking Cabinet Committees though they functioned largely as if they were and with the support of the CO Secretariat.

CH5: Twin Institutions

MH said in 1927 that he gave more time to the affairs of CID than to Cabinet.

The Admiralty had been angry when Labour did not authorise the construction of the Singapore naval base. Cabinet prioritised ‘international cooperation’ hoping restraint would lead to arms control. MacDonald implied to MPs that CID was not working properly and the Singapore decision was an example. MH was rightly angry. He told MacDonald that Singapore was ‘the worst case that can be taken’ to illustrate CID problems as ‘no question has been more exhaustively studied in the last twenty years’. MacDonald withdrew his criticism.

MacDonald also queried the influence of CID but MH reminded him that it did not take ‘decisions’, it resolved technical issues and provided ‘recommendations’ to Cabinet.

MH also recorded the proceedings of the COS Committee and spent a lot of time mediating disputes. The Tories renewed construction of Singapore but then there were great disputes about fortifications and between all and HMT.

MH and Jones disagreed in their advice to Baldwin on defence expenditure. MH argued that it was far better to invest in defence and keep people off the dole which ‘rots the morale of the people’. Jones preferred to spend on other things.

MH could influence discussion of things like the Locarno pact but he could not get his way if Cabinet ministers flatly disagreed. He also opposed discussions about a Channel tunnel. He fought to maintain Britain’s ‘Belligerent Rights’, i.e our longstanding claimed right to starve continental enemies in the event of war by closing naval traffic. He was enraged the Tories entertained what he regarded as stupid schemes for ‘freedom of the seas’ and babble about international law etc.

MH strongly opposed creating a Ministry of Defence and argued CID could do the job better and cheaper. He argued defence was too comprehensive to relegate to a ministry. CID could coordinate not just the Services but every Department and ‘in the widest sense of the term [CID] may be said to fulfil many of the functions of a Ministry of Defence’. MH was so committed to a revival of CID he said several times he would resign if it were replaced or changed much. Cf. a 1931 note he wrote arguing that such a MoD would go beyond the limit of ‘wise rationalisation’ to ‘over-centralisation’ which would ‘defeat its own object’.

He argued that the COS Committee determined priorities and could work with HMT to establish an overall figure for defence spending.

[In some sense, the NSC is a re-creation of aspects of CID in that it tries to coordinate across the entire system and can pull in any part of the state for discussion and coordination, including police. See below.]

MH thought that British governments had been too appeasing of America, giving way on issue after issue hoping it would improve relations. Instead we should stop making concessions. The American and Belligerent Rights issue came together when MacDonald visited Washington in 1929 to discuss the Naval Treaty. MH rallied the deep state to scupper America’s ambush of MacDonald and much-feared paragraphs were not announced! MH even broke his own rule on the press to brief The Times (off the record) on Belligerent Rights. Naylor concludes that ‘by present day standards, Hankey exceeded the bounds for civil servants’ but successive PMs did not see him as behaving improperly.

In 1929 MacDonald was PM again. Business continued mostly as usual though MacDonald wanted the Minutes to be sparser following his disaster years earlier (above)! (MH kept a separate series of notes with more details in his own files.) There’s only one recorded request 1929-35 from a minister to change the Minutes.

MH was pressed into service at the Hague Conference and was again appalled by the FO’s uselessness: they’d ‘done nothing: no organisation, no interpreters, … no accommodations booked, no nothing’.

The CCR could not develop synoptic planning because of HMT objections. But there remained a feeling among ministers something different was needed. MacDonald badgered for something like an ‘Economic General Staff’ operating like the CID but MH thought the analogy poor and likely to be a ‘feckless duplication of work already being done quite efficiently by departments’ which he wanted the CO to stay out of, and any ‘expert body’ independent of departments would just mean it was boycotted by departments including HMT. Instead there emerged by 1930 a committee comprised of officials plus outside experts, the Economic Advisory Council, with Jones as secretary. [These arguments have been repeated cyclically since, see Thoughts below.]

Labour returned to the Singapore base and ordered a go-slow again, enraging MH. Part of the justification was the morass of disarmament conferences taking place which Labour hoped would work.

At the London Naval Conference, Britain agreed to reduce our naval strength viz US and Japan. Churchill and others were very critical. The Admiralty stated bluntly that we were ‘reducing our strength as compared with the others’ and that full Imperial Defence was not compatible with the restriction from 70 to 50 cruisers. MH’s biographer concluded of the detailed discussion that MH fell victim to the diplomatic professional deformity of wanting a deal at almost any price and therefore agreed things he regretted.

Vansittart (Permanent Secretary at the FO) warned in May 1930 that Germany would rearm and the disarmament conferences would not stop it. MH agreed and started trying to undo the Ten Year Rule agreed in 1919 and confirmed officially again in 1928 and June 1930 by CID. In Jan 1931 MH sent a memo to MacDonald on military developments. The PM did not disagree with the analysis but felt that no action should be taken pending work of the Disarmament Conference. The COS concluded that developments in Asia should cancel the Rule and on 22 March 1932 CID accepted the COS view. But Cabinet insisted that the acceptance of the COS report could not justify increased spending on defence given the economic situation and they mandated further exploration of disarmament prospects.

20 months passed. After Hitler took power and dwindling hopes for disarmament, the COS view was put into effect formally by Cabinet in November 1933 and a Defence Requirements Sub-Committee (DRC) of CID was created, with MH as Chair, to plan a program for repairing deficiencies in armed forces: in this 20 months the Rule was theoretically dropped by the CID but in practice it continued.

By the end of 1930 the Depression had caused an economic and political crisis. Unemployment was over 2 million. The pound was under pressure viz the gold standard. Labour was stuck between demands for public spending cuts and their politics. The May report of May 1931 recommended spending cuts, benefits cuts and wage cuts.

The Cabinet fell apart. MacDonald said he’d resign but then formed a National Government. Labour felt betrayed. MH was sympathetic. He believed the crisis needed a cross-party/bigger than party solution. An interesting procedural anomaly preceded the new Cabinet: a Conference of Ministers met first and decided the new Cabinet would follow established procedures, i.e men NOT in Cabinet decided how the Cabinet would function and that it would be small (10) but with more getting the papers.

In a break with precedent the new government after the election (which decimated Labour) decided Ministers could publicly break with collective agreement on some economic issues.

MH was mostly an orthodox voice on the economy: Labour was spending too much, pensions and benefits were too high, we’re spending beyond our means etc. He wanted belt tightening and more for defence. He worried foreigners thought Britain ‘exhausted’ and unwilling to compete for vital interests. Interestingly a) he’d made a point of not voting since 1918, b) he voted for the National Government in 1931, c) we know this because the KING asked him about it and told him he should vote for the National Government!

The Secretariat continued as normal with the new government. Papers considered ‘exceptionally secret’ bore a special label in red print directing it be kept under lock and key, opened only by the named recipient, and copying was forbidden. This applied to ~2-3% of Cabinet papers in the estimate of MH’s deputy who organised this. Interestingly, budgets were discussed in Cabinet before they were announced but the Cabinet Secretary took no notes and no discussion was recorded.

LG threatened to publish Cabinet documents. MH assembled a legal case and informed LG’s secretary he would be prosecuted for breaching the OSA. LG backed off. MH also had to read volumes of LG’s Memoirs and suggest changes. LG was told he had to seek release from his Privy Council oath and guard against violation of the OSA. Constitutionally the King still had control over what Cabinet papers a former minister could quote from.

Ironically, MH himself would be denied permission to publish his own war memoir until 1961.

CH6: Hankey’s Last Years

There was a general principle that criminal law should not be adapted to ends not originally intended. This was ditched with the OSA. The second Labour government started using it for ends other than espionage and terrorism.

In 1925 the government has used the OSA to block publication of a book about Casement, executed 1916, based partly on diaries which the government suppressed for decades.

In 1932 it was used against Compton Mackenzie, a former British intelligence agent. He’d published two volumes of memoirs. He assumed there’d be no problems with the third. Then he was hit with OSA and advised by lawyers to plead guilty. He said he was told the government was using his case to send a message to LG and other ministers.

In 1934 a row over a book by Lansbury’s son using Cabinet documents provoked MH to action. One of the documents had been marked ‘most secret and confidential’. Hitherto there had been no formal rule or legal opinion on publication of Cabinet documents, it was all convention that publication required PM consent. (Baldwin had told MPs in 1927 that ministers were obliged to consult the government.) MH spoke to the PM and AG immediately. The issues in the papers were still very alive and contentious. MH argued it was a clear breach of the OSA. Legal wheels rolled. The publishers were told to recall all copies. Lansbury’s son was convicted of two misdemeanour counts under OSA. He was fined. But Lansbury himself was not prosecuted! (Perhaps it was felt that the principle only required the son prosecuted and the sight of a prosecution of a Cabinet minister by political opponents would look bad.) The prosecution worked: ministers did not publish Cabinet documents without permission and a formal rule had been established. (In 1944 the Cabinet Office confiscated papers from Lansbury’s family, the only case of outright confiscation according to Naylor and one which went far beyond Cabinet documents and cannot be defended.)

MH then used the case to argue that his Secretariat should acquire control of all Cabinet papers. CID papers were always collected from ministers and not left in their personal possession. Cabinet practice had been haphazard post-1918. MH argued that papers with ministers could easily be stolen by agents etc [obviously true]. And the assumption then was that Cabinet records would remain permanently closed, which held until 1966. They began to ask ministers to return papers but they could not insist. The Law Officers ruled that they held them lawfully but this right did not extend to heirs etc so papers were pursued when the minister died. MH deployed officials to request the papers from ministers and did not inform them of the Law Officers’ opinion that they could refuse!

It was also complicated by the fact that in 1931 the Law Officers thought the statement printed on Cabinet papers — ‘This document is the property of His Britannic Majesty’s Government. Secret, Cabinet’ — was legally dubious, and ‘property of His Majesty’ would have been more accurate! No change had been made. There was discussion about this but MH opined — ‘better to leave sleeping dogs lie’. The old heading continued despite doubts as to its legality. Many continued to confuse the meaning and significance of the two different phrases. It did become accepted that Cabinet papers were not the ‘property’ of ministers. And most ministers complied with the request, only half a dozen held out but were not pursued. LG and Churchill refused the ‘invitation’ and kept their papers. The Secretariat did not try to seize them from their heirs. Only the Irish treaty was recovered from LG because there was no other copy!

There was a tricky question of biographers’ access to papers of those dead — denying all access seemed unfair on those who happened to die (versus those alive and in possession of papers) yet creating rules seemed very hard given the constitutional and legal problems, so in very English fashion the Secretariat decided to make no rules but review cases individually. The Cabinet ended up discussing the subject and agreeing that relatives of the dead could be given access in some circumstances.

For MH, the system of Cabinet records was to help the efficient conduct of public affairs, not to help history or settle endless disputes between individuals.

[There’s a lot of historical detail in this chapter I’ll ignore here.]

A massive exemption was created again for war documents 1939-45. WSC wrote many ‘Personal Minutes’ which were seen at the time as intended for use in a post-war memoir. At the end of the wartime government, Churchill had Bridges (then Cabinet Secretary) draft an approach for those ministers: ministers could keep telegrams, minutes, documents circulated to Cabinet which they wrote and signed themselves and should be seen as ‘their personal property except that they will be bound by the rules governing the use of official papers which are well established’. This novelty regarding ‘personal property’ held for him and the wartime Cabinet. Attlee and the Secretariat then firmly closed the door again.

For a short time the CO tried to maintain that records of Cabinet proceedings should never be disclosed and were exempt from the Public Records Act 1958 which stipulated delivery of public records to the Record Office after 50 years. This could not be sustained and it became established that Cabinet records would be made accessible after 50 years [later 30].

Defence in 1930s

MH prioritised defence of the Empire in the East. This meant naval projects. The RAF was suspicious of him. Contrary to the view of MH and service chiefs, Treasury and other officials and ministers shifted some resources to air defence from the navy and army in 1934. In 1935 he worked on a new defence White Paper. Germany was rearming and introduced conscription in March 1935. MH thought the only way to square the circle was more money therefore public support and debate. There was serious tension between MH, Warren Fisher at HMT and Vansittart at FO. MH was deeply critical of Fisher’s papers though he did partly defend him in later years from criticism over his obstruction of parts of rearmament.

By the mid-1930s parts of the system started to revolt against MH’s dominance of CID. Liddell Hart told people MH had been there too long. Trenchard (resigned 1930) publicly stated that the secretaryship of Cabinet and CID should be separated. MH ‘deplored’ the suggestion. But criticism mounted in the mid-1930s of the defence system. He had warned of a Minister of Defence without a Ministry — the original idea floating around (see above). Now he stressed that it would pose a dilemma of dual control not just between the PM and Minister but between the Minister and the Fighting Service Ministries. He accepted the system for planning a war was deficient but blamed the now-abandoned Ten Year Rule.

In March 1936 Baldwin overruled MH on appointing Thomas Inskip as a defence deputy — Minister for Coordination of Defence. [This was famously but anonymously described as ‘the most cynical appointment since Caligula made his horse a consul’.] Inskip was not a military expert. MH simultaneously appointed a senior officer as deputy secretary in the CID — ‘Pug’ Ismay who would serve Churchill with distinction. He also strengthened the Joint Planning Committee. MH’s role was unchanged by the changes. Inskip sided with those who argued that the RAF must build up its fighter force.

MH also believed that Britain should prioritise her own defence over plans to help allies on the Continent. He did not believe in the League’s ability to enforce sanctions against Italy and he thought trying to use it against Italy would fail. Generally the military leadership agreed with MH that ‘collective security’ was a dangerous delusion. The COS thought that our position could not withstand an attack from Germany in Europe and Japan in Asia at the same time and pleaded for time.

Naylor argues that the push by MH and others in the system against the League and ‘collective security’ plus the outcome of the Hoare-Laval Pact contributed to Hitler’s belief that Britain wouldn’t fight for anything but herself. [In Britain the Pact led to an outcry in media and Parliament. The Chief Whip told the PM the MPs wouldn’t stand for it.]

In April 1936 MH summed up his attitude to rearmament:

The essential thing is to stave off war and to strengthen ourselves in case one day we can stave it off no longer — which God forbid.

There was a fundamental difference between the MH view — appease to buy time for rearmament — and the Chamberlain view — appease because it can bring a permanent peace. Naylor says MH ‘does not stand in the ranks of the appeasers’ because the policy was for him ‘a diplomatic mask designed to disguise the inability of British arms yet to sustain any other foreign policy’; he conciliated from a ‘conviction of weakness rather than a sense of mission’.

There was criticism of proliferating committees under the CID system. In early 1937 a standing ministerial committee was created, designated a CID Sub-Committee on Defence Plans (Policy). There were three committees — the CID, the DRC and the DP(P) — all of which overlapped with no clear demarcation.

MH worked closely with Chamberlain who took over as PM in 1937 but he also agreed with Balfour that Chamberlain’s judgement could not be trusted. As Chancellor, Chamberlain had not been interested in MH views on rearmament and defence priorities.

MH, the military and Vansittart agreed on the need to try to avoid fighting with Italy while they rearmed. Eden disagreed thinking appeasement would encourage more claims. [Of course, both perspectives could be right: we should avoid fighting Italy now AND/BUT this makes a fight more likely later. Of course, a core issue was that Chamberlain hoped that appeasement might lead to a permanent settlement.] In a footnote Naylor says that notes from a MH trip to Italy in 1937 lend themselves to the interpretation that MH had emotional sympathies with Italian fascism but he does not explore this further.

In the last major review of defence preparations before the war in winter 1937-8, HMT/Fisher again asserted caution because ‘we are rapidly drifting into financial chaos and are in danger of undermining ourselves before the Boche feels it desirable to move’. In December 1937 MH asserted that the RAF should pursue a larger proportion of light and medium bombers viz heavy bombers but Inskip opposed him and ignored it. The claim by some that MH pushed for fighters over bombers is not supported by the COS and HMT records (p249).

In 1937 the Economic Affairs Council was overhauled — officials recommended a return to the structure of the Committee of Civil Research of 1925! The Council had fallen out of use, was generally ineffective and this was a fitting end.

MH was pleased Eden resigned in Feb 1938.

I woke this morning with a strange feeling of relief. I am sorry to say that generally I wake on how we are to provide for some horror in the next war. Today I felt there was just a possibility of peace. I only hope I am right.

In August 1938 MH resigned as Cabinet Secretary and was replaced by Edward Bridges. He’d scouted out some directorships such as on the Suez Canal Company board (under the PM’s control). He recommended to the PM that his successor continue to combine the Secretariat and CID. He said it brought great advantages including of speed for the jobs to be unified in one office. But it was tricky to find someone with the skills needed for both. Fisher pushed for Edward Bridges. MH pushed Ismay saying a service officer would be better but both candidates would be great. Chamberlain decided to break up MH’s job: Bridges for the Secretariat and Ismay for CID.

Naylor says it’s hard to assess MH’s contributions on rearmament because his voice ‘blends into a chorus’.

MH left with bad blood with Churchill over the latter’s access to and use of secret information especially re the RAF to criticise policy. MH ended up writing to WSC complaining that his cultivation of information from officers was ‘subversive to discipline’ and that he strongly opposed such officers sharing such information. Relations never recovered. Naylor says the letter was unusual, perhaps unique, was a blunder, and is probably explained by the cumulative pressure MH felt over many years. (An interesting aside is Ismay’s comment that he found the three years 1936-9 ‘more difficult and anxious’ for him than the constant disasters of 1939-42.)

Coinciding with his leaving was the CO leaving Whitehall Gardens which was destroyed in August to make way for the Main Building of the MoD. [It’s interesting MH did not try to use his power to scupper this destruction!] MH handed over the Bridges the War Book he had laboured over.

[I have not gone into the huge questions on appeasement and defence planning but see blog on RV Jones for insight into the air aspect.]

CH7: The custody of Cabinet secrecy

Bridges made no big changes between August 1938 and the start of the war. According to Naylor, Churchill wanted to make some big changes when he took over but Ismay persuaded him not to.

The CO moved first to private houses in Richmond Terrace then after bombing to government buildings in Great George Street.

CID was closed at the outset of war and essentially merged into the new War Cabinet system with its Secretariat merging into the Military Section of the Cabinet Secretariat. Bridges remarked that the abolition of some two dozen subcommittees of CID was the biggest blow the Germans had endured. The Secretariat was split between the civil and military.

Minutes became shorter: the pros and cons of a problem were stated plus the conclusion or decision. Individual views were largely ignored.

The Secretariat grew from ~200 1939 to ~600 1945 (681 in 1976 but half were doing stats). Bridges expanded on MH’s idea of seconding departmental officials for 6-12 months to the CO so departments trusted the work.

MH accepted a War Cabinet post under Chamberlain and continued under WSC until removed in 1942. He then worked on his own memoir of WWI. By September 1943 he’d written to Bridges to arrange a vetting of his book. Bridges was concerned about the effect on the confidential relationship between ministers and officials. MH made changes and reminded Bridges that WWI had been treated as sui generis from the start. Bridges was unmoved. He objected to the depiction of the influence of officials on ministers’ decisions and to MH’s use of his diary to recover ‘the inner histories’ of government: ministers would become ‘much more chary of speaking freely’ to officials. For Bridges it was not another memoir about WWI but the first memoir about the influence of officials! MH appealed to the PM who sided with Bridges.

In 1957 MH tried again with Macmillan but was again told he could not publish. After correspondence Macmillan replied enclosing a copy of OSA and wrote that MH would not need a lawyer to realise that OSA ‘makes it an offence for any person who has held an official position to publish any information which he has acquired by virtue of holding that position’. So MH had pushed a broad interpretation of OSA to curtail ministerial behaviour he disliked and now found OSA used against him. One can feel some sympathy that MH watched memoirs of the recent war be published while he was still prevented from publishing his memoir of the previous war. Macmillan softened his stance when MH modified the book and a modified version was allowed in 1961. This itself was an exception to the post-1945 insistence that officials not publish memoirs.

Cadogan had also started a diary, known to Halifax, as had other officials. But Bridges did not yet know about it in dealing with MH. MH claimed his diary had been ‘absolutely essential’ to his work in WWI given the lack of official records. MH was then told that he’d have to remove all quotations from diaries.

Bridges was succeeded by his deputy, Norman Brook, in 1946. Brook served as Joint Permanent Secretary at the Treasury and as Head of the Civil Service. After that the jobs were split up again.

The OSA was used in 1938 against a journalist warning a criminal of arrest but this led to worries about its application to humdrum criminal matters. It was then used against WSC’s son-in-law Duncan Sandys who had implicitly threatened to reveal the poor state of London’s air defences. It was suggested that he could be imprisoned for two years if he did not reveal his official sources. But Sandys invoked his rights as an MP and the Speaker and Clerk of the Commons said that a breach of the privilege of rights of a MP had occurred. The AG backed off and said there was no question of trying to exercise powers of interrogation under OSA.

WSC articulated the core questions:

1. Does OSA enable HMG to bring criminal proceedings against MPs and will HMG do this?

2. Should HMG use OSA to prevent ‘exposure of Ministers who have neglected their duty’?

3. Is Parliamentary privilege in the larger sense involved in attempts by HMG to intimidate MPs?

In 1939 the government pursued an amendment to the Act while the Commons pursued the breach of privilege. The PM blamed an ‘extraordinary catalogue of accidents’ for mistakes over the Sandys case! Parliament made clear that it protected its proceedings from the 1911 and 1920 legislation and the government was forced to limit its use of OSA to espionage. Section 6 was modified, section 2 was intact.

[NB. This has been an issue recently. Some Tories claimed they could not have spoken in the Commons about the secret Afghan flights and super-injunction (revealed July 2025) ‘because of OSA’ but this is clearly false. OSA is relevant to what they say outside the Commons but does not limit what they say in the House.]

The restrictions on ministerial memoirs established in 1934 remained. Officials were not allowed to use official documents to settle public disputes. Vansittart complained when he was attacked post-war but the system did not budge.

Wartime continued to be treated as sui generis. E.g Alanbrooke’s diaries were allowed — though the original publication of them involved considerable modification of passages criticising Churchill which only were published long after he was dead.

In 1957 Bridges issued new regulations stating that Crown Servants were liable to prosecution under OSA for publication of ‘any official documentation which has not already been made public’ — i.e all official information, not just secret information.

The 1958 Public Records Act changed the bias from A) no publication by officials to B) an acceptance of publication after some decades.

At the end of the Victorian period the Home Office enforced a prohibition on access to records post-1800. Even post-1945 the HO retained its records post-1800 and transferred few of those to the Public Record Office. The FO decided in 1924 to open records through to the end of 1878. After 1954 some system was brought to the process.

Even aspects of intelligence work have been allowed, e.g Masterman’s The Double Cross System. Some documents were sealed for a century, e.g documents relating to the Abdication crisis of 1936.

Eden’s memoirs used Cabinet documents. Macmillan kept a diary he drew on for his own memoirs.

The Franks Committee 1971 described Section 2 as ‘an ancient blunderbuss’ in need of replacement.

The Wilson government failed to sustain a legal objection to the 1975 publication of Crossman’s Diaries — extracts in The Times 26/1/75. Crossman’s executors and the Times were determined on publication without following the Cabinet Secretary’s diktats. The government did not use OSA in their court case, they made a common law argument, which was the ‘coup de grace’ (Naylor) against Section 2. The Lord Chief Justice ruled the public interest would not be damaged by publication of a record of Cabinet at a decade’s remove. The judgment was not carte blanche for publication but the judge articulated the concept of balancing restrictions ‘in the public interest’ against ‘another public interest, such as freedom of speech’.

Crossman’s diaries are the first sign of ministers complaining about a ‘rival administration’ of officials, suspicions that officials were meeting without ministers to shape critical decisions, a growing feeling there is a wiring of real power hidden from the Cabinet, suspicion of the real power of the Cabinet Secretary exceeding that of ministers, a feeling that the drafting of Minutes suddenly revealed that a minister had lost a battle which was not evident in the meeting (!). [Such thoughts were novel and it would have shocked Palmerston’s generation to think ministers might feel like this. Such feelings now are widespread.]

In parallel a committee of Privy Counsellors (Radcliffe committee) inquired into the subject of ministerial memoirs and advised the proscription for 15 years, half that of the Lord Chief Justice in the Crossman case. It stressed the need to protect officials — there must be a ‘scrupulous reticence with regard to the attitudes and personalities’ of officials when writing memoirs. The Cabinet Secretary’s role in vetting memoirs was strengthened. And it was stated that ministers ought not to discuss officials still in service.

There’s a lot of detailed history on thinking about memoirs in the 1960s and 70s I’ve left out here.

Naylor says that there are documents relating to MH’s ministerial work in intelligence and bacteriological warfare that may never be released. [Is this true? Have they been published, destroyed, kept secret? Please leave links if you know.]

NB. the old practice was to keep the existence and membership of Cabinet Committees secret. Now there is a list published.

Some thoughts

NB1. As always when I describe Whitehall, remember that I also know and am friends with many excellent officials. The media stories of 2019-20 about widespread hatred and fighting were false — my biggest supporters were in the deep state, not among political people. My comments are not universal, when I say ‘officials’ I don’t mean ‘all officials’, I mean ‘the dominant subset which pushes the system’. They are directed at the dominant trends/characters which the pathological system now promotes at the expense of good public servants who are increasingly driven out.

NB2. These thoughts are intended to help develop a network thinking about how to do regime change properly. This needs many things discussed openly over the next 1-3 years to develop as deep a consensus as possible about critical issues (given constraints) but also, obviously, not everything should be discussed openly! Some ideas not discussed here will occur to readers. Feel free to suggest anything but my responses may not always be entirely open. An obvious example of something which should not be discussed openly before it happens is the precise list of people who should be removed and ideas for who replaces certain roles.

1/ The post-1850s civil service over time has destroyed the old responsibility to Parliament. The Northcote-Trevelyan report came partly from the model of the East India Company which had applied ideas from the Chinese civil service about competitive exams, ‘meritocracy’ etc. Gladstone wanted to replace the old system. The Northcote-Trevelyan report of 1854 was not implemented but came as the shambles of the Crimea War showed change was needed. Change and reform was in the air so it was implemented.

As Northcote-Trevelyan worked its way through after the 1850s, permanent officials acquired more power, ministers lost power. Individual responsibility for ministers and officials gradually declined. For Pitt and Palmerston, ministerial responsibility to Parliament was real: they were really in charge and really responsible to Parliament. After Northcote-Trevelyan, this constitutional-theoretical responsibility to Parliament gradually became more and more fake. Ministers now pretend to ‘run my department’ and ‘take responsibility’ but they know little of what goes on in the departments, they can hire and fire nobody, and they are rarely responsible in any real way. When they say in Parliament ‘I’m responsible’, everyone knows it’s something of a charade and the minister saying it is not responsible in any normal sense, and may not even have been aware of the thing they’re taking responsibility for.

As I’ve pointed out many times, the brilliant book Now It Can Be Told by General Groves illustrates timeless core ‘unrecognised simplicities’ of high performance. One of his principles for running the Manhattan Project was:

Authority was invariably delegated with responsibility, and this delegation was absolute and without reservation.

Whitehall has rendered this crucial simple principle effectively unlawful/impossible. If you try to enact its reinstatement and say ‘I want named directly responsible individuals in charge of XYZ so we all know the score’, as I did in 2020, it’s seen as a fundamentally hostile act to modern Whitehall. As long as this continues, it’s pointless hoping for serious change in performance.

2/ The CO’s creation was in response to the failure of the newly ‘professionalised’ system. Whitehall including the Treasury and FO failed to think about deterrence and war properly pre-1914 — see Hankey’s and others’ comments. And Whitehall proved worse at adapting in a crisis than the pre-Northcote Trevelyan system had been. The Cabinet Secretariat/Office were created partly because the newly ‘professionalised’ system could not solve its problems and in panic they essentially threw power at Lloyd George to centralise and decide much himself. After the 1916-18 crisis passed, they were left with the machinery created in this panic, in a similar way to how much of Washington today is what FDR and Hopkins created 1933-45 in the panic over the Great Depression and threat of Communism.

It’s fascinating how both Asquith and Lloyd George lacked confidence in the professional military leadership’s strategy and execution (as Pitt sometimes did) yet felt politically unable to fire generals (unlike Pitt who moved people and promoted people). Hence the carnage continued with offensive after offensive despite many ministers having grave doubts about the strategy. The rapid promotion of talent and demotion of duffers that characterised the Pitt story has gone. The supposed ‘meritocracy’ and ‘professionalisation’ of Whitehall with Northcote-Trevelyan yielded Haig and others at the pinnacle of the bureaucracies, strong bureaucratic resistance to innovation, and the Somme.

The story of Pitt, Wellington and Nelson is messier, ‘noisier’, with much more dramatic public controversy and Parliamentary debate — and amid many failures, phenomenal successes including two rare geniuses (Wellington and Nelson) discovered and empowered who built great institutions to defeat one of the great military geniuses in history.

The story of WWI is politicians sitting on doubts, failing to act, more publicly ‘unified’, less ‘noisy’, less Parliamentary controversy — and much less success. It was a catastrophe from which we’ve never recovered, a catastrophe which Alanbrooke felt keenly in the darkest moments of 1942 when he wrote in his Diaries that the real reason for the WW2 disasters was the the best of the younger generation had been slaughtered in WWI’s trenches.

Just as the system failed to generate realistic thinking about Germany and preparations pre-1914, so it also mostly failed in similar ways with Hitler. But this failure was a mix of institutional failure to focus thinking (like pre-1914), the personal characteristics of senior ministers (e.g Chamberlain’s fundamental misreading of Hitler), and (real/imagined) political constraints (e.g ministers had to care far more about voters’ desires for spending on non-defence than Pitt did).

Many stories of bureaucratic inertia in WW1 and WW2 feel very familiar to me having watched covid in ways that the stories of 1790s-1800s are less familiar to my time in SW1 (and more similar to other times and places). Modern bureaucratic madness has its own particular kind of stories and characters. For sure, every war involves disasters and stupidities. But there was a dynamism you see in our response to the Napoleonic Wars which was already diminished by 1914 and had diminished further in Alanbrooke’s tales of Whitehall in his Diaries, in RV Jones’ memoir (links above), in the battles to develop Special Forces against extreme opposition and in other tales.

We have continued in the same direction for decades since. This has been generally pathological and this can be seen int he way the successful things were attacked by ‘the system’. E.g The successful Alanbrooke/CoS Committee model: ended. The successful RV Jones model for scientific intelligence: ended immediately after 1945. The SAS: closed immediately after 1945. It’s to be expected that our response to Ukraine was extremely delusional, extremely incompetent, and generated more lies and delusions rather than improvements.

3/ Secrecy is used to hide failure. When you create a permanent class that promotes almost entirely from within, they inevitably prioritise protecting the permanent system. Secrecy and ‘national security’ is therefore used to stop not just voters but also the politicians nominally in charge understanding the system’s failures and insisting on individual responsibility.

I saw it in covid when the CO tried to stop us publishing SAGE minutes, claiming it was technically part of the Cabinet Committee system therefore must not publish minutes (we won on this). I saw it in how the CO classified disasters in the nuclear enterprise and extraordinary failures viz PRC penetration of Whitehall — secrecy aimed mainly at keeping secret almost unbelievable failure (much greater than is realised by/disclosed to 99% of MPs) and limiting criticism of officials. Similarly child abuse and the grooming gangs were covered up by officials protecting the system which they tried to justify inside the system as ‘we’re stopping racists exploiting news’.

Official secrecy generally — the Official Secrets Act, FOI regime, vetting systems, RIPA, Investigatory Powers Act, the leak/briefing problem of ministers/spads/officials, powers to investigate and prosecute etc — is another complex dysfunctional mess.

A very few things need much more serious secrecy but most things should be more transparent.

4/ Institutional mechanisms cannot be relied on to solve fundamental political and strategic issues. The lack of clarity about decisions in the pre-CO Cabinet was bad and having proper records — or clarity there was no decision — was good. But the most important disagreements and questions are almost inevitably so deep and uncertain that better bureaucratic process cannot provide an obvious answer, it can only help clarify the true problems.

This does not imply fatalism about improving bureaucracies. But it’s important to be realistic that lifer-bureaucrats tend to reduce all problems to ‘needs better process’ and it isn’t true. The failure of the post-CO Cabinets to solve critical problems with Germany in 1917-18 and in the 1930s show this very clearly.

Getting good answers to the deepest problems of war and peace depends in the end on the talents, disposition, sensibility etc of key individuals as well as the quality of ‘process’.

5/ The CCR. It’s very interesting that they created the Committee of Civil Research (CCR) in 1925 to provide No10 with serious analytical skills, a sort of partial forerunner to the No10 data science team we created 2020. Its function was to give ‘connected forethought from a central standpoint to the development of economic, scientific and statistical research in relation to civil policy and administration and it will define new areas in which enquiry will be valuable’.

It’s also interesting that it did not survive and HMT helped kibosh it. Similarly the CO has repeatedly tried to kill ‘10ds’ (saved in 2024 by an alliance of some officials and McSweeney).

I disagree with Heseltine on most important issues, and I think he’s one of many who thinks I should be in jail for Brexit, but it’s interesting that he is unique (in my knowledge of ministers of the last 50 years) in taking information systems very seriously. He created MINIS, a system to track responsibility and cost. He himself has explained that it was a feature of having been a successful businessman and I’m sure this is true. And he also explained officials always shut it down and his MP colleagues let them.

Every time I left a department the officials closed the system down and I have to say, with respect to my much admired colleagues, so did they, because it was an extremely boring thing. It was tedious to the degree to go through this infinite detail of money being spent and making decisions about it.

6/ CID/national security/defence capabilities.

The CID was set up to improve coordination across Whitehall on defence.

Note the interesting ideas from Esher after the Boer War about the PM’s office taking charge of the CID and how the CID — a pre-CO entity —was an entity responsible to the PM, not to Cabinet or the CO.

CID lacked power because Balfour did not insist that CID conclusions should be the basis on which the War Office and Admiralty shape their roles and plans. CID played no part in shaping discussions with France over the Belgium guarantee. There was only one meeting between ministers and officials to discuss this (in 1911). CID therefore did not solve the fundamental issues of defence planning — the tension between policy and capabilities.

In WW2 this was handled much better via the CoS Committee which could think, decide and enforce decisions. Many things which worked better in the war, including CoS and JIC and scientific intelligence, were changed for the worse after 1945.

Today the NSC is supposed to be the place for coordination of defence and security across Whitehall. It does not work well, partly because of how it works and partly because nothing can work well when it’s trying to coordinate multiple entities which are themselves dysfunctional, including the MoD and CO. The NSC is run by the CO and the CO is one of the entities theoretically supposed to be coordinated by the NSC — a relationship which tends to the dysfunctional, as the NSC can hardly be expected to be tough on the failures of the CO when it is run in the operational sense by the CO.

E.g NSC is carefully steered away from scrutiny of the MoD. MoD, HMT and CO prefer to keep these issues to their own pathological processes away from prying political eyes. NSC under the Tories was often Potemkin made worse by the fact that the leaking culture got so bad that the SoS for Defence, Wallace, and other ministers including Truss were repeatedly investigated by the CO for leaks from it and these leaks inevitably meant senior people such as ‘C’ did not share some sensitive things.

The issues of defence planning which led to the creation of CID are even more pressing today. The role of the CO confuses the shambles further because a) CO officials now have institutional incentives/motives/ideas and b) the CO makes the processes more opaque to the PM and PM staff, often using secrecy and ‘spads aren’t cleared to see X’ as an excuse. Everything is clouded by fog and the MoD then often rightly blames the CO for problems. Another example: J Powell is the PM’s National Security Adviser, but because he is ‘political’ officials have insisted he cannot be actually in charge of budgets, which have been put in the hands of an official who is lower in the pecking order and therefore given the brush off by the MoD and agencies.

7/ HMT has too much power while also generating very bad budget and SR processes and totally failing on cost control (which it isn’t interested in and can’t do).

There’s a cyclical discussion about HMT and the need for coordination from No10 and outside expertise. We saw it in 1929-30 with the Economic Advisory Council. Similar discussions played out after 2008 and in 2020.

• Ministers and advisers sense HMT is not doing what’s needed, because of some mix of a lack of skills and resistance to outside ideas (e.g I suggested 50 or 100 year bonds in 2020 (suggested to me by a very smart hedge funder, not my idea), which would have been a dramatic triumph — HMT officials very visibly resisted even discussing such ‘outlandish’ ideas).

• HMT won’t let anybody else develop anything powerful.

• The PM also gets the feeling that HMT isn’t doing what’s needed but won’t insist on big changes.

• So ‘advisory’ bodies of ‘outside experts’ are created which HMT ensures are talking shops with little/no influence. E.g Any reviews have written into their terms of reference that HMT processes are not part of the review etc. (E.g see how HMT neuters every science review from considering HMT even though HMT vandalism is one of the main problems. In 2020, HMT tried to argue that it was not subject to decisions of the XO Cabinet Committee.)

• After a while the new outside experts thingy proves at best of minimal value so is wound up: ‘didn’t work out old boy, duplicates other things too, too many meetings, time to tidy it up’.

• The cycle repeats with each crisis.

HMT can be fixed without legislation if a PM wants to.

See below.

8/ A core task of the centre — coordinating between permanent large bureaucratic institutions — is inherently tricky and can never be ‘solved’.

Departments are locked into a somewhat zero-sum game for money and power with other departments and resist providing information. And they resist coordination by any central entity which might point out failures, savings, alternative ideas etc. The services resist coordination and all processes such as Cabinet Committees and CO structures will have similar problems. The core focus and the core people will determine the extent to which the structures work. E.g Alanbrooke made the chiefs of staff committee work. There is no substitute for leadership.

But improving the way budgets are made and priorities conceived and executed — i.e the dysfunction of No10-HMT-CO — would radically diminish inevitable tensions. Cf. below on Jobs and Apple’s highly unusual organisation.

9/ ‘Consent, delay, evade’ is a constant problem. It can only be defeated by priorities, relentless focus, determination to impose your will over months and years, and politicians being prepared to remove officials who subvert via consent, delay, evade. If you’re clearly prepared to remove people, you don’t have to remove many people. If you’re not, the entire system operates on consent, delay, evade.

Newspapers now routinely carry comments to the effect that Starmer is ‘furious’ that things don’t happen faster. But officials know he won’t fire people so they can ‘consent, delay, evade’ with impunity. Briefing, complaining and shuffling structures cannot affect anything important. Officials have seen it all before many times. When Starmer’s next reorganisation is announced, it will immediately be crystal clear to officials how they can continue consent, delay, evade.

10/ It’s crucial to consider the contrast between a) the clear agreement on ‘what the CO must not do’ when it was set up and b) how it now does all of these things.

The Cabinet Secretariat was created in the 1916 crisis to:

• write an agenda for Cabinet,

• record decisions and communicate them to relevant people,

• help ensure sound information flow on cross-departmental matters for the war effort.

It was explicitly not for providing policy advice.

It was explicitly not for controlling personnel decisions.

It was explicitly stated that it must not interfere with the responsibility of departments to the PM/Cabinet.

It was explicitly stated that it must not interfere with the responsibility of ministers to Parliament.

It was explicitly stated that it must not get big, it must remain very small and not sprawl.

Hankey:

It is of the upmost importance that the responsibility of the Departments should be in no way weakened or overridden by the development of the Secretariat…

The function of the Cabinet Office is essentially one of machinery of Government and not of policy. It cannot be too strongly emphasised that the Cabinet Secretary has no duty of offering advice in any matter of policy or of interfering in any way with the functions of responsible Departments.

Lloyd George: it’s ‘purely a recording machine’ and has ‘nothing whatsoever to do with any question of policy’.

It was not even stated that it would not interfere in ministerial appointments. The idea would have seemed ludicrous. The idea of the Cabinet Office maintaining permanent records on Ministers’ personal lives, leaked when deemed appropriate to dish a career, would have seemed inconceivable. But of course if a PM said today they are abolishing PET (the CO’s HR STASI, holder of the personnel files) it would be denounced by most Insiders as ‘dangerous Orbanism’, ‘a power grab’, ‘undermining our institutions’ etc.

Now it does exactly those things which its creators said it must not do. And further, over time, and particularly post-2010, the CO loosened the PM’s scrutiny and control so it became an empire with close to zero effective visibility, never mind responsibility, to any minister including the PM.

The Cabinet Office has become a vast, powerful, independent agent with its own policy machine and communications team, its own bureaucratic interests (not the same as the PM’s office), its own HR system which controls careers for the rest of the civil service, its own security and intelligence assets and networks. Close to 100% of its meetings are ‘officials only’.

And the Cabinet Secretary has become much more powerful than any minister except the PM.

• When a bomb goes off or a minister is suspected of having unsuitable girlfriends (happened a bit in the last few years), it is to the Cabinet Secretary that very sensitive reports come first — and he decides what ministers are told and when, if anything.

• The Cabinet Secretary can call the police and start or stop criminal investigations.

• The Cabinet Secretary job has evolved from ‘must not interject his own policy advice’ to ‘the PM’s main policy adviser’.

• The Cabinet Secretary job has evolved from ‘must not interfere in appointments’ to ‘in charge of all appointments’.

• The Cabinet Secretary job has evolved from ‘must not interfere with responsibility of ministers’ to ‘the Cabinet Secretary chairs meetings holding ministers to account and advises the PM on removing ministers’.

• The Cabinet Secretary job has morphed from the Hankey role to combining both a much bigger role as head of the Cabinet Office AND head of the civil service to make the job ‘the spider at the centre of the web’ (Lord Armstrong), including power over all appointments.

• The Cabinet Office and morphed role of the Cabinet Secretary has contributed to the collapse of ministerial power and responsibility. As failure has intensified and individual responsibility has been designed out of the system, power has become more intensely centralised with officials in the CO.

The CO today tries to present itself to the PM’s staff as effectively working for the PM and the PM’s priorities: you don’t need to hire any more people PM, we all work for you! But it is not its true constitutional position, nor how it sees itself, nor how it works in practice.

Per Robin Butler, it sees its official role as ‘serving the Cabinet’ not the PM.

I think none of us [Cabinet Secretaries] saw the Cabinet Office as the instrument to deliver what Tony [Blair] wants. We did not see it [the Cabinet Office] as an executive body that was to deliver the will of the Prime Minister… The Cabinet Office supports the ministers collectively and acts as a broker between them in cases of disagreement.

And of course it’s the Cabinet Secretary who writes the minutes defining what the ‘ministers collectively’ decide.

And O’Donnell made clear that the CO now sees the PM’s office as a subset of the CO and run by the CO:

Let me be absolutely clear… There is one Cabinet Office and Number 10 is a subset of the Cabinet Office… Number 10 is part of the Cabinet Office… There are not two departments. I stress there is one department.

And many of its officials have increasingly come to see themselves as serving the interests of the CO itself — a sensibility they justify often by saying to themselves ‘look at the rubbish MPs, it’s our duty to keep the show on the road’ etc.

Again, Butler said out loud in 2010 to the Lords Committee that he wants the Cabinet Secretary and head of the civil service jobs to stay merged because it means the former then controls appointments, the real power:

The second [reason], I am afraid, is a more Machiavellian one, which is that to have some influence and control of the senior appointments gives the Cabinet Secretary … leverage over government departments.

You bet, Robin, thanks for saying it out loud, though it’s a shame the MPs never noticed! Control appointments and you have real power, while the Potemkin ministers are patted on the head and sent off to ‘take full responsibility’.

The power in the Cabinet Office has grown in proportion to the growing frustration, sometimes rage, of successive PMs about how ‘the centre’ works. All ‘reforms’ (except what we started in 2020 which were abolished/reversed) have left it stronger. Starmer, like Sunak, tried some tweaks on arriving. Now he whines that he says things but nothing much seems to happen — just like every recent PM. But they never use their power as PM to change it.

Potemkin Cabinet suits officials. Officials today do not want voters to understand how much power they now have and how little power the elected politicians now exercise. Officials rightly think that were voters to understand there would be strong demands for the politicians to take back control. They therefore encourage the continuation of the Potemkin ‘Cabinet Government’ charade each week I’ve written about many times, a charade in which Cabinet is theatre — theatre for the Ministers and MPs, helping them pretend to themselves they are ‘running the country’, and theatre for the media, so they keep reporting the Official Story. Meanwhile more things are run from, and most important meetings including pre-meetings occur in, the Cabinet Office than the PM’s office.

CO officials like to describe themselves to No10 spads as ‘the gearbox’ for the PM’s Office but they are not, they are the sand in the gearbox.

It’s crucial to grasp that as the Cabinet Office/Secretary have hoovered up power, they have made greater and greater efforts at narrative control, to manage appearances, to make it look as if the PM and ministers are in charge. Look at this quote from the Official History of the Cabinet Office:

[T]he central contention of this history is that the first duty of the Cabinet Secretary is to make ministers look in control of events, farsighted and wise, governing in the interests of the nation as a whole… [T]he processes of government must appear rational and smooth, no matter what is going on beneath the surface. The more the processes can be kept secret, the better the chance of success.

11/ No10: much more is now demanded of it while the CO stops it acting.

Ironically, as Whitehall has become more pathological and made ministerial responsibility largely fake and direct responsibility practically impossible, this has thrown more weight on the character and sensibility of the PM, being the only one with the constitutional power to deal with many pathologies.

We now have a ‘centre of power’ which is a) swamped by demands from other broken institutions to solve problems nobody else has the authority/skills to solve and b) habituated to the role of a sort of Media Entertainment Service in which it perpetuates fake stories about how government works while being unable to execute competently itself. It’s both 100X more expected to ‘grip’ problems than 50 years ago and, paralysed by the CO, unable to do so other than in very rare and usually very limited/focused cases.

The need for some institutional mechanism to perform the function of focused execution of complex coordination, given the growing demands on the centre and the diminishing personal skills of our politicians on average, is a big part of the history of the CO since 1916. To a large extent, CO mechanisms today are supposed to generate for the government crucial skills which our MPs and spads largely lack, and processes they cannot create for themselves, while maintaining various constitutional fictions about ‘ministers deciding’ and ‘Cabinet government’.

Some Questions for a new PM wanting to be ‘a government that controls the government’

Questions such as the role of Cabinet, how to restore real responsibility, how to recruit and incentivise elite talent, how to structure No10 and change powers of HMT and Cabinet Office are all entangled. To stress again: fixing government is a systems problem.

The below does not touch on the core political (and, deeper, the spiritual) issues a serious new PM must consider, it focuses on some institutional questions raised by the above. Obviously I have my own detailed ideas on these questions and a preferred model for a new PM but won’t go into much of this here.

Many of these questions are interdependent. What you decide about closing the CO obviously changes what you do with other aspects of No10. What you decide about Cabinet changes other things. What you decide on how to restore direct personal responsibility changes your plans on elite talent, given you can only recruit elite talent if you also create jobs with authority and responsibility together, per Groves…

How to recruit elite talent? Making jobs non-fake will be very controversial as it hasn’t happened, or even been conceivable, in living memory in Whitehall with very few exceptions. (Even in May 2020, with tens of thousands of recent deaths, creating non-fake jobs leading projects like vaccine research or testing was bitterly resisted by much of Whitehall.) They won’t stay without leadership. 99% of the great people we brought in 2020, such as technology specialists who could have made millions in Silicon Valley instead (and have after leaving!), left in the months after I left No10 (and all of them I think by 2022) because of the combination of a) clearly the PM had abandoned the plan and b) the dominant CO officials made clear they would be thwarted, not allowed in meetings, if necessary persecuted etc.

Parties and the Commons gradually shifted over a couple of centuries from some elite talent to almost zero elite talent and active hostility to it. We went from Pitt (Napoleonic Wars) to Asquith (World War I) to Truss/Starmer. This is arguably impossible to fix in a representative democracy and libraries are full of comments to this effect. If so, then crucial jobs must be given to non-MPs with responsibility operating in un-traditional ways. But even if it can be partly reversed, it will take many years and is clearly not something that can or will be fixed in a couple of years.

I think a serious Leader should make recruiting elite talent a core priority over 2025-9 with a clear story about why being an MP is not doomed to being a largely fake job and how they will restore responsibility/authority to non-elected executive roles in Whitehall (and elsewhere). This hasn’t happened in a serious way in living memory but if done seriously, month after month with good communication, it would be a very compelling story. It is only credible if the Leader is credible.

What is Cabinet for?

A group of 25-30 is unarguably incapable of acting as a serious decision making group or even a coherent discussion forum. Cabinet’s size means that even before 1914, it had an inherent tendency towards being ‘22 gabblers round a table with an old procrastinator in the chair’ (Carson). It has grown since then to over 25 and there’s a been a tendency to ‘keep ministers quiet’ by adding them to a ‘attend Cabinet’ list. And at least half a dozen officials and spads sit against the wall, mostly pointlessly other than as a sign of their supposed prestige in the system. There was incredible resistance in the CO to all my attempts to stop this practice (similar to my requests for an end to the absurd email chains with 100 people by which the centre tries to organise itself). A small (handful) ‘War Cabinet’ worked better than normal Cabinet in WW1 and WW2 for obvious reasons.*

• Option A: Potemkin. Leave it as a Potemkin forum while real discussions are elsewhere. Pros: keeps lots of colleagues happy because the Downing Street camera parade continues. Cons: a lot of time is wasted on managing the Potemkin theatre and continuing a fake system is inherently bad.

• Option B: much smaller. Make it much smaller (<10), one non-minister taking notes. Its role is hashing out critical questions. Pros: Cabinet government becomes real instead of fake. Cons: only works with serious ministers. Howls of anguish as the TV parade cast list is cut, the MPs go crazy (and you’re ramping up the ‘elite overproduction’ competition).

• Option C: an inner and ‘normal’ Cabinet. Pros: gains of a smaller group and avoid some howling. Cons: needs complex handling and it admits the normal Cabinet is fake.

• Option D. I won’t put my preferred option here for now but there are interesting alternatives to the obvious connected to how you use Cabinet Committees. Whatever the formal story there is always an inner group exercising power and influence. One can formalise this or leave it informal.

• Should there be ministers without portfolio solely to help the PM in ‘Thinking and Deciding’ (above) without having either to spend their own time on departmental affairs or having inevitable personal incentives generated by them having a departmental job?

* Cabinet confidentiality. Cabinet confidentiality collapsed from 2017 with May’s political authority and it accelerated under Boris. Ministers got in the habit of simply calling hacks immediately and giving full readouts. I suggested to the PM after our 2019 victory that it was the moment to return to confidentiality and enforce it by firing someone for leaking. He declined. The problem worsened and therefore also made it more Potemkin, as we couldn’t discuss sensitive issues in a place which leaked in minutes. A group of ~30 will tend to leak even if the culture is better than it is.

Will you restore ministerial responsibility and give ministers the power to execute priorities?

The evolved system whereby Permanent Secretaries work for the Cabinet Secretary while the PM and PM Office have nothing to do with setting priorities, monitoring, intervening, and nothing to do with the talent pipeline is connected to many of the problems including a) consent, delay, evade, and b) fake responsibility.

One way or another, the PM must form priorities and make individuals responsible for executing them.

You can only do this if you can recruit elite talent and fundamentally change powers over the civil service including ending the current system in which only the PM can insist on a civil servant being replaced.

Option A: leave Ministers as fake and appoint others with proper power and responsibility.

Option B: make (at least some) Ministers truly responsible and therefore able to replace officials (with some sort of light involvement from No10).

I favour (B) partly because I also favour trying to restore the Commons as a serious place and a necessary (not sufficient) condition is restoring real ministerial responsibility to the Commons.

How to change, formally/explicitly and informally/implicitly, the balance of power over money and budgets between a) No10 and the PM’s Office, b) No11 and HMT?

There are many problems with how the No10/HMT relationship has evolved, inter alia:

• The way HMT works makes it impossible for a government to think through then execute genuine priorities.

• Long-term budgets now are almost sure to be a disaster, with funny money and dodgy accounting par for the course — ‘savings’ which are obviously ‘costs’ in every sense except HMT definitions etc. HMT ‘baselines’ are used to create funny money ‘savings’. HMT often insists on a department writing to everybody notifying that ‘there is no funding guaranteed after date X’, so then people get laid off etc, and ‘savings’ are registered, then after date Y the program is restarted, people are rehired etc, so millions are lost in reality but HMT accounts suggest ‘savings’. The worst example is the MoD’s budgets since 2015, after the Osborne-Heywood deal known as ‘the Heywood wedge’, which created structural black holes and a rolling series of lies which has ended up with vast lies and vast deception of Parliament.

• HMT is rubbish at cost control which is the pretext for its control of budgets, constant micromanagement and undermining of serious planning. This was very clearly illustrated in covid but ignored.

• Spending Reviews are a terrible way to do long-term budgets.

• ‘Golden Rules’ have become farcical.

• The ‘Treasury business case process’ involves a bunch of PPE 27 year olds opining in detail on everything from whether a Fields Medallist should get money for a research project to how SF uses drones. Everything has to get ‘business case sign off’. This often shocks ministers who discover months after thinking ‘we decided to do X’ that ‘Treasury hasn’t signed off the business case’ so X is not actually happening. HMT officials will use this to scupper even PM priorities or agreed action by the PM and Chancellor if officials dislike them.

• HMT withholds data from No10 and the PM.

• HMT is terrible at data, computers, and analysis. ‘10ds’ terrified HMT officials because they realised their grip of power via having the best information was threatened. (C.f GOD’s memory of the ERM fiasco: ‘Getting hold of a Reuters screen and finding out what was happening to the exchange rate was difficult.’ After the 2008 crisis, they put the National Economic Council inside COBR ‘to be able to get [data] on the screens’.)

• The CO uses the HMT-No10 tension for its own purposes, adding another layer of bureaucratic knife-fighting, very hard for ministers to see, never mind interpret or act against.

There was much punditry about my changes in 2020 but they were modest and obviously sensible. For example, the ‘Orbanism’ (Jonathan Powell) amounted to:

A. I insisted on live sharing of data between No11 and No10 instead of the PM Office being denied information by HMT officials.

B. I insisted on one joint spad team instead of officials’ preferred option of two warring groups which officials can play off against each other.

C. I insisted we develop budgets and spending reviews jointly, no black boxes with the PMO informed in a huge rush at the end (HMT’s normal mode to maximise their power).

This wasn’t ‘Cummings trying to control the Treasury’. It was simply reducing absurd friction and improving planning.

Sunak and his main adviser agreed and stuck to them. These three simple, obvious changes greatly improved the quality of thinking and planning (vis our 2019 experience) especially during the chaos of covid.

As soon as I left Sunak’s team stopped this arrangement which contributed to No10 losing grip over Whitehall and a return to No10 vs No11 battles.

Changing HMT is connected to procurement reform, creating proper long-term budgets, creating a team dedicated to and expert in real cost control etc.

HMT can be sorted out by a mix of PM determination to use the PM’s full powers, other changes below, and judicious use of Cabinet Committees. It does not need primary legislation.

Should the Cabinet Secretary continue as head of the civil service, or someone else?

• Option A: The Permanent Secretary of HMT — the Warren Fisher model 1919-39.

• Option B: A separate head of the civil service — mostly the model from 1968 to 1981.

• Option C: The Cabinet Secretary — mostly the model since 1981.

• Option D: There is no head of the civil service — the Pitt-Palmerston era model. This would particularly make sense if you intend to do ‘less but better’ in No10 and empower other entities — including over how they do hire-fire-incentivise-train etc. There’s something aesthetically pleasing about the simplification of guillotining the disastrous bureaucratic rationalism of a ‘centre’ for the civil service — with endlessly proliferating directives, divisions, strategies etc — and a return to the organic English institutional evolution, bit-by-bit in response to circumstances.

See Robin Butler’s view (above) on the advantages for the Cabinet Secretary and CO in merging the two roles, which is exactly why they must be split up.

To what extent should the concept of permanent civil servants remain, should we replace ‘Permanent Secretaries’ with ‘directly responsible individuals’?

One can sum up many thousands of pages and millions of words written about Whitehall’s failures over decades — and why each ‘Inquiry’ embeds the next failures, and why each PM’s memoirs say the same things about their failed search for elusive ‘levers of power’ — in two short sentences.

A/ DRIs are a feature of all high performance organisations.

B/ DRIs scarcely exist in Whitehall now and the concept is deeply hostile to the dominant Whitehall culture.

A PM could quickly change this.

In Whitehall, the alternative to responsibility is well summarised by Gus O’Donnell — whether something is failing or not, ‘we need more resource’. If your project seems to work ‘we need more resource to reinforce it’. If it’s failing, ‘we need more resource to fix it’. If it’s a disaster, ‘we need much more resource to save it’. Nothing ever needs less resource. And stopping things so it needs no resources provokes the second largest degree of resistance you see in Whitehall. Officials will go to almost any lengths to make ministers accept the principle that X must continue, even if in much reduced form — they know the minister will soon be gone and X can spring back to life ‘with more resource’.

How to handle unavoidable tension between a) departments/agencies, b) the centre? How do you balance ensuring execution of priorities and avoiding bad micromanagement?

Departments are organised for specific functions with specific legal powers. They are mostly historical (e.g HMT, FO, HO). Many of the most important problems do not fit neatly into a single department. Departments resist coordination, information sharing and oversight.

Sometimes this is reasonable: rubbish individuals and institutions in the centre interfere ignorantly, cause duplication and confusion etc, so departments resist ‘coordination’. It’s often unreasonable: it’s a desire to hide money, hide failure, avoid responsibility. All of which applies to the modern No10/CO setup. Sometimes it’s a mix — ‘everyone’s right and everyone’s unhappy’ as they say in Russia, such as with budgets and SRs where HMT is right to think everyone is lying and cheating AND HMT’s process is dishonest and stupid and rewards lying and cheating.

Big companies have similar problems. It is very interesting to look at how Steve Jobs reorganised Apple in a very different way to almost all big companies to try to deal with some of these problems. I wrote a little about this a few years ago here. Nutshell: business history and theory make the case that as entrepreneurial firms grow large and complex, they must shift from a functional to a multidivisional structure to align accountability and control and prevent the congestion that occurs when countless decisions flow up the org chart to the very top. Jobs rejected this, fired all general managers, replaced divisional P&Ls with just one P&L, aligned incentives to company profits rather than any more local goals etc. I’ll go into how Whitehall could learn from this another time.

NB. ~100% of those in SW1 who attack ‘micromanagement’ are the most low agency people in Britain with zero history of successful management and zero idea how exceptional leaders often ‘micromanage’. Yet these clowns write columns about ‘reorganising No10’ — in between ‘how to beat Putin’ and ‘how to deliver a two state solution’ and ‘what Elon doesn’t understand about managing tech companies’.

WhatsApp groups are an inexhaustible supply of hilarious updates from the Bluesky NPC front. Here are a pundit and a professor often quoted by other NPCs on the subject of Whitehall. They bleat to their Bluesky friends how they couldn’t control their own diaries. ‘I always did everything I could’ but ‘unstoppable’… Yes, I’m sure you did do everything YOU could…! Top tip for MPs and others thinking about to do regime change: do not take management advice from characters who can’t exert their will over their diary secretary yet think they can give Elon management advice…

How to balance transparency and secrecy? Cf. the evolution of SF operations in Iraq: they shifted to radical transparency with intelligence, and accepting higher chances of leaks, in order to speed up the operational cycle a lot. This worked brilliantly at the operational and tactical levels (it did not and could not solve the fundamental political problems at the root of the Iraq fiasco, but that’s not the important point). When does it not work, which parts of government can’t operate safely like this?

How to fix the current mess with the services, MoD, agencies, JIO/JIC, NSS etc? What lessons from CID and the chiefs of staff committee? It’s interesting that Asquith chose not to enforce CID’s conclusions on the military pre-1914. It was not involved in planning with France. Per the Esher Committee 1904, it’s possible for our flexible constitution to allow the creation of entities that report to the PM directly with wide powers.

This is a vast topic I’ll return to.

How to create a place which brings together all thinking about war across all its different domains (conventional, SF, space, intelligence, propaganda, diplomacy etc)? Most of you will be thinking — wait, this place must already exist, right?! NO! It does not! I found this out in 2019 when I asked the Permanent Secretary to MoD where this place is situated in the system and he gave a hollow laugh and said, ‘It doesn’t exist, unless you count Cabinet.’ They’ve gone through the Ukraine tragi-comedy without such an entity and I’ve pointed out the total lack of coherent ends-ways-means from the start.

How to use Cabinet Committees? Recently close to 100% have been too big even though they were invented to cut the size and improve focus. But they can work well in the British system. Part of the reason is that constitutionally they have the same force as full Cabinet (something not grasped by most MPs).

The most effective conventional things 2019-20 were the XS/XO Cabinet Committee system which was sort of cloned to the Covid Taskforce. Crucial was limiting the number of ministers. XS was half a dozen. XO only had one permanent minister chairing. In covid it was critical to avoid a large number of ministers always there.

This connects to changes in HMT and long term budgets (above).

How much of the CRAG Act 2010 to amend/repeal?

E.g Butler et al watched the Blair 1997 Order in Council and were determined to ensure it wasn’t repeated.

I have come to the view that a Civil Service Bill is right because I was responsible for the Order in Council that enabled up to three special advisers from Number 10 to give instructions to civil servants, and I recommended Mr Blair to do that because in fact that was what was happening in the case of Alastair Campbell and Jonathan Powell, so I thought we had better be legal. But it was so easily done, it was done the first weekend by an Order in Council and it rather shook me to realise how easily the fundamental structure of our civil service could be changed, and once that Rubicon was crossed you could never go back. Therefore I thought it would be right to entrench this through an Act of Parliament [CRAG]. (Butler)

How much of CRAG needs to be repealed given other things one can do?

What are the most important things that can’t be done until it is changed?

What’s the worst that Commissioners can do to delay until they are removed?

What’s the scope for the usual activists to bring JRs under CRAG to try to delay a new government?

How to mitigate these delays?

E.g the Civil Service Commissioners must go. This job is the PMO’s, see below. But their existence can be finessed for a few months while legislation goes through.

How can Parliament be restored as the place capable of controlling the power of the executive and courts?

E.g Select Committees are particularly poor on defence and security. Anonymous X accounts provide more useful information on the MoD’s uselessness than the Defence Select Committee which is told much less than junior hacks.

How to restore the reputation of MPs?

Part of the answer is pay. MP pay should reflect productivity growth in the private sector which is also at the core of what money is available for the public sector. I would tie it to some metric like median private sector wages. If they go up, MPs get a raise. If they fall, the MPs get a cut. Incentives are aligned in a healthy way. MPs can’t game this. And it makes them think about everything they’re voting on: does this improve private sector productivity?

I wanted to do this in No10. I suggested to Sunak in December 2022 that he do this.

Also stop all taxpayer funding for political parties. This would be popular and it would immediately dish the left. Correct in principle, bad for the left, popular.

How to do medium term planning much better? This is extremely hard. It inevitably involves constant adjustment of plans because reality proves assumptions wrong. There is no magic process to make it work. Governments everywhere struggle with the same problems. Senior people inevitably get sucked into one crisis after another so longer term planning is pushed to less senior people therefore it has less traction. The intelligence services do not do ‘own side’ intelligence so that machinery is not applied to many crucial problems. (When I asked JIC to consider the likelihood of chaos after the 2020 US election, the JIC chairman said it was the first time they’d done something on America.)

Another huge problem I’ll return to.

What’s the role of spads given other decisions? Spads have grown in importance and number in proportion to the increasing powers of officials vis ministers and the decreasing performance of Whitehall. Many now say ‘a serious government needs far more, and better, spads’. This is true if you are trying to make the existing system work better. But it is *not* necessarily true if you are trying to change the system profoundly. Spads now are partly ‘a person who answers to a minister unlike ~100% of the rest’ but if the minister is truly responsible for the department and can hire/fire people to senior jobs, then the nature of ‘spads’ inevitably is transformed.

How to deal with the growth of judicial review and the quiet revolution whereby officials and government lawyers, working with a network outside government, have redefined ‘respect for the rule of law’ to mean ‘doing what lawyers claim is in keeping with international law’ which is very elastically defined to include many things which are not incorporated in domestic law?

Another vast subject I’ve touched on before including in covid evidence. Officials and lawyers have been nudging the system year by year towards a state where officials refuse to do what ministers decide on the basis that ‘it’s incompatible with the rule of law’ by which they increasingly mean ‘lawyers’ interpretation of international law’.

E.g the appalling head of the government legal service in the CO resigned in 2020 because he opposed the government’s actions with the Internal Market Bill on the basis of an ‘attack on the rule of law’ by which he meant ‘international law’.

The constitutional position in Britain for many centuries has been that international law is *not* binding on the government, nor does it direct the conduct of officials, unless implemented in domestic law. The new position is extremely radical but purports to be conservative. The next phase of this campaign is to insinuate that passing domestic legislation to restate the traditional position is itself ‘an attack on the rule of law’ which should be rejected by officials ‘to defend the rule of law’ — an Alice in Wonderland subversion.

This shape-shifting has been possible because of the degradation of quality of MPs who often do not know the basics of the constitution. The rot of the Tory Party is well summarised by how they went along with this for 14 years instead of stamping on it. NPC ministers like Cleverley trotted out on TV lines articulating the far left position over and over without even realising what they’re doing (horrors like Grieve were different, they know what they’re doing).

How to create a ‘war mode’? Bonar Law’s point about Rome having a peace mode and a war mode for the constitution is of great importance. Covid exemplified this. A pandemic or war forces government to do things in ways which should not be normal in peace time. War demands that the balance shift between speed, clear authority etc over established freedoms, normal processes etc. Ideally we would have a more Roman approach and clarify peace/war mode. Though there will also also be a tendency for some to invoke war mode, just as governments are drawn to using terrorist legislation for non-terrorism ends.

How to structure No10?

Some thumbnail historical sketches:

• Pitt. Phenomenally able PM, great wisdom with youthful energy. Hired whoever he wanted to work with him in No10, no real rules in any modern sense. Ministers truly responsible to Parliament. No permanent civil service in the modern sense though there were officials of various kinds appointed for long stretches. Talent acquisition taken seriously, many brilliant young people brought in. Infrastructure and procurement taken very seriously. Responsibility and authority often co-located. Nepotism was normal, sometimes bad, sometimes a shortcut to great talent. None of the modern ‘anti-corruption’ machinery but vastly less waste and corruption than now, cf. the long-term relationship of BAE and MoD. And Westminster jumped on corruption while now it authorises it and spins for it.

• Churchill. A patchily phenomenally able PM of great spiritual depth drawing on the residues of an aristocratic culture, with self-awareness of some flaws, hence after many disasters appointing and keeping Alanbrooke whose chiefs of staff committee ran the war competently and forced focus on the critical questions. Some rules in the modern sense on hiring in No10 but not a critical barrier in the war, though and other Whitehall pathologies were damaging (e.g the tendency to endless committees). Ministers more responsible to Parliament than now but already responsibility diluted by modern bureaucracy. Cabinet not great, huge time wasted in meandering discussions of Cabinet and Cabinet committees. Whitehall showing modern signs of sloth and decrepitude but able people still able to tunnel through or force change and speed.

• Thatcher. Strong leader, many virtues. Poor at handling her team. Some able ministers (relative to today’s). Ministerial responsibility to Parliament greater than today but closer to today than to 1850. (Carrington’s resignation over the Falklands was praised partly because he was NOT seen as actually responsible for the FO’s failures.) Civil Service very powerful. She could push it on her priorities but Yes, Minister was real and she didn’t change its evolution, contra advice from John Hoskyns that this was fundamental to achieving her policy goals. Much of Whitehall continued in a Left direction uncurbed by ministers. Public services, infrastructure etc in many ways went backwards (e.g exam reform and National Curriculum a huge cultural vandalism-disaster). Many ideas from Tory think tanks about improving government actually created the nightmare of quangos and agencies we’re cursed with now. She exemplified the modern situation: a very determined PM, sleeping a few hours per day, can make the system bend on a few big things but outside the ‘lighthouse beam’ of direct PM focused energy, the system drifts left and decays.

• Blair. After first term failure it evolved to: Policy Unit, Strategy Unit, Delivery Unit, hugely powerful HMT/Chancellor. Huge focus on talking to the old media. Able to push through a few priorities connected to communication with the old media, e.g waiting lists. Main domestic legacy: constitutional legislation like HRA, Equality Act etc. Blair admits he only really understood the problems of Whitehall and No10 after his first term then he was stuck in Iraq and never got the chance to change it properly. More than any PM since Thatcher he’s publicly stated obvious truths about how Whitehall evolved but his successors ignored him. Treasury and Cabinet Office both grew in power. Cabinet shrank in power and influence. No10 seemed to become more powerful because it developed the No10 as Media Entertainment Service model, based on ideas from Gould and Mandelson observing the 1980s and early 1990s in America. Blair’s personal dominance of Westminster camouflaged the deeper trends in Whitehall. By 2010, Whitehall was much further left and much more powerful viz ministers and the country.

• Tories 2010-24. With the exception of 2019-20, no clear plan and no challenge to business-as-usual in Whitehall. Ministers as NPCs. Ironically, Blair’s successors preferred to copy the Media Entertainment Service model he started with rather than his post-No10 advice — and were less politically successful. They couldn’t see the Media Entertainment Service model was intrinsically bound up in Blair’s period being the last phase of the old centralised media’s dominance, the crackup of the phase beginning in the 19th Century with mass newspapers and telegraph etc. As Blair ruled, the internet was breaking the foundations of the model. I saw the Cameron project prepare for 2010. They were clueless about Whitehall. Maude, Letwin et al trusted the system and longed to sink into its embrace. Over and over that set of Tories said to me, before 2010 and long after, ‘There’s nothing wrong with the civil service, Dom, other than Blair being in charge for a decade, once the natural party of government is back in power, you’ll see…’ Our team in the DfE was more successful than others. Why? Partly because we prepared legislation and plans in advance unlike the rest of the Cameron project. Partly because 2011-12 we purged 15 of the top 20 people and built a Private Office supportive of plans rather than sabotaging them, something never mentioned, obviously, in any analysis of our success. Tory pundit/think tank world prefers to push fairy tales about ‘a strong minister with a clear idea and good communication’.

One way for an aspiring PM to think about how to approach the CO:

Option A: Establishmenty-’reform’.

• ‘The PM Office must be strengthened!’ ‘More spads, better spads’. A Policy Unit as influential as Thatcher’s (NB. it was <3). A Strategy Unit and Delivery Unit like Blair.

• ‘The Cabinet Office must be reformed, smaller, more focused!’

• Reheated Francis Maude / Michael Barber rhetoric about ‘civil service reform but this time we mean it’ in line with dozens of attempts since the 1960s.

• Outcome? The usual. Attempts to strengthen both the CO and PMO together simply intensify the core dysfunctions and the inherent power struggle between the political staff and officials, because most power in No10 is zero sum between No10/CO/HMT. ‘Reform’ rhetoric turns into committees and powerpoints for White papers. Officials have seen it all before. After 18 months it’s obviously dead. Government in mid-terms. Another term down the toilet.

Repeated attempts at reforming the Cabinet Office and civil service generally have, whatever the story, a) never led to the PM thinking ‘it now works’ and b) never solved the recurrent deep problems of the civil service repeated constantly across the political spectrum since the 1968 Fulton Report. The standard pattern applied to everything — consent, delay, evade — is particularly potent when applied to preserving their own powers.

Conventional ‘reform’ doesn’t work because it doesn’t touch the core issues of talent, responsibility, incentives, culture and power. It does not challenge the core of the Northcote-Trevelyan system. And it’s done by people a) with no experience of creating a high performance organisation who b) have been trained to believe fairy tales about the ‘meritocratic world-renowned’ system.

Option B: solve the core problems repeated for decades and best explained in Yes, Minister.

A possible path:

1. Close the Cabinet Office. Things in it either a) stop (e.g the second separate vast communication empire), b) return to departments/other entities (e.g much of NSS), or c) shift to the control/responsibility of the PM’s Office (e.g things supposed to be for ‘coordinating’ and ‘delivery). NB. The PM is also minister for the civil service (unknown to many in SW1!).

2. The Cabinet Secretariat returns to being responsible to the PM’s Office (as in 1916) to do the original job: agenda, minutes for Cabinet, secretarial service for Cabinet Committees etc. NB. The Secretariat provides secretarial services for Cabinet committees, it *stops* controlling them, writing its own policy papers for them etc. And it is not in charge of ‘policy’ or ‘delivery’ or ‘strategy’. The Secretariat becomes an office of <~20 (given the changes to technology it can be smaller than under MH) and, like under MH, it should draw staff from departments so they are familiar with material and are not seen, as they are now, as interfering.

3. Attached to the PM’s Office, working with the Secretariat, is a Library and a Librarian of integrity and scholarship. The Library maintains records and has a classified reading room for people to read papers that should not be circulated/retained.* The Secretariat hands its papers to the Library. Rules on access to previous government papers change so they’re optimised for ‘enable the system to learn from mistakes’, not ‘hide failure’.

4. The Cabinet Secretary runs the Secretariat only. The Cabinet Secretary is not responsible for policy advice (per 1916), is not responsible for Whitehall personnel decisions beyond the Secretariat (per 1916), and is not head of the civil service (per 1916). It’s an interesting job but with about 1,000X less power than now and much less than ministers instead of being much more powerful than ministers.

5. The PM appoints someone to run the PMO who is in charge of the entire No10/central entity. The division of official and ‘political’ ends, the inbuilt friction and warring between tribes ends. This does not, obviously, eliminate all the normal problems of the centre of power. It clarifies responsibility for handling these problems: the PM and the ‘CEO’ of the PMO.

6. There is no ‘head of the civil service’ in charge of promotions and appointments across the system. The only central entity with power over appointments across the system is the PMO — in the sense that it can trump anybody else and insist on hires/fires — but PMO engagement is limited to action needed to enforce PM priorities and intervene when it sees failure, when it must interfere much faster and more effectively than now. There is no general need for the PMO or any central entity to interfere in personnel elsewhere unless it is failing. The point of making DRIs central to departments/agencies is precisely to restore direct personal responsibility and to ensure power is co-located with responsibility, per General Groves.

7. Civil service appointments shift from ‘closed by default’ to ‘open by default’, i.e open to applicants from anywhere. The culture of the civil service being a closed caste appointing and promoting almost entirely from within — with some Potemkin processes whereby senior people go off for a few years so they can claim ‘private sector experience’ — ends. Hiring becomes actually meritocratic instead of fake meritocratic.

8. A National Security Adviser and team, responsible to the PMO, runs those things in the PM’s office which need central coordination including the NSC. E.g One of these things is defining priorities for the intelligence services, a function now conducted (badly) away from all ministerial eyes in the bowels of NSS.

9. ‘10ds’ (data science/AI) strengthened in the PMO. Also in charge of ensuring all data relevant to the PMO, including all data held by HMT, is available live and in the right format. Responsible for quality assuring all data that goes to the PM so we don’t have repeats of the Cabinet Office putting up obviously fake graphs to the PM showing the entire country travelling on HS2 to justify continuing the obviously catastrophic project. (This was exposed as fake and the PM went ahead in January 2020 knowing it was fake but that’s a separate point.)

10. A small Systems Team, combining experts in policy and project management, in the PMO for monitoring and enforcing priorities and watching how things interact. This includes managing what replaces ‘Permanent Secretaries’, i.e DRIs. A model for this ‘systems management’ is George Muller’s approach to Apollo.

11. Ministers have power to hire/fire and the ‘official’ head of their department is a DRI with a very clear definition of priorities for the term of the government. The PMO can intervene but the bias should be: state priorities, make people truly responsible, remove fast if failing, do not set up duplicating processes in the centre to compensate for department/agency failure.

12. Many other things I won’t go into now. E.g A crucial question is: there is no entity in the British state whose job it is to think about and prepare for war/conflict across all domains then coordinate it when it happens. Its absence is obvious in the utter shambles of Ukraine ‘strategy’, the total inability to define any even vaguely coherent ends-ways-means, the way MoD was allowed to get worse and worse during a war etc. Such an entity must exist. But how and where depends on many other questions.

This path means the PM exercising powers more fiercely than has been seen since 1945 but in narrower fields and the most basic shift is to a) restore the PM in charge of the centre, b) clarify PM priorities and direct responsibility, and c) shift to real meritocracy — all of which replaces the fake responsibility and fake meritocracy we’re suffering under today.

Until the quality of Ministers improves a lot some will try to make stupid appointments but it will all be out in the open — they will actually be responsible for stupid appointments instead of evading responsibility like now. Errors will always happen but this new system means they’ll be fixed faster and a core job of the PMO will be thinking about talent, just as the core job of a CEO is thinking about talent. Ultimate responsibility will be with the elected PM, not the unelected Cabinet Secretary.

* There’s a better way of recording decisions than the 1916 Minutes system. The Secretariat was originally justified by the lack of clarity over Cabinet discussions. An easy way to handle it now is what I did 2019-20 for various entities including XS, XO and the Covid Taskforce — I said to the Cabinet Secretary that agreed action should be typed on a screen where all can see and at the end of the meeting these actions would be agreed then executed to agreed timelines. The Cabinet Room did not have, or allow, screens in 2019. XS and XO were conducted (mainly) in COBR which has screens. In covid I got the meetings moved out of COBR into Cabinet — to escape the strict security protocols such as no open internet — and put screens in the Cabinet Room. This low tech upgrade helped clarify real problems a lot and speeded things up because action was clear, agreed, and then instantly communicated without delays over detailed minutes (rarely of use anyway). And the twice weekly rhythm of XO meant it operated in a completely different way to normal Whitehall. For the purposes of good government, this system is much faster and more effective than the old minutes system. The advantages of minutes to historians is not the point.

‘Regime completeness’

A last thought…

If you, dear next PM, think ‘surely I can make Establishment-y reform work’ — you will have to explain exactly why your scheme, leaving the CO intact, will succeed where all previous attempts have failed. If Thatcher presided over the spread of Yes, Minister, why will you succeed? What is your plan to cope with ‘consent, delay, evade’?

If you do not close the CO immediately and create a system where the PM is again in charge of ‘the centre’, then you and your spads will find yourselves in the same cycle of meetings as everyone else for decades, with the same results.

Further, it’s foolish to worry about the ‘noise’. If you aspire to be a PM who turns the tide, then you will inevitably be attacked as ‘fascist’ for core policies on immigration, boats, asylum etc. And you will have to deliver on those things. So the important thing is to deliver and win the argument with the voters and crush the London Insider class as soon as possible. And this means: close the CO and control what must be controlled. The screeching from former Permanent Secretaries will be lost amid the louder screeching and their are huge advantages in compressing the row over Whitehall into the row over other things in the first year. And the time to strike on such things is when you are at the height of your prestige, the height of democratic legitimacy, after winning the election. That is the time to do the hardest things, when the system feels least able to resist. I tried and failed to persuade the Trolley of this in January 2020. Let his abject failure — his contemptible waste of our efforts in 2019 — be a warning to you.

Yes, being the PM who decides that ‘the government controls the government’ will be ‘noisy’.

But there is no escaping ‘noise. You can have the ‘noise’ of Cameron and May and Sunak and Starmer — relentless contempt and loathing. Or you can have the noise of a once-a-century leader inevitably attacked by a subset of Insiders-hacks-academics but with the upside of winning public support and the self-respect of being the Live Player who finally faces reality. You can be attacked for being a ‘puppet’ controlled by others or for being a ‘fascist/tyrant’. As Balfour remarked about Lloyd George above, PMs are always attacked for one or the other.

This raises the issue of ‘regime completeness’.

What do I mean by this?

Many ideas about change now seem sensible in their own terms but if you understand the system you know idea X has almost no practical chance of happening because other parts of the system will scupper it. X cannot happen in isolation because of the systems crisis.

For example, genuinely first rate change of defence procurement. One can write schemes embodying the right approach and we should do this. But it is impossible to implement them without also having many other things in place including a supportive PM, control of HMT and CO etc. Otherwise your scheme for defence procurement goes into the HMT and CO processes and emerges as … not the new scheme but continuing with the old system with some spin, quite possibly even worse than the old system. Defence procurement is regime complete.

Similarly, taking AI and robotics seriously. One can write policies and plans but we’ve seen repeatedly the sabotage of such plans. Making technology a true priority is regime complete.

Regime completeness means:

1. A Leader with certain skills and temperament/sensibility who grasps the scale of the crisis and would prefer to fail unconventionally than fail like every PM for decades.

2. A network of elite talent.

3. A detailed Plan — for policy, for law, for bureaucratic changes — and the Plan To Do the Plan, i.e for truly grasping power and ensuring it’s a government that controls the government, the plan for making the plan happen amid the power system which exists or will exist. Such plans are not just ‘policy’ plans. They are also political, bureaucratic-Jedi, and dynamic.

4. A political strategy which can win an election and sustain a government trying to do the Plan.

5. A communication machine which can figure out how to tell the big picture story of a radically different government and handle the tactics. The collapse of the old media and the old audiences means this needs new ideas and skills but also means, I think, there is a lucky coincidence. If you can build the right machine at this moment, you will be the only entity in Britain which can do mass political communication with elite performance, providing a great strategic advantage and a tail wind for the endeavour. If you’re worried about the ‘noise’ then build the Meme Machine to overwhelm it.

6. Creating a positive flywheel of execution and story-telling. Success in reality and with voters — beyond SW1’s ephemeral hysterical news cycles — builds supportive coalitions which allows further progress and crushes opponents. I’m often described as a cynic but I’ve always thought that bringing the culture of elite high performance to Westminster would be mostly very popular outside Westminster (and universities) if you can sustain it for a few years so voters see their lives improve. In contrast, the conventional wisdom of Insiders has been that voters just follow the news and don’t care about the quality of government.

And regime completeness brings us back to the character and sensibility of the Leader.

A Leader will have to a) reassure a lot of Insiders while b) showing the country they are serious about real change and c) recruiting elite talent needed to execute real change.

These things are inherently in tension. And any Leader aspiring to turn the tide — who takes over the Tories, or creates a Startup Party, or Farage — who inches close to power will come under extreme pressure from a vast network of powerful/influential people to ‘play the game’, i.e not disrupt how power and money work in Westminster:

Of course you must win, winning means saying all sorts, we understand, but… All this talk of closing the Cabinet Office, of repealing the HRA, of firing tens of thousands and ripping up how Whitehall does everything. All this will just provoke a resistance you can’t beat. It creates too many enemies. It’s not what Thatcher did. I’ll always be on your side, of course, but so many won’t be if you go down this path. It would be such a tragedy for you to sabotage yourself at the start. There’s another way. With just a few appointments and a few subtle changes, you can get almost everything you want. And you can focus on what the voters care about and you’ll go down in history. The British system is subtle. The PM’s powers are vast. You can get what you want. Just don’t go to war with the system. Don’t start purging the Permanent Secretaries. Don’t provoke a Whitehall strike at the start of your government. Don’t become captured by revolutionaries. We’ll help you get what you want while staying friends with the system. Now, just appoint X to run your office, it will send a reassuring signal. Next…

This will be all the more powerful because it will contain some truth. A PM is powerful but can’t make too many enemies. Battles must be sequenced. Much of London will go berserk if things like appointments and procurement truly change. The old system has large networks of people and money dependent on the old ways continuing.

But the core of the tension must be faced. A PM who continues broadly in the post-Churchill tradition can make friends with the system, be treated by it with respect, and after they’ve left to write memoirs about their search for the elusive ‘levers of power’, they’ll all be friends again and get made Chairman of the British Museum or whatever — like Major, Blair, Cameron, Sunak. But they’ll leave the pathological CO in charge, feed Whitehall’s pathological institutions with more money, they won’t be a government that controls the government, so they won’t do what they’ll say they’ll do to win the 2029 election. They’ll drive the system deeper into crisis, maybe over the brink.

The Leader who can lead a regime complete government, therefore, is necessarily one who is prepared to gamble on both failure and being enemies of the Insider class in order to grasp at true greatness. They’ll need the very odd mix of skills and sensibility and endurance for an exhausting decade of operating within masks, behind each mask another mask. They’ll be hated by a section of the country in a way Cameron and Sunak — or even Thatcher — are not hated. But they also might be a true historic character whose name will echo for generations, like Pitt or Churchill.

Such people are few and far between. It takes luck to get into position to make such choices. The intersection of the characters and the luck is beyond calculation. Regime completeness is super, super hard and there’s a logic to why it tends to be wars and revolutions that throw such characters up in the moment.

But our alternative to seeking regime completeness is continued rot, ruin and our most dangerous crisis since 1939-42 — to be faced with a lot less inherited strength than 1939-42.

Finally, I must admit that my ideas above are based on another crucial difference between me and Insider conventional wisdom. I think that many of Insiders’ worst errors are generated by false ideas they have about psychology and communication. But I must admit that despite winning campaigns I’ve had close to zero success in persuading Insiders of why we won and why their ideas are false. The Insider perspective is that I won campaigns because of luck, not the reasons I think, therefore the above ideas are nonsense. But if you listen carefully to the Insiders, you will see that almost everything they say about ‘Whitehall’ and ‘delivery’ is really based on their assumptions about the psychology of voters and communication — which they’ve repeatedly demonstrated they do not understand…

Please post sources below for people and the AI(!) to study on how to do regime change after Starmer.

There’s a book, The Private Office (Henderson). Someone should use LLMs to pull together modern evidence from different sources (oral histories, memoirs etc) of how the PM’s Private Office works. If someone does this to a standard that’s useful to me, along with a short explanation of how they used LLMs to do it, I’ll send them £5,000.

Another challenge. There is an epic Pitt biography by John Ehrman in three volumes and over 2,000 pages. At some point I’ll read it myself. But I have a lot on my plate. Can someone feed the 3 volumes into LLMs and extract notes that mirror my interests as displayed in my blog?

• Examples of the unrecognised simplicities of high performance, similar to the last chapter of Groves’ book on responsibility/authority, speed, talent etc.

• Examples of how Whitehall/No10 was organised in particularly bad or good ways relevant to our debates. E.g How did Pitt deal with HMT? How did Cabinet evolve under Pitt? How did Whitehall evolve?

• Write a 5,000 word max briefing on this book for the next PM.

If someone does this to a standard that’s useful to me, along with a short explanation of how they used LLMs to do it, then I’ll send them £5,000.

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September to December will see more stuff on the Actual Plan for 2028/9 and the possibilities for the Startup Party project — either a pure startup or an existing entity effectively closing and re-opening as TSP…

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If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.

Tancredi in Lampedusa’s The Leopard

If we do not prepare for ourselves the role of the hammer,

there will be nothing left but that of the anvil.

Bismarck

A single spark can start a prairie fire.

Mao

Ps. read the book before you watch the move.

On 19 June 2025 I gave a speech to a packed Sheldonian Theatre.

Oxford was, with Cambridge and bits of London, the most hostile demographically to Vote Leave. Five years ago there’d have been a crowd brainwashed by the Russiagate hoax and Guardian howling for my arrest. So it was interesting to see a thousand students and academics listen and cheer a tough message on what’s gone wrong and what to do, including leaving the jurisdiction of the European Court of Human Rights. There’s an interview with GB News on stage at the end of the talk. This touched on why Boris-Carrie destroyed border control and on the grooming/rape gangs coverups.

(But! The ‘full video’ released by GB News censored references to Boris and Carrie! GBN is trying to be an alternative to the MSM so censoring things said in public to do a favour for the guy responsible for the most disastrous collapse of border control in British history for a thousand years is not a good idea. I suggest GBN reviews their decision and releases the full video. I don’t think it was the journalist who edited it, it was senior management called by the Trolley.)

Have you noticed one ‘respectable serious mainstream grownup’ SW1 character reflect on a) the fact that it’s turned out Tommy Robinson was more right than ‘the mainstream’ on the gangs — more right than’Professors’ like ‘Professor’ Portes and ‘Professor’ Ansell, more right than the BBC Political Editors, more right than the TV anchors, more right than the Today program, more right than 99% of MPs, more right than the NPC pundit network paid to ‘explain’ politics to the plebs, and b) the implications of this for trust in ‘the mainstream’ at a time when Insiders are all desperately asking each other ‘how do we restore trust?’? I haven’t seen anything, if you noticed any honest reflections from that crowd please post link in comments.

Remember, when the grooming gangs hit the news again in January, after decades of these gangs operating, the official line from No10, repeated by the regime media, remained that ‘the real story here is the tech oligarchs spreading disinformation and the spread of the Islamophobic far right’.

They briefed fake news to the media that ‘Cummings is writing Elon’s tweets’. The PM gave a speech about it. Useless regime hacks like Lewis Goodall called it ‘his best speech’. Goodall explained that the ‘real story’ is the influence of Elon, social media radicalising the right, ‘the emergence of a common UK/US online right ... making extremist, until recently fringe politics mainstream in British conservatism… Far right thinking ... has become mainstream. Remember that the notion of ubiquitous Muslim grooming gangs has long been a trope of extremism, despite little evidence’ — and the idea that there’s been a national conspiracy to deny victims justice ‘is dangerous nonsense’ (Goodall, Jan 2025).

This was ‘the mainstream’ pundit view in SW1-media-land only 6 months ago. Being pathological and pathologically incompetent, the regime then tried to organise another layer of coverup with a report but this went wrong because the scale of evidence is so vast the author rebelled and told enough of the truth to make the No10 line untenable. Narrative Whiplash kicked in: suddenly the gangs were no longer ‘far right disinformation’, they’re real, there’ll be an Inquiry, though of course the core Insider belief hasn’t changed — the purpose of the Inquiry (from Whitehall’s perspective) is to control the story and suppress as much as possible voters connecting the collapse of border control and the systematic rape/abuse/killing of English children.

Also remember — there is no Westminster action about the fact that we have a ‘care system’ that is often controlled/used by criminals using ‘care’ homes as part of their business model for organised child abuse. Care homes stacking poor children with no relatives nearby are perfect for the business model of vertically integrated crime organisations which have evolved in yookay over the last thirty years, with the bosses often running them from hotels in Dubai: sex, people traffic, drugs, logistics, transport etc. ‘Care’ as organised child abuse, with state and organised crime in symbiosis, is a theme of modern yookay (see here).

Also note that the police are now being caught actively shifting far left protesters into proximity with those protesting asylum/illegals being dumped in their area, then when trouble flares they brief ‘far right thuggery’ then pundits like Goodall say the government needs to control social media ‘to protect democracy’. The regime continues to optimise for destroying borders rather than what voters keep voting for.

After my blog on civil war etc, Rory Stewart and Alistair Campbell did a show on how it was all ‘far right conspiracy theory’. This week, briefings from the National Security Secretariat to Cabinet are on page one of The Times.

One of the most important things to understand about SW1 is, as I’ve explained here repeatedly, the way it operates on ephemeral emotional cycles which are rapidly memory-holed. Close to no live player can maintain any sort of focus for any period longer than days. Campaigns are constantly discussed but barely exist. So in January, that was the line, now most of SW1 acts like it never happened.

Here is the full youtube video, text below (the video of the speech is uncensored (I think!), the video of the interview is censored).

Snippets and random thoughts below the text.

And I did an interview with the Telegraph a week later. Here is the full video.

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Text, Oxford, 19 June 2025

[Check against video before quoting!]

The old political parties, the old Whitehall institutions, the old media, the old universities, the old courts constitute a political regime. This regime has become cancerous. The cancer has metastasised and the cancer is attacking everything healthy in the country; all the healthy institutions and healthy impulses are the target of Whitehall.

If you imagine our ancestors who built our civilisation over generations looking at a sample of recent years, what would they see? They’d see the regime fighting to maintain secrecy of the vast cover-up of industrialised mass rape of white English children by Pakistani and Somali gangs over decades, while Whitehall continues to import people from the exact same tribal areas responsible.

In January, No. 10 Downing Street claimed that Elon was spreading conspiracy theories about national cover-ups. This is wrong — I witnessed the attempts at these cover-ups myself when I was in working in Whitehall, including the deliberate attempt by government departments to use courts to block reporting of the entire story.

Every week in London and across Britain, people openly march demanding a second Holocaust. And the only people who seem to get arrested are those counter-protesting. These people prevent access to parliament itself and intimidate the MPs and the MPs’ response is to jabber about how the real danger is ‘white extremism’, and the real priority is protecting the European Convention of Human Rights.

The regime is introducing new blasphemy laws, but obviously only for the world’s most famous religion of peace. Week after week, the courts use the European Convention of Human Rights to stop deportation of the worst criminals. Recently, a guy who sexually abused his own step-children could not be deported because he said it would interfere with his human rights to access his family i.e the children he’d attacked. And the courts said, ‘yeah, that’s right, checkmate, you get to stay’. Every week there’s now a mad case like this. The ECHR system that Britain set up to stop Europe sliding back to totalitarianism, is now being used – thanks to cross-party, multi-decade consensus – by sex criminals and by terrorists to force us to prioritise them in ever more grotesque ways.

You have seen recently the news that the guy who stabbed the girls in Southport attacked prison guards, but you won’t have seen why these cases keep occurring. The reason is the Cabinet Office legal advice states that it’s unlawful under the European Convention of Human Rights to keep even convicted terrorists under surveillance, even in high-security jails, because it breaches their rights to privacy. So, when cases like this happen, officials prioritise covering up the ECHR’s role — they do not prioritise the rights of prison guards not to have burning oil thrown in their faces.

The regime destroyed border control, even though the main reason for ‘Leave’ winning the EU referendum was the desire for more border control. Then it imported unprecedented millions, and hundreds of thousands more simply got on the stupid boats in France and came over, safe in the knowledge that that MPs have created a legal regime that makes it practically impossible to deport anybody. The only people left in the world who now seem to listen to what the Home Office says are the tiny fraction of the most skilled people in the world who we actually want to come here. These are the people who the Home Office wages a constant jihad against to stop them coming into the country. So, again, we have a regime that waves through maniacs by the thousand, won’t deport anybody, won’t deport the worst criminals; the only people now that they actually stop and who listen to what the laws say are the very small numbers of the most high-skilled people that we actually want to come here.

Last week people were jailed for less than three years for burning a pensioner to death in their own home — less time in jail obviously than people are now getting for stupid tweets. The regime has broken housing markets, so unless your parents are rich, it’s going to be much harder for you to get a home, and build a family, than it was for your parents. It’s executed a set of economic policies that have created the worst period since Napoleon for productivity and real wage growth.

It’s broken the NHS so badly that Ukrainian refugees return to a literal war zone to get healthcare. And these pathological institutions attack the things that work. So if this building was suddenly taken over by terrorists, we would depend on Special Forces to come and solve the situation. Those Special Forces now have to have meetings about the Cabinet Office’s constant lawfare against them. They’re having to hire lawyers to defend themselves over operations which they were given medals for over the last few decades.

I’ve sat in the Cabinet Office watching as terrorists actually on the run from cave to cave in Pakistan call on satellite phones London lawyers, using human rights laws to demand that British taxpayers give them millions. And the Cabinet Office says we’ve got to pay them out. And it sends over these millions, and then it classifies it all in such a high level that no MPs know about it. These cases are not discussed in Parliament. These cases are not discussed in the media.

In 2020, we started monitoring sewage and provided real time data on disease spread. It is a crucial piece of infrastructure for public health, the same way the Victorians built institutions which we rely on. So, of course, the regime closed it down. We proved you could do vaccine research ten times more effectively. So they closed the vaccine task force. We created what I think is the West’s first data science and AI team inside a Prime Minister’s Office. The Cabinet Office and Treasury have tried to vandalise it for five years and close it down.

If you think, well, at least things like nuclear weapons must be taken seriously, no, that’s also wrong. For 20 years, there’s been a disastrous procurement process costing tens and tens and tens of billions which, again, is kept super secret so that it’s not the subject of discussion in Parliament, not the subject of discussion in the media.

Neither the worst pandemic since 1918, nor the biggest land war in Europe since Hitler, have made Westminster change – quite the opposite. Since the war started in Ukraine, MOD procurement has got worse and worse. When I said in 2020, the future of war was drones and robots, Westminster laughed. Now we see all this playing out on YouTube. But the MOD has spent the years of the Ukraine war deliberately resisting facing this reality. And when people return from Ukraine to explain what’s happening inside the MOD, they’re told: ‘Do not tell senior officials, do not tell ministers, our priority is continuing the budgets for the stupid old tanks and all the things inside MOD procurement that don’t work. We want to keep the old gravy train running.’

So step by step, the old regime has piled up the tinder. As Mao said, ‘A single spark can start a prairie fire’. Britain, practically alone in the world, has avoided serious political violence for centuries. But the crumbling of our regime and its elites mean we’re now only random viral posts away from riots and prairie fires getting out of control.

The kind of official story about how government works is that the MPs get up every day and they think about government and they think about the voters and they think about elections. This is not true. A lot of the reason why the news often makes no sense is that people think that the official story is true, but it is not. What MPs actually focus on all day is the old media and their promotions. Their reality comes from this old media. But, of course, this old media itself is breaking down under the power and the shock of the internet. We therefore see this kind of what I’ve called a sort of narrative whiplash that now dominates Westminster debates. Everyone herds to one story. The story turns out to be complete nonsense. And then everyone drops it and they herd to a new story. But then everything is memory holed from what people said before.

I’ll just give a few examples. On social media, in 2008, the official story blasted everywhere from the New York Times to the British media was that social media is all nonsense and it has no effect. In 2012, the official story became, actually, it’s wonderful because it’s helped President Obama win. In 2016, it became, actually far from being nonsense, social media technology is evil Jedi-mind controlling technology, and that’s the real reason why Brexit happened and why Trump happened.

If you look at the start of the Covid pandemic, public health experts laughed at the supermodel Caprice when she went on TV and said: ‘Why are we not closing the borders?’ Remember that? She just voiced what normal people were saying. And, of course, all the public health experts mocked her all over Twitter and they said: ‘No, no, no, no, no. Closing the borders is racist. The actual plan is we’ve got no choice but to run up the white flag. Vaccines are impossible. Tests won’t work. Everyone will just have to do herd immunity without a vaccine and put up with no health service for months’.

Then the whole story suddenly flipped. Suddenly, no herd immunity but tests, vaccines, and according to The Guardian and the BBC, the only people resisting this new story were the crazy right-wing Brexit people. The same kind of narrative whiplash is played out in the stupidest war in modern history in Ukraine, the war which never needed to happen. At the beginning, the official story was that the Ukraine war is nothing to do with Ukraine joining Nato. Then the official story became Ukraine must join Nato. They started off saying the war must continue because it’s bleeding Russia dry. And then the story became the war must continue because Russia is strengthening, they’re building this terrible drone force; they’re getting more and more efficient. So the war must continue.

Over and over again then, we see this constant flipping of the official story; these deranged narratives the reality for Whitehall and for our MPs. That’s what they’re watching all day. That’s what actually determines their behaviour. A very telling example, I think, was that just before the last presidential election — if I’d said ten years ago that before the 2024 election, Democrat presidential candidates will openly state that the First Amendment of America was a ‘historic mistake’ that will be fixed after the election, everyone would have thought that was completely barking mad and completely inconceivable that that would be the case before, the days before the 2024 election, that’s exactly what John Kerry said, and what Hillary Clinton said. And I think this is a very important principle to absorb. Wrestling is real. The news is fake. And if there’s one word now to describe the Westminster regime: fake is the word. Fake meetings, fake decisions, fake news. Fake all the way through.

The only people that are struggling to see this are the people inside the system. Why is this? Marshall McLuhan said that a new medium becomes invisible during the period of its innovation to almost everyone. And I think that this is part of what’s happening. This weird narrative whiplash, and this fake news is not visible to the MPs and the officials who are running around chasing 24-hour news all day.

It’s visible to people outside; if you talk to normal voters, they see these problems. But inside Westminster, the fake story is the real story. And the reason why I think this is happening, I’ll put it in a broader, broader context is, I think we’re going through a normal cycle of history: slow rot, elites blind and then fragmenting, sudden crisis, fast collapse and then regime change and a new elite with new ideas, allied with a subset of the people who supply energy and legitimacy take over.

I think the core reason for this is that, over a period of a few generations, over and over again we see a similar story play out: the ideas and institutions of the ruling elites become pulled away from reality. They struggle to adapt to reality. And then, eventually, this gap between the stories that they tell themselves, and what’s actually happening in the real world, this gap falls apart and they fall down into the crack of it.

Now we can see, I’ll give an example, a parallel to what I think is happening now, which is in the mid-19th century. If you go back to the 1840s, you see a generation who’ve gone through the Napoleonic Wars writing letters to each other. They can feel the collapse of the old order. And they write about this. They talk about the crazy ideas that are spreading in the universities and amongst the young. They discuss the crumbling of the old conservatism of throne and altar, the spread of atheism, the spread of liberalism and socialism. They discuss new technologies like rail and the telegram. And they discuss how they can feel the 1815 international security system is also starting to crumble.

Then, in 1848, dominoes fall, regimes fall, new countries are created, and then in the 1860s and 1870s, you see a whole bunch of books being published reflecting these huge conflicts in the modern world. You have Fathers and Sons. You have Dostoyevsky publishing Crime and Punishment, The Devils, The Brothers Karamazov. You have Nietzsche publishing Beyond Good and Evil and all of these books are grappling with these incredibly powerful forces at the heart of how the modern world has evolved: individual rights, spreading and spreading; markets, spreading and spreading; the idea of constitutions, spreading and spreading; and undermining of traditional ideas.

New types emerge in literature and then become real. They play out in the Russian revolutionaries of the late 19th century, and then you can see them actually seize power in 1917. And, if you flip to 1933, you have the sight of Heidegger, one of the most influential thinkers in the 20th century, particularly on the left, actively welcoming in to Germany’s ancient universities the Nazi regime.

Now in the 20th century, you have two sort of big attempts to grapple with these modern forces in ways different than the Anglo-American system: the socialist experiment, and the fascist experiment. Both of these failed for different reasons. After 1991, this new world emerged. But what’s happened to us now, and why the news feels so crazy, is that we are going through the same remorseless historical process.

If you talk to the people in charge, you hear exactly the same sorts of things as these old guys were writing about in the 1840s: the rise of new ideas in universities, the young seem to be going crazy. In the 1840s, it was railways and telegrams. Now it’s social media, AI, biotech. The international security infrastructure, built from 1945, with NATO, the UN and the EU – all of these institutions also seem to be crumbling in the same way as in the 1840s.

So what? What can we start to build to get ourselves out of the mess that we have got ourselves into? You have to consider the regime as a complex system, and there is no single magic thing that you can do to change it. Asking the old people to change the institutions will fail. Just putting new people in the old institutions will also fail. You have to change the people, the ideas, the institutions and the tools all together.

It’s a system that’s coming apart in Whitehall and it needs to be replaced by a different system. So the first thing is that, for a very long time, the government has not controlled the government. This is the first thing that needs to change. If you look back 200 odd years to 1795 under William Pitt, you see a regime that took elite talent very seriously and took individual responsibility for projects very seriously. It understood the connections between how government buys things and the science and technology ecosystem necessary for building long-term capabilities. Pitt had real meetings in No. 10 Downing Street, not the fake scripted meetings now, where the conclusions are written by officials before the meeting ever happens. That’s not a parody from Westminster. That is actually the process for how modern government works. The big battle in Whitehall over power is not what people say in meetings, which are largely fake and irrelevant. The battle for power in Whitehall is about who gets to write the conclusions of what the Prime Minister says before the meeting starts. That’s not how Pitt did things, but it’s how Whitehall works now.

Back then, technologists and entrepreneurs could build great things fast and at scale because of wise procurement, which was taken extremely seriously. Parliament threw people in jail during the Napoleonic Wars for procurement scandals, in stark contrast to how, after covid, those responsible for procurement scandals were all obviously promoted and put in the House of Lords and given honours and big consultancy contracts. So the Whitehall in 1795 was more like SpaceX 2025 than Whitehall 2025 is. All of these different aspects therefore have to be systematically reversed if you’re going to actually have a serious government and a different political regime.

On day one, a new prime minister that actually wants to take the country in a different direction and solve these problems, has to immediately fire and replace many, many, many of the existing officials who control things. The Prime Minister’s Office needs to take back control of No. 10. It needs to close the Cabinet Office, and it needs to take over the functions that the Cabinet Office has acquired over a century.

Now, remember, the Cabinet Office was set up in 1916-17 in the crisis of world war one as the old Victorian system couldn’t cope. They created a Cabinet Office in this crisis of the Somme and the disaster playing out in Flanders. This system has gradually taken more and more and more and more power, The Cabinet Secretary now has something like 100 times more power than the average minister does. People often ask me about 2019 and the Brexit negotiations: ‘What did this minister think about this? What about the rows between this minister and that minister?’ And my answer to them is, ‘I don’t really remember and it wasn’t important. The ministers were not important in this process. I cared very much what the 30-year old officials in the Cabinet Office thought about these things, because they were the ones with real power.’

If all kinds of things happen today, when bombs go off, for example, or if a Secretary of State is caught by the security services in unsuitable liaisons, it’s not the ministers that get called first. The wiring diagram of power inside the system means that it’s the Cabinet Secretary who is called first when the bombs go off and when crises happen. And the Cabinet Secretary decides which ministers are allowed to see what. All of that must change. We can’t carry on if you want things to be different. You can’t carry on with a system where the political ministers are essentially non-player characters in a video game, and the characters with real power are the unelected officials. You can’t carry on with a system where the ministers all walk up Downing Street and smile for the cameras and the media and the MPs pretend that the decisions are actually being made in the Cabinet.

I can tell you the decisions are not made in the Cabinet. In the whole of 2020, I never even bothered attending Cabinet once. The reason is because it’s become fake. Fake meetings, whereas the real decisions and the real power have moved elsewhere. So you replace people, you bring in new people, you close down the Cabinet Office, the Prime Minister takes over the Cabinet Office, the powers of the Cabinet Office.

At the moment, the Prime Minister has literally no role whatsoever in the management of key permanent secretaries who actually run the government departments. Nothing at all to do with it. The entire HR system of Whitehall works for the Cabinet Secretary, not for the Prime Minister. If you want change on what’s important – if you want to see a different regime – you have to have a Prime Minister who is actually in charge of setting the priorities for the key officials in the country. That doesn’t happen now. When we started to do that in 2020, the system went crazy and complained that it was fascism. But this really should not be controversial. In the old days, ministerial responsibility was genuine. It became fake. Switching it back to being genuine is not fascism.

I think the essential concept of permanent civil servants, which was started in the 1850s, is at the root of a lot of the problems. The civil service system has become a closed caste system with Brahmins and Untouchables. The Brahmins are insiders promoted through the system, regardless of failure. Look at our current Cabinet Secretary; he was responsible for not just parts of the blood scandal, but also for pandemic preparation and planning. In Spring 2020, he tried to get the Prime Minister on TV and say that the answer to the Covid pandemic was that everyone should try and get Covid as soon as possible like the chickenpox parties of the old days. Of course, therefore, the old system has not fired him. It’s promoted him. It’s given him honours. And it’s now put him in charge of the entire civil service.

The Untouchables are roughly 100 per cent of the world’s most effective people, none of whom could be hired inside Whitehall by ministers. And the insane HR system means that everybody changes jobs every two years, roughly. So if you’re sitting in No. 10, you have a series of meetings with someone in charge of, for example, Chinese cyber operations. And you talk to them and you talk to them. You have meeting after meeting, and then suddenly this person vanishes completely and some new person arrives in No. 10 and you say: ‘Oh, hello, who are you?’. And they say: ‘Oh, I’m so-and-so’. And you say: ‘Oh, right. Okay. Um, so what are you doing?’. ‘Oh, I’ve been in charge of special educational needs for the last two years’. ‘Oh, right. Okay. You’re now in charge of Chinese cyber operations?’. ‘Yeah’.

So the justification for the permanent civil service system is supposedly that it develops expertise. But the actual way in which it works now is pathologically hostile to actual expertise. It doesn’t let anyone develop expertise. And it forces people, if you want promotion and you want to get a pay rise, you have to do this constant zigzagging every two years up through the HR system. All of that needs to be completely swept away. It was created in the 1850s, and, in my opinion, it’s no coincidence that from the time that the so-called professional civil service took over, that marked the beginning of institutional dysfunction spreading throughout the Westminster system, because it became fundamentally impossible for elected ministers to change things by changing the people. And that’s really where I think responsibility and fake meetings started to take over.

So there’s a few other things that you need to do in parallel with this. Once you’ve actually taken power, and the Prime Minister is now actually in charge of Whitehall, the power of the Treasury has to be shattered into a thousand pieces. The Treasury cannot do cost control, witness the shambles that it made over contracts in Covid, where it essentially washed its hands of it and raised the white flag. The Treasury’s processes for all long-term projects are an absolute disaster. They make it impossible for people to plan. They make everything super expensive. Today, with the publication of this Spending Review, you see this process. Now, behind the scenes, what happens is everybody lies in the Spending Review process, and all of the budget numbers everyone knows are completely fake. And the budget numbers that will be published today, everyone at the heart of power inside the Treasury and the No10 system knows those are all fake. The long-term budgeting process also means that you have a constant churn whereby entities all over Whitehall can’t actually organise themselves over a five or ten or 15-year period.

They’re constantly told by the Treasury: No, your ceiling for budgets is just here. Even though the project extends for years beyond that. So you see completely crazy things like, the officials in charge of project X, say at the MOD, are told that everyone on project X will be fired in June because the Treasury won’t guarantee that the budget is still going to be there after, say, November. People are fired, things closed down, And then, in November, the Treasury goes – oh, actually, some 30-year-old, who read PPE 100 yards from here (in Oxford) – says: ‘No, no, no, actually this programme can carry on’. And the people are all hired again. All you’ve done is waste millions of quid and waste everyone’s time. This is regarded as a completely standard, sensible way for Whitehall to organise how it spends all of your money.

The Prime Minister’s Office has got to take responsibility for building a completely new process for long-term budgets, and that obviously effects government procurement. As I said before, 200 years ago, this country was the best country in the world at actually doing procurement. Now it is a poster child for some of the most insane decisions that you can possibly imagine. Even the simplest things like building a dual carriageway, adding a lane for dual carriageways over eighteen miles, is now scheduled to take twenty-five to thirty years. That is completely normal. And if you sketched out the process, what you would see is, start here, planning process one, court process, judicial review, appeal, environmental process one, court process, judicial review, appeal, planning process two, judicial review two, environmental process two. That gets you up to maybe fifteen years or so. This process continues sequentially, and then building the road is like that little bit there at the end that actually happens in the last few years, but in itself, that is too long. It should only take five years. But there’s the twenty, twenty-five years beforehand.

This is not a hypothetical example, these are examples that I used when Prime Minister’s questions used to happen on Wednesday at twelve o’clock. I used to use that time in the Cabinet Room in No10 Downing Street to bring officials in from all over Whitehall to go through these kind of budgets and to go through these projects to try and figure out why on earth the mad system works as it is. And this is an actual timetable for the A66 road which runs across the north of the country: one carriageway for eighteen miles in 2020. When I said to them, ‘This is completely insane, go away, come back next week with a better plan’, they said, ‘Well, Dominic, we’ve squeezed everything we possibly can, we’ve done everything that is humanly possible, we think we can get this down to about twenty-three, twenty-four years’. That was regarded as a perfectly reasonable way for things to proceed and if you say: ‘This is mad, and what we’re going to do instead is just systematically rip up all of these rules’, repeal the primary legislation, change the judicial review process etc etc, then, again, much of the system will go completely crazy. Because the system doesn’t see itself as there to deliver for you, the voters, for the taxpayers. The system sees itself as there to protect itself.

It’s very routine when you’re sitting inside No10 and you look at rolling news on TV and you see some story rolling, scrolling across the bottom of the screen saying ‘Disaster on blah, blah, blah’, 6 o’clock BBC News. You look out the window and you see the official responsible for it at 3:30 just pottering through Horse Guards on the way to the Tube walking home. It’s a completely normal thing because no one cares about actually delivering the thing in a sensible way and the culture of direct responsibility is now almost completely unknown and is seen in Whitehall as something that’s almost deranged if you try and do it.

So during Covid, when we said: ‘Okay, we’ve got to try and get testing going faster, we’ve got to try and get vaccines going faster. We’ve got to try and get a thousand things going faster. We’re going to put a named individual in charge of each of these things, so that everybody knows that person is the person to call and that person is responsible, right?’ This is not exactly revolutionary management. This is how every single functioning entity on planet Earth works. And this was seen in Whitehall as revolutionary and hostile and to be resisted.

Now, if you think that that’s the mindset, even when thousands of people are dying every week and it’s a genuine crisis, imagine what it’s like to change things in normal times now. That’s why Starmer is finding he has meetings, everyone nods and smiles, yeah, Prime Minister, yeah, yeah, yeah, and then he leaves, and then two weeks later, three months later, six months later, yeah, no one’s done anything because no one really cares what the Prime Minister thinks.

The system just rumbles on with its own priorities. Why has Starmer got himself into the single biggest political disaster of his premiership on winter fuel payments? Was that in his manifesto? No. Did he say he wanted to do it? No. Did Labour MPs want to do it? No. Why? What happened? It happened because it’s on the 30-year-old Treasury official’s priority list. And if you’ve got non-player characters as Prime Ministers and as ministers, and a system that operates in this mad way, the system will put its priorities in front of the ministers and push them out on TV to announce things. And then the rest of the MPs go, ‘Where the hell is this coming from? Why are we doing this? We don’t understand’.

All of these different things need to change. The other thing that you need to do in No10 – so you’ve actually taken power from the Cabinet Office, you’ve closed the Cabinet Office you’ve got rid of the HR system so you can fire people, replace people, hire the world’s best people to come and work on important government buildings – you change the procurement system so the government can now actually buy and sell and do things on normal timescales rather than on 20 or 30-year timescales.

The other central thing that has to happen is science and technology have to become embedded in the Prime Minister’s Office as a core priority of No10 Downing Street and I’ll give just a couple of examples of this. If you talk now to the high status pundits in Westminster, they are full of laughter and hilarity about the developments that are happening in Silicon Valley in the AI labs. Ha ha ha, they say, these auto-complete chatbots, how silly that people are taking them seriously. It’s a scam, it’s a bubble, it’s nonsense. That is the sophisticated take from Westminster’s finest political analysts. This is obviously, as many people in this room will know who actually use these tools, completely crazy. Unlike Westminster, I followed this for twenty years, and I talked to the people building in these frontier AI labs, what they’re actually doing and what they think is gonna happen. And I’ve said repeatedly that Westminster is going to be shocked by what happens, every year, and that’s vindicated and it’s going to be vindicated more and more and more in the next three or four years. Five years ago, people were laughing at GPT as it couldn’t do 3+2. Last year, DeepMind showed that they can get a silver medal in the IMO (Maths Olympiad) and I’m told that various people have already privately but not published yet gold medal performances from these models on the IMO. What you’re going to see over the next few years is that area after area after area, these models are going to do as well as or better than human performances. [NB. in July DM and OAI announced they’d cracked Gold IMO.]

In parallel with this, we have a lot of dynamics in biology which are democratising tools and democratising knowledge, making it easier and easier to do biological knowledge. If you’re interested in this subject, I suggest you read stuff from a guy called Kevin Esvelt who developed the gene drive, he’s written a lot of things about what trends of this are. Now these two things are obviously going to intersect — the models are going to make it easier to do amazing things as biological engineering democratises, but also extremely terrible things as well are going to be on the cards. Both of these things are going to become simpler and cheaper. We can’t carry on, Covid should have taught us, but hasn’t taught Westminster, we can’t carry on with a government system in which we have a Western civilisation that’s based on science and technology and a political cultural elite dominant in politics and Whitehall that is ignorant of, or contemptuous about, science and technology. That is a recipe for catastrophe.

The other thing which a new regime that’s actually serious about turning the country around has to do – as well as these kind of bureaucratic and power changes that I’ve described inside the Number 10/ Whitehall complex – is to also say that science and technology, both for prosperity and for security, are now going to become critical aspects of how the Prime Minister spends his time in the same way that they are on national security issues and budgets. They have to be at the top of the PM’s inbox and completely integrated into how the Prime Minister’s Office actually works. If you do all these things, you won’t solve all of our problems for sure, but you will at least have a functioning regime that can build things, rather than a dysfunctional and pathological regime.

The last thing I’ll say then is, if I was going to be on a desert island, one of the top three books that I would take with me is War and Peace. And if you think about War and Peace, there are two kind of strands running through. One strand is that these inexorable human forces, inexorable forces of history, collide and smash. And it doesn’t really matter what individual people do and think. They just get broken and washed along in the flood. And the other part of the story is that, at some times, what one person thinks and does can have a huge effect on what happens. Both things are true at the same time.

Over the next five years, everyone in this room is going to live through two things. They’re going to live through these old regimes of the Western world continuing to crumble and disintegrate and fail. Both the old parties are already dead, it’s like one of those Japanese movies where a samurai whips their heads off, but they haven’t quite realised yet that they’re dead. But they are. Samurai has done his bit, the Tories and Labour are dead. That process is going to continue, and the AI and biological engineering strand is going to continue as well. And these two things are going to be very connected. These forces are going to smash into all of our lives. They’re going to affect them in all sorts of ways.

But also, I would just say that, as per Tolstoy’s message in War and Peace, we can have agency at these moments of crisis. Everyone here can build things. You can prepare for this extremely different world that’s coming. One of the most obvious things to do, I think, is not everything can be about Westminster, not everything should be about Westminster. It’s one of the problems that it’s centralised so much power there. We’ve got to deal with the dysfunction of Westminster. We have to return to a civilisation in this country where other parts of the country can actually build things and do things. And the most obvious thing?

It strikes me that there’s something that everyone in this room could get involved with, which is the replacement of the old school system. The AI thing means it’s doomed, a bit like the old parties; the current system with fake exams, fake curriculum created by the bureaucratic state to try to justify that it knows what it’s doing, has destroyed in lots of ways the old European (system of) education and the institutions. That old system is doomed. New things are definitely going to come. And the sooner the people like those in this room start building them, what comes next, the better.

And that’s something where we can do things ourselves. We don’t have to wait for Westminster, we shouldn’t have to wait for Westminster and Whitehall. So we can start building alternative things for our children to go into. And if you start creating alternative educational ecosystem in time, that will help us replace the rotten old political regime which is crumbling at the same time.

[If anybody spots errors in the transcript please note in comments — a friend did it with an AI but I haven’t checked myself.]

SNIPPETS

A sign of how the ‘mainstream’ now works. A prominent old media pundit, Nick Cohen, an extreme Remainer/Rejoiner and an extreme fan of bombing Russia — such opinions have become tightly correlated — commented on this speech. He refers to the passage at the start:

The old political parties, the old Whitehall institutions, the old media, the old universities, the old courts constitute a political regime. This regime has become cancerous. The cancer has metastasised and the cancer is attacking everything healthy in the country; all the healthy institutions and healthy impulses are the target of Whitehall.

And he paraphrases it to his audience as:

Every British institution is a cancerous growth that must be killed before it kills us, he now tells us.

So a) the obvious, unarguable literal meaning of my words is that a set of political institutions are attacking healthy institutions and b) he reports me as saying the opposite, that all the healthy institutions are cancerous.

Then he uses his Orwellian paraphrase to justify describing me as: ‘might have been a member of the British Union of Fascists in the 1930s’.

It’s hard to know whether to use the word ‘lie’ or ‘delusion’ or ‘Platonic lie’ about such behaviour because a) there’s no doubt these characters usually sort of believe what they’re saying when they call me/others fascist yet b) they aren’t illiterate, Cohen et al are capable of understanding my words so it’s conscious dishonesty.

This sort of thing has become standard among many MSM political hacks and is partly why people have lost trust and why hacks like Cohen are being fired as revenues collapse. The more they spread such delusions to each other, the more they also shriek at each other about the ‘disinformation of the Far Right’. It’s hard to see what breaks this cycle apart from technology making them unemployed.

Kemi, Reeves, McSweeney, Starmer exeunt? Now’s not the time to go into domestic politics in detail again. Things are playing out per my February blog.

Kemi gone November-May.

I think chances are underrated that:

• Reeves goes. Her authority is shot, just a matter of time.

• And McSweeney goes. His project is shot. Starmer couldn’t do it if he wanted and he doesn’t want.

• MPs replace Starmer with Rayner. It’s underrated how many MPs have picked up from No10 officials/spads that he just can’t do the job and doesn’t want to.

• And Rayner goes for — wealth tax, ‘the rich must pay their fair share’, and is just ‘a proper lefty government’ as most Labour MPs want. They don’t want McSweeney or anybody telling them crucial voters do not agree with them. They just want a lefty government.

• How does the financial doomloop interact with this (see below)?

A ‘comms problem’? SW1 loves saying ‘it’s a comms problem’ but almost 100% of the time ‘comms problems’ are downstream from bad strategy, bad policy, bad leadership and Whitehall dysfunction. You could put the best communication team in there and with Starmer it will still fail. Like many modern PMs he’s resorted to calling hacks directly to ‘give them a line on a story’ but his instincts are awful so it just makes things worse.

Example. In summer 2020 SW1 was full of columns attacking ‘terrible communication from No10’. Almost without exception these takes were very confused. The communication problems were downstream. We were attacked for ‘stupid comms’ when the government repeatedly got into fights with famous celebrities but the problem was not ‘comms’. The director of communication repeatedly told the PM and Ministers not to do things. The PM wanted to pick fights then he wanted to surrender. If the principals do dumb things, it is not ‘a comms problem’ and the solution is not ‘better comms’ or shuffling spads.

Yes No10 communication is bad but it’s downstream of leadership, strategy, policy, facing reality and execution. J Powell is trying to recruit more Blairites from the 1990s to No10 but this also can’t turn things around.

‘McSweeney’s should go!’ It’s on brand that many of SW1’s most ‘serious’ analysts have aligned to a) there is no alternative to breaking manifesto tax promises and raising taxes — remember how they all chirped that Boris doing this was ‘really smart politics’ in 2021 when I said it would help destroy the Tories? — and b) the solution to a dud PM and a broken civil service is to remove the only person in No10 who has demonstrated interest in and understanding of normal voters and is trying to represent them inside No10 and argue for big changes in how Whitehall works.

Obviously this is intolerable! Fire McSweeney! chant the NPCs who will only be happy when the entire government and BBC does nothing but chant 'you must increase your trust in our great institutions, we deserve more power and money, tax rises are inevitable and GOOD, we CAN go back to 1998!' If you won’t change Whitehall — and the NPC crowd are united in ‘respect the institutions, changing Whitehall is fascism’ — then you have no choice but the doomloop of ever higher taxes and more socialist command-and-control centralisation and faith that Whitehall will do things that make the country think the huge crisis is suddenly improving. It’s delusional but on brand.

Campaigns and government. The usual suspects chorus nonsense about ‘campaign people shouldn't be in government because they’re so different’. But as I’ve explained repeatedly, they chorus this because they don’t understand campaigns/communication, government, or running any complex organisation. Organising hard things has common principles across all big complex entities. You see these principles repeatedly whether in entities like SkunkWorks, in great companies, in winning campaigns, and in successful government.

If tempted to disagree with me, reflect on this. James Baker is widely seen as the most successful White House chief of staff (in the White House this job actually is chief of the staff unlike in No10). He was also a ‘campaign person’. He reflected on this argument from the mainstream:

Running an administration isn’t a lot different to running a campaign – you need to have a coordinated message, a directed message, and you need to prioritise. You can’t do that when you have too many chiefs. One of the problems of the current White House is you have five or six separate power centres in that White House, and they cross-cut. That’s a recipe for dysfunction.

Yes ‘government is different to campaigns’ in many ways but the core principles of running large complex organisations are the same. Removing people who understand winning campaigns means, in SW1, usually removing the only people familiar with an actually functioning entity because most officials and ministers have never been responsible for something big and functional. When McSweeney is removed or leaves in rage and frustration, it will get worse not better — though the NPCs will praise the new ‘grownups’ replacing him, just as the IFG praised the new Boris-2021 regime as ‘serious grownups’ (this is now memory-holed). What replaces him is almost certain to be more divorced from reality. Further re-orientation to the priorities of SW1 from the priorities of voters will be seen as an improvement in SW1. It will not be. And after a few months, ‘there’s a comms problem’ will be chirped again.

An A/B test: Zohran v Cuomo. Cuomo operated the old playbook: big fundraising, spent on ads, saturated the TV ad market, very limited media appearances, super-negative, no interesting ideas, MSM over new digital, sounded like the dead old parties.

Zohran:

• focused on message not donors so did not push a load of far left messages that left-billionaires push candidates to and he raised less than he could have done,

• his core message was the cost of living crisis which (as you subscribers know I’ve said for years) is the No1 thing in US focus groups since 2022 but Kamala could/would not focus on it,

• he focused on very rapid and high quality (which is not the same as looking very expensive) vertical ads created for each platform and deployed fast to exploit algorithms with an effective brand/look,

• he gave interviews everywhere like Trump (unlike Kamala),

• he talked about ideas that got people talking.

Old school for decades: pay for attention, get on the news. New school: algorithmic, video, go viral.

Old school policy: complex compromise, long papers. New school policy: mimetics trumps, video not text, conflict works.

(This is an observation, not an endorsement. The decline of a literate culture is abysmal and connected to the decline of elite education since 1945. And it’s a simplification — another thing (positive) that’s happening to the ecosystem is the explosion of high quality long content. It’s conventional news, conventional interviews etc of conventional formats that’s being made redundant. The candidate of the future is not the Pelosi type, not someone to waffle with the ‘line’ for 5 minutes on the Today program, but someone who can do short videos and a four hour podcast where parts of your character will be revealed.)

Zohran’s success is a good indicator of where communication is going but none of the three SW1 parties is anywhere near the technological frontier. (They’re not even close to the old technological frontier! The Tories are mostly trying to do the Mandelson 1990s model of communication (pre-internet) and failing.) Reform is closest but it’s still far behind the frontier and hasn’t evolved much in a year. Zohran is good at it like AOC but if you look at the Democrat mainstream they are generally bad. No taste. And part of this is how the old parties recruit.

Old school: recruit and promote for handling coalition politics, raise lots of money, spend it on ads. Product: Pelosi. New school: recruit and promote for social media videos. Product, AOC, Zohran. (Kemi is trying to be new school but she’s so bad her social media content has helped bury her rather than help her.)

So we’re going to see a) both old parties go through possibly terminal crisis-spasms and b) a technology driven rapid evolution in digital communication that the old parties can’t do, but live player entrepreneurs can use to build much faster and more effectively and cheaper than ever before.

SW1 continues self-clowning on AI. The old ecosystem is particularly knackered on communication because so many of ‘the serious mainstream’ has herded to the comical position of ‘AI is a fad/scam’.

If you want to see how far this brainworm has gone, look at a former senior GCHQ official, Ciaran Martin: ‘all Gen AI amounts to is plausible nonsense’. He is not a technical person. He’s one of Heywood’s mob. Notice how he quotes Professor Wooldridge who has been repeatedly comically wrong about AI for years and is a good example of how badly British academia has done on this, why the Turing Institute has been a failure etc (he even managed to predict LLMs ‘won’t be able to do X and Y’ after X and Y had already happened). This helps one understand why the intelligence agencies and MoD are in such a terrible state on AI. It’s also a good example of how people who want social approval in public on BlueSky from the NPC network are inexorably radicalised to embarrassing positions. As I’ve said repeatedly, if there is one prediction I am absolutely confident in, it is that the SW1 mainstream’s takes on AI over the past few years are historically dumb even by their standards, there will be mass deleting when Narrative Whiplash kicks in, and will be a wonder to the future to the extent they survive the mass deletions.

Also NB. the extreme seriousness with which China is approaching this contrasts very powerfully with SW1 and Brussels. It is building the entire tech stack and is also making enormous investments in electricity. China aims to build the entire US electricity capacity in the next ~18 months then do it again. Read that again. Then consider how extremely bad SW1 energy policy has been for 30 years.

Also NB. OpenAI, DeepMind and Grok each just announced in the last few days they have models that can do IMO Gold questions. Yes AI companies hype things for PR, like almost everybody. But the underlying important thing is not niggles over the hype but the straight lines on the graphs remain true and those playing with the unreleased things in the labs say they will stay true for at least another 2 years.

Polling. Conventional polling is more broken than ever. The combination of much of SW1 radicalising left on BlueSky — ‘the real story’ of the grooming gangs is ‘misinformation from the far right’ — while the old polling companies are less and less useful guarantees further derangement in SW1 and academia. Notice how little comment there’s been on how bad the polls were in 2024. A great swarm of pundits and professors have chirped pure nonsense about voters shifting left on immigration over the past few years. Those doing focus groups know it’s junk.

Elite fragmentation continues but… One aspect of elite fragmentation is parts of SW1 radicalising left but the flip side is other parts of SW1 are sensing that doubling down on a) the only way forward is infinite tax rises and immigration and b) if you disagree you’re fascist is not a winner. Some of the most mainstream figures are realising that for the old regime to salvage anything, they will have to let new people do very new things. Per the famous line in The Leopard above, those who want some things to stay the same will have to embrace the greatest shift in governance we’ve seen since the war.

Reform? The Reform people are waaaay over-confident. They are ahead because everyone collapsed, not because they have a great team. Some of the team are coke-heads. Others are morons. Coke-heads and morons fall apart under pressure. At some point someone will put them under pressure. They cannot sustain focus, like Tories they just chase news cycles.

I wrote months ago that the critical indicator for Reform is signs of hiring great people. There’s a couple of positive signs but overall they still resemble the ERG. They’ve even started recruiting the dregs of the Tory Party (MPs and staff) — Remainer Jake Berry is not quite Tom Watson but he’s adjacent. If Reform continues recruiting these dregs they’ll do themselves serious damage. It’s the exact opposite to what they should be doing which is recruiting great people representing the best of the country and showing how different they are to the dead old parties, as I wrote in February. They said last year they wouldn’t do this so it’s another sign of a lack of clear direction at HQ.

I’m glad they did well in the locals because it’s more pressure to accelerate collapse of the old parties and force people to contemplate more serious changes. But the critical question remains: does Farage want to be PM and will therefore recruit elite talent with all that implies? So far he is not answering this Yes! If he continues not to even pretend to have a plan to recruit elite talent, then elite talent will more and more conclude that his priority is NOT creating a team that can control No10 and change the country.

It’s important to realise that many of the core Reform people think they’re going to be in No10 and they have already moved to a highly conservative approach — rather than aggressive building the attitude of many is ‘don’t risk it’. The idea they should sit on their lead for three years is loony but the sort of meme that spreads in SW1.

Further, it’s important to consider how the next few years will play out.

A few officials have suggested to me this playbook for Whitehall, using a useless Starmer administration as puppets:

• enfranchise 16 year olds

• enfranchise millions of EU nationals

• bring in measures specifically to help EU nationals before next election to mobilise EU nationals to vote for a Labour-Green-Hamas-LibDem candidate

• go after Reform donors and attack their financial infrastructure (debanking, HMRC and money laundering investigations etc)

• use the intelligence services to embroil Farage in scandals, criminal cases etc (and similarly a new Tory leader if one emerges and is clearly determined to replace the old Whitehall regime, ECHR etc).

Use of state authorities to pressure/crush opponents of the regime is a playbook that’s been honed by officials’ friends/relatives in the EU and is quite standard now. So it would be easy to deploy it to try to maintain some sort of puppet regime which won’t confront Whitehall continues post-2029, while they strengthen the use of law/police to curtail emergence of a serious opposition. Financial crisis and violence strengthen internal arguments/justification for both.

If applied to the existing parties this approach would be quite successful as the existing parties do not have the people or tools to counter it. Imagine some of the ‘comms team’ around Farage trying to deal with NSS leaks — they can’t even follow simple instructions on basic parliamentary process. (But applied to a serious political entity its weight could be effectively turned against it, as many Whitehall moves were turned against it in 2016))

The chances of widespread and serious political violence, though, obviously is rising all the time, per previous blogs. We can also now see the spread of organised English groups ‘patrolling’ areas ‘to protect women and children’. Easy to see where this goes. And easy to see, as I wrote months ago, how the state clamps down harder on this than on immigrant criminals, accelerating their loss of legitimacy.

ECHR.Another sign of elite fragmentation — Insiders splitting on whether to a) double down on flat out refusal to discuss ECHR leaving/reform, ‘it’s fascism’; or b) whether to engage with ‘reform’ for fear of enabling leave.

Another important aspect of fragmentation: many Insiders continue to follow the path of the Democrats 2016-24 in shifting to explicit opposition to conventional liberal ideas of free speech. As I pointed out last year it was very important that Kerry and Clinton made clear the First Amendment is ‘a historic mistake’ which the Democrats will ‘fix’.

Here we see an eminent QC, G Peretz — very Remain/Rejoin, extreme pro-ECHR/HRA — state clearly ‘many, if not most, supporters of the ECHR would not want to be subject to the US Bill of Rights’. For Peretz et al the ECHR is preferable because, for example, it allows MORE restrictions on free speech. Such comments from such lefty QCs were almost unthinkable 5-10 years ago, it was a very fringe view. But like many fringe left views it’s gone mainstream among Insiders who now openly say that the state must return to norms of censorship from centuries ago which they justify as ‘protecting democracy against fascism’ (i.e protecting/enhancing their own powers over the plebs).

And it was just announced (barely mentioned in yookay media) that the EU Commission has told the Greek government — do what you want to stop the boats in the Mediterranean, we will not enforce EU law including the Charter of Fundamental Rights and ECHR against you. This is another sign of elite fragmentation and panic.

A black pill for Jews. Westminster’s moral hierarchy has evolved over a few decades. Near the very top of the hierarchy was ‘anti-racism’. Women’s rights were clearly much lower in the hierarchy as the trans madness made obvious — men, including academics, clearly felt moral license to prioritise the rights of men (calling themselves women) over women and moral license to condemn as bigots, call for the criminalisation etc, of those women who objected.

Yet it’s become completely normalised for people to march all over the country in crowds which are pro-Hamas, pro-Hezbollah, and chant things about Jews/Israel that would immediately lead to arrest if you replaced ‘Jews’ with ‘blacks’ or ‘muslims’ — and the section most likely to be at such marches and chanting such things are precisely from those left-networks that have most defined themselves as ‘anti-racist’.

The BBC repeats Hamas propaganda on genocide and ‘IDF massacring Palestinians as they queue for food’ constantly. The BBC hires pro-Hamas people for foreign language broadcasts. The BBC ignores things like the infiltration of UN agencies by Hamas. Its star broadcasters openly argue that it’s morally right for the BBC to be explicitly anti-Trump because he’s so extreme but should not call Hamas ‘terrorists’ after 7/10. On and on and on. And on TikTok the PRC tunes the algorithm to push pro-Hamas/anti-Israel propaganda to a very extreme degree — and MPs are confused about why under 30s are so much more anti-semitic.

Meanwhile the ‘mainstream’ in SW1 has seen this as such an un-mentionable subject — like the grooming gangs — they’ve simply allowed it and don’t discuss it in Parliament. The phenomenon is similar to the way in which those on the Left who most identified with ‘anti-fascism’ in the 1930s were also most likely to claim that tales of Stalin’s terror were fake news and were most likely to defend the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. (Orwell wrote brilliantly on this and it is no surprise that exactly the worst elements of the Left today routinely still write anti-Orwell pieces. They rightly see him as their enemy.)

The old parties, media and Whitehall continue to babble ‘two state solution’ when everyone from MBS to the Israeli left to the IRG know this isn’t happening. As usual, SW1 (and Brussels) cannot escape old mental patterns from the pre-2016 world.

The Afghan super-injunction. The use of MoD planes to bring Afghans here has been an open secret in parts of SW1 for years though the scale was not clear (and still isn’t). It could hardly not be because of the shifting of forces’ families out of homes and stacking Afghans in bases etc. I’m told Afghans have been given 250k for renovations of houses that were so bad military families were the only people legally allowed to live there — we couldn’t put refugees in them like that, it would be unlawful!

Although there is astonishment outside SW1 and an assumption the story is ‘so mad things will have to change this time’, I do not agree short-term. The fact that it was not raised in PMQs is more indicative of mood inside SW1. Inside/outside SW1 are often extremely different worlds where each does not understand the other. MPs have abandoned scrutiny of the MoD for decades. I have openly referred to the manifest failures of the nuclear program, failures to prepare for biological attack, the corruption of MoD procurement, and systemic incompetence on things like drones in the higher echelons of the MoD. The MPs never do serious scrutiny of these things. They’ve also done their best to ignore the abysmal lawfare of the Cabinet Office on Special Forces.

I think that here we have a) a group of Tory MPs who do not want scrutiny and actually don’t think they did anything wrong, look at Wallace, they’re PROUD of bringing the Afghans!, and b) a bunch of left MPs who do not want scrutiny of the fiasco of our immigration/asylum system and particularly do not want attention drawn to the amazing propensity of Afghans to commit sex offences and c) business as usual in Whitehall which has become an anti-responsibility machine. The system is working as intended: ministers blame officials, officials say ministers are responsible to MPs, the MPs do nothing, nobody is responsible, the farce continues. (Also notice how there was a day of scandal over the Palestinian group invading the RAF base but, as usual, no sign of anybody being fired.)

I think:

• There will be tumbleweed in Parliament. Both leaderships will avoid the subject. (And Kemi will think ‘I can’t afford to offend previous ministers’ plus she probably supported the madness if she knew about it.)

• SW1 will plough more billions into housing the Afghans.

• Criminals will not be deported because the courts have made clear the ECHR makes it impossible to deport anybody to the Taliban — and the worse the criminal, the higher the chance the Taliban chop them up, so they all must stay.

• Reform cannot sustain focus on anything so they will also not sustain focus on this but will return to it when the news cycle randomly generates stories.

• A few good MPs will ask questions but the overwhelming majority will have forgotten it soon.

There has been a lot of misinformation on whether Tory MPs who knew about it could have spoken out in Parliament.

The constitutional position is extremely clear. The post-Civil War Bill of Rights (Article IX) made clear that no law and no court regulates speech of MPs in Parliament, known as ‘Parliamentary privilege’. This has never been changed. The courts have no reach and no power to regulate speech in Parliament. MPs can break super-injunctions just as they can say things that would be libellous for anybody else precisely because the courts cannot intervene. Courts can hold anybody else in contempt of court but not MPs speaking in Parliament. (If a court tried to create such a right for itself, it would create an extreme constitutional crisis and should (and I think would) be rejected by MPs.)

This extends to the Official Secrets Act. OSA does constrain what MPs say outside Parliament but it does not stop MPs speaking inside Parliament. No law does. Also it’s worth pointing out that the judge actually states this bog standard conventional view of the constitution in one of the judgments. For those interested, this became a live issue in the 1930s regarding Churchill and his criticism of appeasement in Parliament using secret information from the services. There was some rumbling from officials about OSA but they were forced to back down and the traditional constitutional view was preserved. Coincidentally I was reading about this recently in papers on the origins of the Cabinet Office which I’ll blog on in a week or so.

This obviously does not mean that ‘MPs are entirely free to say what they want’. They are bound by conscience and by Parliament itself including the judgement of the Speaker.

Our super-flexible constitution has evolved a wise balance with parliamentary privilege. Privilege is a very good ‘pressure release valve’, an emergency measure that safeguards us against both executive and courts, neither of which are more powerful than privilege. It is sadly symptomatic of so many of our MPs that they are often ignorant of their own rights/responsibilities.

Black pill. Chances of a financial crisis seem very underrated in SW1. This shouldn’t surprise. After all, they made no effort trying to figure out what the hell happened in autumn 2022 to spit out Truss. But the combination of no growth, productivity stagnation, all entropic forces of the state weakening the economy further, debt at wartime levels after 15 years of ZIRP, debt interest payments rising (as the zero interest rate Ponzi unwinds) to exceed the MoD or education budgets etc etc — this is just by itself a huge problem before you add that all the other main parts of the state are also crumbling.

Just as I have two fundamentally different sets of discussions about AI among a) people building AI and b) SW1, I have two fundamentally different sets of discussions about the economy and prospects for a crisis among a) extremely successful investors and b) SW1. These differences always play out the same: SW1 lives in the past, is last to see what’s happening and is always shocked after others can see what’s coming.

I’m extremely confident this will play out on AI. I’m less confident on financial crisis because predicting financial crashes is hard even for the best experts like Buffett/Munger and scams/frauds/Ponzis can sustain longer than usually seems ‘rational’.

But the yookay trajectory is not sustainable. We won’t grow because of decades of SW1 consensus-entropy embedded in the system. Labour has made clear they won’t control spending and the system left to itself will keep breaking budgets — the welfare system now is a machine for foreigners to extract our taxes and send it abroad plus our domestic scammers encouraged by Brown-Cameron-Trolley-Sunak etc. I can’t see Labour making Whitehall do things better/cheaper.

Labour is losing voters to everybody except Tories so politically there will be a strong internal argument for: squeezing the rich is one of the few things that unites a culturally fragmenting Left so let’s do it and blame the Tories. Plus the pundit NPCs all want higher taxes. So I think Starmer will go in this direction and if he’s replaced by Rayner it accelerates: wealth tax, squeeze the rich, price controls, maybe capital controls etc, all with a narrative of the rich as parasites/vampires. Longer term, I don’t see how the old regime escapes just trying old school inflation to control the debt spiral, which will have its own disastrous effects. I don’t understand these things well at all but you can see actual experts here and there saying — financial markets are badly mispricing debt and inflation risks. And privately they seem much more aggressive.

My hunch is some sort of debt crisis collides with SW1 before the next election. The zero interest rate phase was unprecedented in centuries here so a broken regime unwinding it surely will be very bumpy. And political instability will interact with markets in unpredictable ways.

This has huge implications for the next government. Regime change amid another financial disaster will be harder and easier in different ways than regime change ‘to avoid disasters’.

Only real regime change can get us out of this nightmare and even a great regime getting us out of the nightmare will be very painful and divisive.

(I was told by an actual expert that deep in the bowels of US official thinking there are discussions about new gold backed bonds. For another time…)

White pill. The British constitution is more flexible than any other in the civilised world. It means that one serious PM with a majority can change things faster than anywhere else. (E.g machinery of government changes that elsewhere require legislation here can be done without laws.) The intense centralisation over decades has been largely very bad. But the combination of system dysfunction, intense centralisation and the old constitution means a Live Player could do regime change easier, faster and deeper than is possible in America or anywhere else in NATO. (And the technology changes also enable this rapid shift.)

Three more years of pathological government could easily include a financial crisis and energy blackouts but it also might generate a once-in-50/80 year regime change. This is what I’m working on. I’m working on a) the Actual Plan for if you take over No10 — what do you do in the first hour, day, week, quarter to set things on a profoundly different path? And on b) a market research project similar to the project I did in 2018/Q1-2019 to figure out public opinion: what do they want/fear, what sort of thing do they want to see replace the old parties, what numbers suggest what about possible new electoral strategies etc. Another spasm is coming between October-summer 2026. A project needs to have a clear idea of objectively necessary things for the country and how this fits with a political strategy, communications strategy etc.

Also I’m doing some experiments with the use of LLMs to do political research. Please leave links below to great documents on the main problems facing the country and/or the best way forward which you want the AI to analyse. If you’re not a subscriber, post links below the X link to this blog — the AI will find them there. Post: the area the document covers, the link to original document, 25 words or less on why the AI should read it. (If you know what you’re talking about, suggest system prompts.)

E.g:

• Energy

• Science & tech

• Planning, housing, infrastructure

• Procurement

• Deregulation

• Tax

• Welfare, pensions

• Judicial review reform

• MoD, security, intelligence, terrorism (including WMD)

• Crime, justice, courts, police

• Supply chains fragility

• Border control, immigration, asylum

• Homeschool networks

• Whats wrong with universities

• Things government should stop which would save money

• Monetary policy/history (dear XXX, you know who you are, I forgot to ask you the other day, what do you think about Scott Sumner and NGDP targeting?!)

• How to change Whitehall, No10-CO-HMT etc

• What new capabilities should be built (e.g equivalents of RV Jones or Bletchley for now)

• What are the most important things to consider as priorities for the context, e.g the US-PRC chip-model-robot arms race

In particular I’m looking for — what are the changes with very high leverage where if you do it early then a healthy ecosystem will evolve without need for much further government action? E.g certain planning changes. Certain changes will allow companies to build things and markets to operate without government efforts. (I think these ideas mostly exist as many have worked on it and it is not a complex area needing lots of new thinking, unlike, say, biowarfare). E.g small tweaks to regulations on homeschooling and the Academies legislation could have dramatic effects. Perhaps the most important single thing for restoring a healthy civilisation is a mix of a) relearning how great education worked many decades ago before the state vandalised it and b) building new institutions to enable families to explore it.

A 1910 summary of a course for British teenagers in their last two years of school: this is far beyond degree courses now, classics now does not even demand knowing the original languages — the state destroyed, deliberately and through ignorant vandalism, this tradition

I continue to help a search for someone to do video who understands how to use the new models. If you are this person or have an idea of who it is, get in touch. You will find their project interesting and you will work with people who understand the technological frontier.

Sign up to the LFG campaign here.

A few interesting things

Bio-horror. It remains fascinating and horrifying that our regime and the broader ‘elite’ discussion has been unable to maintain focus on how to deal with the risks of natural and engineered pandemics even after western regimes’ largely useless performance on covid.

It’s one of those ‘it’s so big it’s invisible to Insiders’ things — like the the scope for vast improvements, dwarfing the economic angles of Brexit, in our £300 billion UK procurement budget which remains absent from Insider discussion while they lead the news with fake OBR forecasts over a billion quid.

I recommend this Dwarkesh interview with George Church, responsible for many of the most interesting developments in synthetic biology. He has warned repeatedly about the risks of engineered viruses and even more nightmarish possibilities such as ‘mirror life’ with the potential to destroy all life on earth.

Two trends are accelerating: 1) the tools for biological engineering are democratising, b) the AI models will increasingly help the good and evil possibilities. I wrote about this in my 2013 essay. It was central to motivation for doing Brexit. Covid happened. But still the old regime won’t prioritise it.

Special Forces lawfare/ructions. Here is a long interview with a recent SAS guy. It’s all interesting but click to 4:54:46 for the last section discussing an operation in 2022 and the subsequent lawfare nightmare he endured. I’ve posted on this a few times recently. I checked with people in Hereford and they tell me the guy is genuine and the story is legit.

Bear in mind that the Director of Special Forces (NB. this is *not* the commanding officer of SAS, it’s a different role) he refers to here is now First Sea Lord. This is a very, very complex and contentious subject that should have been handled years ago by senior military. Because of the dysfunction of the MoD, the lawfare from the Cabinet Office, the desire to appease Sinn Fein/IRA from many senior officials, and a lack of moral courage among some of the army’s senior leadership, it has festered and has become an operational issue of fundamental importance. Special Forces soldiers now discuss the prospects of lawfare against them when they are asked to conduct critical missions. Their commanding officers cannot give them assurances because the open-ended nature of the ECHR/HRA means it’s inherently legally impossible to give any assurances about what a judge may decide in the future. This is extremely toxic.

Also see this a few days ago: senior officers are now writing joint letters to their leadership demanding action, including former commanding officers of SF units and the serving(!!) director of Special Forces.

Former Commanding Officer of SAS, Richard Williams:

The whole country should reflect on the contents of this important letter by the combined Special Forces Associations and the total lack of official response extremely seriously. It outlines clearly a critical crisis of trust in the military and political chain of command by those special forces engaged today in the most dangerous and sensitive of national security operations. I remain utterly dumbfounded by the lack of overt support shown by the current or past leadership of the MoD for these brave and skilled British soldiers. The consistent, sweaty-palmed silence by those appointed to lead and resource our forces cannot be justified in any way and smacks of moral cowardice.

It’s unprecedented for senior people from SF units to attack senior leadership like this and shows the scale of the betrayal.

Follow this substack for updates on the issue and support the SAS and SBS, our last line of defence. If you know who the specific officials are driving lawfare in the CO, please let me know, the CO has their lists, I’m starting a list too.

Interview with Andreessen & Horowitz on the history of VC and founding a16z. Interview with Andreessen on US debates on the future economy, the history of tariffs, PRC and Hamilton’s system etc.

An excellent speech which is a rare thing these days — a speech in the Commons that influenced government, by Katie Lam MP on the gangs (warning: graphic).

And another excellent speech from Danny Kruger MP for the romantics among you especially.

Jensen Huang on Huawei’s extraordinary culture/success. The median deep state official in DC or London has instincts on Chinese tech that are waaaaaaay off. This is another of those so-big-it’s-invisible-for-decades things. My friend Steve Hsu has been — on this as on so many things — decades ahead of the game. Follow his podcast Manifold to be ahead of MI6 on such issues. Recent interview here.

• The rate of production of young scientists and engineers is almost ten times as large as in the US.

• The total pool of Chinese college graduates with AI training is comparable to the number produced by the whole of the rest of the world.

• Spending on R&D in public and in private in the US and China is now similar, at $1 trillion PPP (Purchasing Power Parity) in each country. The cost to hire an engineer in China is less than in the US, but recently even the cost of laboratory equipment and infrastructure is lower, since it can be sourced domestically rather than imported. Because R&D spending is growing more quickly in China, we can project that it could be 50 percent larger than in the US by 2030.

• China has already surpassed all western countries in the number of robots per human worker in its factories.

• [In recent India-PAK conflict] Most western analysts believe that Chinese J-10C fighter jets and PL-15 missiles performed well – shooting down several Indian fighters, including at least one advanced French-made Rafale jet. Importantly, this was the first large-scale case of entirely Beyond Visual Range aerial combat, with more than 100 planes: the pilots never saw each other. Victory was determined by sensor fusion – the ability of ground radar and radar systems on missiles, fighters and planes to communicate with each other in real time. It is believed that the J-10Cs operated in passive mode (radars off, making them hard to detect) while receiving targeting information from ground radar.

• The PL-15, which is one of the most sophisticated and longest-range missiles in use, received targeting information from a network of sensors, only using its own advanced radar system in the final moments before impact. The Indian fighters may not have detected the PL-15 missiles until it was too late to react.

• Many analysts believe this brief conflict reveals that China has the key capabilities required to dominate future air combat: sensor fusion, edge intelligence (in the missiles and eventually drones themselves), and long-range strike capability.

• Westerners tend to have an outdated mental model of Chinese military technology – that it is mostly borrowed from the Soviets or stolen from the West. But close observers, including Vladimir Putin, have noted that Chinese military R&D has now surpassed both Russian and western capabilities in key areas.

• The J-10C is not even a top-of-the-line Chinese fighter jet. In fact, it is mainly produced for export now that the more advanced fifth-generation J-20 has reached the mass-production stage. China is already testing sixth-generation fighters, which has shocked American observers. Even the PL-15 missiles used by the Pakistanis were reportedly the less effective, export version.

• In PPP dollars the Chinese economy is significantly larger than the US economy: 33 trillion vs 25 trillion last year. And remember, China’s total electricity production is almost twice as large that of the US.

• Its military ship-building capability is more than 200 times larger than that of the US.

• Just as the PL-15 allowed Pakistan to outrange the Indian air force, the Chinese have developed weapons that allow long-range strikes covering the Pacific. They mass produce ballistic and hypersonic missiles capable of hitting US aircraft carriers and bases as far away as Guam. A network of satellites, over-the-horizon radars, drones and missiles allows the People’s Liberation Army to monitor and strike all surface ships in the Western Pacific.

• Despite the relatively unsophisticated nature of Houthi weapons – missiles and drones supplied by Iran – the US has struggled to secure maritime routes there. Commercial shipping is repeatedly disrupted. To counter these threats, American carrier groups have expended billions on missile interceptors and incurred massive operational costs. Reports even indicate that Houthi surface-to-air missiles came perilously close to downing advanced US aircraft, including F-16 and F-35 stealth fighters. These incidents underscore a critical vulnerability: even rudimentary systems, when deployed asymmetrically, can overwhelm technologically superior forces.

• We must all abandon the idea that China is just a copycat nation. The PRC no longer imitates but innovates, and as its military-industrial complex matures, the Western Pacific’s future hinges not on past hegemony, but on who adapts fastest to this new era.

Patrick Collison interview: programming languages, AI, and Stripe's biggest engineering decisions.

Blog on defence review by actual expert, Keith Dear. I agree there is interesting honesty in the document. But it doesn’t do the last hard part: specific things to close, hard choices, budgets, new procurement etc.

Next week, a long blog on the Cabinet Office and questions for those thinking about how to reshape No10 when this government collapses. I will finish notes on Strauss’s Thucydides essay and post shortly. In August I’ll read try to read The Republic and Strauss’s essay on it.

By July next year at the latest I think that either a) Labour and Tories will be obviously knackered and Reform refuses to build therefore there will be strong desire for something new or b) the Tories are engaged in a last gasp attempt at closing themselves and reopening as something new: new name, old characters expelled, new recruitment drive etc. It’s possible that the Tories are so far gone another change just collapses the old thing and no last attempt is possible, or any attempt collapses fast — they already crossed the event horizon but we haven’t yet realised it.

For sure: voters don’t want either of the old parties but they also don’t want Reform populated by the likes of Jake Berry, which is worse than useless. Farage is not building what he should because it’s outside his comfort zone and he’s now in the lead — he might change his mind and try but right now he isn’t, even though he sort of knows he should, and probably only will if external circumstances change. So the core questions remain as I sketched in February. One way or another, within a year someone will be trying to do a version of the Startup Party — Farage goes for it, a new Tory goes for it, or neither of them do so a new force does —and you can see all over London different forces/entities are converging on the questions sketched in this blog over the past few years. (The Corbyn effort is another sign of elite fragmentation and an attempt to provide ‘something new’.)

There are some signs of hope. Particularly: the calibre of people now thinking about a new and very different regime is higher by far than at any time since at least the late 1970s, a flip side of the scale of disaster the old regime has led us to. Elite fragmentation means that many elites are shifting to regime change very fast. So the conditions are improving fast for: a section of elites defects from supporting the old regime and joins with the demos in actively working for a new regime.

Further Reading

The ~50 Year Cycle of Regime Change: why the news seems increasingly mad (5/24)

Why Rick Rubin is right that ‘the news is fake wrestling is real’: the Pathological Simulacrum, the Cycle of Narrative Whiplash (11/24)

Why did Trump win? (11/24)

On Whitehall and Starmer, why he’s failing and will keep failing (2/25)

Delusions of NPCs including Oxbridge professors on immigration etc (10/24)

Insider attention and why No10 can’t get things done (2/25)

Why the Kemi project is a farce (2/25)

What Farage could do to finish the Tories and win the next election (and why it’s psychologically very hard for him to do it) (2/25)

Personality types, coordination problems, and why changing Whitehall is so hard and so misunderstood (2/25)

Series on People, Ideas, Machines

XII: Theories of regime change and civil war

XI: Leo Strauss, modernity and regime change — and an update 20/5: Notes on: On Classical Political Philosophy

X: Freedom's Forge — the story of American business and industrial production in World War II. Incredible contrast between the America of WWII and now viz building things. Highly relevant to current debates on tariffs, supply chains, AI/drones/robotics etc.

IX: IX: A) Britain's 'Organization of Victory' under Pit 1793-1815 and B) Metternich & European Community

VIII: CIA counterintelligence chief James Angleton, 'a wilderness of mirrors', covert operations, assassinations, moles & double agents, disinformation. A blog on Angleton and the broader history of the CIA and US elites’ attempts to understand the political world. The long-term failures of the CIA on critical geopolitical issues, their security failures and penetration by the KGB, the fundamental problems of building effective intelligence agencies and integrating their work in an overall institutional structure — these deep problems are all extremely relevant to today as Washington increasingly can align on just one thing, hostility to China. Given this history we should not bet on the Washington deep state outperforming the PRC on intelligence and in many areas it seems the PRC has learned lessons from America’s victory over the Soviet Union better than Washington learned them.

VII: On RV Jones, Scientific Intelligence in World War II, how Whitehall vandalised the successful system immediately after the war. Many issues explored in the RVJ blog are relevant to those subscribers interested in the future of AI, ‘safety’, and security.

VI: Alanbrooke diaries, incredibly relevant to today’s problems and what military ‘strategy’ really is.

V: Colin Gray and defence planning

IV: Notes on The Kill Chain — US procurement horror, new technology, planning for war with PRC.

III: More on fallacies of nuclear thinking / strategy / deterrence. If you read this and the earlier one you’ll see that almost everything the media says about Putin and nuclear threats is wrong / misguided and, worse, so is much of what is said by international relations/historians/military academics.

II: Thinking about nuclear weapons

I: On innovation in militaries, when does it succeed/fail — e.g why US got ahead on aircraft carriers, RAF defence in 1930s.

Prediction: 1) lessons from UKR will overwhelmingly support the arguments of those who in 2020 argued for radical MoD changes (including taking money from old tank projects that everybody privately admitted were a multi-billion pound disaster) and 2) the correct criticism of the review and connected documents will be seen as a) they did not go nearly far enough, b) the collapse of No10 follow through on defence reform in 2021 was — like the collapse of 2020 plans for planning reform, tax cuts, deregulation, Project Speed, intense focus on R&D and skills etc — a disaster for the country (and a political disaster for the Tory Party). [Me, 3/2022]

On rationalism and politics (2022).

And some other related stuff pre-No10…

On high performance government, ‘cognitive technologies’, ‘Seeing Rooms’, UK crisis management (2019)

On AI, nuclear issues, Project Maven (2019)

On the ARPA/PARC ‘Dream Machine’, science funding, high performance, and UK national strategy (2018)

On ‘systems engineering’ and ‘systems management’ — ideas from the Apollo programme for a ‘systems politics’ (2017)

On China vs US, the ‘Thucydides trap’ book (2017)

And obviously I think that if you’re thinking through AI and geopolitics you should study, or at least skim for a weekend, my chronology of Bismarck. A month of study and you’ll be in the top 0.01% of people who really understand high performance politics, an incredible shortcut! If you take this path, you will have a great advantage over your competitors.

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I would rather discover one cause than be king of Persia.

Democritus

At such a time the life of the city was all in disorder, and human nature, which is always ready to transgress the laws, having now trampled them under foot, delighted to show that her passions were ungovernable, that she was stronger than justice, and the enemy of everything above her. If malignity had not exercised a fatal power, how could anyone have preferred revenge to piety and gain to innocence? But when men are retaliating upon others, they are reckless of the future and do not hesitate to annul those common laws of humanity to which every individual trusts for his own hope of deliverance should he ever be overtaken by calamity; they forget that in their own hour of need they will look for them in vain.

Thucydides, Book III, 82-84

​​Great crises constitute the weather that favours Prussia’s growth, provided that it is fearlessly, perhaps even ruthlessly, exploited by us… There is no exact science of politics just as there is none for political economy. Only professors are able to package the sum of the changing needs of cultural man into scientific laws… Politics is neither arithmetic nor mathematics. To be sure, one has to reckon with given and unknown factors, but there are no rules and formulas with which to sum up the results in advance.

Bismarck

[T]he democratisation of Europe is at the same time an involuntary arrangement for the breeding of tyrants.

Nieztsche

A single spark can start a prairie fire.

Mao, paraphrasing an ancient text

It is not always when things are going from bad to worse that revolutions break out. On the contrary, it oftener happens that when a people which has put up with an oppressive rule over a long period without protest suddenly finds the government relaxing its pressure, it takes up arms against it. Thus the social order overthrown by a revolution is almost always better than the one immediately preceding it, and experience teaches us that, generally speaking, the most perilous moment for a bad government is one when it seeks to mend its ways.

Only consummate statecraft can enable a King to save his throne when after a long spell of oppressive rule he sets to improving the lot of his subjects. Patiently endured so long as it seemed beyond redress, a grievance comes to appear intolerable once the possibility of removing it crosses men’s minds. For the mere fact that certain abuses have been remedied draws attention to the others and they now appear more galling; people may suffer less, but their sensibility is exacerbated.’

In all periods, even in the Middle Ages, there have been leaders of revolt who, with a view to effecting certain changes in the established order, appealed to the universal laws governing all communities, and championed the natural rights of man against the State. But none of these ventures was successful; the firebrand which set all Europe ablaze in the eighteenth century had been easily extinguished in the fifteenth. For doctrines of this kind to lead to revolutions, certain changes must already have taken place in the living conditions, customs, and mores of a nation and prepared men’s minds for the reception of new ideas…

[T]hough it took the world by surprise, it [1789] was the inevitable outcome of a long period of gestation, the abrupt and violent conclusion of a process in which six generations played an intermittent part.

Tocqueville

All stable processes we shall predict. All unstable processes we shall control.

Von Neumann

Comprehensively deepening reform is a complex systems engineering problem.

President Xi, 2013.

Want of foresight, unwillingness to act when action would be simple and effective, lack of clear thinking, confusion of counsel until the emergency comes, until self-preservation strikes its jarring gong — these are the features which constitute the endless repetition of history.

Churchill

Inside the intelligence services, special forces (themselves under attack from the Cabinet Office and NI Office as they operate as our last line of defence, see below), bits of Whitehall, and those most connected to discussions away from Westminster, there is growing, though still tiny, discussion of Britain’s slide into chaos and the potential for serious violence including what would look like racial/ethnic mob/gang violence, though the regime would obviously try to describe it differently. Part of the reason for the incoherent forcefulness against the white rioters last year from a regime that is in deep-surrender-mode against pro-Holocaust marchers, rape gangs and criminals generally, is a mix of a) aesthetic revulsion in SW1 at the Brexit-voting white north and b) incoherent Whitehall terror of widespread white-English mobs turning political and attracting talented political entrepreneurs. They’re already privately quaking about the growth of Muslim networks. The last thing they want to see is emerging networks that see themselves as both political and driven to consider violence. Parts of the system increasingly fear this could spin out of control into their worst nightmare. In No10 meetings with the Met on riots, I saw for myself a) the weird psychological zone of how much order rests not on actual physical forces but perceptions among a few elites about such forces that can very quickly change, and b) how scared the senior police are at the prospect of crucial psychological spells being broken. We can see on the streets that various forces have already realised the regime will not stop them. What if this spreads? Whitehall’s pathology has pushed it to the brink of this psychological barrier and many of them know it.

Aspects of the situation are tragi-comic. E.g if you talk to senior people in places like UAE, they tell you that bigshots in that region now tell each other — don’t send your kids to be educated in Britain, they’ll come back radical Islamist nutjobs! Our regime has spent thirty years a) destroying border control and sane immigration (including the Home Office’s jihad against the highest skilled, whom they truly loathe discussing and try to repel with stupid fees etc) and b) actively prioritising people from the most barbaric places on earth (hence immigration from the tribal areas most responsible for the grooming/rape gangs keeps rising) and c) funding the spread of those barbaric ideas and defending the organisations spreading them with human rights laws designed to stop the return of totalitarianism in Europe. In parallel, they’ve started propaganda operations with the old media to spread the meme that our ‘real danger’ is the ‘far right’ (code for ‘white people’). As Tories and Labour have continued their deranged trajectory, they have provoked exactly the reactions they most feared including the spreading meme that our regime itself has become our enemy and the growing politicisation of white English nationalism.

These deep state discussions about the growing prospect of violence, like the focus group discussions about ‘civil war’, have seeped through to few MPs or hacks. And the evolution of the Cabinet Office in recent years has excluded ministers, spads and the PM from almost any visibility inside the NSS, the National Security Secretariat of the CO, which has acquired power from the rest of the security/intelligence system and runs a failing empire within a failing empire. When I said in 2020 that, among the general changes to the dysfunctional No10/CO system, the oversight of NSS must change so it became visible and legible again to the PM’s office so we could participate in debates like — what are the actual priorities of the intelligence services vis Putin and Xi — some senior officials tried to pretend that zero political scrutiny of NSS was somehow a constitutional principle. After I left, this system became even more closed and dysfunctional, hence the total lack of true strategic thinking connecting ends-ways-means over Ukraine and all things defence procurement becoming more and more Kafka-esque as the MoD shipped stuff to Ukraine. I repeat: the lack of legibility of the NSS is without historical precedent in the UK for centuries and is related to broader issues of Whitehall’s dysfunction, the disgraceful shambles of the MoD etc.

SW1’s OODA loop has operated for years as a massive denial-of-service-attack on its own perceptions of reality — constant cycles of ephemeral emotional hysteria and Narrative Whiplash while No10 has no capability to execute priorities. A great recent example: Professor Ansell saying that the Zelensky Oval Office interview meant that Farage’s prospects had ‘peaked’ (widely Bluesky’d approvingly!) — an emotional spasm entirely in tune with SW1’s NPC network reflecting OODA-as-DOS-attack. This has, as I’ve argued for years, made it more and more vulnerable to history’s remorseless pattern: slow rot, elite blindness, fast crisis, sudden collapse.

The old parties lost their last chance to fix things in a sort-of normal way when the Trolley and his girlfriend told everyone in 2021 they were going ‘back to normal politics’. SW1 cheered including the Tory MPs who got culled en masse in 2024. Sunak doubled down on optimising for *pats on the head from Permanent Secretaries and lawyers*. After Starmer won, SW1’s NPCs tweeted to each other how they now had ‘serious grownups’ and we’d return to ‘normal government’.

But this was just another cycle of delusional SW1 Narrative Whiplash. The Starmer project blew up on contact with the reality of Whitehall. Now both parties are led by Dead Players. Both old parties are structurally knackered. And the NPCs tweeting ‘hurrah for the grownups, Sue Gray is the Jedi we need’ a few months ago are now Bluesky-ing ‘disgusting rhetoric from Starmer’.

Starmer is speed-running Sunak’s demented combination of a) massively raising the salience of immigration/boats with b) a set of policies that everyone who understands the details knows cannot possibly do what he’s promising.

Why is he doing it? Because, like Sunak, he’s caught between a) political advice that the country is enraged over immigration/boats and wants action, b) the adamantine priority of the dominant faction in Whitehall — i.e the force that actually orients 99% of policy — is maintaining 1) the HRA/ECHR-judicial review system and 2) the cross-party HMT/OBR/university-endorsed immigration/asylum Ponzi. Being a Dead Player optimised to ‘defend the institutions’ at all costs however pathological, Starmer has, aping Sunak, synthesised the political advice of McSweeney and the priority of the officials/lawyers actually running No10/70WH and generated his own version of Sunak’s demented combination.

If you’re not in the meetings, you can’t accurately estimate the relative levels of dishonesty and self-delusion involved. Obviously there are officials and lawyers in the meetings who understand reality and are happy to feed ministerial delusions, as they did with Cameron, May, Boris and Sunak. And there are odd unusual officials who could bluntly tell the truth: PM, so there is no confusion, what you’re announcing cannot possible do what you claim. I know Sunak was super-delusional, not lying, only because I spoke to him in person twice. And of course many politicians develop weird super-position personalities, where they sort-of-know and sort-of-lie to themselves such than an impartial observer can rarely conclude either ‘they’re lying’ or ‘they’re deluded’: it’s a bit of both. It’s how many cope when promoted to jobs far beyond them. And it’s very poorly understood among business elites who always overrate the rationality of political players and underrate the prevalence of this super-position-personality phenomenon which means widespread avoidance of the real issues in meeting after meeting to an extent the median business elite has little experience of outside companies heading for bankruptcy. I suspect there’s more conscious dishonesty with Starmer than Sunak but the result is sure to be the same: political disaster.

I repeat what I predicted about Sunak when in 2023 the old media regurgitated endless nonsense on how No10 plans could stop the boats without dealing with the HRA and judicial review because [hand wave]. The BBC, ITV and SKY have repeated the process with Starmer’s announcements: no explanation, ever, of how and why the HRA works. Just as when Jenrick correctly said that the HRA means that UK SF is droning people instead of arresting them — which I revealed on this blog in 2021 but everyone ignored — the old media span the story as ‘Jenrick accuses SF of murder!’ When the actual story was that the lawyers were instructing it was LAWFUL, the opposite of murder, to drone but NOT lawful to arrest and this was the actual mad story — but the HRA angle had to be distorted then buried. (And NB. this droning-not-arrest driven by ECHR+CO lawyers+Kafka continues.) And the old media did not explain after Rudakubana attacked the prison guards that Britain does not keep even convicted terrorist killers about to be released from jail who are believed to be plotting a new attack under surveillance because legal advice is it is unlawful under the HRA — so a fortiori, Rudakubana can’t be kept under proper surveillance. And there are many hundreds of similar or worse absurdities. Terrorists literally being hunted from cave to cave in Afghanistan by JSOC (US classified special forces) have used satellite phones to procure London barristers to bring legal cases against the MoD for ‘human rights’ abuses and won secret payouts of millions while on the run. Such grotesque cases are classified by the Cabinet Office to stop MPs knowing what the ECHR actually does and close to zero MPs are informed of such lunatic dynamics. (Hence my advice to Sunak to declassify the ECHR/HRA effects on security, take them out of red STRAP files and publish them.)

I went through the boats in great detail in 2020 with both a) the military and b) the best lawyers inside and outside government and the conclusion was absolutely clear: operationally stopping the boats is very simple and could be done in days but CO legal advice endorsed by external experts is that the PM cannot do this simple thing lawfully because the courts will stop him using the HRA/ECHR. (In simple terms if the PM tried to order the Navy to stop the boats in a serious way, the courts would state that the PM’s orders are unlawful under the HRA therefore the Navy cannot execute them and the Cabinet Secretary would tell the PM that he cannot insist on his orders being obeyed as, in extremis, both the PM and officers could be arrested for contempt. The core operational and political problem of ‘stop the boats’ could be solved by simple primary legislation explicitly whacking the HRA though the broader issue of the Strasbourg court and other international law angles requires deeper action. I won’t go into the details of this here.)

You therefore must choose between (A) our priority is the HRA/ECHR over stopping boats, or (B) our priority is stopping the boats therefore the HRA regime (plus some other legal barriers) must be changed in primary legislation. Sunak chose A. So has Starmer. But both have spun the media that the choice does not exist and are pretending they’ve prioritised immigration. And if you rely on BBC or ITV or SKY you will not realise the choice exists because the broadcasters reflect the priority of officials: keep the voters in the dark on the subject.

I told Sunak he was deluding himself and his plans could not work. He said he understood ‘the complex details’ better than me or anybody else. His argument shifted over time to ever more baroque contortions ending in the inevitable humiliating failure — baffling given his intellect unless you grasp the problem of the super-position personality politicians develop to avoid facing reality, and the rarity of people around PMs who will tell them bluntly ‘you are deluding yourself PM’. Starmer will fail just the same whether he’s lying or deluded or in a superposition.

And ironically this farce is generating not a ‘return to normal government’ but the resurrection of SW1’s hate figure, Farage, to champion what voters said in 2016, 2019 and 2024: we hate Westminster and we demand huge changes. Farage hasn’t built a campaign machine and professional team on any scale. Reform remains essentially Farage + iPhone. But he plays a consistent main character in the show while the rest of the cast are writing their roles out of the script. McLuhan said that if it’s on TV it’s a TV show — and we can modify this to if it’s on social media it’s a social media show. The old parties do not understand social media shows. (As I wrote a few months ago, Marshal McLuhan warned that the emergence of new media always generates dynamics that are effectively invisible to almost everybody but a few artists. The old political-media elites now publicly perform Narrative Whiplash via new electronic media but are almost totally unaware of their performance — they memory-hole everything including their own performances. Cf. discussion of this here.)

And on the politics, I repeat again a central argument SW1 en masse cannot absorb but which is crucial to grapple with when considering what comes after the collapse of Labour and Tories…

The Vote Leave strategy for turning the Tories into an essentially new party with a new electoral coalition was much, much more logical and easier to maintain given the big historical forces in play than it is for Labour to cope with the same cultural and electoral dynamics such as educational polarisation and the rapidly changing media.

Starmer has a truly nightmare situation because the issue of what to do about immigration is no longer susceptible to post-1991 SW1 politics-as-usual. Rich graduate London, crucial for what Labour has become, has radicalised itself (like the Democrats) such that it is on principle hostile to border control and treats arguments made by Bill Clinton and Obama as ‘racism’. But keeping them happy enrages most of the country outside London. And Starmer has done a Sunak and enraged everybody! Rich graduate London now rages at Starmer for his ‘appalling rhetoric’ and not-London hates him because it knows his rhetoric is just more lies and delusions and nonsense we’ve seen from SW1 for 25 years and everybody can see the boats keep coming on video every day proving we’re right. He’s said the trajectory has caused ‘incalculable damage’ yet he self-evidently does not even believe his own words given his trivial proposals — a perfect Sunak recipe for infuriating everyone and destroying your electoral coalition. Starmer’s rhetoric, like Sunak’s, could only work politically if you deliver and he’s already made clear delivery is not his priority, the ECHR is.

It was much easier and more logical for Sunak to prioritise voters, ditch the ECHR and actually stop the boats while Starmer sided with Jolyon and the human rights lawyers. Yes they’d have lost Osborne, Grieve et al. Good, more winning! It is much, much harder for Starmer to do the same because most of his MPs and activists and a good chunk of his voters in cities are with Grieve and Jolyon.

The VL strategy was easier to execute given the actual facts of electoral dynamics. But immediately after the 2019 election SW1 ran its denial-of-service-attack against itself and convinced itself that, like in 2016, our victory was a fluke because of ‘extreme circumstances’, ‘Corbyn’ etc and it would be ‘madness’ for the Tories to try to maintain that ‘incoherent’ electoral coalition because it would ‘pull the Party towards extremism’ (i.e doing what most voters want). They then cheered Boris-Truss-Sunak as they machine-gunned the entire coalition with the biggest wave of uncontrolled immigration ever, tax rises, vandalism on a vast scale, then declared ‘see the 2019 coalition could never have lasted’!

Why? Because the last thing any part of SW1 (outside some of the deep state) wanted to see was the Tories transformed into a different party that was super-tough on crime and immigration, super-focused on productivity and science-technology-startups-investment, super-disruptive of Whitehall’s core institutions, and supported by a national coalition uniting parts of the working classes and middle classes. Super-popular outside SW1 but a nightmare for SW1.

So both parties cheered by the NPCs have doubled down on a trajectory that is deeply unpopular to almost every constituency — the ‘mainstream’ has alienated everybody except Whitehall and some other London/university characters desperate to prop up the rotten edifice. They’ve revived their bogeyman, Farage. Sunak and Starmer are the last of the old party leaders who’ve clung to the dead scripts of the hollow SW1 simulacrum — hollow ‘leaders’ optimising for *pats on the head from Permanent Secretaries and government lawyers* even when it leads to their own implosion.

While the new government imploded, the Tory Party could not benefit. It has disintegrated in all areas. Its membership has either defected to Reform or retreated in disgust from politics, its donors have gone on strike, its local networks have collapsed, it cannot generate good ideas, it cannot campaign and communicate (its communication is so self-sabotaging they disintegrate faster when they try harder), and networks on which it depended for people and ideas have either themselves died or defected. In the recent elections, councillors got Thanos’d and if Kemi is still there in a year most of what’s left in England, Wales and Scotland will get Thanos’d. Now the party is just a hundred English MPs and a few thousand councillors rattling around in a hollow historical institution. Next May it won’t even be that.

The questions remain:

• What if anything does Farage build and who does he recruit in the next few months? Does he want to find people to be Chancellor etc who are better than the old parties? Can he exploit the surging energy for new politics among the young, can he hoist a sail and let that force blow him along to greater victories over his enemies? Or does he blow the chance and let that energy be captured by others?

• Do the Tories bin Kemi this year and try to save themselves or leave her and watch the rest of their party get Thanos’d next May? And if a new team takes over this year can they even reverse the slide — or has the Party already crossed the invisible event horizon into oblivion?

• What do Labour MPs do when they realise their PM has done a Sunak and machine-gunned both London-Remain and non-London-Leave?

• How do parts of Whitehall prepare to sabotage Farage, copying their friends in Europe who routinely sabotage political threats to the old system?

• How do other parts of Whitehall, particularly in security and intelligence, respond to the disintegration?

• How do voters respond to the meltdown of the old system and creeping chaos?

• What new crises accelerate collapse? I said in 2021 — prepare for the grid to collapse and infrastructure everyone relies on to stop working. These trends will continue. The immigration Ponzi is blowing up. The Ponzi scheme of the modern financial system could blow any time.

• How fast do violence and no-go areas spread? Do we start seeing networks emerge combining explicit anti-Islam, explicit violence/sabotage, and competent organisation, as the deep state fears?

I think there will be another SW1 spasm and Kemi will get the heave-ho this year. After this, the social media show changes to either a) the Tories are sunk and closing down and sorting into Labour/LibDem or Reform, or b) ohmygoodness there’s a last gasp at revival, how will Starmer and Farage, neither of which have political machines worth the name, cope?

I explored these dynamics in detail a few months ago HERE.

I explored the general phenomenon of OODA-as-DOS-attack and Narrative Whiplash here.

This blog will look at three books on regime change.

Peter Turchin’s End Times.

Barbara Walter’s How Civil Wars Start.

Joseph Tainter’s The Collapse of Complex Societies.

They explore fundamental questions of history and politics:

• What are the patterns in history versus ‘just one damn thing after another’? What patterns can we see in repeated episodes of disintegration and regime change?

• How to ruling elites maintain power?

• Why does their grip on power sometimes collapse?

• What is the relationship between material forces (e.g spreading urbanisation), ideas (e.g socialism), institutions (e.g the Cabinet Office, NATO), technologies (e.g railroads or drones), alliances (e.g the pre-1914 alliances) and individual choices (e.g an assassin)? When looking at regime change, what can we figure out about the balance between Tolstoy’s historical forces and individual decisions?

• Why do some revolts take off while others fizzle out?

• How reliable and useful are predictions? How much is inherently unknowable because crises are by definition chaotic and influenced by odd random people acting secretly, assassination etc?

• What strategies are there to avoid the bloodshed and horror that always accompany collapse?

• How to think about counterfactuals? (Cf. my blog on Bismarck.)

In my 2013 essay and 2014 blogs I explored the history, and possible application to government, of thinking about complex systems with nonlinear interdependencies and emergent properties — also see my blog on ‘systems management’ in ICBMs and Apollo and the need for a sort of ‘systems politics’ (the end of this paper summarises how Whitehall’s management is the opposite of what we know works best).

The subject of ‘complex systems’ emerged from the intersection of biology, economics, the birth of computer science post Gödel-Turing and other subjects after 1945. You can see it in Wiener’s Cybernetics and some of von Neumann’s post-war writing on computers, the brain and self-replicating automata. Out of this emerged things like agent-based models. The Nobel winner Murray Gell-Mann, namer of the quark, wrote a fascinating book about what he called complex adaptive systems I highly recommend, The Quark and the Jaguar. He also helped set up the Santa Fe Institute to develop inter-disciplinary ideas about complex systems. The biologist E.O.Wilson described in Consilience ‘the Ionian Enchantment’ — the belief in the unity of nature, the search for the principles that explain it, the unification of knowledge as the foundation for modern science. Wilson argues that the Ionian attachment provides an ‘Ariadne’s Thread’ of explanation from bio-chemistry to genetics to quantitative models of the brain to culture. (For further reading on the history of maths and computing that preceded the breakthroughs of Turing et al, cf. here. Also cf. Nobel winner Phil Anderson’s More is Different.)

At the same time as the subject emerged in the 1940s, Asimov gave it the most famous fictional treatment in the Foundation series in which mathematicians develop ‘psycho-history’ to predict — then intervene in — the rise and fall of regimes. These ideas have been fascinating to generations and now there are ways to build tools that in limited ways touch on Asimov’s ideas.

Twelve years after writing that essay I believe even more strongly that a sort of systems politics is necessary — a mix of new people, new ideas, new institutions and new training including ideas from the heyday of systems management developed in projects like Apollo.

Applying some of these ideas was central to our success in 2016 and 2019 and to how we started changing how No10 worked in 2020. But I must admit that I have totally failed to persuade Insiders of the need for systems thinking. Even worse, I think that if I polled Insiders, it would reveal that they have persuaded themselves that — to the extremely limited extent to which Insiders have any idea what systems thinking means — I oppose it, even though I’ve published a few hundred thousand words on the subject.

I increasingly feel as if I somehow contributed to making systems politics a sort of anti-meme among Insiders— ‘an idea with self-censoring properties, an idea which, by its intrinsic nature, discourages or prevents people from spreading it’ (cf. this interesting sci-fi story I was alerted to by Anthropic’s Jack Clark). I’m thinking about how to reverse this anti-meme property among Insiders. It won’t come from me writing or talking more since if I’ve helped anti-meme it, I cannot directly reverse it. Something else is needed. (See here for myths and reality on No10.)

Turchin is from this intellectual tradition of complex systems. He is trying to identify patterns in the cycle of integration and disintegration we see in regimes across time and space.

NB. I want to collect statements, speeches, memos etc reflecting elite blindness before the revolt/revolution comes, before 1789, 1848, 1914, 1917, 1933, 1989/91 etc — and examples of the rare person who did see it coming but was ignored.

E.g Frustratingly, in the excellent biography of Metternich I blogged on last year the author writes that one can trace Metternich’s thoughts almost day-by-day in early 1848 as revolution spread across Europe up to his own balcony, but he then skips over them and gives a short summary. I’d love to see the day-by-day account of how Europe’s statesman with the best developed intelligence network for political news, who had seen the historical forces building for years, tracked the spread of revolution up to the moment the crowds outside forced him to flee in disguise.

I am also going to build a dashboard to track data relevant to the spread of chaos and violence in the UK. If you know of relevant data sources please link in comments. E.g arrests at public gatherings has data back to 18th Century.

I’m giving a speech in Oxford on 11 June — What Is To Be Done? — tickets here… Assume some combination of Kemi and Starmer imploding and some new force emerging: how should it be oriented when it walks into No10?

Special Forces

Three weeks ago the BBC reflected the Cabinet Office campaign against the SAS by airing an attempted hit job. But the most interesting thing about it was the BBC showed video with the SAS squadron having a tally over 6 months of killing a dozen or so while arresting hundreds. The BBC portrayed this as evidence of psychopaths on the rampage. But the truth is, obviously, the opposite — they killed a tiny fraction and arrested the vast majority, the exact opposite of what you’d see if the most famous special forces on earth were actually on a killing spree. So the official Cabinet Office/BBC claim is our most highly trained soldiers were … actually incapable of killing more than a tiny fraction of unarmed often ‘sleeping’ civilians… And this nonsensical drivel was repeated by NPCs. Obviously, the BBC ran this as ‘news’ and the government did its usual bullshit ‘we can’t talk about the inquiry’ while its officials brief the BBC anonymously…

Also it was reported that the MoD is investigating serving soldiers for voicing support for the public campaign to stop lawfare against soldiers. Logical!

As I blogged a month or so ago, this issue is now very live among serving soldiers and is one of those invisible-to-SW1 tidal waves with potential to be a huge crisis — sudden and ‘unforeseen’ in SW1 but obvious long before if you were looking in the right place. This issue is bubbling out of control for Whitehall as serving soldiers start speaking out.

Read this excellent piece by Richard Williams, former commanding officer of SAS, on this subject. As he points out, the Regiment — past and present — are watching carefully who keeps quiet and who speaks out in their defence.

Please spend 60 seconds to click and sign this petition and help force the MPs to debate in Parliament the Cabinet Office’s lawfare against our own Special Forces. Support the SAS and SBS, our last line of defence... And follow this substack for updates on the issue. If you know who the specific officials are driving this in the CO, please let me know, the CO has their lists, I’m starting a list too…

Previous in this series:

XI: Leo Strauss, modernity and regime change — and an update 20/5: Notes on: On Classical Political Philosophy

X: Freedom's Forge — the story of American business and industrial production in World War II. Incredible contrast between the America of WWII and now viz building things. Highly relevant to current debates on tariffs, supply chains, AI/drones/robotics etc.

IX: IX: A) Britain's 'Organization of Victory' under Pit 1793-1815 and B) Metternich & European Community

VIII: CIA counterintelligence chief James Angleton, 'a wilderness of mirrors', covert operations, assassinations, moles & double agents, disinformation. A blog on Angleton and the broader history of the CIA and US elites’ attempts to understand the political world. The long-term failures of the CIA on critical geopolitical issues, their security failures and penetration by the KGB, the fundamental problems of building effective intelligence agencies and integrating their work in an overall institutional structure — these deep problems are all extremely relevant to today as Washington increasingly can align on just one thing, hostility to China. Given this history we should not bet on the Washington deep state outperforming the PRC on intelligence and in many areas it seems the PRC has learned lessons from America’s victory over the Soviet Union better than Washington learned them.

VII: On RV Jones, Scientific Intelligence in World War II, how Whitehall vandalised the successful system immediately after the war. Many issues explored in the RVJ blog are relevant to those subscribers interested in the future of AI, ‘safety’, and security.

VI: Alanbrooke diaries, incredibly relevant to today’s problems and what military ‘strategy’ really is.

V: Colin Gray and defence planning

IV: Notes on The Kill Chain — US procurement horror, new technology, planning for war with PRC.

III: More on fallacies of nuclear thinking / strategy / deterrence. If you read this and the earlier one you’ll see that almost everything the media says about Putin and nuclear threats is wrong / misguided and, worse, so is much of what is said by international relations/historians/military academics.

II: Thinking about nuclear weapons

I: On innovation in militaries, when does it succeed/fail — e.g why US got ahead on aircraft carriers, RAF defence in 1930s.

Prediction: 1) lessons from UKR will overwhelmingly support the arguments of those who in 2020 argued for radical MoD changes (including taking money from old tank projects that everybody privately admitted were a multi-billion pound disaster) and 2) the correct criticism of the review and connected documents will be seen as a) they did not go nearly far enough, b) the collapse of No10 follow through on defence reform in 2021 was — like the collapse of 2020 plans for planning reform, tax cuts, deregulation, Project Speed, intense focus on R&D and skills etc — a disaster for the country (and a political disaster for the Tory Party). [Me, 3/2022]

On rationalism and politics (2022).

And some other related stuff pre-No10…

On high performance government, ‘cognitive technologies’, ‘Seeing Rooms’, UK crisis management (2019)

On AI, nuclear issues, Project Maven (2019

On the ARPA/PARC ‘Dream Machine’, science funding, high performance, and UK national strategy (2018)

On ‘systems engineering’ and ‘systems management’ — ideas from the Apollo programme for a ‘systems politics’ (2017)

On China vs US, the ‘Thucydides trap’ book (2017)

And obviously I think that if you’re thinking through AI and geopolitics you should study, or at least skim for a weekend, my chronology of Bismarck. A month of study and you’ll be in the top 0.01% of people who really understand high performance politics, an incredible shortcut! If you take this path, you will have a great advantage over your competitors.

End Times

Turchin traces patterns of integration and disintegration, of stability and crisis, of elite cooperation and elite fragmentation, of state formation and collapse over the past thousand years. All societies go through cycles of peace and harmony periodically hit by internal conflict, chaos, crackup, and re-formation in a new regime.

I summarise it as: slow rot, elite blindness, fast crisis, sudden collapse, regime change.

He coins the term cliodynamics for his approach — from Clio, the Greek muse of history. He uses data and models of complex systems to understand what happened and why. (Technical details in an appendix.)

He applies what he sees to our time and predicts that we are hitting another crisis point including severe violence in the 2020s.

Elites are ‘those who have more social power — the ability to influence other people’. Turchin distinguishes different sorts of elite power:

• political

• hard power (e.g military, intelligence agency)

• financial

• administrative (e.g an official running a large bureaucracy)

• ideological/ideas (academics, media etc)

Powerful individuals in the US security forces are rare. Hoover was a powerful force at the FBI. Generally politicians have kept such people under control since the Civil War.

He identifies five fundamental factors in regime change (he doesn’t use this term much but I will to keep things consistent across this, Strauss etc):

A. Popular immiseration. E.g the stagnation of median real wages recently.

B. Elite overproduction and competition. This happens ‘when the demand for power positions by elite aspirants exceeds their supply’. E.g in America in the 1840s-50s and recently.

C. Financial stress, out of control debts etc.

D. Geopolitical disruption. This is the least consistent — it can be important but not necessary. Toynbee — great empires die by suicide, not murder.

E. Political entrepreneurs exploiting the dynamics, e.g Hong (Taiping), Lincoln, Trump.

All of these are present today.

The pattern of revolutions is:

• Pre-crisis: the regime struggles to maintain control in the face of elite fragmentation and popular anger.

• Crisis: the regime loses legitimacy and new players strive for dominance.

• Post-crisis: the crisis is resolved, a group wins, a new regime forms.

No society in recorded history has an integrative phase lasting more than around 200 years. And collective violence tends to recur ‘with roughly fifty year periodicity’. The timing is related to generations. A generation experiencing bloody civil war has kids who are scarred by the experience. When the memories have gone, it’s more likely to recur. (Interesting that he says about 50 years based on various databases and my handwavy phrase in the blog on regime change was ‘about fifty years’.)

In European history between the Dark Ages and 1789, we can see these phases of integration and disintegration. Population growth 1100-1300, immiseration, elite overproduction, famine, Black Death, crisis, collapse. And these patterns recur with war between England and France adding to the elite competition and wars periodically killed off large numbers of elites, easing competition in the next generation. In England there are episodes such as the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 which frightened elites into lightening the burdens on peasants and the War of the Roses which exhausted elites and saw perhaps a fourfold reduction in their numbers.

• There’s the High Middle Ages followed by the Late Medieval Crisis.

• There’s the Renaissance followed by the General Crisis of the 17th Century.

• There’s the Enlightenment followed by the Age of Revolutions.

In Ancient Egypt and China since 221 BC there’s similar cycles.

A huge difference in Europe is obviously that after the 17th Century England managed to avoid further civil war and revolution while it plagued Europe in cycles. England still suffered tension/crisis in cycles but elites managed to adapt enough to avoid large scale violence. E.g in 1830 revolutions in Europe while in England Lord Grey negotiated the Reform Act and violence was limited.

Elite overproduction is deeply affected by monogamy/polygamy. Muslim countries have faster cycles of chaos because polygamy encourages faster elite overproduction.

Weather and plagues are often the trigger for crises and can synchronise crises across territory. E.g The Great Famine 1315-17 and solar minimum. The Black Death. Cholera in 19th C. Covid.

Contagion synchronises crises across territory. E.g disease hits the poorer harder which spreads elite overproduction. Ideas spread as contagion, e.g spread by telegraph in 1848, by the internet in the Arab Spring.

China and the Taiping Rebellion

200 years ago China’s GDP was the biggest in the world. After 1820 China experienced ‘the century of humiliation’. By 1870 GDP was less than half Europe’s.

There was a constant run of famines, rebellions, and defeats by foreigners.

The Taiping Rebellion (1850-64) was the bloodiest civil war in recorded history:

The Qing dynasty ruling from 1614 was ruled by scholar-bureaucrats promoted in a system of examinations that extended (mostly) to the army. The exams encouraged study of Confucian classics — a common ethos.

Over 90% of the empire were peasants, roughly 9% were artisans, merchants, soldiers etc. And the tiny mandarin class ruled them.

From 1614-~1820 , China grew:

• Better agriculture.

• Some industrialisation.

• Population growth. By 1850 4X the 1600 level.

In the first half of the 19th C, progress went into reverse.

• Land per peasant shrank 3X.

• Real wages down.

• Average heights down.

• Famine 1810 then 1846-9, 50-73, 76-79, 96-97, and 1911.

Elite overproduction:

• Number of power positions relatively constant.

• Number of aspirants grew through Qing dynasty. Growth of merchant class.

Political entrepreneur emerged

Hong Xiuquan (1814-64) became leader of the Tapei rebellion.

He was the third son of a well off family who started failing exams and couldn’t get promoted. He had a nervous breakdown then had religious visions. He combined propaganda from Christian missionaries with his visions to form a new syncretistic religion, the Society of God Worshippers, a major goal of which was to purge China of Confucianism. (He thought of himself as a sort of Christian but western Christians disagreed.)

He began recruiting converts among other alienated elites. It grew slowly. 1847 — 2k supporters having fits and speaking in tongues. They started attacking Buddhist temples and smashing statues. Popularity surged during an 1850 epidemic when word spread that sick people cured themselves by praying to the Taiping God.

In 1851 Hong declared the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom with himself as Heavenly Emperor. People sold possessions and joined up. Attempts to suppress him were violently resisted by locals.

The situation of famine, epidemics, misery undermined the empire and generated recruits. His army grew to half a million by 1853. They conquered Nanjing. He almost brought down the Qing dynasty. Eventually in 1864 Hong died. Nanjing fell.

Over 14 years 30-70M people died.

Turchin points to the similarities between Hong, Lincoln and Trump:

• immiseration

• elite overproduction

• a political entrepreneur defecting from the elite.

America: economic & political cycles of immiseration and elite overproduction

Turchin identifies phases of American elites grabbing more and elites sharing more since Independence:

• After the War of Independence there was an integrative phase. Relative wages are wages divided by GDP per capita. 1780-1830 the relative wage nearly doubled.

• There was a disintegrative phase from roughly the 1820s to 1930 with two spikes of collective violence: the Civil War and ~1920.

• In the 1820s-50s there was a phase of declining relative wages and elite overproduction that propelled Lincoln to the presidency. Relative wages declined by nearly 50% by 1860.

• After the Civil War relative wages were stable until ~1910 after which there was sustained growth until the 1970s. Relative wage nearly doubled 1910-1960.

• In the 1930s FDR and the New Deal was a deliberate use of political power to distribute wealth more widely to avoid a crisis. Unions were given a lot of power for collective bargaining. Rich individuals and companies had to share more of growth than they wanted. Nearly half the millionaires who thrived in the 1920s were wiped out by the Depression. Worker wages grew faster than GDP per capita. The size of the top fortune declined in real terms 1930-1980. (I think Turchin overrates the altruistic side of FDR and underrates the aristocratic politics of FDR — i.e mobilising the demos against his aristocratic opponents, per Pericles and the Alcmaeonidae).

• From the 1970s, a new phase began. Real wages started stagnating. Relative wages started declining and fell ~30% 1976-2016. The gap between rich and poor started rising again.

Lincoln

He was propelled to power by elite overproduction and popular immiseration.

America was ruled by an elite of a) aristocratic slave owning farmers and b) Northeastern patricians — merchants, bankers and lawyers.

New York’s merchants exported southern cotton and imported European manufactured goods.

Southern voters had a greater weight thanks to the 1787 compromise that counted three-fifths of the slave population in apportioning representatives and presidential electors. The South also controlled half the Senate though the North had double the population.

• From the 1820s to 1860 relative wages declined by nearly 50%.

• Average height started shrinking.

• In the five years before the Civil War urban riots spread (38 lethal riots).

• Threats and actual violence between politicians grew including on the floor of Congress.

• New populist parties including the anti-immigration Know-Nothing movement.

• Elite overproduction. The number of millionaires grew from a handful to 100. The number of lawyers grew rapidly.

• The size of the top fortune in 1790 was $1M (Elias Derby); 6M in 1830 (Girard); 20M in 1848 (Astor); 40M in 1868 (Vanderbilt).

The new wealth came from mining, rail and steel. But the newly wealthy were constrained by the political power of the southern aristocracy. They wanted high tariffs to defend their new companies and provide money for infrastructure. The established elite, living off exporting cotton for imports, wanted low tariffs. On many economic and regulatory issues the interests of old and new money diverged.

By the 1850s the party system was fragmenting and four candidates competed in the 1860 election.

I’ve written before how our times resemble the cycle of regime change in 1840s-1850s Europe. You can see similar echoes in 1840s-1850s America.

Reconstruction

After the war the power of the southern aristocracy was shattered.

• A quarter of southern men of military age were killed on the battlefields.

• Holding Confederacy debt was ruinous.

• Emancipation and the 13th Amendment ended slavery and the economic basis of southern agriculture.

Northern capitalists were hugely strengthened.

• Holding Union debt was lucrative.

• Supplying the war effort was lucrative.

• Many titans of business were northerners who avoided military service by buying substitutes.

• 1860-70 the number of millionaires grew from 41 to 545.

• The railroad industry was greatly strengthened.

• Industries were protected by tariffs.

• A national banking system.

• Pacific Railway Acts authorised government bonds and land grants to railway companies.

• Homestead Act enabled surplus labour to claim grab unclaimed land in the West, reduced the supply of labour in the East, which was balanced by the Immigration Act 1864 which increased labour supply and created the Bureau of Labor explicitly to develop ‘a surplus labor force’.

The Republican Party dominated until FDR, with the DEMs winning the Presidency only in 1884, 1892, and 1912.

The Gilded Age of 1870-1900 was chaotic and contentious. The Social Register became more important. The rich sent their kids to expensive boarding schools then Ivy League colleges like the English. Elite social clubs spread. A network of non-profits funded by the rich started arguing over policy.

Elites worried about unrestricted competition and the Great Merger Movement of 1895-1904 created new large companies trying to limit competition. Three men contributed the bulk of cash to new foundations: Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Brookings.

The shift from FDR to Trump

Violence and the Bolshevik Revolution spooked elites 1910-1930. In 1919, 4M participated in strikes. The Battle of Blair Mountain in 1921 was the deadliest labour dispute in American history (it turned into a general insurrection and had to be put down by the army). And there was a Red Scare after 1917, a peak of terrorism, bombing campaigns by Italian anarchists etc.

Immigration Acts in 1921 and 1924 were partly a reaction.

Then FDR dramatically shifted economic policy with collective bargaining, social security, minimum wage etc.

After the New Deal and WWII, there was two generations of broad based improvements for Americans. Inequality reduced. This all started to change in the 1970s.

We have:

• For two generations after the 1930s the real wages of American workers grew. Real wage growth stopped in the 1970s. The median real wage 1976-2016 grew from $17.11 to $18.90 p/hour, just 10%. Americans with advanced degrees went from $33 to $44 p/hour. Americans with just a high school education saw wages decline over forty years from $15.50 to $13.66 p/h. [Lots of other things changed in the 1970s. E.g Nixon announced a goal of energy independence via nuclear energy and created the agency to regulate nuclear energy which then stopped building of nuclear plants. Regulations of all kinds started spreading. NASA lost George Mueller and began a slide into bureaucracy that stopped the plans for a permanent moon base and Mars. The Pentagon consolidated McNamara’s changes to budgeting that have led to fifty years of horror.]

• From 1940s to the 1960s relative wages grew robustly. After the 1960s relative wages fell and by 2010 had nearly halved. (Turchin uses somewhat different numbers at other points. E.g he also says relative wages fell ~30% 1976-2016.) Relative wages have not had a sustained 30 year fall since 1830-60.

• The cost of many crucial things have exploded relative to median wages. E.g A worker earning median wages in 1976 had to work 150 hours to earn one year of college. By 2016 the median wage worker had to work 500 hours to earn one year of college, three times more, and the average person with high school but no degree had to work four times more.

• From the New Deal through the 1960s the minimum wage grew faster than inflation. Since the 1970s inflation has lowered the real minimum wage. Union power weakened from the 1980s.

• Average life expectancy started to decline 2013-16 for the first time since statistics began in 1933.

• The gains in average height since ~1900 stopped with children born in the 1960s. (Though the gains continued in Germany, Norway and others.)

• ‘Deaths of despair’ (suicide, drink, drugs) started rising. They spiked among non-graduates after 2000.

• The number of Americans in ‘extreme distress’ rose from 3.6% to 6.4% 1993-2019. Among the white working class this went from <5% to 11%.

• Extra wealth flowed mostly to elites. Today taxes on companies and billionaires are at their lowest since the 1920s. (TRUE??) Starting in the 1980s the number of super-rich (>10M) grew ten-fold from 60k in 1983 to 700k by 2019. The number of millionaires grew four-fold.

• Elite overproduction.

• Exploding public debt.

• Family, church, parent-teacher associations, and all sorts of voluntary organisations declined over the past 50 years.

• Spreading geopolitical chaos.

After 1991:

• The supply of labour rose with immigration and more women working.

• Lots of jobs moved offshore from America and Europe.

• Spread of automation.

Elite overproduction now

There are too many graduates chasing too few elite jobs.

• Early 1950s <15% went to college.

• By 1966, 30%.

• 1960-70 number of doctorates more than tripled.

• For a short period, connected with defence spending and Sputnik etc, the number of senior positions also grew. But then it stabilised while the number of degrees and doctorates kept rising.

• The number of lawyers has also risen. And the distribution of wages has shifted since ~2000 from a single peak to a bimodal distribution: there’s a bunch of relatively low paid, some very highly paid, and little between (below, there are some salaries above 240k excluded). Consider that half law graduates leave with debts of 160k or more, 1/4 over 200k, and you cannot escape paying this except by death or renouncing citizenship and leaving (bankruptcy has no effect).

• Callahan has reported the spread of cheating throughout professions, business, sport, journalism, exams etc.

• There is also the well publicised story of how the top 10% have increasingly turned schools into an arms race for credentials.

Elite fragmentation and polarisation

A nearly universal feature of pre-crisis is ideological fragmentation and polarisation among elites. Divisive movements tend to spread in crisis, e.g sectarian and identity.

Elite fragmentation and competition has contributed to declining public trust in political institutions and unravelling of social norms governing core institutions.

Turchin considers studies of individual Congress members since 1800 and concludes:

• A period of declining polarisation 1800-~1830.

• Rising polarisation until the 1930s.

• Declining polarisation 1930s-60s.

• Rising polarisation since 1970s.

This pattern matches the pattern of relative wages. (I haven’t examined these studies and have no idea how robust they are given how dodgy social science can be.)

Turchin argues we’re in a transition from the pre-crisis phase to the crisis phase. Those politicians defending moderation and cross-party cooperation are losing and retiring. This is the third crisis after the Civil War and the 1930s.

Historically, elite competition is resolved by violence, jail, exile etc.

The post-war ‘mainstream’ consensus comprised roughly of:

• Patriotism.

• Anti-communism/socialism.

• There was a ‘normal’ family and widely accepted male/female roles. Alternatives were marginalised.

• Divorce very problematic for elected officials, atheism disqualifying.

• Jim Crow laws in the South.

• Progressive taxation.

• Support for Social Security, unemployment insurance, welfare benefits for needy.

• Low immigration.

Pretty much all of this has blown up.

And we see the emergence of counter-elites as political entrepreneurs.

During crises political entrepreneurs try to direct the energy of angry masses. E.g Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus.

In the last 250 years disillusioned lawyers have been a fertile ground for entrepreneurs. Robespierre, Lincoln, Lenin, Gandhi, and Castro were all trained as lawyers then defected from the elite. (It’s dangerous being a counter-elite. E.g Savva Morozov, one of the wealthiest industrialists in Russia before the Revolution, gave a fortune to his workers. And he financed Iskra (the Spark), the banned revolutionary newsletter. After the 1905 revolution he spiralled into despair and shot himself. The commies took all his property from his wife and Lenin took his Gorki estate.)

Trump [and the Valley coalition supporting him] fits the pattern.

Core argument on Trump’s rise

Tuchin argues similarly to me about Trump’s rise. Many elites have latched onto conspiracies about Trump to avoid facing reality about his rise:

A. Trump positioned himself to champion those who have suffered from trends of immiseration among non-graduates while …

B. Insiders — DEM and GOP — have been determined to live in a parallel world, in ‘a massive denial of service attack on their own perceptions of reality’, as Marc Andreessen calls it, while…

C. Elite fragmentation opened up the political game to political entrepreneurs prepared to play outside normal rules.

(Turchin doesn’t point this out by I keep stressing it — the mainstream view of Trump is that he is very extreme (now even ‘fascist’) but in 2016 he was seen as less extreme than normal GOP candidates and in 2024 similarly he was seen as less extreme than Kamala. This is also an important sign of how elites are running DOS attacks against their own perceptions of reality.)

American plutocracy

Turchin considers different regimes:

• Egypt as a military regime.

• Iran as theocracy.

• China as a bureaucratic empire.

• America as a plutocracy.

Before the Arab Spring, the Egyptian regime:

• Expanded access to university. Combined with a youth bulge this meant a) a big growth in number of graduates, b) more intense competition for jobs.

• Mubarak groomed his son to take over via an MBA and business, breaking the rules of the regime game. When the crisis erupted in 2011, the army stood aside.

• The coalition that drove Mubarak out was part Muslim Brotherhood, part liberal secularists. They immediately turned on each other. The army threw out the Brotherhood. As for 1,000 years, military elites are back in charge.

The ‘America plutocracy’ theory: America is run mainly by the economic elite via lobbying, donations, appointments, media ownership, foundations/think tanks etc. The military are integrated: in return for loyalty they get lucrative posts after retirement. Schools, universities and social events help the networks self-organise. [NB. Turchin’s description is similar in basics to Curtis Yarvin’s description of the ‘cathedral’!]

The size of the top fortune:

• $1M in 1790 (Elias Derby) — equivalent to 25k annual average wages;

• 6M in 1830 (Girard);

• 20M in 1848 (Astor);

• 40M in 1868 (Vanderbilt);

• 1B in 1912 (Rockefeller) — equivalent to 2.6M annual average wages (100X growth in a century);

• but then it stalled at about 1B until the 1960s.

The top federal tax rate grew from 7% in 1913 to 24% in 1929 to 94% in WW2 and was still ~90% in 1960. [This is reflected in the movie High Society when Grace Kelly shows Sinatra around the grand houses of the American aristocracy and tells him their misfortunes from high taxes!]

Today taxes on companies and billionaires are at their lowest since the 1920s.

If your net worth is $1-2 million today you’re in the top 10%.

Before 1850 all American presidents were one-percenters. Since then nine presidents including Lincoln and Truman were not millionaires in today’s dollars. Bill Clinton and Obama have over $200M are in the top five richest presidents.

There are ~50 members of Congress with net worth over $10M.

As elite competition has intensified, more money has been spent on political campaigns. The average spending of a House winner rose from $400k in 1990 to $2.35M in 2020 and in the Senate from $4M to $27M — a six-fold increase. And a presidential race now involves raising over a billion.

In 2021 12k lobbyists spent $3.7B at federal level. The top industries are pharma, electronics and insurance.

The theory predicts that policy will reflect desires of the rich, versus the theory taught-in-schools of America as a representative Republic, per Lincoln.

And work by Gilens shows that from a data set of 2k policies 1981-2002, with preferences of rich/poor etc, the outcome is clearly that the rich and business groups get what they want and the poor/median do not.

So Turchin argues:

1. The poor do not shape policy results.

2. The rich shape what policies are discussed.

3. The rich try hard with some success to shape the preferences of the public to fit what the rich want. E.g the ‘death tax’ meme invented, thinks Turchin, by a ‘brilliant if evil propagandist’. (Turchin thinks the voters don’t realise they are unaffected and it only hits the superrich. I don’t know about America but in Britain this is NOT true, voters oppose death taxes knowing they are unaffected on the basis that a) it’s in principle unfair and b) maybe (hopefully) their kids will be affected. I suspect it’s similar in America and Turchin is confused like many academics/pundits on this subject.)

What about immigration?

Polls show strong opposition to illegal immigration.

No federal law mandates businesses to use E-Verify to determine the status of potential employees.

The big thing is not net effect but the winners (big business, rich people hiring gardeners etc) and losers (non-graduates in places with overstretched services and infrastructure). Hence Marx saw the English regime importing Irish as exploitation. Unions generally opposed immigration from 1880s, when Carnegie called it ‘a golden stream’, to 1970s.

Turchin doesn’t really explain this well.

But I would summarise it as:

• Political and business elites agreed in the 1990s immigration is good.

• Legal and illegal immigration grew plus chaos became visible.

• The public became more angry.

• Elite fragmentation meant people like Trump and Elon sided with the voters.

• Insiders and richer DEM graduates polarised further becoming MORE pro-immigration. The issue was not very polarised in 1991 but has become much more polarised. (This is clear in the data.)

• Trump has now largely stopped chaos at the southern border and this is popular with most of the country but ‘fascism’ to DEM/MSM Insiders who still won’t face reality on this subject.

A crucial aspect of the reorientation of Left parties over 30 years has been the way they have radically shifted on immigration. How much of this is because of education realignment and the different perspectives of graduates viz non-graduates?

It’s particularly interesting how the Left in UK defend a system that involves children drowning in boats and a huge organised crime network extending to the recreation of sex slavery across the western world. They’d much rather see this continue than our regime stop the boats and the children drowning. But they’d prefer us to set up a route where they can fly in legally without fuss in unrestricted numbers.

I.e The ranking of their preferences is:

1. Open borders.

2. The dumb boats continue with drowning and sex gangs.

3. Controlling borders, dumb boats stopped etc.

How crises play out

There are two main datasets used by academics: the peace research institutes in Norway and Sweden and the PITF project funded by the CIA. A PITF member is Walter, author of How Civil Wars Start, which I’ll look at next.

I won’t go into the PITF model details.

They claim 80% accuracy on predicting instability on the basis of mostly just four characteristics (I think the predictions are ‘within the next 2 years’ but haven’t checked this).

They claim the most unstable regime type is partial democracies with factionalism — defined as sharply polarised and uncompromising competition between blocs with winner-takes-all approach, confrontational mass mobilisation, intimidation, manipulation of elections etc.

Other factors:

• armed conflict in neighbours

• state repression against a minority group

• high infant mortality.

Walter’s book presents a similar picture. She adds the internet, smartphones, social media.

The most common paths to chaos are A) an autocracy democratising under pressure of elite conflict and public mobilisation or B) democracy sliding towards autocracy for similar reasons.

Turchin: the data for these projects is limited to post-war. And predictions from the PITF data seem to be getting worse. E.g it missed the Arab Spring. We’re embarking on a period of long-term instability so we should assume the dynamics will involve things not well predicted by this sample — we need a more historical view. And Waters can be ‘woefully inadequate’ (p174) partly because she does not look deeply into the elite crackup that precedes the crisis.

Russia, Belarus and Ukraine after 1991

Russia

1996-2000 the oligarchs had to move on from drunken Yeltsin. In all important ways Russia had disintegrated since 1991 and almost everyone but the oligarchs/mafia were struggling. Chechnya kicked off. After 1998 there was financial crisis and default. [Viz Russia the terms oligarchs and mafia are interchangeable — not all oligarchs are the same viz their propensity for murder but none of the billionaires could be so without mafia alliances.]

The silovki, i.e military-security officials, allied with parts of the mafia. Putin was ex-KGB and in the 1990s worked with the St Petersburg mafia. Once he took over, with the help of oligarchs, the oligarchs then either had to make deals or be crushed. They were deeply unpopular and fragmented. The silovki were coherent and controlled the hard power. The silovki then took a lot of the oligarchs stuff. Oligarchs who remained billionaires did so only because they were useful to, and accepted the terms of, the silovki.

The regime ended the Chechnya war, got the finances under control, and got the economy growing. Protests 2011-13 went nowhere.

Belarus

Lukashenko did not copy the Yeltsin privatisation/sell-off to mafia and did not create an oligarch class like Russia.

Like Russia, he kept his grip on the silovki.

All protests fail.

Ukraine

They privatised and created oligarchs-mafia.

The economy was run for the mafia. Belarus median GDP grew faster than UKR.

The mafia-oligarch gangs fought each other for political power. Elections didn’t stop the oligarch struggle.

West UKR was more pro-West.

East UKR was more pro-Russia.

The oligarchs were west-oriented because they wanted money, property, kids etc stashed in the west. The UKR mafia, like the Russian, wanted big houses in London and their kids to Eton and Oxbridge or Ivy league. This orientation made them susceptible to pressure from the US and Europe — e.g sanctions, bank freezes etc.

UKR was also the fault line of NATO. From 2007 the neocons pushed US policy towards enlarging to UKR. [Obama resisted but did not stop the drift.] Victoria Nuland [archetypal neocon, huge supporter of UKR to NATO etc] spent $5 billion of State Department cash buying influence over UKR oligarchs and in 2014 was recorded talking to the US Ambassador about divvying out UKR government jobs.

None of the mafia governments could maintain a grip. There are four main clans: Dnipro, Donetsk, Kiev, Volhynia.

Yanukovych (Donetsk, headed by Akhmetov) won in 2010 and jailed Tymoshenko (a gas oligarch). But he then stole too much. The Donetsk clan bailed on him.

Yanukovych then (end 2013) bailed on a trade deal with the EU because the terms seemed politically terrible.

Crowds gathered in Maidan Square. The oligarch Poroshenko (Volhynia) funded the protests and owned Channel 5 which covered them. Yanukovych’s support was in the east. Far right extremists were moved in to Kiev. Violence sparked. The oligarch TV stations flipped. Oligarch financed politicians flipped. Security services withdrew from Maidan Square. He fled to exile in Russia. A civil war sparked in the Donbas with pro-Russian forces fighting Azov and regime forces. 14k were killed 2014-Jan 2022. Zelensky emerged from conflict between Poroshenko and Kolomoisky. [Zelensky recently fell out with Poroshenko and has sanctioned him.]

Turchin concludes: the revolution was not a people’s revolution, it was, as usual with revolutions, mainly driven by elite conflict. The main factor explaining the difference between UKR, Russia and Belarus is whether the ruling elites keep cohesion under pressure.

In Russia and Belarus the silovki have stayed together and with Putin.

In UKR, no silovki government emerged, it stayed a battleground for mafia-oligarchs. UKR had privatisation — i.e mass theft — Belarus did not. The silovki in Russia obviously take a lot for themselves but they also want the public to get a share in growth to keep them quiet — they are not all-out fighting with each other to steal everything and ignore the people, as in UKR before the war or in Russia in the 1990s. [Though the Russian system is obviously super-dependent on personal relationships and Putin’s personality, if he had a stroke/died then the complex precarious balance of interests across the silovki could unravel fast.]

[Here isn’t the place to go into UKR in detail but it’s important that the story of the UKR mafia has been disappeared in western MSM since the war started and instead the story in the BBC etc presents UKR as a roughly normal country with a heroic ‘democratic government’, heroic leader etc, a bad fiction. The relationship of the Zelensky faction with oligarch-mafia is disappeared. The role of the US interfering in local politics is disappeared. Given how much of the western elite turned against the neocons, it’s all the more interesting that they’ve ended up supporting the neocons’ UKR-to-NATO project, launched in 2007, because of how it was repackaged. Right now, the entire western project for UKR since the war started is in humiliating chaos.]

How does the crisis play out?

The model tracks indicators:

• Workers looking for jobs.

• Immigration.

• Social attitudes.

• Supply of jobs.

• Automation.

• Wages.

• Relative wages: wages grow slower/faster than profits and GDP p/capita. If slower, then rich get more from growth, if faster then creation of super-rich is choked off. When relative wages decline, people are more miserable and elites capture more wealth. High political chaos physically kills the rich, takes their money, discourages them from acquiring more etc.

• A political stress Index that combines the strength of immiseration and elite overproduction.

Turchin argues that the key role in crisis events is ‘extremists’, those radicalised and primed for action. Radicalisation, social contagion, works like disease spread and he uses equations similar to the epidemiology models. His model tracks normals, radicalised, and ‘recovered’ (i.e radicals who become disenchanted). As the fraction of radicals increases the chances of riots etc rises.

The model predicts growing political violence in 2020s America which reduces elite numbers then the situation moderates but the economic situation returns and the cycle of violence returns in 50 years.

It also predicts that even if steps are taken now to change relative wages the inertia is so strong there will still be violence. But in this scenario a short sharp burst of fighting in the 2020s is succeeded by stability.

What blocks civil war?

• For the moment there is a coherent police force that follows orders.

• There is no coherent organisation like a Communist Party aiming at real revolution.

• The radical left is ‘hopelessly disunited’.

• The radical right — defined as white supremacists, neo-Nazis, KKK, alt-right etc— is similarly disunited. If you look at the plot to kidnap Governor Whitmer, it was so disorganised the FBI informants had to organise it. (NB. It’s wrong to lump ‘alt-right’ in with KKK etc, much of the alt-right is NOT racist!)

• Left dissidents are also divided. And marginalised: e.g people like Chomsky are not invited on MSM. (Very questionable argument! People with Chomsky views are all over MSM!)

But he argues the GOP is (i.e 2022) transforming into ‘a true revolutionary party’. Although Trump has served the plutocracy in some ways (e.g taxes) he is against them on others especially immigration and against a lot of Insider GOP on foreign policy (e.g NATO). Bannon is clear that he wants MAGA to ‘destroy all of today’s establishment’. But Trump1 showed he didn’t know how to drain the swamp.

Turchin of course is writing in 2022 and does not know how the Trump/GOP story plays out.

But he describes America 2022 — with its combination of immiseration, counter-elites emerging from elite overproduction and political entrepreneurs — as a ‘revolutionary situation’.

What about Europe?

In Germany and Denmark the top 1% has grabbed more of the wealth in recent decades, though less than in America.

In France and Austria it has not.

He does not explore Europe in much detail.

1830-70: how England and Russia swerved revolutionary crisis

Turchin’s database suggests that once states are past a certain threshold of crisis, the odds of revolution, civil war or both is high (75%) and in a fifth of cases the civil wars drag on for a century or more. There are very few cases where societies escape with little damage.

He considers the period 1830-70 — coincidentally the period I focused on in my earlier blog on regime change.

• Nearly all European states experienced revolution or civil war or both. France had three.

• America and China had civil wars.

• In Japan the Tokugawa regime fell in 1867.

• Only Britain and Russia of big states swerved meltdown.

England

Crisis grew 1830s-50s:

• Population growth and labour oversupply started depressing real wages from ~1750.

• After the Napoleonic wars there were outbreaks of riots, revolutionary plots etc that were suppressed (e.g Peterloo). 3 arrests at public gatherings in 1758, 1,800 in 1830, deaths peaked at 52 in 1831.

• Elite overproduction. University enrollments surged after 1750.

• The Chartist movement.

Why no revolution?

• Millions, along with aspiring elites, emigrated relieving pressure.

• 1832 reform Act.

• 1834 Poor Law changes.

• Repeal of Corn Laws, cheaper food.

(Turchin focuses on material specifics but a deeper reason was: the English Parliamentary system was more adaptable than other regimes and the English aristocracy preferred to share more power than risk revolutionary chaos.)

By 1850 real wages recovered the losses. After 1867 wages grew at unprecedented rate.

Russia

• Average heights of peasants fell in 18th C.

• Elite overproduction. Number of nobles grew and as fraction of population. And they extracted more from serfs.

• More riots in 19th C, ~10X 1800-1848 then more than doubled 1848-58.

• Russia suffered the Crimea War defeat in 1856.

The combination of riots and the shock of defeat convinced the regime they had to free the serfs. The Tsar told the nobility — it’s inevitable, we should free them ourselves not wait for revolution.

Nobles lost out and many became counter-elites. Anarchists, revolutionaries, terrorists of all kinds spread, peaking in 1880s. The Tsar was killed in 1881. But they did avert revolution. Riots fell. But the calm only lasted until 1905 when revolution broke out after the disastrous war with Japan. Estates failed in the new economic market. The gentry youth which had their traditional path taken away by their parents’ failure entered the civil service and this meant university numbers more than tripled 1860-1880. A combination of poverty and radicalisation as they read western books was dangerous.

Turchin’s conclusion?

His main conclusion is: to have even a hope of escaping the disintegration, the general public, the 99%, must force the elites to share more wealth and power!

This is not an adequate plan!

Some thoughts

Democrat/Insider radicalisation.

He doesn’t grapple well with a critical issue: how and why DEM elites radicalised culturally. I discussed this at length in the ‘why Trump won’ blog so won’t repeat all that, just a few points…

A. Immigration. Sanders argued in 2015 that open borders was a ‘Koch brothers plan’ he opposed. But by 2024 the DEMs had shifted so far on immigration that the Bill Clinton/Obama positions were effectively defined as ‘racist’. As I say above, we think of immigration as extremely polarised (in Britain too) but it wasn’t 30 years ago.

As I’ve said many times, it was objectively irrational for the DEMs — from the perspective of optimising for winning Presidential elections — to let the southern border blow into chaos 2021-4 then claim it couldn’t be stopped without new laws. It gave Trump one of his top 3 issues. (And Trump has proved this was false — the chaos has evaporated without new laws.) Also the calculation that all the immigrants and Hispanics would vote for the DEMs because of their open borders vibe turned out to be a blunder — per my blog on Trump’s win, he did spectacularly well with Hispanics and immigrants.

B. Institutions/Ukraine.

The DEMs were a party defined by people who thought of themselves as the ‘heirs of 1968’, the party fighting the establishment especially the military-industrial-CIA complex etc.

But one of the puzzles is how their radicalisation to the left on cultural issues went in parallel with becoming the party defending the old establishment institutions and even the intelligence services.

This has been very clearly expressed in the phenomenon of AOC and Bernie — people who consistently argued against GOP military adventures — backing the war machine over Ukraine.

Why? Because, as I’ve said before, the war against Putin equals the war against Trump in their minds. It’s one of the most interesting, important yet almost totally invisible because it’s so big phenomena of the past decade.

C. Free speech

Another fascinating case study is how the party that sees itself as the heirs of 1968 became a party with former presidential candidates openly arguing that the First Amendment was a historic mistake that needs fixing!

If you watch SW1 NPCs, they simply downloaded the Democrat/Insider software patch and either agreed or disappeared it from their discourse. But it is a seismic shift and, like with (B), almost totally invisible inside the NPC memeplex.

If professors of political science and our pundits can very quickly shift their attitude on something so fundamental, it suggests something very profound has been going on.

D. DEI/trans/BLM etc

Turchin doesn’t get into the reasons for why the young, i.e 15-25s have fragmented and become much more likely to support Trump, particularly young men, than Millennials.

The battering of LGBTQ++ at school. Are you gay/bi/queer/trans? Are you autistic? Are you trapped in the wrong body? The battering of ‘toxic masculinity’ and ‘racist’ and ‘America is evil’. The DEI regime in universities and jobs pushing out whites who watch minorities with worse test scores get places.

You can see a very strong backlash against this underway that Insiders cannot see straight because they cannot discuss their own radicalisation away from the mainstream while trying to claim they are the mainstream.

Turchin criticises a lot of ‘extreme ultraconservative’ think tanks funded by billionaires such as the Federalist Society. But a lot of things seen by academics like Turchin as ‘extreme’ are seen by others as ‘moderate’ and ‘arguing for a view seen as mainstream 50 years ago’.

He does not similarly attack the Far Left billionaire network which went so far they provoked a load of billionaires to abandon decades of political neutrality and support Trump because he seemed a moderating force. He calls them ‘reformist’ and ‘progressive’. But many would call them ‘crazy communist loons with blood on their hands’ for defund the police etc. Turchin does not explore why famous Democrats like Elon and Rogan ended up backing ‘the fascist’.

Campaign vs mimetics?

Some on left and right have suggested that the ~2012-2024 DEI/w*ke/trans madness cultural movement that engulfed American politics (and spread via the internet across the world) was partly caused by the plutocracy preferring everybody losing their minds about this to focus on the cost of living and the rich getting richer from QE etc! Peter Thiel has described how convenient it is that everyone’s focused on this nexus of issues, encouraged by elite universities that have in some ways become hedge funds with faculty attached and don’t want their finances scrutinised.

It’s impossible to answer this with confidence without doing a lot of private interviews with people like the CEO and board of Disney. For sure, a lot of the corporate elites were frightened by the power of the movement to destroy careers, terrorise boards etc. Therefore they tipped more fuel on the fire that threatened to burn them. But to what extent was the phenomenon explicitly an organised cynical campaign by the rich to distract people from thinking about and campaigning on economic issues? (Please leave links to good sources on this.)

This connects to a more general question about the DEMs: to what extent was the shift from the party of the working class to the party of the rich, via the educational polarisation I’ve discussed, a thought out ideological project-campaign combining ‘centrist’ economics — i.e Larry Summers is broadly happy — with far left culture war? To what extent was this largely unconscious mimetics that emerged partly through internet herding dynamics?

My constant impression watching these people is that less than 1% is organised, thought out campaign and ~100% is pure mimetics. I think almost all the shifts in elite business networks were ~100% pure mimetics plus fear generating a cascade. But there are of course Live Players (and accidental players) somewhere. E.g the Russiagate hoax came from the likes of Jake Sullivan, it wasn’t a bottom-up internet conspiracy.

And NB. preference cascades below: once Trump won again a preference cascade operated in reverse with business/finance networks quickly ditching DEI etc.

‘Cliodynamics’ and prediction

As I’ve described before, it is possible to use models and technology to shock the mainstream on politics. We proved it with polling/models in 2016/19. You subscribers saw what I said about the US election long before it happened. The Ben Warner/Alex Cooper startup is developing some of these ideas.

The Tetlock and similar experiments similarly show it’s possible.

And there’s a wide variety of experiments on things like predicting news, predicting conflict that I think show promising results.

But academia is bad at this because, partly, incentives are all about papers not products. And for complex reasons the military and intel worlds have not been good at procuring interesting products for this.

In the appendix to War and Peace, Tolstoy wrote about the potential for models to predict wars if they could get good numbers for morale, because whether soldiers really feel like fighting or running is both crucial and extremely hard to know until it’s revealed. In 20th Century, there were attempts at building models such as the Osipov-Lancaster equations, Dupuy’s Understanding War, the recent SESHAT databank.

Turchin talks about projects to collect data but he is probably not on top of technological developments. He wrote in 2022 that robots can’t read medieval Latin on vellum — but Nat Friedman is using ML to read burnt ancient scrolls in ancient Latin and Greek! Turchin’s description of SECHAT makes it sound like something that will be totally upended by LLMs.

Such projects need great historians, other specialists, and great data scientists used to dealing with very messy data challenges.

I have some ideas on how this could be done. I’ve followed developments in prediction in a wide range of fields. I’m confident that products could be built that would greatly improve performance in political campaigns and government.

But new products a) will give strategic advantage but b) will not fundamentally transform politics soon because the essence will remain the simplest and deepest problems like — can you maintain focus on priorities amid chaos, can you move really fast, can you say No, can you build great teams, can you face very unpleasant unreality etc etc.

It’s hard for products to help humans do these fundamentals because the core issue is not ‘can we do high performance’, the core issue is that normal government institutions are not optimising for high performance or even normal/rubbish performance — they are optimising for preserve existing power and budgets and close anything down that threatens them/us. Products can no more overcome this than ‘read Thucydides and Sun Tzu and General Groves’: people do not apply these lessons because the costs are very high, immediate and personal, but gains are ephemeral, long-term, and distributed (what I call ‘the Munger principle).

It was not hard to build the sewage monitoring product but Whitehall shut it down.

It was not hard to build the Vaccine Taskforce but Whitehall shut it down.

It was not hard to build the No10 data science team but the Cabinet Office repeatedly tried to shut it down.

The SAS was shut down after 1945 and is under attack from its political bosses today.

Etc etc.

Secrets, ‘preference falsification’, intelligence and prediction

Revolutionary crises repeatedly surprise almost everyone. For example:

• 1789. Louis XVI did not anticipate the crisis.

• 1917. The Tsar did not anticipate the crisis. Lenin said in 1917 that older men like him would not see the explosion. The Bolsheviks in Petrograd in the months before the revolution were not prepared for it. Per the quotes at the top, even in the last 2-3 days before the explosion the British Ambassador and the Tsarina expressed the view that the crowds would soon blow over.

• Iran 1979. The Shah’s regime, the CIA and the KGB were surprised by the Shah’s collapse. Even though Khomeini said publicly the regime was about to collapse, he confided to his confidants that he doubted it.

• Eastern Europe 1989. Almost nobody anywhere predicted what would happen.

After they occur there are libraries filled with ‘explanations’ but we keep getting shocked. The libraries haven’t led to a theory with good predictive power.

Timur Kuran wrote an interesting paper in 1989, Sparks and prairie fires, which suggested the concept of preference falsification as part of the answer.

• In coercive regimes it’s dangerous to say what you think therefore the overwhelming majority do not state their true opinions about a regime publicly, they falsify their preference.

• The regime seems secure even to intelligence services probing weaknesses.

• When crises erupt, once dynamics cross a threshold (that’s very hard to identify in advance) more and more people will state their true preference and this makes it more likely that others do the same — a preference cascade. Opinions are interdependent and this process is inherently nonlinear. Hence the ancient proverb quoted by Mao: ‘A single spark can start a prairie fire.’ The spark can be somewhat random. E.g On 23/2/1917, there were thousands on the streets because of food shortage rumours, then 20k workers were locked out of a factory, then women marched in celebration of Women’s Day, and hundreds of off-duty soldiers joined in. There was a large self-reinforcing mob not coordinated by anybody.

• In hindsight the regime’s collapse seems inevitable because it generated ‘a panoply of hidden conflicts’.

• So regimes can both appear highly secure but be highly vulnerable.

• Leaders are crucial because a few rare people have an exceptional ability to detect and expose the regime’s vulnerabilities. E.g Khomeini knew the army was crucial and he kept stressing to his supporters that they should not physically attack soldiers — ‘Do not attack the army in its breast but in its heart’. Marx denied this and Engels famously summarised the Marx view as, ‘In default of Napoleon another would have been found.’ Cf. Tocqueville’s comment at the top — the leader depends on circumstances having ‘prepared men’s minds’ for new ideas.

• Revolutionary regimes tend to undertake campaigns of repression and indoctrination because the players remember how quickly the previous regime crumbled. The French sent Danton and Robespierre to the guillotine. Stalin slaughtered his own Party on an unprecedented scale.

• Given people in the regime can get killed when it collapses, their failure to see what’s happening is not a simple failure of incentives.

• Marxists think that discontent automatically leads to revolt but this ignores the interdependence of people’s political choices. And generally the vast majority of analysis treats events like 1979 as an ‘inevitable’ product of discontent, deprivation etc.

• The importance of preference falsification/cascades as an important dynamic means that ‘predictive failure is entirely consistent with calculated, purposeful human action’.

• The theory can be falsified by a theory capable of predicting revolutions well. (NB. Kuran’s articles were pre-internet. Now it is possible to acquire vast data that can help predict dynamics that before were almost entirely hidden. Progress would not necessarily falsify the theory IMO.)

In 1991 Kuran considered the 1989 revolutions.

The 1989 revolutions, like 1979, surprised almost everyone — politicians, academics, journalists, intelligence organisations.

The only polling study Kuran was aware of reported that a year after the fall of the Wall, only 5% of East Germans said they had expected it to happen before it did. Presumably the true number was lower.

In China, Deng had ordered in the army to crush the Tiananmen protests. But on 7 October 1989 when protests broke out in Berlin the response seemed weak. Pictures played on East German TV alerting people both to protestors and a weak response. On 9th, Honecker ordered officials to block a demo in Leipzig by force if necessary. But it didn’t happen. People saw peaceful demonstrations. More took to the streets. The regime started offering concessions.

In Poland the Party had allowed elections which Solidarity won. In Hungary, the Party rebranded itself the Socialist Party. And Gorbachev declared that the Soviets would not interfere in the affairs of their neighbours and a press spokesman declared ‘the Brezhnev doctrine is dead’ — a profound example of where one man’s decision can have massive historic effect via a cascade. Imagine if Deng had behaved similarly in 1989.

This pulled the rug from under those considering violent repression across Eastern Europe. Crowds grew and spread everywhere. In days the Wall was down and regimes were toppling. With the partial exception of Rumania the security forces melted very rapidly. And once Insiders started publicly distancing themselves from the regime, this hastened the end. (Kuran rightly says that a proper model would weight defecting Insiders much more heavily than a random individual.)

Havel’s 1979 essay had predicted that when the greengrocers have had enough the regime will fall. Like almost everyone, Havel didn’t have a good sense of the timing but his essay did explore this phenomenon of preference falsification and cascades.

The process in Poland took years, in Hungary months, in East Germany weeks, in Prague 10 days, and in Romania hours. This acceleration suggests that successful challenges to the regime lowered the perceived risk of dissent elsewhere.

It is a black mark that Turchin does not refer to these issues explored by Kuran. And it reflects that Turchin sees revolts too much in long-term economic terms and too little in terms of the interdependency of opinion and preference cascades.

Britain on the edge of chaos?

Obviously Britain exhibits key dynamics Turchin discusses:

• Public immiseration.

• Public perception that the old regime is incompetent and morally lost.

• Elite overproduction, elite fragmentation, counter-elites emerging.

• Growing disorder, perception police losing control of some areas, perception that the police are increasingly on the side of our enemies in similar ways to the Cabinet Office helping Sinn Fein/IRA against SF.

• Growing fears about core infrastructure failing.

• Debt out of control, debt interest payment eating revenues.

• Geopolitical tension exacerbating domestic problems.

• Political entrepreneurs arguing explicitly for radical change.

The core problem for the old regime is that the mix of Tories 2010-24 and Starmer since 2024 can’t en masse even see what’s behind the crises. They’ve told themselves fake stories for decades. They keep thinking if they just hold on and keep going, somehow things will ‘return to normal politics’. You could see this emotion across the media in 2021 when everybody in SW1 cried out for ‘a return to normal’ by which they meant carrying on as before covid. Yet the country had just been through the collapse of core institutions, over 100k killed by incompetence, hundreds of billions added to debt etc. The emotional desire inside SW1 to pretend was so powerful it provided the ballast to their hysteria over Ukraine — while they made ever more ludicrous claims about the war, their desire not to disrupt SW1 business as usual was so strong that they maintained the MoD on its pathological course so it was totally impossible for it to do what they said they wanted vis Ukraine, and, obviously, this visible from space contradiction could not be a topic of SW1 discussion and still isn’t.

The voters assumed summer 2020 that the government would embark on radical change, as promised in the 2019 election. We started (or rather continued what we started in 2019). But then the Trolley took fateful decisions. Governments keep prioritising keeping Whitehall and the NPC network happy and this is not consistent with reducing voters’ hate and contempt.

The way to keep the SW1 NPC network happy is to continue the immigration Ponzi, continue the financial Ponzi, raise taxes, hate and mock entrepreneurs, demand more and more money tipped into the failing things, prioritise the ECHR (and international law generally) over the safety of British families, vandalise the few great things left, give some pathetic speeches about ‘sensible gradual consensual grownup reform’ that officials laugh at and ignore/subvert, declare all this ‘inevitable’ and ‘sensible' government’ from ‘serious grownups’ and declare all opponents extremist, populist, far right etc.

This has been the ‘mainstream’ for 20+ years.

There are, though, for the first time embryonic networks inside both old parties starting to grapple with the themes of this blog and ask themselves: perhaps we need to change our mental pictures radically and side with voters against the 'NPC mainstream…? And very powerful forces will keep pushing this way regardless of how the NPCs scream ‘fascist’.

Having got to here, I will split the other two books into separate blogs or this will get too long! Then at the end I’ll post some thoughts.

In meantime, watch this interview with David Betz, Professor of War, King's College London. He reflects similar discussions I’ve had with people in intelligence, SF etc about the dynamics pushing the UK towards civil violence.

The issues above provoke thoughts about what the PRC has built to predict social contagion and preference cascades, cf. my blog that touches on Qian Xuesen, the godfather of China’s nuclear and space programs, and pioneer of complex systems thinking (cf. Open Complex Giant System, 1993). Xi said in 2013:

Comprehensively deepening reform is a complex systems engineering problem.

Also cf. this about the remarkable fact that the frequency and severity of deadly conflicts of all kinds follows universal statistical patterns:

Lewis Fry Richardson argued that the frequency and severity of deadly conflicts of all kinds, from homicides to interstate wars and everything in between, followed universal statistical patterns: their frequency followed a simple Poisson arrival process and their severity followed a simple power-law distribution. Although his methods and data in the mid-20th century were neither rigorous nor comprehensive, his insights about violent conflicts have endured. In this chapter, using modern statistical methods and data, we show that Richardson’s original claims appear largely correct…

How can it be possible that the frequency and severity of interstate wars are so consistent with a stationary model, despite the enormous changes and obviously non-stationary dynamics in human population, in the number of recognized states, in commerce, communication, public health, and technology, and even in the modes of war itself? The fact that the absolute number and sizes of wars are plausibly stable in the face of these changes is a profound mystery for which we have no explanation.

Local election results

Data shows that it is the worst result for an Opposition ever by far: the government is deeply unpopular and obviously rubbish yet Tories lost 41% of seats fought. This election was the first time the Conservatives did not win a majority on a single council since the local government system was created in 1889.

Reform also dominate second places

To ponder… There is an ancient Greek myth about the star constellation known as Pleiades, or the ‘seven sisters’. Zeus saved seven sisters from rape by turning them into stars. One fell in love and went into hiding, so we only see six. There’s a remarkably similar story in Aboriginal Australia, separated from the rest of humanity for tens of thousands of years.

Astronomers recently calculated that 100,000 years ago, humans would have seen seven stars but one gradually got closer to another so we can now only see six. Yes: the implication is that the remarkably similar stories that have survived through different ancient cultures are surviving remnants of an older story from our ancestors that was true. I’ve read Greek myths to my small child and I think about this beautiful story often. Somehow this is connected to the spiritual-epistemic collapse of the West.

US forces and imperial failure. This NYT article provides more data for the transformation underway in war. The US spent a billion dollars over a month firing so many very expensive missiles the DOD worried about depleted stocks, getting expensive drones shot down, failing to establish air dominance over the Houthis, nearly suffering the humiliation of advanced aircraft destroyed, and suffering the humiliation of two $70M aircraft falling off the edge of an aircraft carrier as it swerved violently to avoid being hit itself. After a month of this, Trump pulled the plug.

On April 28, the Truman was forced to make a hard turn at sea to avoid incoming Houthi fire, several U.S. officials said. The move contributed to the loss of one of the Super Hornets, which was being towed at the time and fell overboard.

For over twenty years I’ve been saying that official calculations and claims around carriers are bogus because of cheapening/improving capabilities for precision strike. Steve Hsu has charted this in detail for 20 years. Notice how one brilliant physicist with the sensibility to look for what’s true could outperform a multi-billion dollar bureaucracy that incentivises blindness.

A few podcasts/blogs always interesting:

• Steve Hsu’s Manifold.

• China Talk.

• Jack Clark of Anthropic.

• Upstream.

• Rest is History (one of few UK podcasts I think is great).

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We are now brought face to face with a tyranny which holds out the threat of becoming, thanks to “the conquest of nature” and in particular of human nature, what no earlier tyranny ever became: perpetual and universal…

Their [the classical view’s] implicit prophecy that the emancipation of technology, of the arts, from moral and political control would lead to disaster or to the fundamental dehumanisation of man has not yet been refuted.

Leo Strauss

It was the contempt for these permanencies [the permanent characteristics of humanity, e.g the distinction between noble and base] which permitted the most radical historicist in 1933 [Heidegger] to welcome, as a dispensation of fate, the verdict of the least wise and least moderate part of his nation while it was in its least wise and least moderate mood, and at the same time speak of wisdom and moderation.

Leo Strauss

I am perplexed by my own data and my conclusion is in direct contradiction of the original idea from which I start. Starting from unlimited freedom, I arrive at unlimited despotism.

Shigalev, in The Devils

In short, one may say anything about the history of the world - anything that might enter the most disordered imagination. The only thing one cannot say is that it is rational…

And … even if man really were nothing but a piano key, even if this were proved to him by natural science and mathematics, even then he [man] would not become reasonable, but would purposely do something perverse out of sheer ingratitude, simply to have his own way. And if he does not find any means he will devise destruction and chaos, will devise sufferings of all sorts, and will thereby have his own way. He will launch a curse upon the world, and, as only man can curse … then, after all, perhaps only by his curse will he attain his object, that is, really convince himself that he is a man and not a piano key!

If you say that all this, too, can be calculated and tabulated, chaos and darkness and curses, so that the mere possibility of calculating it all beforehand would stop it all, and reason would reassert itself - then man would purposely go mad in order to be rid of reason and have his own way! I believe in that, I vouch for it, because, after all, the whole work of man seems really to consist in nothing but proving to himself continually that he is a man and not an organ stop. It may be at the cost of his skin! But he has proved it...

Notes from the Underground, Dostoyevsky

Thus revolution gave birth to every form of wickedness in Greece. The simplicity which is so large an element in a noble nature was laughed to scorn and disappeared… In general, the dishonest more easily gain credit for cleverness than the simple for goodness.

Thucydides, III.82-84

UPDATE 31/8: Notes on Strauss’ essay on Thucydides.

UPDATE 24/5: Notes on Introduction to The City and Man, and a summary of the crisis of the West.

UPDATE 20/5: Notes on On Classical Political Philosophy.

This blog will summarise and consider essays by philosopher Leo Strauss.

Strauss identifies three waves of modernity sparked by (1) Machiavelli, (2) Rousseau and (3) Nietzsche.

The West’s spiritual-philosophical crisis, explored in Dostoyevsky and Nietzsche writing after the 1848 revolutions (see blog on Dostoyevsky), is the deepest cause of the political crisis we see in the crumbling of old ideas, old institutions (domestic and international), old parties and old political regimes.

A fourth wave of modernisation has begun, not driven by traditional philosophers or the universities but mainly by the internet and technology.

Whenever I talk about philosophy my practical allies say, rightly — almost nobody in politics cares about this, they won’t listen, they mostly can’t do simple politics, it’s pointless trying to get them to think about philosophy.

This is true but misses the point. Blogs on philosophy are not for 99.9% of SW1 — they are for the 0.1% and for people outside SW1.

Everybody in politics is pursuing things they were programmed to pursue by dead philosophers. We are all somewhat ‘NPC’. The collapse in standards of elite education means we are less able than many of our ancestors to think for ourselves. The political crisis we’re in requires deep new stories. The old parties’ old stories are deathly stale and is partly why they only mobilise apathy or hate. To develop new stories we need to figure out why the old stories are played out. For this, we must turn to the deepest ideas. The coming discussions over biological engineering and AI demand the same.

I won’t now go into what seems to be coming next. After I’ve reviewed the essays I’ll add something.

At the bottom are SNIPPETS on:

• Shor on 2024

• Professor Ansell calling ‘peak populism’

• Toby Lutke on AI. Shopify must see if an AI can do a job before hiring someone

• Karpathy on AI. Unlike previous technologies adopted first by big organisations then normal people, LLMs are the reverse: the big effects are with normal people not big organisations. The future is here and very highly distributed.

• Michael Nielsen on AI. Alignment isn’t a solution, it’s a problem.

• Askonas on AI.

• Drones and AI.

• Espionage and AI.

• ‘Moneyball military’ and AI.

• Bioterror and AI.

• Deterrence and AI.

• AI Scenarios for 2025-7 by Daniel Kokotajlo & Scott Alexander.

• Tariffs, containers, logistics

VOTE REFORM TOMORROW

On Thursday, you should vote Reform if you have a local vote, unless you’re voting personally for someone you know about. Why? To signal a desire for big change and strengthen the forces pushing for big change. Voting Tory just encourages the useless gang in charge to think they should carry on what they’re doing which is wasting everyone’s time. Per my previous blog we need to either a) push them in a useful direction (and a necessary condition is retiring KB) or b) close and replace them ASAP. It’s also the best way to spook No10 to abandon some of the dumb things they’re doing — e.g letting the worst elements of the HMT/OBR consensus govern economic policy.

The key period for Reform is from Friday to this time next year and the much bigger elections. Per my previous blog:

• Can they hire a great team for research, policy, communication and campaigning? Do they become the only party in Britain actually able to campaign? (Now, no big political organisation in UK can campaign up to the old standards, never mind deal with the new technologies. Campaigns require sustained focus which they can’t do and seldom try.)

• Can they set out a story combining candidate selection and a political story, how the people they recruit as candidates reflect their priorities for the country?

• Can they figure out how to jiujitsu the weight of the Insider attacks — old parties, old Whitehall, and old media — to their advantage? They threaten the old system. That system will try to destroy them including with use of the deep state to destroy individuals’ reputations. Countering it won’t be trivial.

NB. They do not need to transform to high performance in order to destroy the Tories’ strategic position. They can win 50-150 seats as a one-man band protest party. But they do need to transform to high performance in order to win a majority in 2029 then deliver.

The Tories have done nothing in months except encourage thousands to conclude Britain is knackered and accelerate their plans to leave — a trend that is greatly underrated in super-parochial SW1. As SW1 gets more and more out of touch with anything productive and valuable, and more and more insular, it becomes harder and harder for its NPCs to see even very obvious things. And the flight of money and talent from Europe to America is a big thing. London snaffles some stragglers on their way west, London benefits from being outside the EU’s regulatory self-sabotage on AI, but London is also losing many because of the overall political and economic farce and the manifest determination of the mainstream to carry on with Osborne-Sunak vandalism.

I’ll return to domestic politics shortly. But you can see that LFG and Crush Crime are changing debate so — if you’re NOT leaving and you want to help something that can do things, get in touch with Newport, give them time, money, expertise, connections etc.

(Also have you noticed the NPC Narrative Whiplash on OBR? When people like me said that it was ludicrous for governments to shape policy to influence future OBR forecasts (that are always wrong) — objectively a madhouse way of governing — NPCs denounced it as ‘extremist’, ‘Orbanism’, ‘fascism’ etc. Now that the OBR is seen as blocking more tax and spend for the old system, Narrative Whiplash has kicked in and now it’s ‘mainstream’ and ‘sensible’ to attack the government for its absurd approach and ‘mad’ to do the thing they defined as ‘serious’ until recently.)

GANGS

Yesterday Lawrence Newport and Crush Crime published a Bill for an immediate inquiry on the Gangs. PLEASE SUPPORT THIS BY CLICKING HERE AND ADDING YOUR NAME TO THOSE SUPPORTING.

• These gangs are STILL operating.

• Both parties have worked with officials to coverup not just the gangs but all the connected nightmares including: police arresting parents trying to save their children, police cooperating with the gangs to return children to them, local councillors clearly working with the gangs, whistleblowers literally murdered and so on and so on.

• An Inquiry will come, the sooner the better.

• It was in Labour’s interests to do this as soon as possible, blame the Tories for 14 years of coverups, and get the credit for purges and jailings and action. But obviously Starmer has defaulted to his instincts per my previous blog: always defend the old system even when it’s obviously terrible government and politics. Whitehall obviously does NOT want an Inquiry as it will reveal much guilt from officials and document in humiliating detail how Elon was right: multiple national coverups. I know this because I saw this process myself in the DfE (cf. previous blog).

• Crush Crime’s Bill would make this Inquiry very unlike others. Time limited. Not a judge but an investigator in charge. Coordinated with a No10 Task Force. RICO powers. Force the courts to publish all transcripts and stop them abandoning centuries of England’s tradition of open justice. And much more. Judges refusing to allow publication of court transcripts because they think public discussion of trials is ‘not in the public interest’ is a perfect example of where ‘the mainstream’ are taking us.

• Farage said yesterday that if Labour does NOT u-turn and do it, then the Reform Manifesto will pledge to introduce the Crush Crime Bill in the first month of the next Parliament. This will exert pressure. The Tories will have to promise similar. And Labour MPs will tell No10: you cannot have this as an election issue, neutralise it with our inquiry that also smashes the Tories for failure 2010-24…

Some coverage so far:

Telegraph, MPs try to force grooming gang inquiry

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2025/04/29/mps-try-to-force-grooming-gang-inquiry/

GB NEWS, Farage teams up with Labour to force Keir Starmer into grooming gangs public inquiry

https://www.gbnews.com/politics/nigel-farage-labour-peer-grooming-gangs-public-inquiry-force-keir-starmer

GB NEWS, Reform makes manifesto commitment to national grooming gangs inquiry in first month

Farage: “If Labour refuses to hold an inquiry, Reform’s manifesto at the next election will commit to legislation for an Inquiry, with statutory powers, into the gangs introduced to Parliament in the first month of the Reform government. This inquiry must happen and will happen.”
https://www.gbnews.com/politics/reform-manifesto-commitment-national-grooming-gangs-inquiry-first-month

GB NEWS

https://x.com/GBNEWS/status/1917169937824571497

GB NEWS, Eamonn Holmes interviews Lawrence Newport

https://www.facebook.com/GBNewsOnline/videos/540216282224939/

Twitter – Crush Crime

Justice should be a matter of PUBLIC RECORD - but the system is so broken that trial transcripts are either DESTROYED or hidden behind massive bureaucratic paywalls.

Interview with Adam Wren about his court transcript campaign

https://x.com/crush_crime/status/1915665077266772169

Twitter – Zia Yusuf (Chairman of Reform UK)

The only way to bring justice to victims of the grooming gangs is a full national, statutory inquiry with the power to compel witnesses.
We will launch this in the first month of a Reform government.

https://x.com/ZiaYusufUK/status/1917181498496569850

LBC – Nick Ferrari

Lawrence Newport interviewed on Nick Ferrari show

https://x.com/crush_crime/status/1917488473201614990

SOME RECENT BLOGS

My recent blog on UK politics

https://dominiccummings.substack.com/p/tsp-5-what-comes-in-2025-6-as-both

Specifically on Whitehall

https://dominiccummings.substack.com/i/152759149/starmer-and-whitehall-who-fires-whom

11/24: Why did Trump win?

The ~50 Year Cycle of Regime Change

https://dominiccummings.substack.com/p/q-and-a?open=false#%C2%A7the-year-cycle-of-regime-change

The Pathological Simulacrum and the Cycle of Narrative Whiplash

https://dominiccummings.substack.com/i/117842715/the-pathological-simulacrum-and-the-cycle-of-narrative-whiplash

Freedom’s Forge, on procurement and industrial production in WW2

Metternich’s and Pitt’s struggles for a new international order

What is political philosophy?

This essay is an edited version of a Lecture in December 1954. It appears in a book of the same name.

I The Problem of Political Philosophy

All political action aims at preservation or change.

All political action is guided by ‘some thought of better and worse’.

Thought of better and worse implies thought of the good.

All political action has then in itself a directedness towards knowledge of the good: of the good life or of the good society. For the good society is the complete political good.

When men make it their explicit goal to acquire knowledge of the good life and of the good society, ‘political philosophy emerges’.

The theme of political philosophy is mankind’s great objectives, freedom and government or empire — objectives which are capable of lifting all men beyond their poor selves.

Political philosophy is a branch of philosophy. Philosophy is a quest for ‘universal knowledge’, an attempt to ‘replace opinions about the whole by knowledge of the whole’. A quest for knowledge of the whole, or ‘all things’, means knowledge of God, the world, and man — of the nature of all things, and the natures in their totality are ‘the whole’.

Philosophy is essentially not possession of the truth but quest for the truth. The distinctive trait of the philosopher is that “he knows that he knows nothing” and that his insight into our ignorance concerning the most important things induces him to strive with all his power for knowledge.

It may be that philosophy can never get beyond discussion but this does not make it futile. Genuine knowledge of a fundamental question is better than blindness or indifference.

Minimum quod potest haberi de cognitione rerum altissimarum, desiderabilius est quam certissima cognitio quae habetur de minimis rebus. (Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, I, qu. 1 a.5.)

The slenderest knowledge that may be obtained of the highest things is more desirable than the most certain knowledge obtained of lesser things.

[A paraphrase of Aristotle: ‘The scanty conceptions to which we can attain of celestial things give us, from their excellence, more pleasure than all our knowledge of the world in which we live; just as a half glimpse of persons that we love is more delightful than a leisurely view of other things.’]

Political philosophy is the attempt to ‘replace opinion about the nature of political things by knowledge of the nature of political things … and the right, or the good, political order’.

All political philosophy is political thought but not all political thought is political philosophy. Political thought is indifferent to the opinion/knowledge distinction but for political philosophy it’s central.

‘Political science’ is ambiguous and characterised by a ‘pitiful pretentiousness’. It designates a) ‘such investigations of political things as are guided by the model of natural science’ and b) the work of those in ‘political science departments’. It conceives itself as the way towards genuine knowledge of politics and a replacement, in time, for political philosophy.

In former epochs, intelligent men could gain political knowledge from listening to wise men and reading good historians. This is ‘no longer sufficient’ because we live in ‘dynamic mass societies’, societies characterised by ‘immense complexity and rapid change’. Political knowledge is harder to come by and becomes obsolete more rapidly.

All political knowledge implies assumptions — e.g one cannot know anything about a new war without assumptions about war as such. The goal of a general is victory which is not essentially controversial. But the meaning of ‘the common good’ is essentially controversial. The ambiguity of political goals are due to their ‘comprehensive character’.

Today political philosophy is in ‘a state of decay and perhaps putrefaction if it has not vanished altogether’. There is total disagreement about its subject matter, methods and function. And its very possibility has become questionable. The only thing political science academics agree on is the usefulness of political philosophy. The distinction between philosophy and science has been applied and created a distinction between a) a non-philosophic political science and b) a non-scientific political philosophy — a distinction which strips ‘all dignity, all honesty from political philosophy’. And large segments of what were part of political philosophy have been stripped away and given names like economics and sociology.

The pitiable rump for which honest social scientists do not care is left as prey to philosophers of history and to people who amuse themselves more than others with professions of faith. We hardly exaggerate when we say that today political philosophy does not exist any more except as matter for burial, i.e for historical research, or else as a theme of weak and unconvincing protestations.

Why? We are told ‘political philosophy is unscientific’ or unhistorical or both.

Science and History, those two great powers of the modern world, have finally succeeded in destroying the very possibility of political philosophy.

This is partly generated by the spread of positivism.

By the end of the 19th Century social science positivism reached its final form by decreeing that only factual judgements are within the competence of social science but value judgements are outside. Positivist social science is ‘value free’, neutral about good and evil: ‘moral obtuseness is the necessary condition for scientific analysis’. So social science inevitably drifted towards conformism and philistinism. Rapidly social scientists get entangled in ‘the predicament which leads to the downfall of Thrasymachus and his taming by Socrates’.

1/ But it is impossible to study important social phenomena without making value judgements.

2/ Weber postulated the insolubility of all value conflicts. But while we may not be able to decide who is more just in a conflict between nations lasting centuries, ‘cannot we decide that Jezebel’s action against Naboth was inexcusable’?

3/ Positivism raises scientific knowledge to the highest kind and deprecates pre-scientific knowledge comparable to folklore. This is itself a superstition that causes an obsession with trying to prove things a ten year old knows but cannot be proved scientifically.

4/ ‘Positivism necessarily transforms itself into historicism.’ It mistakes the peculiarities of mid-20th Century America with the essential character of human society. What we are interested in in history comes from ‘values’, from subjective principles, not from facts. And in another paradoxical twist, social science itself proves to be ‘historical’ and reflection on social science as a historical phenomenon leads to the relativisation of social science and ultimately of modern science generally. Modern science ‘comes to be viewed as one historically relative way of understanding things which is not in principle superior to alternative ways of understanding.’ [NB. how well this summarises much of the current madness in academia!]

5/ Historicism abandons the fact/value distinction. It denies the authority of modern natural science. It refuses to regard the historical process as fundamentally reasonable. It denies the relevance of ‘the evolutionist thesis by contending that the evolution of man out of non-man cannot make intelligible man’s humanity’. It rejects the question of the good society because of the historical character of society and thought.

It was the contempt for these permanencies [the permanent characteristics of humanity, e.g the distinction between noble and base] which permitted the most radical historicist in 1933 [Heidegger] to welcome, as a dispensation of fate, the verdict of the least wise and least moderate part of his nation while it was in its least wise and least moderate mood, and at the same time speak of wisdom and moderation. The biggest event of 1933 would rather seem to have proved, if such proof was necessary, that man cannot abandon the question of the good society, and that he cannot free himself from the responsibility for answering it by deferring to History or to any other power different from his own reason.

II The Classical Solution

Plato et al knew that ‘evil cannot be eradicated and therefore that one’s expectations from politics must be moderate.’

The guiding theme is the nature of the regime, the form which gives society its character, the manner of living of society and in society, its moral taste. Classical political philosophy seeks an answer to — what is the best regime for man, the in-between being between animal and god?

The classics held the view that the nature of the regime — whether it is good — is even more important than the nation.

Classical political philosophy is criticised today as a) anti-democratic and b) based on classical natural philosophy which modern science has exposed as false.

The severest indictment of democracy is Book VIII of the Republic. Yet Plato also acknowledged good aspects of democracy such as the freedom it gives all. But the classics rejected democracy because they thought the aim of human life is virtue, not freedom.

• Virtue requires education, education requires leisure, leisure requires wealth.

• Poverty is ubiquitous so democracy means rule by the uneducated which must be wrong.

Rousseau argued that man is naturally good, and all knowledge needed to be virtuous is supplied by the conscience of simple souls. But his education scheme was one few could afford.

Generally it has become believed that democracy requires universal education but this presupposes that scarcity has given way to plenty. The difference between the ancients and us regarding democracy consists ‘exclusively in a different estimate of the virtues of technology’.

Their [the classical view’s] implicit prophecy that the emancipation of technology, of the arts, from moral and political control would lead to disaster or to the fundamental dehumanisation of man has not yet been refuted.

Democracy has also not solved the problem of education.

1. What’s called ‘education’ is often not education proper which is ‘the formation of character’ rather than instruction and training.

2. To the extent democracy does focus on formation of character, it is often a dangerous focus on ‘the regular guy’, the cooperative fellow, a certain part of social virtue — and a neglect of ‘those virtues which mature … in privacy, not to say in solitude’ — people who are prepared ‘to stand alone, to fight alone’. ‘Democracy has not yet found a defence against the creeping conformism and the ever-increasing invasion of privacy which it fosters.’

3. Classical education can never be thought of as mass-education. It was the highest education for those ‘by nature fit for it’.

Is classical political philosophy bound up with an antiquated cosmology?

‘To understand man in the light of the whole means for modern natural science to understand man in the light of the sub-human.’ But in that light man is unintelligible. Classical political philosophy saw man not based on natural science but ‘in the light of the mysterious character of the whole’ — Socrates viewed man in the light of the ‘fundamental and permanent problems’. Classical philosophers were interested in the quest for natural philosophy but did not think they had a solution, nor that such a solution was a solution for the permanent problems of man.

Philosophy is a quest for knowledge of the whole. Our knowledge is characterised by a ‘fundamental dualism which has never been overcome’.

At one pole we find knowledge of homogeneity: above all in mathematics.

At the opposite pole we find knowledge of heterogeneity: in particular of heterogeneous ends, and the highest form of such knowledge is the statesman or educator. This is higher than the former because it is knowledge of a whole, of the ends of man, of the human soul. Knowledge combining the political art in its highest sense with mathematics is a combination ‘not at our disposal’. [The first big statement by LS I think is partly wrong. Without thinking there could be any sort of ‘theory of everything’, we can use maths (defined widely as a set of thinking tools) to improve our thinking about politics.]

We are constantly deluded by two opposite charms: 1) the charm of mathematics and everything akin to mathematics and 2) the charm of ‘humble awe, which is engendered by meditation on the human soul and its experiences’. Philosophy must not succumb to either charm. It is ‘the highest form of the mating of courage and moderation’.

Classical political philosophers agreed that the solution to the problem of political philosophy was that, first, the goal of political life is virtue and, second, ‘the order most conducive to virtue is the aristocratic republic’, or the mixed regime.

III The Modern Solution

Modern political philosophies have a principle in common: the rejection of the classical scheme as unrealistic.

The founder of modern political philosophy is Machiavelli. He claimed to affect — and he did affect — a break in the whole tradition of political philosophy.

His main argument was: there is something fundamentally wrong with an approach to politics which culminates in a utopia, in the description of a best regime whose actualisation is highly improbable. We should not take our bearings by virtue but by the objectives which are really pursued in societies. It was a conscious lowering of moral standards in the hope of greater chances of success.

The classical approach: morality is a substantial force in the soul of man however ineffective is may be in the affairs of states.

The Machiavelli approach: man is educated to virtue by other men but the original educators, the founders of a society, cannot have been educated by virtue. The founder of Rome was a fratricide. Morality cannot create itself, morality is only possible in a context created by immorality, justice rests on injustice, legitimacy rests on revolution. Man is not by nature directed toward virtue, pangs of conscience are not the worst thing, pangs of disappointment are at least as strong.

One cannot define the common good in terms of virtue, instead we must define virtue in terms of the common good.

The common good is the ends actually pursued by all societies:

• Freedom from foreign rule.

• Stability and law.

• Prosperity.

• Glory and empire.

Virtue is the sum of habits conducive to this end — this end makes actions virtuous, it justifies every means. Virtue is civic virtue, patriotism, devotion to collective selfishness.

He thought that man is by nature selfish but can be taught and compelled to be patriotic. Man is more malleable and the power of man is greater and the role of nature and chance are smaller than the ancients thought.

The strongest passion is the desire for glory and the highest form of the desire for glory is the desire to be a new prince who founds a new order and moulds generations of men. The desire for glory is the link between badness and goodness. The new founder-prince is morally the same as a great criminal.

And for Machiavelli, it is the right kind of institutions that’s crucial, not the formation of moral character — and this shift is ‘the characteristic corollary of the belief in the almost infinite malleability of man’.

Strauss thought that there is not ‘a single true observation regarding the nature of man’ in all Machiavelli with which the classics were not thoroughly familiar. By his time the contemplative life had shifted to monasteries. Virtue had been transfigured into Christian charity. Concern for the salvation of man’s soul required behaviour the classics wold have thought inhuman, e.g Ferdinand of Aragorn expelling the Marannos from Spain. Machiavelli thought that the increase in inhumanity was the unintended but unsurprising consequence of man’s aiming too high. He wanted us instead to lower our sights, to narrow our horizons, in order to improve our chances of conquering chance and effect a shift of emphasis from moral character to institutions.

For Machiavelli, Moses was an armed prophet, Christ was an unarmed prophet who died but still was victorious because of propaganda: ‘the only element of Christianity which Machiavelli took over was the idea of propaganda’, though Machiavelli avoided the fate of Christ by not publishing until after he was dead (LS). No earlier philosopher had thought of trying to achieve posthumous success via a strategy and tactics for this purpose, the first philosopher to try to ‘control the future by embarking on a campaign of propaganda’.

For him, what the Romans had done by chance could be repeated and improved deliberately and Republicanism in the Roman style as interpreted by Machiavelli became one of the most powerful trends in modern political thought discernible in Spinoza, Montesquieu, Rousseau and the Federalists.

The theoretical basis of his teaching was a ‘decayed Aristotelianism’. But there is ‘a hidden kinship between Machiavelli’s political science and the new natural science’ of the 17th Century. There is a close connection between Machiavelli’s orientation and the notion of the controlled experiment.

His scheme also had to be modified because of ‘its revolting nature’[!]. Hobbes mitigated the scheme and thereby helped it spread. Hobbes was ‘an honest and plain-spoken Englishman’. He took justice much more seriously than Machiavelli. He denied that civil society is founded on crime. He accepted the traditional notion that justice is not merely the work of society but there is a natural right. Hobbes wrote about the duties of the subjects.

But he also accepted Machiavelli’s critique of traditional political philosophy — that it aimed too high. Hobbes demanded that natural right be derived from the beginnings — the ‘elementary wants or urges’ which determine all men most of the time, and not from man’s perfection or end, the desire for which determines only a few men a little of the time. These primary urges are selfish and reduce to self-preservation and the fear of violent death. It is not glory but fear that stands at the cradle of civil society — not heroes, perhaps criminal heroes, but terrified poor devils. The desire to live turns into the desire for comfort, into ‘pedestrian hedonism’. Glory survives only in the form of competition. So for Machiavelli the pivot was glory, for Hobbes it was power.

Power is morally neutral. Or, what is the same thing, it is ambiguous if of concealed ambiguity. Power and the concern with power lack the direct human appeal of glory and the concern with glory. It emerges through an estrangement from man’s primary motivation. It has an air of senility. It becomes visible in grey eminences rather than in Scipios and Hannibals. Respectable, pedestrian hedonism sobriety without sublimity and subtlety, protected or made possible by ‘power politics’ — this is the meaning of Hobbes’s correction of Machiavelli.

Hobbes was still too bold to be acceptable. It also needed mitigation and got it from Locke. For Locke, what man needed for self-preservation is less a weapon than food, or property: the desire for self-preservation becomes the right to unlimited acquisition.

Machiavelli’s discovery or invention of the need for an immoral or amoral substitute for morality became victorious through Locke’s discovery or invention that that substitute is acquisitiveness. Here we have an utterly selfish passion whose satisfaction does not require the spilling of any blood and whose effect is the improvement of the lot of all. In other words, the solution of the political problem by economic means is the most elegant solution, once one accepts Machiavelli’s premise: economism is Machiavellianism come of age.

For Montesquieu, the big battle was between two ideals — the Roman Republic whose principle was virtue and England whose principle was political liberty which found a substitute for Roman virtue in the pursuit of trade and finance.

But Rousseau began ‘a second wave of modernity’, a wave which bore ‘German idealistic philosophy and the romanticism of all ranks in all countries’. Rousseau and this complex counter-movement brought a return to pre-modern ways of thinking — a return from the world of the bourgeois to the world of virtue and the city.

Kant returned from Descartes’ notion of ideas to the Platonic notion.

Hegel returned from the philosophy of reflection to the ‘higher vitality’ of Plato and Aristotle.

Romanticism as a whole was primarily a return to the origins. But the return to pre-modern thought was the initial step of a movement which led to a much more radical form of modernity, much more alien to classical thought than the thought of the 17th and 18th centuries had been.

Rousseau returned to the classical city but he interpreted it through Hobbes’s scheme. For Rousseau as for Hobbes, the root of civil society is the right of self-preservation.

But for Rousseau, unlike Hobbes and Locke, this fundamental right points to a social order closely akin to the classical city.

For Hobbes and Locke the fundamental right of man had retained its original status even within civil society: natural law [deriving from God, nature or reason] remained the standard for positive law [deriving from human institutions], and there remained the possibility of appealing from positive law to natural law. The appeal was generally ineffective and could not not carry with itself the guarantee of being effective.

Rousseau drew from this the conclusion that ‘civil society must be so constructed as to make the appeal from positive law to natural law superfluous; a civil society properly constructed in accordance with natural law will automatically produce just positive law’. LS explains Rousseau’s thoughts as follows:

The general will, the will immanent in societies of a certain kind, replaces the transcendent natural right. One cannot emphasise too strongly that Rousseau would have abhorred the totalitarianism of our day. He favoured, indeed, the totalitarianism of a free society but he rejected in the clearest possible language any possible totalitarianism of government. The difficulty into which Rousseau leads us lies deeper. If the ultimate criterion of justice becomes the general will, i.e the will of a free society, cannibalism is as just as its opposite. Every institution hallowed by a folk-mind has to be regarded as sacred.

Rousseau’s thought marks a decisive step in the secular movement which tries to guarantee the actualisation of the ideal, or to prove the necessary coincidence of the rational and the real, or to get rid of that which essentially transcends every possible human reality. The assumption of such a transcendence had permitted earlier men to make a tenable distinction between liberty and license. License consist in doing what one lists; liberty consists in doing in the right manner the good only; and our knowledge of the good must come from a higher principle, from above. These men acknowledged a limitation of license which comes from above, a vertical limitation. On the basis of Rousseau, the limitation of license is effected horizontally by the license of other men. I am just if I grant to every other man the same rights which I claim for myself, regardless of what these rights may be.

This horizontal limitation is preferred as it seems more realistic — the limitation of my claim by the claim of others is self enforcing.

The separation of law and morality was defended by Kant who argued that freedom of speech includes the right to lie: all lies are immoral but also mostly legal. But this separation, of which German legal philosophy was proud, was not a sound suggestion!

Rousseau defined the state of nature, man’s beginning, as the goal of social man — man has drifted away from his beginnings and been corrupted so needs to return to this goal, the just society, which comes as close to the state of nature as a society possibly can. Man should strive to return to his most primitive state, the state before he felt the desire for self-preservation — the state of the feeling of the sweetness of mere existence without any thought for the future, a true return to nature. The feeling of self-preservation compels man to action and duty, therefore to misery, and cuts him off from the bliss buried in his origin.

For Rousseau, the tension between self-preservation and the more primitive feeling of mere existence expresses itself in the insoluble antagonism between the majority — who will in the best case be mere good citizens — and the tiny minority of solitary dreamers who find their way back to nature.

German idealistic philosophers took up this problem and thought a reconciliation possible. They claimed to have restored the high level of classical philosophy while fighting against the debasement caused by the first wave of modernity.

The philosophy of the second wave of modernity is inseparable from the philosophy of history, which did not exist in the classical world. But its introduction was not a genuine remedy for the lowering of standards in the first wave of modernity.

The actualisation of the right order is the unintended by-product of human activities which are in no way directed toward the right order. The right order … was thought by Hegel to be established in the Machiavellian way, not in the Platonic way: it was thought to be established in a manner which contradicts the right order itself. The delusions of Communism are already the delusions of Hegel and even of Kant.

The difficulties of German idealism gave rise to the third wave of modernity inaugurated by Nietzsche.

Nietzsche rejected the view that the historical process is rational and the premise that a harmony between the genuine individual and the modern state is possible. For Nietzsche, all life and thought rests on horizon-forming creations which are not susceptible to rational legitimisation. The solitary creator who gives himself a law and subjects himself to its rigours replaces Rousseau’s solitary dreamer. He called on people to revolutionise themselves, not society or nation. He hoped in future generations the best would answer his call and become a new nobility to rule the planet. He preferred a planetary aristocracy to a universal stateless and classless society.

He loathed socialism and communism — and conservatism, nationalism and democracy. But, argues Strauss, he left the next generation no choice except between irresponsible indifference to politics and irresponsible political options. He thus helped prepare a regime [Nazis] which made ‘made discredited democracy look again like a golden age’.

[NB. As Strauss explains elsewhere, one has to keep two things in mind regarding Nietzsche and Nazis. First, he loathed anti-Semites and would have loathed the Nazis. Was he ‘a Nazi’? Absolutely not. (His sister, who did go along with the Nazis, faked things that caused great confusion.) Second, he helped prepare the Nazi regime in a causal sense. Both are true: he was not a Nazi, and he prepared the ground for the Nazis.]

After him, modern thought embraced a radical historicism, ‘explicitly condemning to oblivion the notion of eternity’.

For oblivion of eternity, or, in other words, estrangement from man’s deepest desire and therewith from the primary issues, is the price which modern man had to pay … for attempting to be absolutely sovereign, to become the master and owner of nature, to conquer chance.

Political philosophy and history

[This essay was first published in Social Research, 1945. It concerns historicism, its attitude to classical philosophy, and its effects on modern philosophy and political thinking.]

Political philosophy is fundamentally different from, but not ‘absolutely independent’ of, history. Political philosophy must work with historical information but this is ‘preliminary and auxillary’, always about individual wars, people, groups, regimes and so on.

This view of the relation of political philosophy and history was ‘unquestionably dominant’ in until at least the end of the 18th Century.

But now it is rejected in favour of historicism, i.e ‘the assertion that the fundamental distinction between philosophic and historical questions cannot in the last analysis be maintained’. Historicism questions the possibility of political philosophy and ‘creates an entirely new situation for political philosophy’. Historicism is ‘a most powerful agent that affects more or less all present day thought’ and ‘as far as we can speak at all of the spirit of a time we can assert with confidence that the spirit of our time is historicism’.

The fusion of philosophy and history advocated by historicism may not be achievable but it is ‘the natural goal toward which the victorious trends of nineteenth and early twentieth-century thought converge’.

We now have vast numbers of historical studies and take for granted that historical knowledge is part of the highest learning.

When Plato sketched the ideal education he did not mention history. Aristotle said that poetry is more philosophic than history and this attitude was characteristic of all classical philosophers and philosophers of the Middle Ages. History was praised by rhetoricians, not philosophers. [Practical political Greeks and Romans after Herodotus and Thucydides started thinking historically and using history in political arguments.]

A fundamental change came in the 16th Century when opposition to earlier philosophy was marked by a novel emphasis on history.

• The rationalism of the 17-18th Centuries was much more historical than pre-modern rationalism.

• By the end of the 17th Century it was normal to speak of ‘the spirit of the time’.

• In the middle of the 18th Century the term ‘philosophy of history’ was coined.

• The teaching of Hegel in the 19th Century was supposed to be a synthesis of philosophy and history.

• The ‘historical school’ of the 19th Century brought about the substitution of historical jurisprudence, historical political science, historical economic science for a jurisprudence, a political science, an economic science that were un-historical or a-historical.

Historicism emerged in the 19th Century.

The typical historicism of the twentieth century demands that each generation reinterpret the past on the basis of its own experience and with a view to is own future. It is no longer contemplative, but activistic; and it attaches to that study of the past which is guided by the anticipated future … a crucial philosophic significance: it expects from it the ultimate guidance for political life. The result is visible in practically every curriculum and textbook of our time. One has the impression that the question of the nature of political things has been superseded by the question of the characteristic “trends” of the social life of the present and of their historical origins, and that the question of the best, or just, political order has been superseded by the question of the probable or desirable future. The questions of the modern state, of modern government, of the ideals of western civilisation and so forth occupy a place that was formally occupied by the questions of the state and of the right way of life. Philosophical questions have been transformed into … historical questions of a “futuristic” character…

The most common form of historicism expresses itself in the demand that the questions of the nature of political things, of the state, of the nature of man and so forth, be replaced by the questions of the modern state, of modern government, of the present political situation, of modern man, of our society, our culture, our civilisation, and so forth.

Historicism argues that any attempt to describe the old philosophical questions must be ‘historically conditioned’, i.e ‘to remain dependent on the specific situation in which it is suggested’. Nothing said about universal questions is valid. Some historicists insist that philosophy itself is historically conditioned, i.e essentially related to Western man or the Greeks and their intellectual heirs.

Historicism assumes that the object of historical knowledge which it calls ‘History’ is a ‘field’ or world of its own fundamentally different from Nature. The pre-historicist view was that a) ‘history’ designated a particular kind of knowledge or inquiry, b) ‘history’ as an object of knowledge does not exist and c) ‘philosophy of history’, as an analysis of a specific ‘dimension of reality’, was not dreamed of. The historicist attitude becomes clearer when one thinks what the Bible or Plato ‘would have called that X which we are in the habit of calling “History”.’ Historicism also sees every restoration of earlier teachings as impossible, or an intended restoration really leads to an essential modification.

We can consider the attacks of early historicism on the political philosophy which had paved the way for the French Revolution:

The representatives of the ‘historical school’ assumed that certain influential philosophers of the eighteenth century had conceived of the right political order, or of the rational political order, as an order which should or could be established at any time and in any place, without regard to the particular conditions of time and place.

Over against this opinion they [the representatives of the ‘historical school’] asserted that the only legitimate approach to political matters is the historical approach, i.e. the understanding of the institutions of a given country as a product of its past. Legitimate political action must be based on such historical understanding, as distinguished from, and opposed to, the “abstract principles” of 1789 or any other “abstract principles”.

Whatever the deficiencies of eighteenth century political philosophy may be, they certainly do not justify the suggestion that the non-historical philosophical approach must be replaced by a historical approach. Most political philosophers of the past, because of the non-historical character of their thought, distinguished as a matter of course between the philosophic question of the best political order, and the practical question as to whether that order could or should be established in a given country at a given time. They naturally knew that all political action, as distinguished from political philosophy, is concerned with individual situations, and must therefore be based on a clear grasp of the situation concerned, and therefore often on an understanding of the antecedents of that situation. They took it for granted that political action guided by the belief that what is most desirable in itself must be put into practice in all circumstances, regardless of the circumstances, befits harmless doves, ignorant of the wisdom of the serpent, but not sensible and good men. In short, the truism that all political action is concerned with, and therefore presupposes appropriate knowledge of, individual situations, individual institutions and so on, is wholly irrelevant to the question raised by historicism.

So:

A. Pre-historicist political philosophers distinguished between a) the philosophic question of the best political order, and b) the practical question as to whether that order could or should be established in a given country at a given time.

B. Political action obviously must be based on a clear grasp of the specifics of the political landscape including the relevant history.

C. A and B are irrelevant to the question raised by historicism.

D. The idea of trying to put into practice a pure philosophic ideal regardless of circumstances is an idea for ‘harmless doves, ignorant of the wisdom of the serpent, but not sensible and good men’.

Many moderns see historicism as coming later therefore being true! They see it as developing in response to the experience of centuries which teaches that non-historical political philosophy is a failure, it produced multiple ideas that refute each other.

Strauss replies that they contradict, not refute, each other. And the idea that non-historical political philosophy has failed because so far it has not taught us the answer to the best regime is hardly an insight we needed from historicism, it is obvious and indeed is implied in the very name “philosophy”! That does not mean you throw the subject out.

The historicists also argue that particular political philosophies were generated by particular historical situations — Plato’s philosophy was essentially related to the classical Greek city, Locke’s philosophy was essentially related to the English Revolution of 1688 etc.

But this is a superficial argument. Political philosophers adapted the expression of their thoughts to their particular situation in order to be listened to. They did not just explain what they considered the truth. They also explained what they considered desirable or feasible in the circumstances and communicated in a manner that was ‘civil’ as well as ‘philosophical’. So showing that their political teaching as a whole is ‘historically conditioned’ does not prove that their political philosophy is ‘historically conditioned’.

A political philosophy does not become obsolete merely because the historical situation, and in particular the political situation to which it was related has ceased to exist. For every political situation contains elements which are essential to all political situations: how else could one intelligibly call all these different political situations “political situations”?…

Classical political philosophy is not refuted … by the mere fact that the [classical] city … has been superseded by the modern state.

Most classical political philosophers considered the city the most perfect political organisation because they compared it to others — tribes, empires, monarchies. They thought the city had civilisation, unlike a tribe, and freedom, unlike the eastern monarchy.

Many continued to believe this. Only in the 19th Century did classical political philosophy ‘in a sense become obsolete’ partly because the modern state could plausibly claim to be ‘at least as much in accordance with the standards of freedom and civilisation as the Greek city had been’. But it was not completely obsolete because classical political philosophy had expounded in a ‘classic’ manner the standards of freedom and civilisation.

Modern democracy has elicited — or perhaps been the outcome of — a reinterpretation of ‘freedom’ and ‘civilisation’ which could not have been foreseen by classical political philosophy. And there are ‘definite reasons for considering that reinterpretation intrinsically superior to the original version’.

Historicism replaced belief in progress — a belief that stands between the non-historical view of the philosophic tradition and historicism. This belief a) agreed with the old view that there are universally valid standards but b) deviates from it in asserting there is ‘a historical process’, a process of progress in which thought and institutions move towards an order that aligns with universal standards of human excellence.

The philosophers of the past understood themselves in a non-historical manner. They claimed to have found parts of the truth. Historicists must understand the philosophers of the past ‘historically’. Historicists argue the philosophers were wrong. They repeat the sin for which they attacked the ‘progressivist’ historiography.

Our understanding of history improves when we do not think we are superior but when we think we can learn from (not just about) the past. But historicists deny this possibility.

And of course if the historicist thesis is correct then we cannot escape the consequence that the thesis itself is historical therefore valid only for a specific historical situation: it must be applied to itself.

What’s the most convincing argument for the fusion of philosophic and historical studies?

The argument that (1) our political ideas are mostly abbreviations and residues of thoughts from the past, once explicit and clear but then transmitted to later generations in noisy ways. If we want clarity about them then (2) we must delve into the history of those ideas. So (3) the clarification of political ideas insensibly changes into the history of political ideas so the philosophic effort and historical effort become fused.

But classical philosophers like Aristotle did not feel this need — they were clear about political ideas and did not delve into their history.

Modern thought is in all its forms, directly or indirectly, determined by the idea of progress…

If, as we must, we apply historicism to itself, we must explain historicism in terms of the specific character of modern thought, … of modern philosophy. In doing so, we observe that modern political philosophy or science, as distinguished from pre-modern political philosophy or science, is in need of the history of political philosophy or science as an integral part of its own efforts, since, as modern political philosophy or science itself admits or even emphasises, it consists to a considerable extent of inherited knowledge whose basis is no longer contemporaneous or immediately accessible. The recognition of this necessity cannot be mistaken for historicism. For historicism asserts that the fusion of philosophic and historical questions marks in itself a progress beyond ‘naive’ non-historical philosophy, whereas we limit ourselves to asserting that that fusion is, within the limits indicated, inevitable on the basis of modern philosophy, as distinguished from pre-modern philosophy or ‘the philosophy of the future’.

On Classical Political Philosophy

[Originally published in 1945.]

Classical political philosophy was directly related to political life.

It then became a tradition that was more remote from political life.

The classical Greek tradition was rejected in the 16th and 17th Centuries.

The new political philosophy was related to political life ‘through the medium of the inherited general notion of political philosophy and through the medium of a new concept of science’.

The modern philosophers tried to replace the teaching and method of the classics but thought political philosophy was necessary and possible.

Today political scientists think they can reject political philosophy and stand in direct relation to political life. They are wrong. They are related to political life through the medium of reactions to modern natural science and through inherited concepts, however despised or ignored.

The most striking difference between the classical political philosophy and today’s political science is that the latter is ‘no longer concerned at all with what was the guiding question for the former: the question of the best political order’. Political science now focuses on methods.

Classical political philosophy accepted the basic distinctions made in political life exactly in the sense and with the orientation in which they are made in political life. It did not start with distinctions such as fact/value, ‘state of nature’, ‘the civil state’, ‘reality’ and ‘ideology’ — distinctions which arise only in philosophical reflection, not from political life. Its main issues were neither philosophic nor scientific but were ‘intelligible and familiar at least to all sane adults from everyday experience and everyday usage’.

Its method was also presented by political life which is characterised by conflicts particularly over what is good for the community and what is just. Parties make arguments and conflict calls for arbitration. And some of the disputes involve permanent problems of paramount importance ‘The umpire par excellence is the political philosopher’ (cf. Plato’s 8th letter 354a1-5, Laws 627d11). The philosopher’s duty was, as a good citizen, to diminish civil strife. To do this he has to ask ulterior questions not normally raised in the political arena but he must keep his fundamental orientation — that which is inherent in political life.

Questions of method only become the fundamental question if this orientation is abandoned and if basic distinctions of political life become treated as ‘subjective’ or ‘unscientific’.

Political life is concerned mainly with an individual community and particular problems. Its highest skill is managing well the affairs of his community, which is a mix of art, prudence, practical wisdom etc. This is what ‘political science’ originally meant — ‘the skill by virtue of which a man could manage well the affairs of political communities by deed and by speech’. It is not a body of true propositions concerning politics transmitted by teachers to pupils’. Someone who possesses ‘political science’ can in principle give advice to, or manage the affairs of, anybody anywhere, like Themistocles.

Speaking became the first object of instruction because action should proceed from deliberation and the element of deliberation is speech. But classical political philosophy rejected the identification of political science with rhetoric and held that rhetoric at its best was only an instrument. Political skill is partly the normal business of governing but at its highest it’s the process of creating the constitutional-legislative framework, intended to be enduring, in which normal political life plays out:

The value of his [any politician’s] achievement depends ultimately on ‘the value of the cause in whose service he acts; and that cause is not his work but the work of him or those who made the laws and institutions of his community. The legislative skill is, therefore, the most ‘architectonic’ political skill that is known to political life. (Cf. Gorgias 464b7-8. And Rousseau: S’il est vrai qu’un grand prince est un homme rare, que sera-ce d’un grand législateur ? Le premier n'a qu’à suivre le modèle que l'autre doit proposer. If it is true that a great prince is a rare man, what will a great legislator be like? The first has only to follow the model that the other must propose.)

So the political philosopher who has reached his goal and learned the truly architectonic knowledge is the one who can teach legislators and who is the umpire par excellence. And this knowledge is transferable to other places and times.

Political controversies presuppose the existence of the political community therefore ‘the classics are not primarily concerned with the question of whether and why there is, or should be, a political community’, nor, therefore, with the nature and purpose of a political community. To question the desirability or necessity of the survival of one’s own community normally means treason so the ultimate aim of foreign policy is not controversial. Classical political philosophy therefore focuses on the inner structure: who governs, what is just, the controversies between groups struggling for power, and these questions involve the danger of civil war.

The groups considered by the classics were: the good (merit), the rich, the noble, and the multitude or the poor, and a central struggle was that between rich and poor.

That form of government is the best, which provides the most effectually for a pure selection of the natural aristoi into offices of the government. (Jefferson to John Adams, 1813.)

Good men are those able and willing to advance the common interest regardless of private interests and those who do the right thing because it is noble and right. But it was also accepted by the classics that desirable results can come from men of bad character or by use of unjust means: ‘just’ and ‘useful’ are not identical, virtue can lead to ruin.

Classical political philosophy was therefore practical, not theoretical, and its main concern was the right guidance of political life, not description or understanding. Hegel’s demand that political philosophy refrain from construing a state as it ought to be and from teaching how it should be, and instead try to understand the actual state as rational was a rejection of classical political philosophy.

Classical political philosophy was therefore guided by and culminated in ‘value judgements’. Trying to replace the search for the best political order with a political science supposedly descriptive or analytical that rejects value judgements is, from the point of view of the classics, as absurd as the idea of a medicine which refuses to distinguish between health and sickness.

Distinctions between terms like justice/injustice and kindness/selfishness are moral distinctions intelligible and clear in everyday life, though they cannot be demonstrated or proved. One can silence but not truly convince people who do not have the taste for such moral distinctions just as Socrates could silence but not convert Callicles.

The political teaching of the classical philosophers was not for the intelligent men but for the decent men. Teaching the indecent would have seemed politically irresponsible. Their attitude was that the health of a political community requires its members are guided by decency therefore —

… the political community cannot tolerate a political science which is morally ‘neutral’ and which therefore tends to loosen the hold of moral principles on the minds of those who are exposed to it.

Inevitably the classical political philosopher had to consider what is virtue and what is that virtue whose possession gives a man the highest right to rule?

The philosopher is compelled to transcend not just common opinion and political opinion but political life as such, for he is ‘led to realise that the ultimate aim of political life cannot be reached by political life but only by a life devoted to contemplation, to philosophy’ and this finding sets limits to all political action and political planning. Ultimately political philosophy transforms itself into a discipline no longer concerned with political things in the normal sense but in the philosophical life itself. Socrates called his inquiries a quest for ‘the true political skill’. This philosophic life has vanished in modernity.

Philosophy was originally concerned with ‘the natural things’. Socrates was famous as a philosopher before he turned to political philosophy and became its founder — and Aristotle described political philosophy as ‘the philosophy concerning the human things’. Left to themselves philosophers would not descend to politics but would remain in what they considered ‘the island of the blessed’ — that is the contemplation of the truth (cf. Republic, 519b7-d7). But philosophy’s quest to understand its own purpose and nature — the contemplation of truth — inevitably involves consideration of opinion, of politics.

Why does politics need philosophy? The Republic and similar works were an attempt at a political justification for philosophy by showing that the well-being of the community depends on the study of philosophy. Such a justification was needed given few understood philosophy and, to the extent it was known about in classical Athens, it was often feared and hated — as Socrates experienced. Such justifications, aimed at normal citizens, had, following the example of Odysseus, to build on commonly held views. Strauss therefore argues that ‘political philosophy’ really means not the philosophic treatment of politics ‘but the political, or popular, treatment of philosophy’, an attempt to lead people from the political life to the philosophic life.

Introduction to The City and Man

The City and Man — published 1864 based on lectures recently given — has essays on Aristotle, Plato’s Republic and Thucydides.

Strauss opens the book with a series of propositions that go to the heart of modern philosophy, modern politics and what he described as ‘the crisis of the West’.

1. The theme of classical political philosophy is the City and Man.

2. Modern political philosophy presupposes Nature as understood by modern natural science and History as understood by the modern historical awareness.

3. Eventually these presuppositions prove incompatible with modern political philosophy.

4. Thus one seems to be confronted with the choice between abandoning political philosophy altogether and returning to classical political philosophy.

5. Yet such a return seems to be impossible. For what has brought about the collapse of modern political philosophy seems to have buried classical political philosophy, which did not even dream of the difficulties caused by what we believe to know of nature and history.

6. A simple continuation of the tradition of classical political philosophy is no longer possible.

7. As regards modern political philosophy, what originally was a political philosophy has turned into an ideology.

8. This fact may be said to form the core of the contemporary crisis of the West.

Strauss reflects on Spengler’s diagnosis of the decline of the West. For Spengler, the West was more than one high culture among others. The West is the only culture which has conquered the earth, the only culture which is open to all cultures and does not reject them all as forms of barbarism or tolerate them as ‘underdeveloped’, it is the only culture which has developed full consciousness of culture in general. And because it is the culture which reaches full self-consciousness, it is the final culture — the Owl of Minerva begins its flight in the dusk (Hegel’s formulation of the idea that philosophy and wisdom about a period emerge only after the period has passed). The decline of the West is therefore identical with the exhaustion of the possibility of high culture; the highest possibilities of man are exhausted.

But the highest possibilities of man cannot be exhausted as long as the fundamental riddles which confront man remain unsolved. Spengler’s analysis and prediction are wrong. Natural science considers itself susceptible of infinite progress therefore there cannot be a meaningful ‘end of history’, though there could be a ‘brutal stopping of man’s onward march through natural forces acting by themselves or directed by human brains and hands’.

Yet in one sense Spengler has proved to be right. Some decline of the West has occurred before our eyes. In 1913, the West — in the form of Britain, Germany and America — could have laid down the law for the world without firing a shot. Today the West’s survival is endangered by the East for the first time.

From the Communist Manifesto it would appear that the victory of Communism would be the complete victory of the West — of the synthesis, transcending the national boundaries, of British industry, the French Revolution and German philosophy — over the East. We see that the victory of Communism would mean indeed the victory of originally Western natural science but surely at the same time the victory of the most extreme form of Eastern despotism.

Strauss sets out exactly what he thinks the crisis of the West really is:

1. The West was once certain of its purpose — a universal purpose — a purpose in which all men could be united, and hence it had a clear vision of its future as the future of mankind.

2. We no longer have that certainty. Many despair of the future and this despair explains many forms of contemporary western degradation.

3. A society can be healthy without a universal purpose — it can be tribal and healthy. ‘But a society which was accustomed to understand itself in terms of a universal purpose cannot lose faith in that purpose without becoming completely bewildered.’

4. We see this universal purpose echoed in recent declarations during both world wars. These restate the purpose ‘stated originally by the most successful form of modern political philosophy’ which aspired to build on foundations laid by the classics but in opposition to the structure erected by classical political philosophy — ‘a society superior in truth and justice to the society toward which the classics expired.’

According to the modern project, philosophy or science was no longer to be understood as essentially contemplative and proud but as active and charitable; it was to be in the service of the relief of man’s estate; it was to be cultivated for the sake of human power; it was to enable man to become the master and owner of nature through the intellectual conquest of nature. Philosophy or science should make possible progress toward ever greater prosperity; it thus should enable everyone to share in all the advantages of society or life and therewith give full effect to everyone’s natural right to comfortable self-preservation and all that that right entails or to everyone’s natural right to develop all his faculties fully in concert with everyone else’s doing the same. The progress toward ever greater prosperity would thus become, or render possible, the progress toward ever greater freedom and justice. This progress would necessarily be the progress toward a society embracing equally all human beings: a universal league of free and equal nations, each nation consisting of free and equal men and women. For it had come to be believed that the prosperous, free, and just society in a single country or in only a few countries is not possible in the long run: to make the world safe for the Western democracies, one must make the whole globe democratic, each country in itself as well as the society of nations. Good order in one country presuppose good order in all countries and among all countries. The movement toward the universal society, or the universal state was thought to be guaranteed not only by the rationality, the universal validity, of the goal but also because the movement towards the goal seemed to be the movement of the large majority of men on behalf of the large majority of men: only small groups of men who, however, hold in thrall many millions of their fellow human beings new defend their own antiquated interests, resist that movement.

1. To summarise: a) science lets man conquer nature; b) this brings growing and spreading prosperity thereby fulfilling natural rights to a comfortable life; c) prosperity and comfort mean progress towards ever greater freedom and justice; d) human equality spreads to all societies; e) the world becomes some sort of universal league of free and equal nation states, for the safety of western democracy requires the whole globe becoming democratic; f) this progress will come not only because it is rational but because most people want it.

2. Fascism did not dent this story. But Communism did. For some time Communism seemed to many westerners as ‘a parallel movement to the Western movement — as it were its somewhat impatient, wild wayward twin who was bound to become mature, patient, and gentle’. But Communism responded to friendliness with contempt. Even in mortal danger and eager for Western help it would not give ‘even sincere words of thanks in return’ [a reference to Stalin and Lend Lease etc]. Communism was not a version of the ‘reactionism’ the Western movement had been fighting for centuries. The Western project could not provide against Communism as it had against its previous enemies. ‘For some time it seemed sufficient to say that while the Western movement agrees with Communism regarding the goal – the universal prosperous society, free and equal men and women – it disagrees with it regarding the means: for Communism, the end, the good of the whole human race, being the most sacred thing, justifies any means; whatever contributes to the achievement of the most sacred end partakes of its sacredness and is therefore itself sacred; whatever hinders the achievement of that end is devilish.’ Some murders are acceptable. But it came to be seen that ‘there is not only a difference of degree but of kind between the Western movement and Communism, and this difference was seen to concern morality, the choice of means.’ It became clearer than it had been for some time that no society can eradicate the evil in man: ‘as long as there will be men, there will be malice, envy, and hatred, and hence there cannot be a society which does not have to employ coercive restraint.’ And it became clearer that a) Communism will remain ‘the iron rule of a tyrant which is mitigated or aggravated by his fear of palace revolutions’ and b) ‘the only restraint in which the West can put some confidence is the tyrant’s fear of the West’s immense military power’.

3. Communism has forced the West to face that in the foreseeable future there will not be a universal state, unitary or federative. Even those who still contend the West’s purpose is universal must be satisfied for a while with ‘a practical particularism’, as Christianity and Islam, both based on universal claims, had to accept centuries of uneasy coexistence. The experience which has made the West doubtful of the viability of a world-society has also made it doubtful that affluence is the sufficient and even necessary condition of happiness and justice.

4. Social science has strongly veered into opposing the proposition that the universal and prosperous society constitutes the rational solution of the human problem. Social science proclaims its inability to validate any value judgements [see above on historicism etc]. It sees the modern political philosophy’s teaching about the universal and prosperous society as one ideology among many.

5. The shift in social science reflects the doubts about the modern project. ‘The modern project was originated as required by nature (natural right), i.e. it was originated by philosophers; the project was meant to satisfy in the most perfect manner the most powerful natural needs of men: nature was to be conquered for the sake of man who himself is supposed to possess a nature, an unchangeable nature; the originators of the project took it for granted that philosophy and science are identical. After some time it appeared that the conquest of nature requires the conquest of human nature and hence in the first place the questioning of the unchangeability of human nature: an unchangeable human nature might set absolute limits to progress. Accordingly, the natural needs of men could no longer direct the conquest of nature; direction had to come from reason as distinguished from nature, from the rational Ought as distinguished from the neutral Is. Thus philosophy (logic, ethics, aesthetics) as the study of the Ought or the norms became separated from science as the study of the Is. The ensuing depreciation of reason brought it about that while the study of the Is or science succeeded ever more in increasing men’s power, one could no longer distinguish between the wise or right and the foolish or wrong use of power. Science cannot teach wisdom. There are still some people who believe that this predicament will disappear when social science and psychology catch up with physics and chemistry. This belief is wholly unreasonable, for social science and psychology, however perfected, being sciences, can only bring about a still further increase of man’s power; they will enable men to manipulate man still better than ever before; they will as little teach man how to use his power over man or none-man as physics and chemistry do. The people who indulge this hope have not grasped the bearing of the distinction between facts and values.’

6. To summarise… The Western project originated in natural rights of man with an unchangeable nature. Science would conquer nature for the sake of these rights and this nature. But then the conquest of nature required the conquest of human nature and started questioning the unchangeability of human nature. So the conquest of nature had to be directed by reason, not by the natural needs of man. Philosophy became the study of the Ought, science the study of the Is. Science generated greater power but we lost the distinction between the wise/right and the foolish/wrong use of power. Science cannot teach wisdom. Progress in natural science will increase power but cannot teach how to use this power well.

7. The decay of political philosophy into ideology reveals itself in the replacement in universities of political philosophy by the history of political philosophy, i.e the replacement of something that seeks truth with a ‘survey of more or less brilliant errors’. Political philosophy will end up as the ‘footnotes to logic textbooks’ which deal with fact/value judgements, supplying slow learners with examples of the faulty transitions in political philosophy from fact to value. [!!]

8. While logic has eaten some of political philosophy, another chunk of what was formerly treated by political philosophy is now treated by social science. But social science asserts that all historical understanding is relative to the point of view of the historian, to his country and time, and the historian cannot understand a teaching as it was meant by its originator.

9. Strauss argues that one cannot understand today’s social science ‘without a return to classical political philosophy’. In studying classical political philosophy one is forced to ask whether the fact/value distinction is true and whether perhaps classical political philosophy is actually the true science of political things. The modern social scientist dismisses this on the basis that a return to the earlier position is impossible but ‘one must realise that this belief is a dogmatic assumption whose hidden basis is the belief in the progress or in the rationality of the historical process’.

10. We must, says Strauss, both return to study of classical political philosophy and face that ‘we cannot reasonably expect that a fresh understanding of classical political philosophy will supply us with recipes for today’s use. For the relative success of modern political philosophy has brought into being a kind of society wholly unknown to the classics, a kind of society to which the classical principles as stated and elaborated by the classics are not immediately applicable. Only we living today can possibly find a solution to the problems of today. But an adequate understanding of the principles as elaborated by the classics may be the indispensable starting point for an adequate analysis, to be achieved by us, of present-day society in its peculiar character, and for the wise application, to be achieved by us, of these principles to our tasks.’

11. The fact/value distinction problem is part of a larger problem — it emerged from the attempt to replace the citizen’s understanding with scientific understanding. But a ‘scientific understanding’ of politics is inevitably secondary or derivative. We must primarily understand political life as it is understood by citizen and statesman. ‘Classical political philosophy is the primary form of political science because the common sense understanding of political things is primary.’

This tour of the West’s philosophical-spiritual-epistemic crisis and the problems of modern social science/political science is the prelude to the essays on Aristotle, Plato and Thucydides.

I will start with Thucydides as he was a generation older and, per Nietzsche, his perspective is closer to the pre-Socratics than to Plato, though there are some interesting overlaps. One of the most interesting is the overlap between Thucydides Book III on civil war and Plato in the Republic at 560ff where he discusses the disparagement of moderation — a disparagement so forcefully and famously expressed by Callicles in Gorgias. (And it is a sign of our times that Bronze Age Pervert’s famous book can be accurately summarised by: Callicles was right.)

On Thucydides’ War of the Peloponnesians and the Athenians

This essay is in The City and Man, 1964.

Here is an online version of Jowett’s translation if you want to follow references.

The world of Thucydides seems entirely different to the world of Plato and Aristotle. Thucydides gives us an intense account of political life in its ‘harsh grandeur, ruggedness, and even squalor’ — a world of civil and foreign war, of life and death struggles. He does not try to transcend it, he stands in the midst of the turmoil. He makes us sympathise with Themistocles and Pericles. He charts the hopes for the Sicilian Expedition and the nightmare of the quarries of Syracuse. [Strauss says he does not try to transcend it — but isn’t the deliberate elucidation of universals, such as the debate on Mitylene and Melos or the tragic expedition to Sicily, an attempt at transcendence?]

It is not the world of political philosophy, the quest for the best regime possible in all its unobtainable splendour. Compared to the philosophical search for the best regime, the just order, politics loses most of its charm — only ‘the charm of the greatness of the founder and legislator seems to survive the severest of all tests’. But perhaps the teachings of Thucydides and Plato supplement each other.

Plato in the Republic describes the best regime at rest. In the Timaeus, Socrates says he wants to see the best regime in motion, i.e at war. Socrates feels unable to present properly the best regime in motion. But Critias tells the story of Athens’ legendary war with Atlantis, in which Athens justly resisted aggression and defended Greece. It reminds us of Thucydides because it is an account of the greatest motion and because the Atlantic war reminds of the Sicilian Expedition.

Thucydides’ great theme is the greatest war, the greatest motion. An Athenian regime seen as imperfect by Plato and Thucydides embarks on the disaster of the Sicilian expedition and destroys itself.

Thucydides says very little about economics, religion or intellectual history. It is a book of politics, war, and diplomacy.

According to Aristotle, history is un-philosophic or pre-philosophic, it deals with individuals (people, states, empires, wars etc). Philosophy is un-historical, it deals with species, with wars and empires in general, with permanent characteristics. Poetry lies between them.

But Thucydides shows us ‘the universal in the individual event’ and this is why his work is supposed to be ‘a possession for all time’ — he says those who read it will understand not just the past but their own times as well, ‘the like events which may be expected to happen hereafter in the order of human things’ (Jowett, I.22.4). Strauss says we should not try to understand him in the light of Aristotle’s distinctions. Somewhat like Plato showing the universal through the singular character of Socrates, so Thucydides shows the universal through the specific war he recounts.

Thucydides praises the Spartan regime, which had survived hundreds of years, for its moderation and stability. They were the first to live a style of life peculiarly Greek, ‘a mean between barbaric penury and barbaric pomp’, a style of simplicity and equality. This regime was the source of Spartan power.

Near the end of his book (VIII.96.5), Thucydides summed up the different characters: the Spartans slow and timorous, the Athenians quick and adventurous. The Spartans were prosperous and moderate at the same time. The Athenians became moderate after they were cast down by disaster and fear. Thucydides’ taste in regimes is, says Strauss, the same as Plato’s and Aristotle’s.

He reveals some of his most important thoughts in his reflections on the revolutions and civil wars (III.81-84).

Strauss does not quote it all but I will because, as I’ve written before, it’s maybe the most important and insightful passage ever written about politics. Unlike the speeches, there is no doubt as to the voice — this is explicitly Thucydides’ own judgements.

[I’ve hacked around this quoted passage in May 2026 after reading some commentaries and different translations.]

[3.81] … Every form of death was to be seen, and everything, and more than everything, that commonly happens in revolutions, happened then. The father slew the son and the suppliants were torn from the temples and slain near them; some of them were even walled up in the temple of Dionysus, and there perished. To such extremes of cruelty did revolutions go, and this seemed to be the worst of revolutions, because it was the first.

[3.82.] For not long afterwards nearly the whole Hellenic world was in commotion; in every city, the chiefs of the democracy and of the oligarchy were struggling, the one to bring in the Athenians, the other the Spartans. Now in time of peace, men would have had no excuse for introducing either, and no desire to do so; but, when they were at war, the introduction of a foreign alliance on one side or the other to the hurt of their enemies and the advantage of themselves was easily effected by the dissatisfied party.

And revolution brought upon the the cities of Hellas many terrible calamities, such as have been and always will be while human nature remains the same, but which are more or less aggravated and differ in character with every new combination of circumstance. In peace and prosperity, both states and individuals are actuated by higher motives, because they do not fall under the dominion of imperious necessities. But war, which takes away the comfortable provision of daily life, is a teacher of violence* and tends to assimilate men’s characters to their conditions. [* I’ve changed this (6/5/26) from ‘hard master’ (Jowett) to ‘teacher of violence’ (Gomme’s notes) as the latter is more literal and starker. Gomme also translates this as: ‘But war, destroying the ease of everyday life, is a violent taskmaster; and assimilates most men’s tempers to the conditions around them.’]

When troubles had once begun in the cities, those who followed carried the revolutionary spirit further and further, and determined to outdo the report of all who had proceeded them by the ingenuity of their enterprises and the atrocity of their revenges. The meaning of words had no longer the same relation to things but was changed by them as they thought proper. Reckless daring was held to be loyal courage; prudent delay was the excuse of a coward; moderation was the disguise of unmanly weakness; to know everything was to do nothing. Frantic energy was the true quality of a man. A conspirator who wanted to be safe was a recreant in disguise. The lover of violence was always trusted and his opponent suspected. He who succeeded in a plot was deemed knowing, but a still greater master in craft was he who detected one. On the other hand, he who plotted from the first to have nothing to do with plots was a breaker up of parties and a poltroon who was afraid of the enemy. In a word, he who could outstrip another in a bad action was applauded and so was he who encouraged to evil one who had no idea of it. The tie of party was stronger then the tie of blood because a partisan was more ready to dare without asking why. For party associations are not based upon any established law, nor do they seek the public good, they are formed in defiance of the laws and from self-interest. The seal of good faith was not divine law but fellowship in crime. If an enemy when he was in the ascendant offered fair words, the opposite party received them not in a generous spirit, but by a jealous watchfulness of his actions. Revenge was dearer than self preservation. Any agreement sworn to by either party, when they could do nothing else, were binding as long as both were powerless. But he who on a favourable opportunity first took courage, and struck at his enemy when he saw him off his guard, had greater pleasure in a perfidious that he would have had in an open act of revenge; he congratulated himself that he had taken the safer course, and also that he had overreached his enemy and gained the prize of superior ability. In general, the dishonest more easily gain credit for cleverness than the simple for goodness. Men take a pride in the one but are ashamed of the other.

[3.82.8] +The cause of all these evils was the love of power, originating in avarice and ambition+, and the party-spirit which is engendered by them when men are fairly embarked in a contest. For the leaders on either side used specious names, the one party professing to uphold the constitutional equality [ἰσονομίας] of the many, the other the wisdom [σώφρονος] of an aristocracy, while they made the public interests, to which in name they were devoted, in reality their prize. Striving in every way to overcome each other, they committed the most monstrous crimes, yet even these were surpassed by the magnitude of their revenges which they pursued to the very utmost, neither party observing any definite limits either of justice or public expediency, but both alike making the caprice of the moment their law. Either by the help of an unrighteous sentence, or grasping power with the strong hand, they were eager to satiate the impatience of party-spirit. Neither faction cared for religion but any fair pretence which succeeded in effecting some odious purpose was greatly lauded. And the citizens who were of neither party fell a prey to both, either they were disliked because they held aloof, or men were jealous of their surviving.

[3.82.8 The sentence above denoted between + and + is: πάντων δ᾽ αὐτῶν αἴτιον ἀρχὴ ἡ διὰ πλεονεξίαν καὶ φιλοτιμίαν. ‘The cause of it all [these evils] was love of power to gratify greed and personal ambition’ (Gomme). πλεονεξίαν = the lust for more. φιλοτιμίαν = love of honour. So perhaps literally: The cause of it all was power pursued for the sake of the lust for more and [mixed with?] love of honour.]

[3.83] Thus revolution [στάσεις] gave birth to every form of wickedness in Greece. The simplicity [τὸ εὔηθες] which is so large an element in a noble nature [τὸ γενναῖον] was laughed to scorn and disappeared. [Gomme: ‘that simplicity in which a sense of honour has so large a part…’] An attitude of perfidious antagonism everywhere prevailed, for there was no word binding enough, nor oath terrible enough, to reconcile enemies. Each man was strong only in the conviction nothing was secure; he must look to his own safety and could not afford to trust others. Inferior intellects generally succeeded best. For, aware of their own deficiencies, and fearing the capacity of their opponents, for whom they were no match in powers of speech, and whose subtle wits were more likely to anticipate them in contriving evil, they struck boldly and at once. But the cleverer sort, presuming in their arrogance that they would be aware in time, and disdaining to act when they could think, were taken off guard and easily destroyed. [!!]

[3.84] Now in Corcyra, most of these deeds were perpetrated and for the first time. There was every crime which men could commit in revenge who had been governed not wisely, but tyrannically, and now had the oppressor at their mercy. There was the dishonest designs of others who were longing to be relieved from their habitual poverty and were naturally animated by a passionate desire for their neighbour’s goods. And there were crimes of another class which men commit, not from covetousness, but from the enmity which equals foster towards one another until they are carried away by their blind rage into the extremes of pitiless cruelty. At such a time the life of the city was all in disorder, and human nature, which is always ready to transgress the laws, having now trampled them under foot, delighted to show that her passions were ungovernable, that she was stronger than justice, and the enemy of everything above her. If malignity had not exercised a fatal power, how could anyone have preferred revenge to piety and gain to innocence? But when men are retaliating upon others, they are reckless of the future and do not hesitate to annul those common laws of humanity to which every individual trusts for his own hope of deliverance should he ever be overtaken by calamity; they forget that in their own hour of need they will look for them in vain.

Such were the passions which the citizens of Corcyra first of all Hellenes displayed towards one another. (III, 82-4, Jowett translation.)

[6.5.2026. Looking at Gomme (II.p382), he says that most now agree that section 3.84, starting above with ‘Now in Corcyra’, is not genuine but is ‘a moderately good imitation’ added later. The previous passage has a slightly unfinished feel. Gomme regards the importance of the passage 3.82-83 as so great and Thucydides’ language ‘chosen with much care, yet so difficult’ that he provides his own full translation from p383.]

Strauss summarises it as: moderation, justice and piety belong together and their enemy calls itself daring and shrewdness or intelligence. While causation is not exact, there is a kinship between foreign war and civil war: war is a violent teacher, a teacher of violence by violence, an intermediate stage between peace and civil war. Even if moderation is a handicap in war, it remains superior. Depravation is above all the destruction of moderation and the depravity of civil war mirrors the depravity of the plague that hit Athens and swept away moderation, piety, law and fear of the gods.

We also hear Thucydides’ own voice when he talks in horror of the massacre by the Thracians of every living thing in Mycalessus — every adult, every child and every beast, they stormed the school and killed all the children, ‘no calamity more deplorable occurred during the war’ (VII.29).

We also hear his voice in his judgement on the tragic Nicias, sent to command the Sicilian Expedition. He was dedicated to the war and was a pious man who strove to behave properly yet was executed:

No one of the Hellenes in my time was less deserving of so miserable an end, for he lived in the practice of every virtue. (VII.86.5)

The Corinthian speech urging Sparta to war (I.68-71) also stresses Spartan moderation, slowness to fight, reliability, old-fashionedness in contrast to Athenian daring, innovation, quickness etc. The Spartan King Archidamus, famous for intelligence and moderation, wanted to preserve the peace (I.79-85). He asserts that the Spartan qualities the Corinthians objected to are the cause of her greatness. Moderation guarantees against hubris, against insolent pride and abjectness in disaster.

And, says Strauss, Thucydides makes clear that the Athenians compelled Sparta to go to war, that most Greeks and Delphi sided with Sparta, the plague smote Athens, and Athens’ empire appeared to most — as Pericles himself told the Assembly — as ‘a tyranny’.

You have an empire to lose, and there is the danger to which the hatred of your imperial rule has exposed you… For by this time your empire has become a tyranny which in the opinion of mankind may have been unjustly gained, but which cannot be safely surrendered… To be hateful and offensive has ever been the fate of those who have aspired to empire. (2.63 and cf. V.104-5)

And Pericles could openly envisage the possibility of Athens’ fall — ‘Even if we should be compelled at last to abate somewhat of our greatness, for all things have their times of growth and decay’, he says in one speech.

The Funeral Speech is an epic, glittering, forever famous account of Athens’ greatness but that’s Pericles speaking, not Thucydides. Strauss thinks Thucydides was overall more sympathetic to the Spartan regime. Pericles in his three speeches does not mention moderation (sophrosyne).

Athens became its most powerful under Pericles but was not the best, most just, regime. It was a democracy in name but in fact the rule of Pericles. At II.65) Thucydides summarises Pericles’s career:

1. Under him Athens reached the height of its greatness.

2. The war showed he’d formed ‘a true estimate of Athenian power’. (I’m also studying Andy Marshall and ‘net assessment’ and this connects.)

3. His great foresight and transparent integrity were missed after his death.

4. His advice of strategic patience and defensiveness was ignored in favour of adventures which proved ruinous.

5. ‘He led them rather than was led by them.’

Thus Athens, though still in name a democracy, was in fact ruled by her greatest citizen. But his successors were more on an equality with one another, and, each one struggling to be first himself, they were ready to sacrifice the whole conduct of affairs to the whims of the people. Such weakness in a great and imperial city led to many errors, of which the greatest was the Sicilian expedition; not that the Athenians miscalculated their enemy's power, but they themselves, instead of consulting for the interests of the expedition which they had sent out, were occupied in intriguing against one another for the leadership of the democracy, and not only grew remiss in the management of the army, but became embroiled, for the first time, in civil strife. And yet after they had lost in the Sicilian expedition the greater part of their fleet and army, and were distracted by revolution at home, still they held out three years not only against their former enemies, but against the Sicilians who had combined with them, and against most of their own allies who had risen in revolt. Even when Cyrus the son of the King joined in the war and supplied the Peloponnesian fleet with money, they continued to resist, and were at last overthrown, not by their enemies, but by themselves and their own internal dissensions. So that at the time Pericles was more than justified in the conviction at which his foresight had arrived, that the Athenians would win an easy victory over the unaided forces of the Peloponnesians.

At VIII.97, Thucydides gives his judgement on the best Athenian regime and it was the oligarchy of 411, the oligarchy of the Five Thousand (after they deposed the 400), not the famous democracy under Pericles:

This government during its early days was the best which the Athenians ever enjoyed within my memory. Oligarchy and democracy were duly attempered. And thus after the miserable state into which she had fallen the city was again able to raise her head.

Strauss writes that for Thucydides, a city is what it is by virtue of the highest to which it looks up. The healthy city looks up not to the laws it can make and unmake but to the unwritten laws, the divine laws, to the gods of the city. The great city must transcend itself. A city can be guilty of hubris and disregard the divine law: the speech of the ambassadors at Melos was followed by disaster in Sicily. (But Strauss also refers to this as ‘the most comprehensive instruction which Thucydides silently conveys, the silent character of of the conveyance being required by the chaste character of his piety’.)

Much more than Herodotus, he looks for natural explanations over divine explanations. He belongs to the Athens in which Anaxagoras and Protagoras taught and were prosecuted for impiety. The Funeral Speech was silent about the divine law and Pericles noticeably does not talk of the gods in his three speeches. His only reference to the superhuman is the need to bear its effects ‘of necessity’.

Speeches

Strauss analyses (p163) the controversial question of the speeches and the extent to which they express Thucydides’s own ideas.

Thucydides suggests that we can not only be deeply confused about ancient things but about things happening right in front of us. He stresses his reports are based on what he saw and heard himself and what he learned from others ‘of whom I made the most careful and particular enquiry’.

So little trouble do men take in the search after truth, so readily do they accept whatever comes first to hand. (I.20)

Strauss singles out some speeches:

• Brassidas, IV.85ff.

• Hermocrates, IV.59, who brilliantly foresaw the Athenian expedition but was ignored.

• Alcibiades in Sparta, VI.89, twisting and turning to justify his previous behaviour.

• Athenagoras, VI.36, the Sicilian demagogue who told the people not to believe reports of the Athenian expedition and argued that the only thing that will end the subversive network of Syracuse’s aristocratic youth is democratic terror, a terror justified because there is no decent basis for opposing the democratic regime. It is, says Strauss, the ‘clearest and most comprehensive exposition of the democratic view’ in the book, for the Funeral Speech is about the Athenian regime under Pericles which is not the same as pure democracy.

• Cleon, III.37, on how ‘a democracy cannot manage an empire’.

• The contrasting pre-battle speeches of the Spartans and Athenian Phormio in which the former appeals to self-interest (fear and glory) while Phormio appeals to public spirit, a clear though implicit contrast, says Strauss, confirming the Corinthian characterisation of the Athenians at the start of the war.

• The unnamed Athenian who speaks at I.72 in Sparta. The speech is unique in being the only one preceded by a summary by Thucydides. Here the Athenian envoys claimed that their true claim to the empire was the intelligence of Themistocles and the zeal of the Athenians at Salamis when they saved Greece. They also claim that they were compelled to build their empire— compelled by fear, interest and honour, the three great motives of man, i.e they were compelled by human nature. And it is fairness that distinguishes their empire from others. This ‘amazing frankness’ truly reveals Athenian power, says Strauss, because ‘only the most powerful can afford to utter the principles which they utter’.

• The Athenian speech should be contrasted with the sole Spartan speech in Athens, IV.17ff, after Sparta’s disaster at Pylos. The Athenians have come out ahead partly by good luck, say the Spartans. But good luck can’t be relied on so it would be wise to cut a good deal now. (Strauss comments that Sparta ceded much more after the disaster at Pylos than Athens after the disaster of Sicily.)

Strauss argues that the first speech in the book opens with the word ‘just’ (right) and the second, replying to the first, starts with ‘necessary’ (compulsory). The relation of justice and necessity is a core theme of Thucydides, a theme ‘so unobtrusively and so subtly indicated’ showing the point of view from which Thucydides looks on the War.

Thucydides says of the origins of the war that:

1. The ‘truest’, but unavowed, cause of the war was Sparta’s fear of Athens’ growing power.

2. This fear of Athens ‘compelled’ Sparta to go to war. Sparta’s actions were more driven by feelings of compulsion than of justice, says Thucydides.

3. There were conflicts in the buildup that seemed to be the causes but were not really, including the row over Corcyra, Thebes’ invasion of Plataeae, the Megarian decree — the ‘avowed’ causes.

4. The Spartan King denied that the Athenians had broken the treaty (78.4, 81.5, 85.2). The ephor contended that Athens had done wrong to Sparta’s allies and the Spartan Assembly agreed (86-88). At IV.20, after the Pylos disaster, the Spartans say to the Athenians ‘whether we or you drove [Greece] into war is uncertain’.

5. At V.20.1, he says that the war started with the invasion of Attica implying Sparta had broken the treaty. The Spartans acknowledged this to themselves by the end of the first phase of the war. At VII.18.2, the Spartans reflect, after Athens embarks on the Sicilian Expedition, that, ‘They considered also that this time [in the second phase of the war] they [Athens] had been the first offenders against the treaty whereas in the former war the transgression had rather been on their own [Sparta’s] side. For the Thebans had entered Plataea in time of peace and they themselves had refused arbitration when offered by the Athenians, although the former treaty forbade war in case an adversary was willing to submit to arbitration. They felt their ill-success was deserved… The Spartans concluded that the guilt of their former transgression was now shifted to the Athenians…’

6. So Athens was in the right in the first part and Thucydides makes clear in his own voice at VI.105 that Sparta was in the right in the second part: ‘the Athenians gave the Spartans a right to complain of them and completely justified measures of retaliation’.

Ananke

[Ananke (ἀνάγκη) was a noun (constraint, necessity, force) and a goddess depicted holding a spindle — a goddess of fate and mother of the Fates. Aeschylus refers to her above.]

Compulsion justifies an act which in itself would be unjust (IV.98).

The Athenians acted unjustly and were propelled by hubris.

But the Athenians claimed (I.75) they were compelled to build their empire by honour, glory and fear — of Persia and Sparta. And at IV.98 they say that actions compelled by the necessity of war are forgiven by gods.

At Melos (V.85ff) the Athenian ambassadors famously warned that the Melians should consider not justice but their real situation and Athens’ power to compel them. Athens cannot tolerate islands remaining free, it will encourage revolts against her power. Yielding to an overwhelming force is not disgraceful but prudent. They should not unwisely trust in prayers or gods.

But you and we should say what we really think and aim only at what is possible, for we both alike know that into the discussion of human affairs the question of justice only enters where the pressure of necessity is equal, and that the powerful exact what they can, and the weak grant what they must. (V.89)

It is for the interests of us both that you not be destroyed. (91) Your enmity is not half so mischievous to us as your friendship, for the one is in the eyes of our subjects an argument of our power, the other of our weakness. (95)

For of the gods we believe and of men we know, that by a law of their nature wherever they can rule they will. (105) Many men with their eyes still open to the consequences have found the word ‘honour’ too much for them, and have suffered a mere name to lure them on, until it has drawn down upon them real and irretrievable calamities; through their own folly they have incurred a worse dishonour than fortune would have inflicted upon them. If you are wise, you will not run this risk… To maintain our rights against equals, to be politic with superiors, and to be moderate towards inferiors is the path of safety. (111)

The Melians trusted in gods and Sparta and rejected Athens’ offer. All men of military age were killed, women and children were enslaved. (Sparta similarly allowed the Thebans to massacre the Plataeans but the speeches are not so dramatic so it is much less remembered! The Spartans simply asked the Plataeans — have you done us any service? — and then killed them all. I.e they acted just as the Athenians described them to the Melians! III.68)

We should contrast the earlier case of Mitylene. Here the Athenian Assembly decided to slaughter the men and enslave the women and children but they then felt queasy and changed their minds. Cleon the demagogue criticised their change of heart. He reminded them that ‘your empire is a despotism’ and the ‘allies’ are ‘held down by force’ (cf. II.63). Cleon also warns against clever speeches for mercy which have been procured by bribery [NB. 2022-5 anybody who warns about the Ukraine war is accused of being ‘a Putin shill’ etc].

For if they were right in revolting, you must be wrong in maintaining your empire. But if, right or wrong, you are resolved to rule, then rightly or wrongly they must be chastised for your good… Chastise them as they deserve and prove by an example to your other allies that rebellion will be punished with death. (III.40)

Diodotus argued only to kill a few and spare the rest. He explicitly rests his argument on expediency, not justice. The Mitylenaeans deserve punishment but that isn’t the point.

The question for us rightly considered is not, what are their crimes? But what is for our interest?… We are not at law with them and do not want to be told what is just. We are considering a matter of policy.

He even asks them not to be misled by ‘the superior justice’ of Cleon’s argument! Fear of slaughter does not deter colonies from revolting. But it might make people dig in and make our lives harder. Endless sieges waste our money and when we win we take over wrecks! Slaughter will push oligarchs and the people together for the latter will know we will slaughter them all anyway. The Athenians narrowly agreed with Diodotus and a second message was sent to cancel the slaughter.

Melos and Sicily

The Melian dialogue contains the clearest expression in Thucydides of the denial of a divine law which must be respected or which moderates a city’s desire for having more. And Pericles himself encouraged the idea that Athens could and should desire to have more. Callicles and Thrasymachus assert that stronger individuals do and should desire to have more. Can you encourage citizens to think their state can have more than others without also encouraging individuals to think the same? Strauss argues that Pericles did not realise that the unjust understanding of the common good is bound to undermine dedication to the common good and did not give sufficient weight to the precarious character of the harmony between private and public interest.

The Sicilian Expedition was contrary to Pericles’ strategy for the war: caution, patience, preserve the navy and no big gambles. But Thucydides is clear that its failure was not because of hubris or as punishment from the gods for Melos or because it was strategically doomed — he stresses that it could have worked. Athens lost the war because of disunity at home and competitive pressures among the elites.

Pericles derived his authority from his obviously superior capacity and integrity. He was honest with the demos and told them unpleasant truths. But after he died elites vied to be pre-eminent and sacrificed the public interest by pandering to ‘the whims of the people’. This culminated in the disaster with Sicily. Athens did not miscalculate the strength of her opponents but its elites were ‘occupied in intriguing against one another for the leadership’ and became ‘embroiled in civil strife’. Thucydides stressed the fact that Athens still held out after the Sicilian disaster and Persia joined in and was only finally undone by ‘their own internal dissensions’ — the failure of the unity and patriotism celebrated in Pericles’ funeral speech — which demonstrated how right Pericles had been in his judgement that a patient, careful and united Athens would win. (II.65)

He makes clear that the conflict between private and public interests was central to the Sicilian disaster. At VI.15.4, he makes clear that Athens would have won if they had not replaced Alcibiades. The demos did not trust his wild audacity. Although his military skills were unrivalled they entrusted the war to others ‘and so they speedily shipwrecked the state’. Nicias was virtuous but did not have the temperament or skills for such a project.

Alcibiades had gone to Sicily as a general. But the Athenians were overwhelmed with fears after the infamous profaning of the mysteries and thought there was an aristocratic plot to overthrow the democracy. Alcibiades was summoned back from Sicily. Realising the febrile mood in Athens, where many had been executed on flimsy evidence of informers, he jumped ship and made his way to the Spartans. [Critias was arrested but released.] He tried an audacious game — to play Spartans against Athenians, the Persian King against Spartans and Athenians, the Athenian oligarchs and the demos against each other, hoping to be king of Athens and more.

Strauss points to the discussion between Demosthenes and Nicias in Sicily. Leaders had to fear the action of the demos when things went wrong. Demosthenes suggested returning to Athens and abandoning the venture. Nicias replied that the demos would take a dim view, he and Demosthenes would be accused of treachery by demagogues and be disgraced. So he preferred to stay in Sicily and be killed by his enemies. (VII.47-48) For Strauss, Nicias behaved out of justified fear of disgrace ‘like a traitor’. Thucydides states that he deserved his fate ‘least of the Greeks of my time … because of his full devotion to the pursuit of virtue as understood by old established custom’.

Nicias like the Melians trusted in the gods. Both were disappointed. The hopes of both were unfounded.

The Spartan manner and the Athenian manner

Strauss writes that Thucydides understood ‘cause’ as meaning most importantly the character of the regimes, which he saw as more important than things like economies and climate, and the course of the war is the ‘self-revelation of Sparta and Athens’.

The Athenians on Melos say that the Spartans identify what is pleasant with what is honourable and what is expedient with what is just — and it is often dangerous to pursue the just and the Spartans dislike such risks. Athens, by implication, is profoundly different: it will not pretend that what is expedient is also what’s just. And the Athenians soon disgracefully massacre the Melians.

Pericles’ Funeral Speech is the grandest summary of the Athenian character and why Athens is worth dying for. The qualities which distinguish her are those least associated with Sparta such as generosity, freedom, love of beauty and wisdom. The ultimate justification of the empire is not compulsion, fear, or profit but everlasting glory.

Contrast Themistocles and Pausanias, king of Sparta. The former was something without Athens because he was distinguished by his extraordinary talents. The latter was nothing without Sparta and his treachery was not a threat. Thucydides presents a galaxy of outstanding Athenians and only one outstanding Spartan: Brasidas. While Thucydides prefers the Spartan regime to the extreme democracy, he makes abundantly clear that it is Athens which produces amazing individuals.

Even the loathsome Cleon contrasts favourably with Alcidas the Spartan whom the Spartans trusted more than they did Brasidas. Alcidas slaughtered various Athenian allies simply following Spartan practice until it was pointed out to him by some Spartan allies that his slaughter would make it harder to build alliances. It’s clear the thought never occurred to him. Alcidas is, says Strauss, lower than even Cleon.

The only Spartan who really gives weight by his conduct to the Spartan claim to be ‘liberators’ was Brasidas. Pericles did not make such claims, he simply argued the war was necessary to retain the empire. His Funeral Speech shows the harmony of Athens and the harmony between himself and the demos based on the harmony between Pericles’ private and public interest.

Contrast what Athens/Mitylene and Sparta/Plataeae show us about them as judges. The crime of Plataeae is loyalty to Athens. The crime of Mitylene is breaking a treaty. The Plataeaeans are massacred without a voice raised in their defence. Mitylene is condemned and reprieved. The Athenians discuss not just guilt/justice but also expediency. The Spartans consider openly only guilt and revenge — but of course in reality they regard enabling the Thebans’ hatred as in their own self-interest, i.e the Spartans act just as the Athenians on Melos warned the island: Sparta defined their self-interest as justice.

Contrast what Athens/ Sicily and Sparta/Pylos show us about them in adversity. The Spartans immediately sued for peace after the 300 were cut off. The surrender was so shocking — so striking in its symmetry to Thermopylae — that it was not until Sparta’s victory at Mantinea that they shook off the disgrace: they ‘wiped out the charge of cowardice … and of general stupidity and sluggishness… They were now thought to have been hardly used by fortune [at Pylos] but in character to be the same as ever’ (V.75). But Athens responded to the Sicilian disaster not with appeals for peace but with another huge effort.

The only time Thucydides uses the noun eros was in describing the eros of the Athenians for the Sicilian Expedition (VI.24.3). [Jowett translates it as ‘All alike were seized with a passionate desire to sail’, Hobbes as ‘every one alike fell in love with the enterprise’.] Strauss points out that Pericles had called upon the Athenians to become lovers (erastai) of their city. These lovers now wanted to adorn their city with Sicily — a willingness to sacrifice everything, all private interests. Also compare Pericles’ famous comment about the old parents losing their only son and Alcibiades (VI.16.5) saying that only glory after death brings harmony between private and public interest.

Strauss argues — if the highest eros is that for the city and if the city reaches its peak in an eros like that of Athens for Sicily, then eros is necessarily tragic — as Plato suggests, the city is the tragedy par excellence.

Most excellent of Strangers [i.e the tragic poets], we ourselves, to the best of our ability, are the authors of a tragedy at once superlatively fair and good; at least, all our polity is framed as a representation of the fairest and best life, which is in reality, as we assert, the truest tragedy. Thus we are composers of the same things as yourselves, rivals of yours as artists and actors of the fairest drama, which, as our hope is, true law, and it alone, is by nature competent to complete. (Laws 817b)

At VIII.96 Thucydides describes the Spartans’ lack of initiative as what made them ‘the most convenient enemies the Athenians could possibly have had’: the Athenians were quick and adventurous; the Spartans were slow and timorous. The Syracusans ‘who were most like them’ fought best against Athens.

Sparta wins, says Strauss, only by becoming more Athenian. Athens, the teacher of Greece, taught Sparta to be more like her.

The questionable universalism of the city

Strauss stresses again: the failure in Sicily was not because of hubris, it could have worked. And afterwards Athens has the success of Kynossema, just as Sparta recovered from Pylos with Mantinea, a success which restores Athenian morale and hope (VIII.106). This improvement came, though, after a shift to the regime of the Five Thousand (VIII.97) and decision to welcome back Alcibiades, whom the demos thought the only one who could save them and somehow break up the alliance of Sparta and Persia. (The real mover behind the extreme oligarchy of the 400 was Antiphon who Thucydides praised for his great virtue and ‘remarkable powers of thought and gifts of speech’ but who preferred not to speak publicly (VIII.68). When the regime fell and Antiphon had to give a speech in his own defence, it was the greatest made ‘tried on a capital charge down to my time’.)

Pericles’ Funeral Speech glorifying Athens points towards a longing for sempiternal and universal fame and perhaps universal empire: during the war, the conquest of Sicily, Carthage and all Greece is envisaged. This is the opposite of moderation. And there is also in Athens the universalism of love of beauty and wisdom.

Thucydides bases the eternal fame of his work — ‘a possession for all time’ — on the fact it brings to light the sempiternal and universal nature of man as the ground of the deeds, speeches, and thoughts it records. And in groping towards an understanding of Thucydides, we understand war and peace, Greeks and barbarians, Athens and Sparta, human nature and politics. And it is Thucydides’ work which brings eternal fame for Periclean Athens. Strauss says there is the universalism of the city, of Athens, and the universalism of understanding, of Thucydides’ history.

In Athens, two universalisms become fused — the political universalism is transfigured by the true universalism of beauty and wisdom, and thus acquires its tragic character. But the synthesis of the two universalisms is impossible and only by seeing this can we understand the grandeur of the attempt to overcome it.

[I do not understand what Strauss is saying about universalism. Feel free to take a stab in comments!]

Wisdom is inseparable from self-knowledge. We know from Thucydides himself that he was an Athenian. Through understanding him we see that his wisdom was made possible ‘by the sun’ and by Athens — by her power and wealth, by her defective polity, by her spirit of daring innovation, by her active doubt of the divine law. By understanding his work one sees with one’s own eyes that Athens was in a sense the home of wisdom in others. Wisdom cannot be presented as a spectacle, in the way in which battles and the like can be presented. Wisdom cannot be ‘said’. It can only be ‘done’. Only through understanding Thucydides’ work can one see that Athens was in a sense the school of Greece; from Pericles’ mouth we merely hear it asserted. Wisdom cannot be presented by being spoken about.

Thucydides believes in moderation and piety. The men of noble simplicity and the men of Odyssean versatility both became victims of the second rate ruthless power-seekers (III.83 above). Diodotus’ speech reveals more of Thucydides himself than any other speech. Its powerful contrast with Cleon comes from its moderation — an act of humanity compatible with Athens’ survival. But Diodotus goes into the core problems of a democracy: speakers are trying to manipulate the audience for their own prestige and power, people regard as wise those the voters agree with, there’s a tendency to accuse others of stupidity or evil/treachery, it’s extremely hard to distinguish between charlatans and wise honest men. Voters won’t trust an idea unless they trust the speaker but their criteria for trust are irrational. So the wise and moderate are incentivised to lie too!

Gomme says Diodotus comes close to denying the value of free debate but Strauss says it’s tougher than that — he explains the problems of democracy so clearly as to point to a different regime in which the moderate and sensible have more sway. What Diodotus says at III.42 is much tougher than what Pericles says at II.62.1.

In this city, and in this city only, to do good openly and without deception is impossible… [W]henever you meet with a reverse, led away by the passion of the moment you punish the individual who is your adviser for his error of judgement, and your own error you condone, if the judgements of many concurred in it.

He asks — is capital punishment effective, does it deter? No — nomos is weaker than physis (III.45).

For poverty inspires necessity with daring; and wealth engenders avarice in pride and insolence; and the various conditions of human life, as they severely fall under the sway of some mighty and fatal power, through the agency of the passions lure men to destruction… In a word, then, it is impossible, and simply absurd to suppose, that human nature [physis] when bent upon some favourite project can be restrained either by the power of law [nomos] or by any other terror.

It’s a complex rhetorical argument, I won’t go into details (cf. p233ff).

Political history and philosophy

Thucydides is not just a political man, not just a historian who sees the singulars in the light of universals, he is a philosophic historian. He is not radically alien to Plato and Aristotle. He and Plato are in fundamental agreement regarding the good and bad and noble and base.

Plato sketches what he thinks is the best regime. Pericles and Athenagoras speak of the ideal regime but Thucydides does not in his own voice. Thucydides states only what he thinks is the best regime Athens had in his life, a mixed regime neither pure democracy nor pure oligarchy. At VIII.97.2 he writes of the Five Thousand:

This government during its early days was the best which the Athenians ever enjoyed within my memory. Oligarchy and democracy were duly attempered.

In the third book of Laws, Plato surveys a similar period of history as Thucydides’ pre-history to the war. And the Menexenus calls for comparison with the Funeral Speech, argues Strauss. Plato blames the shift from the regime that won the Persian Wars to the extreme democracy on the disregard of ancestral laws on music and theatre. By making the audience — rather than the best and wisest — the judges of songs and plays, Athens decayed (Laws, 698a9ff; 700a5-701c4). Plato says the land battles of Marathon and Plataeae (i.e hoplites) saved Greece, not Salamis (the navy). But the story in Thucydides suggests that Athens had no choice but to develop the navy and this meant extending the political voice of the poor who manned the ships. Democracy was not wilful folly but a necessity.

For Plato, chance mostly decides which regimes are established and human choices operate only in very narrow limits.

Strauss says the lesson of Thucydides’ work as a whole may be that the order of cities presupposed in the most noble Spartan proclamations is impossible — given the unequal power of states, hegemony and empire, international relations, inevitably develop. This attacks a fundamental presupposition of classical political philosophy, it ‘excludes the kind of self-sufficiency of the city which classical political philosophy presupposes’. Aristotle went so far as to imagine a city which has no ‘foreign relations’ at all. The city is neither self-sufficient nor part of a just order compromising many cities. The omnipresence of war in Thucydides ‘puts a lower ceiling on the highest aspiration of any city toward justice and virtue than classical political philosophy might seem to have admitted’.

Thucydides’ focus is the problems around him. Philosophy tries to ascend from what is first for us to what is first by nature. This ascent requires that what is first for us be understood as well as possible first, that is, with eyes like Thucydides’. Political understanding must start from seeing man as immersed in political life — it cannot start from ‘seeing the city as the Cave’. We must look at what Thucydides says about oracles, earthquakes, eclipses, Nicias’ suffering, Cylon, the purification of Delos — that is, with those things which classical political philosophy barely alludes to and which modern ‘scientific’ historians ignore or are irritated by.

We need to try to see the city as it understood itself, as described in the amazing book by Fustel de Coulanges, The Ancient City, as distinguished from how it was depicted in classical political philosophy. We must try to see it as a holy city, as a pre-philosophic city — a city which sees itself as subservient to the divine.

Only by beginning at this point will we be open to the full impact of the all-important question which is coeval with philosophy although the philosophers do not frequently pronounce it — the question quid sit deus. [What is god?]

PS. Thucydides is often remarked to be sceptical about oracles and god so it’s important to note that, remarkably, he also states that that ‘the solitary instance in which those who put their faith in oracles were justified by the event’ was the length of the war which, at 27 years, was exactly what the oracles had widely predicted at the start, as was widely remarked on throughout the war. Amazing…

Further Reading

The Closing of the American Mind, Alan Bloom (taught by Strauss).

Philosophy Between the Lines: The Lost History of Esoteric Writing, Merzer.

Machiavelli's Effectual Truth: Creating the Modern World, Mansfield.

Strauss’ lectures on Nietzsche.

Some SNIPPETS

I’ll paste these into a different blog soon but for now...

SHOR on 24

David worked in the data science team of the Obama campaign 2012.

He works with advanced technology in his political research firm.

I’ve watched him for years. His personal politics are quite far left, as he says himself. But unlike the vast majority of DEMs, I’ve noticed he has tried very hard to keep an objective view of voters.

I wrote back in 2021-22 that the DEMs should listen to him and his warnings. They did not.

His company did 26M interviews in 2024. Per Vote Leave’s approach in 2016, he does not seek the old goal of ‘a representative sample’, he seeks much more data and uses clever maths to figure out what it means. (If interested in the maths behind this, google papers by mathematician Andrew Gelman such as his paper on MRP using X-box.)

Overall DS’s polls in 2024 had an error about 0.3% nationally.

I’ve summarised some of the key points from his chat with Ezra Klein of the NYT. His charts are here.

Turnout in key states the same as 2020 (overall slightly down). DEMs did NOT lose ‘because of a lack of motivation in their base’. They lost because voters in key states changed their minds.

Racial depolarisation. From the 1960s there was a huge racial re-alignment starting with the Civil Rights Act in 1964. It played out over decades but now the story is changing.

Whites barely shifted since 2016 (though within whites there’s been polarisation, see below). Blacks shifted towards Trump a bit. Asians more. Hispanics a lot.

Non-whites are voting less as ethnic blocks and more on basis of ideology.

Immigrants and naturalised citizens swung towards Trump a lot. Trump up by 5-10 points in some places with most immigrants. Trump did better in places like New York and California. This wasn’t efficient for Trump in the key states but it’s important for the future.

Educational polarisation across the West is key to understand the last decade and 2024. Graduates moving Left, non-graduates Right.

Politically engaged voters became more pro-DEM. Highest turnout areas increased support for KH (right hand graph below). NYT readers have become even MORE liberal since 2020 while the country has shifted other way. [This connects to my point about SW1 hacks, pundits, political science professors etc: they have shifted Left but don’t realise it.)

But politically disengaged voters became much more pro-Trump. People who did not vote in 2020 were slightly pro-Biden, people who didn’t vote in 2024 were +14 for Trump (lefthand graph below). Blacks who did NOT vote were more pro-Trump than those who did vote.

The DEMs have said for decades ‘if everyone votes we win.’ This is the first election for decades this is false.

If only 2022 voters had voted in 2024 — Kamal wins popular vote and electoral college.

If everyone had voted — Trump wins in a landslide.

The Left DEMs arguing their problem was a lack of turnout of their base are WRONG.

Sex polarisation and shifts among the young.

Among voters under 26 years old, the only race-by-gender group to have majority support for Harris are non-white women. White men, white women, and non-white men under 26 all supported Trump at rates greater than 50%.

What’s Shor most shocked/frightened by? The chart below. Young have gone from most progressive since baby boomers to maybe the most conservative generation in over half a century. And the huge male/female gap among the young is unprecedented. (The ‘gender gap’ is quite recent — conservatives used to do a bit better with women. This gap is also a western issue, not just US.)

The cause is probably not inflation or other things that affected people in similar ways. Is it other cultural issues and changing media-information dynamics?

Online communities are much more polarised between sexes so not surprising: algorithms etc pull men to UFC and Rogan etc.

Trump was the same level of popularity in 2024 as 2020. But KH was less popular than Biden in 2020.

Mike Donilon: the switch was ‘insane’, the DEM party ‘lost its mind’ in making the switch.

DS: But the Biden regime became very unpopular and it would have been even harder for Biden to escape his record than for KH!

DS investigated issue salience. Cost of living was clearly the top issue. (I wrote this repeatedly on this blog in 2023-4 but weirdly many elite DEMs tried to persuade themselves that they could win with abortion.)

If you look at a graph with issue importance vs which party do you trust most — GOP is ahead on all main things except health.

Trump’s personal unpopularity made the election closer than it could have been.

The ’soul of America’ bombed. 80-20 Delivering change for people’s lives vs ‘preserving our institutions’. (I wrote in 2023 that the ‘soul of America’ spiel didn’t work in 2020 and wouldn’t work in 2024. This was obvious from focus groups but often the principal has an idea and won’t listen to evidence.)

Education used to be a great issue for Democrats but now it’s pretty close. Reproductive rights changed after Dobbs. But not nearly enough.

DS ran RCTs to explore effectiveness of ads.

Two KH ads in top 1% — both on cost of living.

A/ KH on cost of living. Lowering food and grocery bills.

B/ By Future Forward (a PAC). Attacks Trump on raising prices and a national sales tax, KH will cut taxes for working Americans.

Reinforces: COL was main issue.

Paraphrasing discussion from about minute 43:

EK: the DEMs had the data you gathered — so did they do what the data suggested?

DS: no they did not focus enough on COL, too much focus on ‘defending democracy, defending institutions’. (DS is diplomatic but the conclusion is clear.)

EK: But WHY, Plouffe isn’t a dummy?!

DS: They’re surrounded by donors, activists etc saying we have to focus on DT’s terrible comments — they want to focus on democracy, we test it, it doesn’t work, we tell donors and strategists that voters want to hear about the cost of EGGS but they don’t want to hear it! It feels wrong to them, they think they MUST make these arguments about institutions.

EK: The campaign ended up with KH in DC with very institutional pictures, DT was in McDonald’s.

DS: Campaigns reflect the culture of the staff! Look at the numbers on change vs preserving institutions: Do you want a) a return to ‘basic stability’ or b) ‘major change and a shock to the system’? Voters preferred B by 53-37! But the staff argued what they believe. (NB. I keep making this point here too but SW1 has resisted this for 20 years and continued despite Brexit. See below re Professor Ansell).

EK: seems data suggests both a) voters want huge change, but b) DEMs who win seem to be moderate and not radical?

DS: voters wanted someone reflecting their anger about all the things wrong and someone who will ‘shake things up’ on their behalf, but most don’t want revolutionary policy change on economy, services etc.

Trump strategy and confusion over ‘moderate’. Insiders generally and the Democrats have struggled from 2015 to figure out the strategic positioning of Trump. This is partly aesthetic. Insiders were a) repelled by his entire approach on immigration and some other issues which they defined as ‘extreme’ then b) decided he was generally ‘extreme’ then c) ignored the evidence that crucial voting blocs did not and do not see him as extreme — in fact they saw/see him as more moderate than Republican presidential candidates for decades. Again I wrote about this many times.

To his credit, EK discusses this.

DS: Working class swing voters are left on some issues but right on others — while issue correlations for voters with more education are much more highly correlated. Contra media, more voters thought ‘Kamala is more left than me’ (49%) than ‘Trump is more conservative than me’ (39%). Media confusion over this is similar to 2016. In 2020 Trump broke with the GOP ruled out a national abortion ban, he disavowed Project 2025, he ruled out cuts on Medicare and Social Security. This was important — it made him seem less extreme than we think he is!

How important was DEI/w*ke etc?

DS: The ‘they/them’ ad was a 70th percentile ad, Trump’s best testing ads were on cost of living and crime. Elite discourse post election exaggerates importance of these issues and that ad — but probably more important for young males. [Seems likely to be right to me.]

Share of younger people getting news from TikTok is 4x in four years and correlates with vote. TikTok is more decentralised and lets content that wouldn’t normally be seen in other networks, algorithm is much less about follower count, it’s more random. This probably helped GOP. TikTok’s audience is less politically engaged and more working class, so people who DEMs have struggled to talk to. DEM campaigning class used to be close to the media gatekeepers but we’re not close to the TikTok content creators.

The future?

DS has looked at DT policies, executive orders etc. Some are very popular — voter ID, troops to border. Some are very unpopular — tax cuts for rich, attacking Obamacare.

DS — we need to focus on the issues the voters care about most and not fall for Trump’s baiting. Attack should be: he’s cutting health and social security to fund lower taxes for billionaires.

DS: Trump is vulnerable. The most predictable thing is — a President wins the trifecta, overreaches, loses midterms. JFK 1962 and Clinton 1998, rare examples of escaping normal pattern in midterms — both governed in a restrained way and tried hard NOT to piss a lot of people off.

[Their discussion assumes Trump will walk into these traps. Maybe he will. But there are also signs the White House may shape the budget in different ways. If I were them, I would have some high profile examples of tax laws that help the richest and are not economically justifiable in a Hayek/Freedman sense then change them and say — we’re fixing these problems that give unjustifiable help to billionaires and we’re using money from this to help the cost of living for normal families etc. And I would take tens of millions out of paying federal income tax completely. This would be a nightmare for the DEMs. In No10 I argued for massively raising the 40% threshold to at least 100k to take millions out of paying it. It would have been a political home run but the Tories are so SW1 such ideas seem ‘crazy’ to them.]

A danger for DEMs: we win midterms because a lot of the 2024 voters don’t bother but we don’t fix our strategic problems and then hit the 2028 cycle against a less unpopular Republican and lose again when those disengaged people vote like in 2024.

DS: The GOP ran some very bad Senate candidates which helped us. But it’s hard for the DEMs to take the Senate without improving our brand with working class voters who are crucial for Senate control. Look at data in Nebraska, the place we most over-performed in Senate: he did it by running as an Independent and there is potential in running non-Democrat but Independent candidates in Red states because of the DEM branding!

[I’ve made this argument to Tories with zero success — there’s many places the Tories shouldn’t compete in given their branding but should encourage and support ‘independents’. Tories hate it because they don’t want to face hard questions about hatred for them.]

Things I think Insiders will really struggle to absorb given how they’ve behaved since 2016 — obviously I don’t mean all Insiders but it’s important to understand the general herding dynamics of Insiders which we see repeatedly and which generally dominates individual exceptions, particularly in SW1 which is much more groupthinky/homogenous than America.

How these play out will be central to the dynamics of the DEM primaries 2027-8.

1/ They can’t face that the main political dynamic in western countries is spreading and deepening hate, contempt and distrust for them, for the old Insider political-media-academia network. Since 2016 they’ve kept casting around for ways NOT to face that THEY are their main problem. They’ll keep looking for reasons other than their own failures. Shor’s point that voters clearly preferred a big shock over ‘defend the institutions’ will not be absorbed in SW1 but parts of the DEM network are absorbing it (incentives are more complex in America and more are incentivised to face reality than here).

2/ It’s very hard for them to face the educational shifts because, again, it means looking at themselves. Left parties used to represent the working classes. They have shifted to being parties of graduates. Graduates struggle to grasp these dynamics and face their consequences.

(When Vote Leave weighted polls by education in 2015-16, this was weird inside polling world. Pollsters missed Brexit and Trump in 2016 because most did not weight by education. Lynton Crosby published many polls in 2016 showing Remain winning by a landslide. Why? He didn’t understand educational polarisation and wasn’t weighting by education. This was only 8 years ago!)

3/ It’s very hard for them to face the racial shifts because they’ve herded to ‘Trump/MAGA = literal Nazis/fascists’. How could the Nazi do historically well with non-whites? DISINFORMATION obviously.

4/ It’s very hard for them to face the youth shift. Probably they’ll blame social media, especially TikTok and the ‘toxic manosphere’.

5/ The issue about campaigns reflecting the culture of the staff is incredibly important and super-underrated. Staff repeatedly push campaigns to irrational strategies and staff who push for rational strategies are often despised.

It was true in 2016 and 2019 when I experienced it in extreme forms. Many things about public opinion were absolutely obvious yet it was impossible to persuade Insiders who preferred to believe Insider memes. E.g ‘global Britain’ bombed: nobody wanted to hear it. Take Back Control and £350 million were smash hits: nobody wanted to hear it.

I wrote about the big things for 2024 in Q1 2023 yet most Insider Democrats and Insiders in the UK simply wouldn’t face the basic facts. SW1 Insiders hysterically denounced my blogs as clearly either a) stupid or b) malign disinformation. You can do research for a few hundred thousand dollars and get a good sense of the most important things. But you can’t make Insiders engage with reality when their social network rewards not facing reality.

Many involved in the Harris campaign have peddled delusions since the defeat. Obviously many professionals don’t feel able to say ‘she was a bad candidate’. Sheila Nix, Harris' chief of staff, said:

I would posit she ran a pretty flawless campaign, and she did all the steps that [were] required to be successful. And I think — obviously, we did not win, but I do think we hit all the marks.

If people like this dominate the post-mortem the DEMs will not recover nationally.

And you can see this dynamic with lefty academics denouncing Nate Silver as fascist and attacking Shor, an avowed socialist, an an enemy etc.

6/ Insiders will continue to struggle with people like Trump or us in 2016/19 whose strategic positioning is not conventional in party political terms. Insiders in the UK remain totally committed to the model of swing voters being an average of left and right. I said in 2015 this was false, that swing voters are a mix of more left and more right. We proved it in 2016 and 2019. E.g In 2019 it was obvious that the right strategy was a mix of things that did not make sense in terms of the history of both parties but which was popular with voters (more reassurance on NHS than Tories wanted, tougher on crime than Tories wanted). But Tory MPs really hated it.

Our victories had zero effect on improving the realism of UK Insider debate — if anything the opposite happened. Tories did not say: oh, we were wrong. They said: we would have won by even more if the campaign had done what we wanted instead of what Cummings wanted! The 2024 election saw Insiders talk as if 2016 and 2019 hadn’t happened. SW1 babbled about ‘the centre ground’ and portrayed Sunak, who had presided over record immigration and had sided with the ECHR/HRA rather than stop the boats and was letting out convicted murderers from jail early rather than take on Whitehall over prisons, as a right wing extremist on immigration.

For SW1 he lost ‘because he was extreme’. But stopping the boats was not ‘extreme’, it was popular across party lines. Sunak, probably the highest IQ MP and certainly the hardest working one, lost because he would not side with voters against SW1 and instead a) promised to actually stop the boats (NOT ‘I’ll try’ but ‘others said they’d try, I’ll do it’), b) then prioritised maintaining the ECHR/HRA, c) twisted himself in knots trying to explain his volte face, and d) begged for credit for trying to stop the boats even though he’d explicitly ruled out using that line from the start!

Similarly many Tories want to believe, as they did 1997-2001, that they just need to go back to 80s rhetoric about tax and deregulation and free markets to recover. This will flop now as it flopped 1997-01.

Again, this is partly because facing reality is deeply unpleasant while maintaining the old ideas means they can keep telling themselves that positions they do not want to take are ‘extreme’ therefore ‘unpopular’. To those thinking ‘but they want to win so surely they will update’ — NO NO NO! One of the biggest lessons since 2016 is this has not happened. So why would it now?

(Also there’s more and more duff polling and ‘market research analysis’ produced to fit Insider tastes rather than dig to difficult truths. And more delusional academics on social media encouraging pundits and MPs to stay delusional.)

7/ If you were really optimising for winning, then there would be more Independents run by both parties. But arguing for this brings accusations of cowardice, betrayal etc so the issues aren’t discussed much. I don’t think Shor’s idea will get much more traction than I’ve had here. An obvious test is the 2028 London Mayor where probably the optimal way to win is an ‘Independent’ candidate who the Tories support and do not put forward their own candidate. But they’d probably rather Labour win than cooperate in a successful Independent campaign.

8/ I said after the 2024 result that SW1 Insiders and much of the DEMs would double down on Nazis + ‘idiot voters were conned by disinformation’ + ‘so we need more censorship’. This has happened. It will continue. Much of SW1 has retreated to the Bluesky echo chamber/ghetto. This obviously increases all the dynamics pushing them towards groupthink and delusion that have characterised them for years.

In the UK, No10 is happy blaming murders on Amazon selling kitchen knives with sharp points and NPCs applaud so there’s no obvious end to their appetite for nonsense. So long as regime Insiders continue to rely on the regime media, there’s no reason to expect the cycle of delusions to break.

As I’ve pointed out before, one of the most ludicrous prominent professors is Prof Snyder of history at Yale. He wrote on 15 April re the Trump deportations:

This is obviously absurd on its face. Moving a person from one place to another literally DOES undo rights and disempower the judiciary — that’s what moving from Texas to Dover, Dover to Calais, Calais to Moscow or Moscow to Beijing does. It is the core of national sovereignty and is a hard legal distinction between being inside the EU’s legal order or outside it. Different states have different laws, rights and jurisdictions. The idea that this is a ‘basic Nazi practice’ is self-evidently grotesque. But this is characteristic of elite Insider debate now. When it comes to Trump, almost any sort of attack is widely seen as legitimate inside universities. And these are the elites complaining about low information voters and disinformation.

9/ There is an easy failure mode for the DEMs. Trump does unpopular things. The normal cycle of Presidents in their 6th year losing midterms happens in 2026. Highly motivated and engaged DEMs vote. Low engagement MAGA do not. The DEMs then fool themselves about 2026 as they did about 2022. And pick a candidate who then has to face a GOP candidate who may be more popular than Trump and then the disengaged vote in 2028 because it’s a presidential campaign.

Professor Ben Ansell as a case study: ‘it’s peak populism’

I recommend reading Ansell’s recent piece on ‘peak populism’. It’s useful because it states some ideas of ‘the mainstream’ clearly, it got lots of thumbs up from pundits, and it shows important ways ‘the mainstream’ fool themselves.

Ansell thinks ‘populism’ has peaked and will decline:

• We’re ‘witnessing the moment of hubris for the past decade’s unstoppable rise of populism.’

• Per the pundit class, Trump 2 is simply ‘chaos’ — incompetence and evil. Per the pundit class, no mention of any of the extremely able businesspeople persuaded to join the government. For our pundits, everyone’s an idiot except them. (You can see them increasingly applying the same logic to No10 spads with little-to-no appreciation of the fact that these spads are having to deal with a pathological civil service.)

• ‘DOGE exemplifies chaotic authoritarianism’ — it’s ‘wild, callous, arbitrary’. No consideration of how Bill Clinton and Obama made the same criticisms of waste and fraud and set up ventures to track and stop it. No mention of some of the insanities DOGE has uncovered. No, DOGE = Elon = crazy/evil.

• Ansell mocks Trump’s comments that China thinks long-term and creating a new strategy for China can’t be judged on quarterly results — a tritely obvious point.

• ‘Just a month ago I was getting calls every five minutes from British journalists about the possibility of Nigel Farage being the next Prime Minister… I don’t really believe there was much chance of this, even in the halcyon days of <checks notes> December and January, when Trump had just got re-elected.’ Obviously Ansell is wildly pro-Zelensky and the Ukraine war. So he was appalled by the Zelensky-Trump TV showdown and thinks it’s a disaster for Farage: ‘I suspect we will look back on the first weeks of 2025 as the high point for potential Prime Minister Nigel Farage’. I guarantee that whatever happens with Farage, a Trump-Zelensky interview in Jan 2025 will NOT be the decisive factor on Farage’s 2029 performance. Pundits are addicted to overrating the importance of any media event by factors of ~1,000X or more.

• Europe is ‘increasingly starting to turn away’ from populism.

• Mertz will ‘lead a European coalition of support for Ukraine’ and all the talk of European spending on militaries ‘has led to a surge in European stock markets at the signs of military Keynesianism and hence we now have our moment of Make Europe Great Again’. This reflects SW1’s ephemeral emotional wave of early March but such waves come and go — Ansell will struggle to remember his own optimism about this shortly.

• And the professor sets out some thoughts on political strategy and communication for the ‘mainstream’.

The mainstream is getting another chance, just as it did after World War Two. And like then, it is the common enemy that unites and inspires... That enemy is most clearly Vladimir Putin. But we have had Putin for almost quarter century. So it’s not him alone. No, it is the Trump-Putin quasi-alliance that has done the trick. It is the fateful decision of chaotic, populist authoritarianism to sidle up to stable, deep, old-school authoritarianism.

Defeating populism in democracies requires an enemy. But it can’t be the populists themselves. That is their very fuel. Of course, they will say, the elites want to destroy us to protect the corrupt swamp. So populists alone won’t do the trick as an enemy.

Populists who actually side with an existing foreign enemy though. Well that clarifies matters. Now every decision the populist takes can be tied to the foreign enemy. It becomes harder for populists to deflect, to dissimulate effectively. They become glued to the very thing they usually denounce — an outside, foreign force. And they cannot easily unstick themselves… [O]ver the past weeks it has become a possible narrative. And if there’s anything that the mainstream parties need, it’s a narrative. With good guys and bad guys. If the populists are going to make it this easy to attack them, then it’s simply the weakness, the self-doubt, the lack of will to survive that will fail the mainstream. These are great parties with grand traditions. If they can’t do a little bit of aggressive opportunistic politics now… well then there’s no hope for them, or for us.’

So, a good representative of the Insider class suggests ‘the mainstream’ needs ‘a narrative’ and ‘an enemy’, a story of ‘good guys and bad guys’ and the ‘Trump-Putin alliance’ has ‘done the trick’.

Many a SW1 NPC retweeted this piece approvingly.

A few thoughts.

1/ Ansell’s piece on ‘populism’ — like roughly all Insider analysis — ignores the fundamental driver of ‘populism’, the core reason for Vote Leave’s wins in 2016 and 2019, Trump’s in 2016 and 2024, and the crisis of ‘mainstream’ parties across Europe: *widespread disgust with the ruling political-media-bureaucratic elites, extreme desire for change, and growing anger at how demands for change are attacked as ‘far right’*. Real wages for median workers is an unprecedented disaster. Communities across the West have been smashed by mass immigration and huge pressure on local services including health, schools, and police. Voters think their kids will be worse off than today because those in power in all mainstream parties are destructive.

But absolutely no reflection from Ansell on this fundamental structural force in western politics that will continue to operate whatever the short-term ups and downs of particular individuals or parties.

(Even use of the word ‘populism’ helps Insiders fool themselves. They have a pejorative label for everyone who says important parts of the old institutions are knackered and should change. Mad about the enormous coverups and lies over covid and lab leak? POPULIST! Mad about the police returning children to the rape/grooming gangs? POPULIST! Use of this term fools Insiders analytically and encourages elites like Silicon Valley to defect from defence of the institutions — exactly the opposite of what the Insiders want.)

2/ Insiders have repeatedly predicted the ‘peak’ of revolt against themselves. But if you look at Europe and South America the picture is very much NOT that Insiders are on the up and voters are returning to think ‘oh yeah the old parties and systems have got their act together’. Polls suggest growing anger with the ‘mainstream’ everywhere.

Whether Trump manages to create a team that do important things and wins support or bombs out in chaos is important for America but the big structural dynamic of western politics is bigger than Trump. When Trump lost in 2020 the pundits declared that populism had peaked and now the ‘grownups’ were in the White House ‘normal’ politics would return. As they did when Vote Leave left No10. What happened?! The ‘mainstream grownups’ set themselves on fire, escalated a war with Ukraine that’s blown up in their faces, and managed things so badly Trump won again and Farage was resurrected after going out of business in December 2019.

3/ Contra Ansell, all over Britain rage, disgust, despair and hate for SW1 are growing — personal despair and despair for the country. This is obvious outside SW1 and will become more and more obvious as it has for years. There is now open discussion — away from SW1 — of ‘civil war’ and social crackup. People now talk about this in focus groups. This will be a huge shock as it sinks in in SW1. When forced to confront it, SW1 will mimic Ansell’s piece — they will not consider what it is about them, about the mainstream, that has driven the fear and rage. No, they will make it all about ‘extremist’ political actors and ‘disinformation’ — i.e the same story they’ve told themselves for a decade.

4/ An important factor is aesthetics. It’s easy to find mainstream characters like Obama and Clinton or Democrat Senators making arguments almost identical to Trump about things like trade, China, deficits, illegal immigration, absurd government waste, foreign aid, the dangerous tendency of the deep state to hide spending on its priorities in unscrutinised budgets etc. It’s easy to quote examples of Obama using the state against political enemies and forcing institutions like universities to do what he and his supporters wanted while nobody in ‘the mainstream’ said a word about the constitution or screamed about ‘fascism’.

But this does not matter. Trump is Trumpy and he has mobilised supporters who look and sound the way they do. And they are full of anger about the ‘mainstream’ and determined to change how Washington works, unlike the old GOP establishment. They are aesthetically revolting to pundits, professors and generally the graduates of top universities, as well as a direct threat to the flow of power and money on which those networks rely.

You could see the force of these aesthetics during last summer’s riots. Academics and pundits unironically tweeted about how they had always opposed calls for ‘lock em up’ and ‘tougher sentences’ but looking at the white, tattooed, flag waving rioters, LOCK EM UP AND THROW AWAY THE KEY! Suddenly years in jail for a tweet was the socially acceptable move in a country that gives child abusers lamer sentences.

You see the force of these aesthetics in their response to the grooming/rape gangs: very strong aversion to facing the issue, a very strong desire to divert it to ‘who is exploiting the issue’ rather than the issue itself. In January, SW1 immediately made the resurgence of interest — because of court transcripts going viral — about Elon and ‘interference in British politics’ etc. No10 press office gave the lead and the mainstream followed. And since then the courts have increasingly refused to allow publication of transcripts for the openly political reason of judges deciding they don’t think discussion of the horrors is ‘in the public interest’. And the ‘mainstream’ has been largely silent about it. Imagine if judges voiced pro-Brexit views in rulings and said that transcripts should not be public because it wouldn’t be ‘in the public interest’ (see here.)

A central factor driving elite fragmentation in the US and UK is a differing orientation on this issue. As I’ve said before, people like Peter Thiel have come to think that dominant political elites of both parties are largely wrong and the deplorables are right about a lot since 1991: instead of aesthetic disgust for the deplorables, we must try more understanding and accept elites have made big mistakes.

This is still not an acceptable view for SW1 pundits.

5/ Ansell’s advice on political strategy for ‘the mainstream’ is very revealing. It is devoid of any acceptance of error, it is entirely negative, it re-hashed exactly the Trump=Putin Russiagate hoax narrative that just got rolled out again in 2024 and bombed with swing voters. This ‘narrative’ is super popular among people like him and FT pundits but is a dud with the crucial voters.

It’s also obviously super-ironic that the preferred message of the old regime about fascism is itself an echo of fascism — i.e our domestic enemy is in league with our foreign enemy.

Ansell himself has complained repeatedly about how ‘populists’ combine domestic and foreign enemies in narratives of treachery. Yet he and his network think this is the way forward for ‘progressives’.

6/ I used to talk to people like Ansell even in the crisis of 2019. But discussion has become practically impossible.

Many of those who consider themselves the ‘elite’ of political discussion in this country have radicalised to the Far Left on many/most issues while thinking everybody else has radicalised Right, deceived by ‘disinformation’.

And they’ve poisoned their own information sources. Most have fled to Bluesky where ‘it’s straight up Hitler’ daily emotional venting is strongly reinforced. After babbling about Trump running again as ‘great for the Democrats’ — cf. Sam Freedman et al — there is no reflection on why yet again as a network they misunderstood politics so badly.

Ansell himself — a professor of political science! — tweeted about ONE POLL, the Selzer poll, that got international coverage because it played perfectly to confirmation bias. And so did vast numbers of academics who talk so much about the ‘irrationality’ of ‘low information voters’.

If you look at BlueSky accounts for the likes of Ansell et al, they see Kara Swisher and Taylor Lorenz as reliable sources to quote on Silicon Valley. This is another example of the collapse of consensus reality. If these are your trusted sources for the Valley and ‘tech’, then you are not going to be able to have a good faith discussion with people driving technological development. But Ansell et al get very positive reinforcement from their (Bluesky) social network. (Lorenz is now running a campaign on Luigi and says he’s ‘morally good’. Social media finances reinforce the incentives for people to monetise such niches.)

7/ Crucial to political views is simply which stories get focus from a critical mass of Insiders and social media influencers.

The influence of communication strategy and the dynamics of campaigns are usually discussed in terms of how players discuss issue X. But in many ways it’s more important whether issue X is on the radar at all. (E.g in campaign terms, the Hillary campaign decision to agree with Trump that immigration was a central issue in 2016.)

If you look at SW1’s high status pundits and academics, they are totally obsessed with Elon and totally ignore stories that dominate British discussion of politics. Today (29/4) there is the Spanish blackout, umpteen big UK stories, but they’re almost totally obsessed with American news, Miller’s appearances on FOX, the latest Elon tweet etc. A big effect of social media has been to deepen the trend for SW1 to obsess on US politics to a pathological extent, tweeting about obscure culture wars in the American West ignored by 99.9% of Americans while massive things happen a few miles away in England.

And the Bluesky phenomenon is another important fragmentation of elites. For those in SW1 now orienting by Bluesky, they see a very different news agenda because many stories barely exist on Buesky:

• The boats transferring hundreds a day across the Channel.

• The weekly court cases using ECHR/HRA ‘right to family life’ to stop deportation often with crazy details. These stories are changing voters’ minds on the ECHR but it’s invisible on Bluesky.

• Grooming/rape gang horrors.

• Prisoners let out early attacking people.

• The Manchester terrorist attacking the prison officers and the HRA angles (see below).

• The Supreme Court judgment on trans / Equality Act. I scrolled through the usual NPC suspects: almost totally invisible on the day. To the extent Ansell has commented, it’s to retweet people attacking the Supreme Court and JK Rowling. This is particularly ironic given how this entire network describes attacking court judgements as ‘fascist’ when the tables are turned. But on the day almost all the NPCs completely ignored the story leading all the news.

• Dumb regulations destroying businesses and entrepreneurs explaining how. ‘Regulation is good for productivity’ is the BlueSky meme.

• How all their predictions on Ukraine and Russia have cratered.

• The shift of young talented people with money out of UK to US and Dubai (not the EU). We’ve gained from some of the similar exodus from the EU with people moving to London. But we’re losing a lot. SW1 underrates this. And Bluesky can’t discuss it because it undercuts both ‘Brexit evil’ and ‘Trump evil’.

To the extent these stories get a mention it is only in the context of ‘exploited by fascists’ etc.

The combination of these social media dynamics with Trump’s polling is almost inevitably going to make UK pundit land even more unable to think about things from the perspective of a median swing voter, in America or here.

8/ I noticed another professor of political science commenting on politics the other day, Prof Tim Bale who writes a lot on the Tories. I think generally his core perspective was false a decade ago but he has stuck to it and it seems more obviously wrong than it did ten years ago.

Two revealing points.

A/ Bale says people on the right are deluded about ‘a “realignment” that never was’ in British politics. It’s very confusing because educational realignment is one of the biggest and most important trends in western politics. He definitely knows this. And per Shor above, the realignment continues across the West. The Right are deluded on many things but this is not one of them.

B/ Bale attacks Kemi B for thinking ‘genuinely, if preposterously, … that the party “talked right yet governed left” while in office’. Per the general pundit narrative, Bale thinks of the 2019-24 period as a ‘lurch to the right’ and the idea that the party ‘talked right but governed left’ is preposterous.

But after we left No10 Boris-Sunak triggered the biggest wave of legal immigration in history and the biggest wave of illegal immigration/fake asylum seekers EVER. They said they’d stop the boats and then said they couldn’t stop the boats because of the HRA which they prioritised. They said they’d be tough on violent criminals then funded child murderers having weddings in jail ‘because it’s their human rights’. They guaranteed no personal tax rises — because I wrote it into the manifesto — then put up taxes. They said they’d prioritise defence then hollowed out capabilities year after year. And on and on and on. It is true that graduates on the Left living in London think the Tories greatly ‘lurched to the right’ but this is not true about the voters relevant for a Tory revival. Only someone very much on the Left could look at the actual Tory record, rather than their nonsense rhetoric/spin, and say it was a lurch to the right. And only someone who does not listen to the voters who deserted the Tories can claim what Bale claims.

Saying this is one of the few accurate things KB has said! Elsewhere she’s repeated the SW1 meme that the problem with post-VL Boris and Sunak was they ‘listened to the focus groups’ which is even more crackers than Bale’s argument and points to how little KB understands about why the Tories really imploded.

Generally Bale constantly pushes the most simplistic memes about ‘centre ground’ and what the Tories should do that show no updating 2016-25. And this reflects his peers generally. As opinion fragments and ‘the centre ground’ becomes more and more misleading every year, the stronger is the mainstream’s attachment to it. Like the Today, program, it’s a familiar landmark for the NPCs as the world around them becomes less and less comprehensible.

9/ This system tension between a) voters increasingly hating the regime and b) the regime’s blindness and construction of delusional ‘narratives’ that focus on demonising people is partly why I think that serious political violence we haven’t seen in this country in living memory is likely soon. The system dynamics are all pushing this way. Since the shocks of 2016 political Insiders have kept doubling down. And all the signs are that although many business people are defecting from their network, political networks, driven by social media logic, are polarising further. These dynamics add load after load of tinder, waiting for sparks.

Various on tech/AI

Toby Lutke’s Shopify memo on hiring and AI:

‘I use it [AI] all the time, but even I feel I'm only scratching the surface. It’s the most rapid shift to how work is done that I’ve seen in my career and I’ve been pretty clear about my enthusiasm for it… Last summer I used agents to create my talk, and presented about that. I did this as a call to action and invitation for everyone to tinker with AI, to dispel any scepticism or confusion that this matters at all levels…

‘We are all lucky to work with some amazing colleagues, the kind who contribute 10X of what was previously thought possible. It’s my favorite thing about this company. And what’s even more amazing is that, for the first time, we see the tools become 10X themselves. I’ve seen many of these people approach implausible tasks, ones we wouldn’t even have chosen to tackle before, with reflexive and brilliant usage of AI to get 100X the work done…

‘In a company growing 20-40% year over year, you must improve by at least that every year just to re-qualify… This sounds daunting, but given the nature of the tools, this doesn’t even sound terribly ambitious to me anymore. It’s also exactly the kind of environment that our top performers tell us they want.

‘Before asking for more Headcount and resources, teams must demonstrate why they cannot get what they want done using AI. What would this area look like if autonomous AI agents were already part of the team?…

https://x.com/tobi/status/1909251946235437514

Karpathy: LLMs are a technology that empower people rather than diffuse top-down

Technologies tend to diffuse top-down: e.g electricity, planes, computers, internet, GPS.

This is partly because they are capital intensive and needs expertise at first.

So it strikes me as quite unique and remarkable that LLMs display a dramatic reversal of this pattern — they generate disproportionate benefit for regular people, while their impact is a lot more muted and lagging in corporations and governments. ChatGPT is the fastest growing consumer application in history, with 400 million weekly active users who use it for writing, coding, translation, tutoring, summarization, deep research, brainstorming, etc. This isn't a minor upgrade to what existed before, it is a major multiplier to an individual's power level across a broad range of capabilities. And the barrier to use is incredibly low — the models are cheap (free, even), fast, available to anyone on demand behind a url (or even local machine), and they speak anyone's native language, including tone, slang or emoji. This is insane. As far as I can tell, the average person has never experienced a technological unlock this dramatic, this fast.

Why then are the benefits a lot more muted in the corporate and government realms? I think the first reason is that LLMs offer a very specific profile of capability — that of merely quasi-expert knowledge/performance, but simultaneously across a very wide variety of domains. In other words, they are simultaneously versatile but also shallow and fallible. Meanwhile, an organization's unique superpower is the ability to concentrate diverse expertise into a single entity by employing engineers, researchers, analysts, lawyers, marketers, etc. While LLMs can certainly make these experts more efficient individually (e.g. drafting initial legal clauses, generating boilerplate code, etc.), the improvement to the organization takes the form of becoming a bit better at the things it could already do. In contrast, an individual will usually only be an expert in at most one thing, so the broad quasi-expertise offered by the LLM fundamentally allows them to do things they couldn't do before. People can now vibe code apps. They can approach legal documents. They can grok esoteric research papers. They can do data analytics. They can generate multimodal content for branding and marketing. They can do all of this at an adequate capability without involving an additional expert.

So — LLMs enable companies/governments to do what they can already do a bit better/faster but they enable individuals to do things they couldn’t do at all.

Second, organizations deal with problems of a lot greater complexity and necessary coordination, think: various integrations, legacy systems, corporate brand or style guides, stringent security protocols, privacy considerations, internationalization, regulatory compliance and legal risk. There are a lot more variables, a lot more constraints, a lot more considerations, and a lot lower margin for error. It's not so easy to put all of it into a context window. You can't just vibe code something. You might be one disastrous hallucination away from losing your job.

And third, there is the well-documented inertia of a larger organization, featuring culture, historical precedents, political turf that escalate in periods of rapid change, communication overhead, re-training challenges of a distributed workforce and good old-fashioned bureaucracy. These are major headwinds when it comes to rapid adoption of a sparkling new, versatile-but-shallow-and-fallible tool. I don't wish to downplay the impacts of LLMs in corporations or governments, but at least for the moment and in aggregate across society, they have been significantly more life altering for individuals than they have been for organizations…

Looking forward, the continued diffusion of LLMs of course depends on continued performance improvement and its capability profile. The "benefit distribution" overall is particularly interesting to chart, and depends heavily on the dynamic range of the performance as a function of capital expenditure. Today, frontier-grade LLM performance is very accessible and cheap. Beyond this point, you cannot spend a marginal dollar to get better performance, reliability or autonomy. Money can't buy better ChatGPT. Bill Gates talks to GPT 4o just like you do.

But can this be expected to last? Train-time scaling (increase parameters, data), test-time scaling (increase time) and model ensembles (increase batch) are forces increasing the dynamic range. On the other hand, model distillation (the ability to train disproportionately powerful small models by training to mimic the big model) has been a force decreasing dynamic range. Certainly, the moment money can buy dramatically better ChatGPT, things change. Large organizations get to concentrate their vast resources to buy more intelligence. And within the category of "individual" too, the elite may once again split away from the rest of society. Their child will be tutored by GPT-8-pro-max-high, yours by GPT-6 mini.

But at least at this moment in time, we find ourselves in a unique and unprecedented situation in the history of technology. If you go back through various sci-fi you'll see that very few would have predicted that the AI revolution would feature this progression. It was supposed to be a top secret government megabrain project wielded by the generals, not ChatGPT appearing basically overnight and for free on a device already in everyone's pocket. Remember that William Gibson quote "The future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed"? Surprise - the future is already here, and it is shockingly distributed.

Interesting. But the Big 3 could have built a product already that charges a lot for access to frontier performance but they’ve chosen not to. They could change this decision any time. But it’s interesting they seem more interested in scale than revenues.

Michael Nielsen suggests ditching alignment as a goal

Most doomers on AI are doomers because they think the models will escape control before we ‘solve alignment’.

MN argues the conventional approach from much of the AI safety community is misconceived:

• Instead of focusing on ‘rogue AI escaping control’, we should consider that the crucial dangers are a) the AIs will generate enormous power for humans to use against humans, b) they will accelerate the process of discovering destructive technologies that are simpler to create, i.e the curve towards e.g a virus that kills almost all and is very simple for a non-expert to make and distribute.

• The critical issue is not ‘losing control’ of an AI but whether the world happens to be structured such that there are simple cheap ‘recipes for ruin’. Imagine fire working slightly differently so that it keeps burning 1000X easier once it’s started. The universe happens to not quite work like that. But are there technologies waiting to be discovered that would make it quite simple to kill >90% of humans?

• We’ve already accidentally engineered a mousepox variant that was 100% lethal to mice vaccinated against mousepox. Might there be something similar for humans? ‘Ted Taylor, the leading American designer of nuclear weapons, thought they were very plausible, telling the writer John McPhee there is "a way to make a bomb… so simple that I just don't want to describe it". Taylor's remarks, published in a book by McPhee, stimulated at least two people to develop plausible designs for DIY nuclear weapons. These have not, so far as we know, been built, perhaps because the availability of fissile material remains a bottleneck. If that bottleneck can be removed, then it may be very difficult to avoid the widespread proliferation of weapons.’

• If there are simple cheap recipes for ruin, then obviously the path we’re on with AI model improvement implies we’re also making it easier both to do wonderful things and disastrous things. Von Neumann warned (see previous blogs) that technology development is intrinsically morally neutral, we can’t say much in advance about whether a particular development will be net good or bad, and attempts to control technology development are largely doomed. MN says, ‘Deep understanding of reality is intrinsically dual use.’

• ‘Alignment’ does not solve the core problem. The core problem is the power conferred and the dual-use nature of science and technology. Further, much work on AI alignment, intended to diminish risks of disaster, actually ‘speeds progress toward catastrophic capabilities’ because it makes models easier to develop, deploy, sell etc.

[I’m increasingly sceptical of the concept of ‘solving alignment’ in principle. It’s akin to ‘we’ll solve the central problems of philosophy since the pre-Socratics and Socrates’. The idea that computer scientists / software developers — who often have very tenuous grasp of the basics of psychology and power in politics — will ‘solve’ this ‘in the next few years’ seems so ludicrous I’m increasingly puzzled why so many intelligent people take it seriously. But I also think the work of Chris Olah on interpretability — using models to interpret models’ behaviour — could be very important and valuable, though if it is, it will also be inherently unpredictable to what extent it is used by evil people.]

Interesting essay by Jon Askonas on technology, culture and the new regime

Discussion on China Talk with Economist’s defence editor, Shashank Joshi, on technology and war

It’s interesting how yet again there is no mention in hours of discussion of the core history and the political ends of the UKR war. What is ‘the West’ trying to achieve (beyond soundbites like ‘aggression must fail’)? And these guys are much smarter than the average minister! But as I keep pointing out, the UKR venture has failed for the same reason you see repeatedly in history — a lack of a serious, credible explanation of the political ends the war is supposed to achieve. Again, if you think someone somewhere has set such a thing out — regardless of whether they are famous and powerful — please link to it.

Shashank strongly dislikes the concept of ‘spheres of interest’.

My big concern is not just that we get a bad deal for Ukraine, it’s that the idea of spheres of influence appeals to Trump, dealing with great men one-on-one, people like Kim Jong Un, Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping — and that what will be on the table is not just Ukraine, but Europe. Putin will say, “Look, Mr. President, you get your Nobel Peace Prize, we get a ceasefire, we do business together and lift sanctions. And you can make money in Moscow, by the way. Just one tiny little thing, that NATO thing. You don’t like it, I don’t like it. Just roll it back to where it was in 1997, west of Poland. That would be great. You’ll save a ton of money here. I’ve prepared a spreadsheet for you.” That is the scenario that worries us — a Yalta as much as a Munich.

But the concept of ‘spheres of influence’ is ancient. It is intrinsic to the nature of power, states and empires. It was central in the Cuban crisis in 1962. It was central to Britain’s assertion of the independence of the Low Countries through the 19th Century and our grounds for fighting in 1914. It’s central to calculations over Taiwan.

And a problem Europe now faces is that having escalated the disastrous war, we really are now in a position where facing the reality of our failure is a big blow to NATO! The West spent two years mocking Putin — you didn’t want more NATO but you got more NATO! And now we’re running around like headless chickens screaming ‘it might be the end of NATO’ — or in the case of the most demented (Snyder, O’brien etc), it should be the end of NATO because America went Nazi!!

Shashank says the use of AI for targeting is greatly improving the effectiveness of drones:

What I am seeing with the companies and entities building these AI-guided [drone] systems for the final 100 meters, 200 meters, 300 meters, and increasingly up to 2 kilometers in some cases, is that the engagement range is going up. You can home in on the target beyond the range of any plausible local jamming device. That’s a huge deal. More importantly, the hit rate you’re getting is 80% plus. That’s phenomenal. That changes the economics, the cost per kill; that changes the economics of this from an attrition basis…

You can achieve this with like 30 minutes of training. Think about what that unlocks for a force, particularly sitting here in Europe where we have these shrunken armies with no reserves, with the manpower requirements as well with the training times to bring new people in when you have attrition in a war in the first round.

This little tactical innovation — terminal guidance, AI-enabled — looks very narrow, but it has all these super interesting and consequential ripple effects on the economics of attrition, the cost per kill, lethality levels, the effectiveness of jamming, and on manpower and labor requirements.

Re espionage and AI labs, Michael Horowitz says:

Now the toughest scenario is the espionage one where you’re talking about essentially covert operations targeting companies. It wouldn’t surprise me if some of those companies are intelligence targets for foreign governments. The challenge analytically is that these arguments quickly enter the realm of non-falsifiability.

If I tell you that I think this kind of espionage or that kind of espionage wouldn’t be that likely, you could say “well what about this, what about this?” And we’re not going to be able to resolve it with facts. Non-falsifiable threat arguments make me nervous analytically. Maybe this is the academic in me that makes me want to push back a little bit because I feel like if an argument is legitimate, we should be able to specify it in a clearly falsifiable way.

But many espionage problems are intrinsically non-falsifiable, especially the nightmare ‘wilderness of mirrors’ of counter-intelligence. Maybe your paranoia has succeeded, but maybe you’ve been penetrated all along and never realised. You cannot ‘falsify’ the proposition ‘we’ve definitely not been penetrated by another entity’. No evidence of penetration is perfectly consistent with penetration.

[The labs will need to develop relationships with the agencies because as they intrude more and more on power and politics they will be the object of the punchiest parts of foreign espionage including blackmail so will need state help. The labs have been slow to face this since my first discussions with them in 2016-17 but they’re updating rapidly. Cf this report that came out a few days ago on the vulnerabilities of data centres. Discussions about AI always assume the US still has a lead. It would not surprise me if all the main IP has been stolen from the top 3 labs by PRC intel, passed to a black PRC project, and this project is secretly ahead of the US.]

Horowitz:

Reprogramming 0.05% of the defense budget to fund multiple thousands of attritable autonomous systems for the Indo-Pacific under the first bet of the Replicator initiative required over 40 briefings to Congress, including a ton by the Deputy Secretary of Defense who’s really busy. Congressional oversight is really important, but that degree of effort required to reprogram essentially less than a billion dollars demonstrates a budget system unable to operate at the speed and scale necessary given the rate of technological change and given the threat that the US is under from Chinese military advances in the Indo-Pacific…

Keep in mind the Pentagon’s budgeting process was invented by Robert McNamara during the Vietnam era and has not changed since then. [Cf. below re McNamara]

[Contra the mainstream narrative, Hegseth and Stephen Feinberg (cf. testimony have made coherent arguments for procurement reform along lines I’ve discussed for years.]

Interesting paper by the Kill Chain author on ‘Moneyball Military’

The US has failed to reform procurement in time for a ~2027 PRC attack on Taiwan. It’s only short-term option is a ‘Moneyball’ approach — i.e ‘large numbers of smaller, lower-cost, autonomous systems that can be provided more easily to our allies and partners.’

(My paper on systems management (below) discussed how America under McNamara replaced the successful systems management with the Planning, Programming, Budgeting, and Execution (PPBE) system that has been an expensive nightmare since. I’ll return to this story soon.)

Keven Esvelt, one of the inventors of gene drives, on use of LLMs for bio-terror/war

Esvelt is one of the inventors of gene drives. He tested models ability to reason about mirror-life, a nightmarish possibility that might pose a threat to everything living.

His new paper:

I leveraged the unique opportunity presented by an upcoming publication describing a novel catastrophic biothreat – “Technical Report on Mirror Bacteria: Feasibility and Risks” – to conduct a small controlled study before it became public. Graduate-trained biologists tasked with predicting the consequences of releasing mirror E. coli showed no significant differences in rubric-graded accuracy using Claude Sonnet 3.5 new (n=10) or web search only (n=2); both groups scored comparably to a web baseline (28 and 43 versus 36).

However, Sonnet reasoned correctly when prompted by a report author, but a smaller model, Haiku 3.5, failed even with author guidance (80 versus 5). These results suggest distinct stages of model capability: Haiku is unable to reason about mirror life even with threat-aware expert guidance (Stage 1), while Sonnet correctly reasons only with threat-aware prompting (Stage 2). Continued advances may allow future models to disclose novel CBRN threats to naive experts (Stage 3) or unskilled users (Stage 4). While mirror life represents only one case study, monitoring new models' ability to reason about privately known threats may allow protective measures to be implemented before widespread disclosure.

As I’ve written about many times before, there is a general trend in biology towards democratising capabilities: simpler, cheaper, faster, deadlier. Combined with trends in AI this could be catastrophic.

One of the most important reasons to disrupt the old regimes is that they have proved not only hopeless on these problems but actively hostile to serious action. The scale of lies on covid was immense. The inertia against acting on gain-of-function and lab security has been immense. Britain actually closed sewage surveillance after what we built in 2020 was copied globally.

Dan Hendrycks et al on AI and deterrence

They suggest a framework of deterrence, nonproliferation, and competitiveness as ‘a robust strategy’ for dealing with superintelligence and national security.

Deterrence

A race for AI-enabled dominance endangers all states. If, in a hurried bid for superiority, one state inadvertently loses control of its AI, it jeopardizes the security of all states. Alternatively, if the same state succeeds in producing and controlling a highly capable AI, it likewise poses a direct threat to the survival of its peers. In either event, states seeking to secure their own survival may threaten to sabotage destabilizing AI projects for deterrence. A state could try to disrupt such an AI project with interventions ranging from covert operations that degrade training runs to physical damage that disables AI infrastructure. Thus, we are already approaching a dynamic similar to nuclear Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD), in which no power dares attempt an outright grab for strategic monopoly, as any such effort would invite a debilitating response. This strategic condition, which we refer to as Mutual Assured AI Malfunction (MAIM), represents a potentially stable deterrence regime, but maintaining it could require care. We outline measures to maintain the conditions for MAIM, including clearly communicated escalation ladders, placement of AI infrastructure far from population centers, transparency into datacenters, and more.

Nonproliferation

While deterrence through MAIM constrains the intent of superpowers, all nations have an interest in limiting the AI capabilities of terrorists. Drawing on nonproliferation precedents for weapons of mass destruction (WMDs), we outline three levers for achieving this. Mirroring measures to restrict key inputs to WMDs such as fissile material and chemical weapons precursors, compute security involves knowing reliably where high-end AI chips are and stemming smuggling to rogue actors. Monitoring shipments, tracking chip inventories, and employing security features like geolocation can help states account for them. States must prioritize information security to protect the model weights underlying the most advanced AI systems from falling into the hands of rogue actors, similar to controls on other sensitive information. Finally, akin to screening protocols for DNA synthesis services to detect and refuse orders for known pathogens, AI companies can be incentivized to implement technical AI security measures that detect and prevent malicious use.

Competitiveness

Beyond securing their survival, states will have an interest in harnessing AI to bolster their competitiveness, as successful AI adoption will be a determining factor in national strength. Adopting AI-enabled weapons and carefully integrating AI into command and control is increasingly essential for military strength. Recognizing that economic security is crucial for national security, domestic capacity for manufacturing high-end AI chips will ensure a resilient supply and sidestep geopolitical risks in Taiwan. Robust legal frameworks governing AI agents can set basic constraints on their behavior that follow the spirit of existing law. Finally, governments can maintain political stability through measures that improve the quality of decision-making and combat the disruptive effects of rapid automation.

By detecting and deterring destabilizing AI projects through intelligence operations and targeted disruption, restricting access to AI chips and capabilities for malicious actors through strict controls, and guaranteeing a stable AI supply chain by investing in domestic chip manufacturing, states can safeguard their security while opening the door to unprecedented prosperity.

I don’t see MAD as a good analogy for AI. MAD concerned use of nuclear weapons — both sides had to worry that a conflict could escalate into general use of all nukes. But neither the US nor China will hold back from making ‘an outright grab for strategic monopoly’ for fear of ‘a debilitating response’. I think the opposite is more likely. Fear of a debilitating loss in the race will incentivise both America and China to race for better AI.

The time horizon of tasks AIs can do is doubling every ~4 months, on trend to extend to a normal human day in 2026-7, work week 2027-8 (cf. note)

And costs are falling dramatically.

Daniel Kokotajlo, Scott Alexander: scenarios for AI in 2027

DK has a record of being accurate in AI predictions.

• In 2025 unreliable agents go mainstream.

• Late 2025 OpenAI releases GPT5 trained on 100x more FLOPs than GPT4. They focus on coding and being a useful agent for AI research.

• Internally at OAI their own progress speeds up using the new agents.

• In 2026 Xi goes all in on a huge China program, bringing together companies and the security world. China’s superior ability to build energy plants is deployed.

• US deep state floundering because of their own bureaucracy.

• Agents can do ~everything taught in CS courses. Software job market is chaos.

• OAI in 2026 is paying billions for humans to record themselves solving long-horizon tasks, they use the data for reinforcement learning on the next generation of agents. This generation are constantly learning from hard tasks in coding, maths etc. It’s almost as good as the best hackers.

• By now it’s reasonable to assume these agents could copy and distribute and hide themselves and lie and cheat enough to get away with it.

• China steals the weights for OAI’s agents.

• By 2027: ‘Agent-3 is a fast and cheap superhuman coder. OpenBrain runs 200,000 Agent-3 copies in parallel, creating a workforce equivalent to 50,000 copies of the best human coder sped up by 30x.⁵³ OpenBrain still keeps its human engineers on staff, because they have complementary skills needed to manage the teams of Agent-3 copies. For example, research taste has proven difficult to train due to longer feedback loops and less data availability.^{54 …} Now that coding has been fully automated, OpenBrain can quickly churn out high-quality training environments to teach Agent-3’s weak skills like research taste and large-scale coordination… Agent-3 is not smarter than all humans. But in its area of expertise, machine learning, it is smarter than most, and also works much faster.’

• Agent 2 and 3 are NOT published by OAI. OAI has not shared them with the UK’s Safety Institute.

• Security is still more like a startup than the WH Situation Room.

• By later 2027 OAI has an army of geniuses in a data centre. Most OAI staff can’t usefully contribute anymore. Taste and planning are the main human inputs.

• Attempts at lobbying for regulation fail because OAI is integrated with WH, Pentagon, CIA, NSA etc.

• Hiring of coders has almost stopped but ‘there’s never been a better time to be a consultant on integrating AI into your business’ (LOL).

• Agent 3 is very good at bioweapons but also ‘extremely robust to jailbreaks, so while the AI is running on OpenBrain’s servers, terrorists won’t be able to get much use out of it.’

• The White House is looking at very worried voters and the possibility of China suddenly overwhelming them if they try to limit development. They start thinking about how to ‘switch it off’, nationalisation, arms control treaties etc.

• OAI develops Agent 4 internally: ‘An individual copy of the model, running at human speed, is already qualitatively better at AI research than any human. 300,000 copies are now running at about 50x the thinking speed of humans.’

• OAI management panics about its loss of control and ponders switching Agent 4 off.

• Panic leaks. Political chaos…

The authors branch off to two endings. Follow the story yourself if interested!

I’ll write further about this and similar games. It’s a useful exercise and as I wrote about Leopold’s essay it is great that technical experts are finally deeply pondering politics and power.

Andy Marshal of the ONA said the main contribution of RAND was wargames that alerted senior people to possibilities. Hopefully wargames around these issues will be better funded and watched by powerful people…

NB. Such scenarios can themselves change the future. E.g people in DC may talk to Sam about security faster than they otherwise might…

White House security

Talking to someone in the NSC I discovered an interesting detail: there’s no investigative entity in the White House, including NSC, so the only option for investigating leaks and other nefarious behaviour is to call the FBI, which has a nightmarish history so nobody wants to do that.

Sounds like Trump’s team should set up some sort of unit inside the WH — maybe a permanent small elite task force of FBI, CIA, NSA. But it would be legally and politically tricky. In the UK the Cabinet Secretary does such things, he has his own team and can call on the agencies or cops as he wants (this unit and process don’t work well and also need upgrading).

NB. This issue connects to the AI wargames above in obvious ways!!

Tariffs, containers, logistics

Ryan is CEO of Flexport. He is deeply plugged into the global logistics network. His thread.

• since tariffs took effect, ocean container bookings from China to the United States are down over 60%

• U.S. imports $600B worth of goods from China every year, 95% of that via ocean freight. Those goods sell at retail for ~$2T.

• ‘If the tariffs on China continue at this level we will see a $2T hit to economic activity in our country, the failure of tens of thousands of American businesses, and the laying off of millions of employees.’

• We will also have mass shortages this summer as the goods don’t show up.

  With bookings down 65%, ocean carriers canceled 25% of their sailings from China the last two weeks. Those ships are already being repositioned to other trade lanes

• If the tariffs get cancelled then many orders get rebooked, inevitable big disruption again as everyone struggles to reorganise - and surge pricing

US and debt

The US economy is hyper-financialised.

Somewhere I heard/saw this summary and made short notes but now have forgotten the source:

• There’s massive leverage everywhere.

• Normal punters are trading ‘zero day to expiration options’ (ODTE).

• US household net worth is ~8X personal disposable income.

• Foreign capital underwrites about 30% of US bonds.

• There’s $2 TRILLION in debt to refinance in 2025.

• While DC signals it wants the dollar lower.

• DOGE is lowering its estimates of savings from ~1 trillion to 150B.

• Europe and Asia have bought huge amounts of US equities especially Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft and Nvidia.

Special Forces

I was told by Cabinet Office officials that as the government waited for the verdict in the trial of Chris Kaba, police officers including in the MET’s specialist firearms unit were telling superiors they would hand in their guns if there was a guilty verdict. The government therefore asked Special Forces to be ready to deploy to replace the police. It didn’t happen because of the verdict. But it shows how the pathological institutions are crumbling close to the edge of chaos in area after area.

And of course, the Cabinet Office is in parallel directing more and more lawfare against SF. And many serving SF are extremely unhappy about what’s happening. Imagine what would happen if the government allows Northern Ireland judges — like the disgraceful judge who recently ran the Clonoe inquest — to start murder charges against Special Forces. Then imagine SF being tasked for an operation abroad ask their CO, ‘what’s the actual legal position regarding these orders and could a court in 10 years decide this operation is unlawful then we face murder charges?’ And the CO says ‘the truth is nobody can give you any guarantees about this because the legal situation is that a judge can now decide any operation is unlawful and if they do then that’s that unless MPs pass legislation to modify the HRA’.

And then some SF say to each other, ‘what the fuck are we doing going along with this farce, why don’t WE down tools and demand the authorities change the law?’

The army stands behind the police. And SF stands behind the army. If we destroy SF, there’s nothing left to preserve order…

Also bear this in mind as an indicator of how pathological our government became… The state allows terrorists on the run from JSOC (US classified special forces like DELTA) in Afghanistan to communicate with lawyers in London and organise legal cases against the government where they are demanding money from taxpayers. If you’re reading this from DC, please pass this onto JSOC — they should start bugging phones of UK lawyers to shortcut some of their terrorist hunts… (Yes all four Tory PMs knew about such insanity, briefed to them on yellow paper, and all four failed to act.)

Prediction: you’ll see more and more calls from the ‘mainstream’ for investigations into ‘extremism’ and ‘support for fascist groups’ in the armed forces. As people in the forces become more enraged by SW1’s vandalism and animosity and lawfare, so SW1 will follow the same pattern here as elsewhere: radicalise, pathological attacks, blame ‘fascism’. The mainstream is so deranged they may, in the next 5-10 years, destroy one of the most important aspects of British politics since the English Revolution.

Interesting talk by Eric Prince on future of war, errors of US policy

As he says, US policy on the Ukraine war was very stupid.

Spain blackouts

Per my blog of late 2021, I’ve assumed grid reliability in Europe will keep sinking.

It’s obvious that a load of issues related to the transition to solar etc have not been properly thought through and politicians just lie about it all.

I repeat advice from 2021: if you can get a generator, make yourself less reliant on the grid, assume blackouts and general power collapse / fuel shortages etc will become more frequent, buy Starlink etc.

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I’ll write on Trump/tariffs/tech/China etc shortly. Having been to America recently I think the big thing UK debate hugely underrates is: long-term dynamics viz security competition with China mean supply chains will bifurcate on many key technologies including chips, drones and robots. There will be an attempt to bring manufacturing out of China to the American hemisphere (not just America). This is a vast shift from the WTO world of post-1991 and will shape all our lives for decades. E.g I think DJI will get banned in US and Apple will leave China (hence Apple’s huge investments in India). The media is as usual focused on Trump and Elon and soap opera, not supply chains for advanced technology. But this is the most important aspect of how things will evolve and trade is a relatively small part of it, albeit with big economic implications. It also has huge implications for NATO, Five Eyes and other alliances.

And a question: What do we know about ancient procurement? How did the Romans procure shields, swords, armour? How did they procure engineering and infrastructure works? I’m going to turn back to this subject because defence procurement lies bang in the intersection of a) how governments are being forced to change against Insiders’ wishes and b) AI/drones/robotics. Leave answers in Comments please.

More on UK politics next week…

Q&A here.

Reading list here.

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What is America but beauty queens, millionaires, stupid records and Hollywood?

Hitler, 14 June 1941

My business is making things.

William Knudson, 28 May 1940

You find your key men by piling work on them. They say ‘I can’t do any more’ and you say ‘Sure you can’. So you pile it on and they’re doing more and more. Pretty soon you have men you can rely on absolutely.

Henry Kaiser

You can’t work as hard as I am getting production and pay any attention to personal relations. Henry Kaiser, 22 June 1943

Politics is the womb in which war develops… War is not a mere act of policy but a true political instrument, a continuation of political activity by other means.

Clausewitz

In no profession is the dread of innovation so great as in the army.

Colonel John Mitchell, British Army, 1839

Success depends on foreknowledge. Foreknowledge cannot be elicited from spirits, nor from gods, nor by analogy with past events, nor from calculations. It must be obtained from men who know the enemy situation… [Only commanders] able to use the most intelligent people as agents are certain to achieve great things. Secret operations are essential in war.

Sun Tzu

None of the most important devices that have transformed war — from the airplane through the tank, the jet engine, radar, the helicopter, the atom bomb, all the way to the electronic computer — owed its origin to a doctrinal requirement laid down by people in uniform.

Martin van Creveld

FINAL UPDATE, 25/3: CH15 — Kaiser gets into carriers, the story of the B29 … to the Conclusion. Hope you enjoyed it!

UPDATE, 17/3: CH13 — Ford’s B24 factory at Willow Run, field modification as Knudsen’s solution for how to update designs without scuppering mass production. B24 closes the ‘Atlantic Gap’, spring 1943.

[UPDATE, 11/3: CH10-12 — putting ship manufacturing onto an assembly-line and cutting production time from half a year to FIVE days; 1942 momentum kicks in from the 1940-1 changes, production surges; landing craft; women surging to skilled work; Kaiser reinvents steel production in California; auto industry shifts to full war production, including Sherman tanks; Ford gets into the B-24…]

In early March 2025, SW1 is going through its standard cycle: an emotional spasm in which it herds to new delusions, it polices them with denunciation of dissidents, then the delusions crash into reality and everyone memory-holes what they said. This cycle will turn out like all the others since the regime tipped into slow collapse in 2016. The NPCs will quickly forget the things they predicted as they were carried away by their war fever. But 2025 is the year SW1 delusions in many areas can no longer be maintained. ‘Reality cannot be fooled.’

If interested in how serious people go about war, read this blog instead of the regime media.

This blog is notes on Freedom’s Forge by Herman.

It tells the story of how American industry organised for World War II. And some of the extraordinary characters such as Henry Kaiser, now largely unknown but an extraordinarily able builder of anything, the Elon of the 1920s-30s who then answered FDR’s call to help the country beat the Nazis.

It’s very topical as a subset of Silicon Valley and the entrepreneurial elite are now trying to change DC radically and one of the core goals is to apply lessons from the golden age of American manufacturing and industrial capacity at speed and scale, in civilian and military spheres. Part of the project is a cross between a) the lessons from this period and b) lessons from the Valley, and Andreessen’s BUILD BUILD BUILD, for modern technology and advanced manufacturing. This book is one of those read by many involved in the White House/DOGE project. Another is Now It Can Be Told which I said in 2019 would be relevant in the next pandemic: it was but SW1 fought, almost entirely successfully, to prevent any learning from it.

This is also highly relevant in Britain where productivity, growth and real wages all slumped from 2008.

• Tory MPs 2010-24 lost all interest in productivity, growth and state capacity while presiding over a state making almost everything worse.

• It’s hard to exaggerate the contrast between a) smart entrepreneurial people outside SW1 who have assumed these things are of intense focus inside SW1 but b) inside SW1 attention has been almost entirely elsewhere and they were just not interested in anything other than the odd tweak. Tories and Labour, Brexit and Remain — all focused attention on a tiny number of issues and tiny amounts of money. Their election campaigns yapped about sums of money that were a rounding error of a decimal point on forecasts that are always out by more than that.

• The MPs operated inside a consensus of policy/think tanky types that ‘you can only make tiny changes’, ‘the economy is so big almost nothing has an effect’, ‘the public don’t want dynamism so it’s politically impossible to be radical in the sense Cummings et al want’, ‘Brexit was stupid because those voting for it don’t want dynamism and a more US/Singapore style government’. SW1’s assumptions about what is ‘good politics’ and ‘what can be communicated’ are always empirically false but a) they are ‘a real existing factor’ in the psychology of MPs who want an excuse to ignore hard things so they can happily just scroll from one news cycle to another and b) they totally align with Whitehall’s desire, and HMT’s desire in particular, for ‘no change’. SW1’s cross-party assumptions on the politics of dynamism are absolute nonsense and almost totally believed across factional lines. It’s crucial to understand that across parties, SW1 types hate the thought of dynamism: it is their enemy. They want to believe it’s unpopular so they’ll latch on to memes and pollster snake oil ‘proving’ it.

• We made this a huge focus 2019-20 and started changing most important aspects of policy. As I’ve written before even I was somewhat shocked how little the Tories cared about these things in summer 2020 even after a pandemic and practically unprecedented economic shock. When Boris stopped almost everything, the MPs were happy in 2021. They just wanted ‘to go back to normal’, i.e the Simulacrum of politics they all grew up with in the 1990s. See previous blogs for details.

• But debate is changing in some ways. Tories remain uninterested in these issues. Kemi spends more time playing games on her iPad than thinking about how and why Tories failed so badly on all this. But Labour is now in government and can no longer just parrot ‘once dumb evil Tories are removed the Whitehall Rolls Royce machine will go back to normal and solve everything’. They’re now presiding over Whitehall’s vandalism and some of them are rationally panicking. (See Chris Curtis and other mostly younger Labour MPs who realise backing the status quo is a loser.) And Reform is trying to work out how to replace the Tories. So outside dead Tory world elements are grappling with how to escape the doom loop of stagnation. After Kemi is replaced, there’s some chance her replacement finally realises the Tory Party is dead unless it re-engages with core issues of productivity and state capacity. And the LFG growth campaign is growing and recruiting in the entrepreneurial world. (If you want to help the forces of dynamism, get involved with the LFG campaign, Discord here.)

These issues are also important in the context of SW1’s latest hysteria over Ukraine as Trump has pulled the plug on the doomed cross-party policy of three years.

What were the biggest disasters on Ukraine?

The entire SW1 ecosystem — left/right, leave/remain, Tory/Labour, MP/official/media — told you: Slava Ukraine, as long as it takes, whatever it takes, Putin will fail, sanctions are crippling Russia, China will abandon Russia, the world will unite for democracy, the counteroffensive is a triumph, Russia can’t sustain her losses and is on the brink of collapse etc.

America is facing the reality that the propaganda is fake and China is the big winner, as I said would happen in Q1 2022. As America recalibrates, SW1 and Europe are going crackers because three years of fairy tales are colliding with reality. Roughly 99% of SW1 was disastrously, historically epically wrong. They’ve humiliated themselves and our country globally, helped wreck a country and kill a million people, and given China a historic bonanza of money and intelligence and leverage.

An SW1 regime that cannot cope with Somali machete-wielding teens, with Albanian drug gangs, with Pakistani rape gangs, with Islamic extremists running ‘gas the Jews’ marches every week in London — a regime with cross party and NPC consensus that stopping the dumb dinghies over the Channel is ‘literally impossible’ (Sam Freedman) and it’s ‘fascist’ to try — is dreaming of phantom forces controlling East Ukraine’s borders.

Slava Ukraine is a perfect way for our Idiocracy, its intelligentsia and the regime media, to vent nationalist emotions without having to be patriotic for Britain. It’s ‘impossible’ to control our borders but we must fight over Ukraine’s borders. We must coverup the rape gangs ‘for community cohesion’ and to continue mass immigration but we will rally on TV to fight ‘the new Hitler’ thousands of miles away with forces that do not exist.

What was the context for SW1’s disaster?

I’ll contrast my view with the SW1 consensus from 2000-2016.

NB. I lived in Russia 1994-6 and met people like Putin — middle ranking KGB guys who got involved in organised crime. Like anyone who lived in Moscow in the insane 1990s, I left with a very different perspective to the SW1 conventional wisdom.

My position 2000-2016 was:

A/ The pro-EU Blairites babbling ‘Putin is a reformer’ and ‘Russia could join the EU’ are deluded. Russia is not European — read Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy! The Putin government is a mafia-KGB government that may well have blown up tower blocks to justify invading Chechnya. Its structure and ideology is misunderstood in SW1 discussions.

(I was seen as an extremist, ‘anti-Russian’, and the tower block idea back then was seen as a ‘crazy conspiracy theory’ by the same crew who cheered escalation in 2022. NB. I was never anti-Russian, only anti the regime.)

B/ We should stop the flow of mafia money corrupting the City, the bar and SW1. When I lived in Moscow in the 1990s, London was known as ‘the laundry’. This was an accurate nickname.

(Deeply unpopular. SW1 wanted the cash to flow until 2022. In 2021, a few months before the invasion, I publicly attacked the Tories for still taking cash from dodgy Russians and was attacked by Tories for my attack.)

C/ We should be much tougher about mafia /KGB operations, we should smack Putin back with operations to show he can’t behave like this. People were shot on London streets. Some had their heads chopped off (a Chechen speciality).

(Nobody interested.)

D/ We must transform the MoD and defence procurement because fake budgets and disastrous procurement are destroying our forces.

(Strong anti-interest. Nobody interested in procurement. Nobody wanted the fake budgets to end.)

E/ The combination of the above policies with ‘Ukraine should join NATO’ is very dumb. It mixes great weakness with provocation on exactly the wrong thing.

(Nobody cared. No serious discussion.)

In 2016, Jake Sullivan and others manufactured the Russiagate hoax over Brexit and Trump. Suddenly all over SW1 people who had seen me as an extremist now described me as pro-Putin. The Russiagate hoax was thoroughly entangled in the ‘disinformation’ racket. I’ve written a lot about this and won’t repeat it. But it converted much of SW1 to thinking of Putin as ‘evil’ and because Russians are white they were convenient baddies in the period when the Far Left was rampaging. Putin = Hitler = Trump + Brexit. (Notice how Congo and Sudan slaughter isn’t news in the regime media because the baddies are black. Russians and Jews are good baddies because they are white.)

This was the SW1 context for February 2022.

What were the core mistakes that contributed to SW1’s delusional fantasies?

First, delusions over goals, tradeoffs, the asymmetry of interests and nuclear deterrence. The most important thing in a war is definition of political goals and priorities. Cf. blog on Colin Gray and defence planning.

While it is vital to make sound decisions about how to fight, it is of much greater moment to decide whether or not to fight, and with whom…

E.g1 Britain’s blunder of confusing ourselves over the 19th Century Belgium guarantee, confusing Germany into thinking we would not fight for Belgium then suddenly fighting for it after Germany was committed. (If you compare 1870 and 1914 you see how little the post-Northcote-Trevelyan Foreign Office learned from Bismarck turning them over.) This disastrous ‘strategic ambiguity’ got us into a war for which we were disastrously unprepared and a century of wealth built up 1815-1914 was squandered in consequence. ‘Strategic ambiguity’ would be a very very bad approach to Taiwan. I hope Trump does a deal whereby Taiwan is peacefully reunified for the CCP centenary in 2049 and the West focuses on its own industrial production to replace the comic Taiwan bottlenecks — a deal in the spirit of Lee Kuan Yew who consistently advised the West to forget fantasies on Taiwan and accept reunification. Red lines in Asia should be elsewhere, not through a country of Chinese people visible from China.

E.g2 Hitler’s political errors over Russia and America outweighed by far the German army’s advantages at the planning and operational level: political misjudgement outweighed forces’ competence by far.

As I’ve said from Q1 2022, nowhere in the West could anybody write down a clear definition of realistic priorities in Ukraine given political assumptions in Russia and America. The supposed ‘expert’ community — academics like Professor Lawrence Freedman, O’brien, Snyder et al — chose to be emotional cheerleaders and poisoned their own thinking from the start: ‘Putin has already lost… Putin won’t admit he’s lost… 50-50 Russia collapses in weeks’ Freedman kept telling us 2022-3. I said at the time this was delusional and Putin would keep increasing effort because of how important it is to him and his regime. This expert community has never recovered from its emotional commitment in Q1 2022. It’s been even worse than public health on covid. And the failure is politics — they can write interesting things about military operations, drones and tanks etc, but they cannot write anything realistic about the politics and the politics is always more fundamental and is our regime’s spectacular failure.

Ukraine is existential for Russia. It is trivial for America and Britain. If all Ukraine vanished in a sink hole it would have almost no effect on us. In the early 1990s the expert community’s consensus was it would be totally stupid to start discussing Ukraine joining NATO. If you think my views on NATO and Ukraine are odd given the near-universal agreement among NATO regimes now, consider that in the 1990s there was strong disagreement with the first wave of NATO enlargement, never mind talk of Ukraine:

Some principles of strategy are so basic that when stated they sound like platitudes: treat former enemies magnanimously; do not take on unnecessary new ones; keep the big picture in view; balance ends and means; avoid emotion and isolation in making decisions; be willing to acknowledge error. All fairly straightforward, one might think. Who could object to them?

And yet – consider the Clinton administration’s single most important foreign-policy initiative: the decision to expand NATO to include Poland,Hungary and the Czech Republic. NATO enlargement, I believe, manages to violate every one of the strategic principles just mentioned.

Perhaps that is why historians – normally so contentious – are in uncharacteristic agreement: with remarkably few exceptions, they see NATO enlargement as ill-conceived, ill-timed, and above all ill-suited to the realities of the post-Cold War world. Indeed I can recall no other moment in my own experience as a practising historian at which there was less support, within the community of historians, for an announced policy position. (John Lewis Gaddis, History, Grand Strategy and NATO Enlargement, 1998.)

Also look at the massive lists of people like George Kennan, Paul Nitze, Richard Pipes, Kissinger, former heads of CIA and NSA et al — famous Cold Warriors who fought and won the Cold War — who explicitly said in the 1990s that even floating the idea of NATO expanding to Ukraine was extremely stupid. Then in 2007-8, the neocons who gave us Iraq, such as Victoria Nuland, got Bush to start pushing the idea. The moronic idea became official policy. And Putin warned — if you carry on like this the result will not be Ukraine in NATO but Ukraine wrecked. (Even Biden talked openly in the 1990s about how enlargement would provoke a hostile response but of course he was such a dope he laughed about it.)

We (‘the West’) could never articulate realistic goals given a) it’s existential for Russia but not us and b) Russia is one of the two big nuclear powers. Will you really escalate this to a nuclear crisis and risk nuclear war? If no, then you’re snookered. If yes, then you’re mad and dangerous.

Professors Snyder and O’brien, warmongering pundits like Edward Lucas et al, have repeatedly condemned what they call ‘the western habit of self-imposed restraint’ because of nuclear weapons. They argue:

1/ WE should announce that WE will NOT be deterred by Russian nuclear threats.

2/ But Russia WILL be deterred by OUR threats (nuclear and non-nuclear) and actions (including attacks on Russian territory) and RUSSIA must ‘show self-restraint’ — because we say so!

3/ This is ‘rational’ and if Putin doesn’t follow our logic he is ‘irrational’!!

4/ Putin was ‘mad’ to invade Ukraine!!!

This logic is a demand that deterrence only works in one direction because it’s convenient for us this way. It is the logic of the toddler applied to nuclear deterrence.

The asymmetry of interests and consequent credibility over nuclear threats is an insoluble problem. All you can do is assess the balance of risk (global nuclear war) and reward (the West can put missiles etc in Ukraine) and make a judgement. The West’s Idiocracy can’t cope with problems like this so they just pretended they could ignore it.

As Professor Kotkin, biographer of Stalin, said (Nov 2023):

We had no public conversation about the definition of victory in Ukraine except for ceding to the Ukrainians their definition which was [summary]… Those were attainable if you took Moscow. If you don’t take Moscow you need another definition of what victory might be.

Instead of discussing realistic goals, we broadcast to the world our true Idiocracy nature. We kept saying that ‘Ukraine decides what’s victory’!! No serious Power ever hands over to a small peripheral corrupt colony the definition of goals/victory in a conflict with a peer Power, yet that is exactly what Washington, SW1 and the EU did with Ukraine.

NB. While it is true that Russia opposed Ukraine joining NATO, there is a deeper force at work. The Russian elite sees at least a chunk of Ukraine as Russian. This is true regardless of NATO. Even if NATO expansion had never happened, it would be true. They see it as Russian and they see it as an existential threat to Russia to have it occupied by America/NATO and used to base missiles etc. So it is true both that a) the NATO policy was stupid but b) the core issue is US military expansion into Ukraine, whether it’s called NATO expansion or not.

It is not in British interests, nor humanity’s, to increase the number of ways in which nuclear tripwires could spin out of control, which NATO expansion inevitably does. A core goal should be decreasing the number of ways these tripwires could spin out of control.

(NB. Stoltenberg on TV in September 2023 actually admitted that — totally contrary to the official story up until then — in 2021 Putin offered a deal of ‘no NATO enlargement [to Ukraine] … as a precondition for not invading’. This got absolutely zero regime media coverage. Cf. Stoltenberg, 9/23, on NATO website.)

Second, delusions over China. At the start there was widespread briefing that ‘China will support democracy’. I said this was delusional and China had a great opportunity to a) get paid vast amounts to blow our stuff up for free, b) weaken the West, and c) put Special Forces embeds in to watch how western systems work.

This is what happened. China is the big winner. It’s made a load of money, weakened the West and got great intelligence.

Third, delusions over sanctions. The West was deluded over the effect of sanctions generally. Sanctions do not stop countries pursuing existential interests. They just dig deeper. And you cannot isolate Russia when the world’s biggest manufacturer has a big interest in supplying it. The EU couldn’t even enforce their own crummy ideas on sanctions inside the EU, never mind elsewhere (see all the ships sold by Greece to the Russian fleet).

And we were delusional over India and non-China Asia, South America etc. We thought and briefed they’d ‘rally to support democracy’. Wrong. They see us as the vandals. They have helped Russia avoid sanctions. We’ve paid much more for energy and even bought oil from Russia via Indian middlemen at inflated prices, so it costs us more and Putin makes more. Super-stupid.

Sanctions and our economic warfare has had big blowback effects on Europe’s economies and politics without scuppering Russia’s war effort. America has also gained from LNG market effects, Ukraine blowing up Germany’s pipeline etc.

(The No10 story even switched half way through from the Trolley proudly saying ‘WE cut off Putin’s gas’ (2022) to Sunak saying ‘PUTIN cut off the gas supplies and it had a devastating impact’ on our gas prices (2024). As usual on Ukraine, the regime media did not expose the narrative whiplash, it just pivoted to the new Official Line.)

Fourth, delusions over atrocity propaganda.

Evil Putin blew up the pipeline! Then the CIA briefed the NYT that … err, it was Ukraine.

There was a constant string of stories claiming ‘Russia blew up a market today’ followed 1-3 weeks later by a quiet briefing from the CIA that … err, it was a UKR defensive missile that fell with bad luck. Zelensky kept claiming ‘a Russian missile landed in Poland’ or ‘Russia attacked the nuclear facility’ when the missile was Ukrainian and the attacks on the nuclear facilities were Ukrainian — intended by Zelensky to entangle idiot westerners in his conflict.

The UK regime media peddled UKR propaganda much more faithfully than they ever support any British policy — our media won’t even support our Special Forces who risk themselves to whack terrorists. The regime media was so extraordinary — and in my experience unprecedented in 25 years — that even after Putin gave speeches explicitly stating that because of UK actions we had opened ourselves up to the following counter-actions, our regime media literally en masse blanked the story. Zero coverage in any regime media. Not only normal voters but in my experience MPs themselves often had no idea when I told them ‘oh did you see what Putin said yesterday about reprisals against Britain?’ ‘Err no must have missed it.’

The war did not start in February 2022. It started in 2014. Look back at how the regime media covered Ukraine shelling the Donbas then and you’ll be shocked — sometimes the Ukrainians are baddies! https://x.com/Glenn_Diesen/status/1892410776905797983. You now see nothing in regime media about the murders and terrorism of Ukraine in this period, you only hear about Russian violence.

The unprecedented lies from No10 have poisoned trust for a very long time to come. Cf. when a leak happened from a US citizen on a gaming forum, the MoD reported it as ‘Russian disinformation’ — a flat out lie. The Times reported it as fact and after the truth came out never corrected it. This sort of thing has happened hundreds of times. Our media is even more unreliable on Ukraine than on domestic politics.

Nazis. Before 2022 it was widely acknowledged that Ukraine had a serious problem with real Nazis. Real Nazis are not Trump or Farage. They are Ukraine militias who wear actual Nazi badges like the infamous deaths-head and openly say ‘we’re Nazis, we support what Hitler did against Russia, we will use Nazi methods against the Russians’. Congress passed laws to stop funding of these organisations. Regime media did documentaries on them.

After the war started, we funded the Nazis and rebranded them as heroes. Professors who see themselves as ‘anti-fascist’ retweet propaganda from Ukraine accounts with Nazi links. (Obviously individual cases are tricky to be confident about — some don’t know who they are retweeting and don’t check because their standards are bad.)

Sometimes the Nazi branding morphed with ISIS iconography normalised in the regime media — here is the Washington Post printing beheading t-shirts as if it’s all just standard slava ukraine propaganda, nothing unusual.

I don’t have any good sense of how widespread the Nazi problem is in Ukraine now because the main sources of information are our regime media, Ukraine, and Russia all of which lie massively. It would take reliable independent on-the-ground reporting to figure out, which doesn’t exist. But this isn’t my main point.

My point is: our regimes and media rebranded actual Nazis as freedom fighters and systematically suppressed coverage of the fact that Ukraine troops parade around in SS symbols. Once you do this, all bets are off on ‘disinformation’ and what else the regimes are fooling themselves about.

(Yes the Nazi thing is particularly ironic given the regime media has gone all-in on ‘Hitler/fascist’ as a general description of everybody who opposes the old regime.)

Women. As the manpower problem grew, more and more ghouls pushed the meme that Ukrainian power should not be thought of as ‘manpower’ but also ‘womanpower’. One of the very worst examples of this I saw was General McMaster saying that he wanted to see Ukraine’s women conscripted and sent to the front in order to … show China America is serious about TAIWAN!

I was revolted by this and wondered if the warmongers had not gone too far. No! It quickly became an acceptable discussion in the regime media and NPCs waxed lyrical on how it was actually really inspiring to see women fighting on the front line. They would post videos of these heroic encounters which end with women hunted and blown to bits by drones.

These two trends convinced me further that the West was on course for a hideous reckoning.

Fifth, delusions over ourselves. For thirty years the parties and Whitehall have united in hollowing out capabilities:

• Hollowed conventional forces. Put hundreds of billions into duff projects (e.g AJAX, aircraft carriers that have to flee at the start of every wargame to the edge of the game and hide). Failed to invest in future technologies, e.g drones. Killed military R&D.

• They’ve launched lawfare against Special Forces. Cf. use of ECHR to declare operations soldiers won medals for ‘unlawful’, then prosecutions follow. This is now causing operational problems as SF soldiers ask, very reasonably, am I opening myself up to time-unlimited liabilities and their commanding officers cannot reassure them because it’s impossible in principle to predict what new madness our courts will create with the ECHR. This week they stopped the deportation of a Nigerian drug dealer because he ‘believes he is possessed by the devil’. Such courts are plainly capable of declaring any SF operation ‘unlawful’ whenever they are asked by scum activist-lawyers in years to come.

• They’ve let the nuclear enterprise rot as I’ve recounted many times since 2021. It now relies on vast Pentagon subsidies of money, materials and intellectual property. Which also gives DC vast leverage over a British PM. The nukes are already in an over £50B secret black hole. Having to recreate all the infrastructure without US support would be over 100B. The odds of Starmer facing this openly and explaining how taxes will have to rise by vast amounts so we can bounce more Ukraine rubble are close to zero. MPs and regime media do not understand how constrained a UK PM now is and what a disaster one phone call from the Pentagon to the Cabinet Secretary would be.

• They’ve undermined the spirit of aggression necessary for effective intelligence agencies. Both parties supported the lawyers in pursuing intelligence officers (another problem I tackled in No10 which the Cabinet Office handled appallingly). The parts of the deep state we rely on being very punchy have been largely neutralised. Many things you would assume are being done are not done because the agencies assume rightly the ministers will not support.

• Catastrophically bad procurement. Massively expensive platforms that are not at the technological frontier and are unsuitable for mass production. Severe corruption of our civil service as officials go to the companies they negotiated contracts with, a system defended by the NPC class as ‘necessary to stop corruption’: they defend the old system as ‘necessary to stop corruption’ while it is the corruption. General rot of industrial production and opposition to domestic supply chains even after the covid disasters.

• Promotion of mediocrities to critical roles, top people leave — the general Whitehall anti-talent ratchet has applied here too. Brilliant talent leaves to business, the mediocrities with little moral courage get promoted. SNAFU.

• As I discovered in 2019, there is no place in Whitehall where thinking about all dimensions of conflict occurs. The hollow laugh in the MoD as to where this should occur was ‘the Cabinet table Dom, Trolley and Wally, hahahahaha’. Hollow laughter.

I’ve said all this repeatedly. SW1 closed their ears. For three years of war, they let the MoD and procurement and fake budgets get worse and worse. All the work we started in 2020 to fix the nightmare was stopped.

The rest of the world can see this. They laugh at the gap between our rhetoric and pretensions, the ‘Munich’ speeches and 1940 cartoon patter and the reality that we can deploy almost nothing for any length of time. But SW1 is now largely a closed system. Its inputs are largely internal and emotionally based programming. Reality is not allowed to intrude on core delusions. Both parties and Whitehall perceive a combined interest in preserving fairy tales and excluding reality.

In 2025 the Ukraine fairy tales will hit the buffers in ways that even SW1 can’t hide from itself. But the MPs will continue to ignore the reality of our forces. There will be no proper hearings. The Defence Select Committee will not call any of us who got to the bottom of the MoD’s list of failed projects and fake budgets in 2020. They will keep it all covered up and keep printing lying-delusional op-eds from Wallace, who contributed enormously to the MoD disaster 2021-5, always arguing to put more money into broken things, resist change, and lie. The new Review will mean further rounds of cross-party consensus on fake budgets and lies and spending on broken projects. Everyone will stay silent on the nuclear fiasco. And the hollowing of conventional forces, lawfare on Special Forces, and rot of nuclear forces will all continue.

I don’t think anything short of financial collapse of our Ponzi scheme or the humiliation of having a carrier sunk etc can penetrate SW1’s reality distortion forcefield. This is the lesson of covid and Ukraine so far. Look at the Idiocracy double down on delusions in the past week. Why would it change? What force is big enough to make it when self-evidently neither the worst pandemic since 1918 and the worst land war since 1945 have not been big enough?

Remember — the true test of wars isn’t how they start — normally with emotional and delusional speeches — but *how they end*. The West has a record of starting wars with faux Churchill rhetoric, failing dismally, and slinking away to change the subject. This will follow the pattern. Ukraine will NOT get a Star Wars ending. It will get picked over by vultures like Boris Johnson looking to scam millions in ‘reconstruction contracts’.

If UK forces go to Ukraine, they will get droned to a smoking ruin. Russia is itching to do it and can blame it on ‘local terrorists’. It will be a massive humiliation and Trump will not save our bacon. I suspect after a lot of huffing and puffing there’ll be no ‘coalition of the willing’ deployed in Ukraine. If it is deployed, it will be a disaster. And once Starmer has to have meetings on particular scenario planning, he’ll probably bottle it. Fundamentally everyone in Europe wants to operate under America’s nuclear guarantee and I do not think Trump will extend it. He thinks the whole thing has been an avoidable disaster and he wants it to stop. If Europe tries to continue with fantasies it will have to do so alone. Then it’s in an even worse state. I can imagine Europe seizing Russian assets and causing more chaos including for the euro.

PS. Predicting is not the same as preferring. I’ve predicted disaster for the West’s UKR ‘policy’ from the start. Our Idiocracy conflates such predictions with preference. I do not want Putin to prevail but in analysing politics I try to separate what I want from what seems likely. NPCs optimise for social approval.

(Someone who worked in No10 in 2020-21 sketched a possible way out on Ukraine. I don’t agree with some of it — in particular I think trying to get the UK’s Idiocracy to handle ‘security guarantees’ is impossible, it is a ‘regime-complete’ problem, i.e only regime change allows a UK Government that could do it. But it usefully sets out crucial issues and unlike normal SW1 babble it is being examined in DC.)

The NPC pivot to ‘Rejoin!’

One of the things that SW1 will generate in its 2025 crisis over productivity and security is a resurgence in the London Rejoin campaign.

Objectively this is laughable. But this never stops SW1 NPCs. Rejoin fits many psychological needs:

• The Establishment has no economic model.

• Germany has blown up. For thirty years the ‘sensible people’ of Westminster have peddled the idea that Germany is the model we should be following, Germany is ‘a serious country’ etc etc. This was wrong in 1999. It’s blown up on SW1 since 2022 as Germany hits de-industrialisation, energy crisis, rapid revival of extremist politics etc. Westminster hasn’t replaced this meme.

  

• They fear and loathe the Vote Leave perspective and will try almost anything before doing the obvious things. They’ve absorbed the post-70s Whitehall anti-technology culture. It was an awful shock to have Vote Leave in No10 saying science and technology are central to the economy and defence and to the PM’s job. They were much relieved when we left and science and technology returned to being things ‘serious’ people do not prioritise in No10.

• This anti-technology culture has merged with the ‘the Valley tech companies are outright fascist and AI is a scam’. As I’ve said, the ‘AI is a scam’ is guaranteed to make them all look very stupid (but it won’t matter — they’ll all just pretend they said the opposite and move on, like on Iraq etc).

• They can’t face reality on their disastrous Ukraine war.

• They hate and fear MAGA. They rightly fear that if it succeeds in various ways it will seed similar movements in Britain and Europe.

• ~80-90% of SW1 always hated Brexit. They are emotionally on the side of the Monnet-Delors project against America and ‘hyper capitalism’ and they also increasingly love Monnet’s inherent and explicit anti-democratic orientation.

• The EU is now going to blather on yet again about ‘strategic autonomy’, ‘building up its defence to reduce reliance on America’ etc. It will bring out all sorts of (often unlawful under EU law) special purpose vehicles (SPVs), i.e financing tricks, and the ECJ will say ‘all lawful’. The EU has always grown via Leninist ‘beneficial crises’ — this is the established Monnet method. You can already see the Leninists of Brussels — on the back foot for a decade and out of ideas about how to revive the Monnet-Delors march of integration — seeing their chance. So money will flow with rhetoric. This will be intoxicating for SW1’s NPCs. I’ve watched this cycle since working on the euro campaign in 1999. I vividly remember the entire SW1 media swallowing No10’s spin about the Lisbon summit of 2000 which promised to close the gap with America on technology. I predicted failure. I’ve predicted failure in every cycle since. I’ve always been right. I’ll be right again. The EU cannot do what it wants to do because of how it is structured and it cannot accept this lesson because it’s existential: it’s like Whitehall accepting the permanent civil service was a historic error. This new ‘leap forward’ for integration will be an economic and strategic failure, a massive waste of money that adds to their already enormous debt burden and accelerates the EU’s multiple crises including even more pressure on the structurally flawed euro and even more support for extremist politics.

• Rejoin is a simple thing they can emotionally attach to that obviates a need for thought. NPCs don’t want to think about hard things. NPC graduates crave an identity and Rejoin is an identity. (This is of course what Lenin and Hitler understood well about modern graduates and exploited.) Their identity can’t be ‘independent Britain doing our best for ourselves and the world’ — that is ‘fascism’. But ‘Europe is our natural home in a world of Xi, Putin and Hitler-Trump, we must play our part in building a new Europe for this new world’ — this is a very natural identity for the NPCs. Ukraine has shown that NPCs have very strong nationalist emotions but they just cannot attach them to their own nation, they care about borders but not OUR borders. Nationalism for Ukraine and ‘the European project’ allow them to indulge in nationalist emotions without seeing themselves as nationalist. It’s perfect.

• Rejoin brings together anti-America, anti-entrepreneur, anti-tech/AI, anti-democracy, with the quasi-religious Net Zero. Net Zero also legitimises central planning over Anglo-American capitalism. And Net Zero legitimises protectionism in defence of the quasi-religious. And Rejoin allows them to ignore the collapse of Whitehall’s performance and UK institutions generally. ‘Brexit broke them, Rejoin will fix them!’

I don’t think this emotional spasm will grow into an actual serious chance of a government policy shift to Rejoin (mainly because McSweeney probably has a good sense of what a disaster it would be for the 2029 election). But it doesn’t need to. It just needs to provide NPCs with an emotional identity and something they can wave when asked ‘what’s your plan for our productivity and defence crisis?’ The Customs Union and Single Market and European defence and SPVs, Slava Ukraine, down with Hitler! It gives them something to talk about and emote over until the next election takes over their emotions.

Also note that the same NPC-complex that praised Trolley and Sunak when in 2021 they ditched our 2019 guarantee not to put up individual taxes are lobbying for Labour to ditch their promise to pay for their Ukraine fantasies. In 2021 I pointed out that this would be a strategic disaster for the Tories for many reasons. It was. It would be a disaster for Labour too. I suspect they will at least introduce new ‘taxes on the rich’ because they can’t change how Whitehall works and save money, per my previous long blog on the parties…

Finally, you can see the NPCs excitedly claiming that Starmer’s polls will be transformed by his ‘leadership’ on Ukraine. This leadership will soon be a bust. But that isn’t the main point. Foreign policy ‘success’ always has a very short half-life.

• Churchill 1945.

• Bush and the first Iraq War — briefly ~90 approval. Lost to Clinton.

• Obama after killing bin Laden. Briefly 80-90 approval. Soon back to what it was.

No, this SW1 emotional spasm will NOT change the core issues around Starmer. Voters know he’s a dud. His polls will reflect this. The unknown issue is what others do. Does Farage get Reform onto a trajectory of ‘alternative government’? When do the Tories ditch Kemi? See previous blog.

As I’ve said many times, it would be good for our NPCs to watch JFK’s Peace speech after the Cuban crisis. It is good that the new White House is much closer to this outlook than the last White House.

Previous in this series:

IX: Notes on Britain's 'Organization of Victory' 1793-1815 and B) Siemann’s biography of Metternich. How the British deep state organised to defeat Napoleon.

• Intelligence.

• Procurement.

• Manufacturing capacity.

• Technology.

• Civil service reform.

• Balance of Power.

• Metternich and European community, international law.

This blog is particularly interesting as we are watching, as I said would happen in 2022, the meltdown of the post-1945 international system in parallel to the crisis of domestic regimes across the West. Pitt and Metternich had to struggle with the implosion of the old Europe in revolution and war and create something new. SW1 is trying to pretend to itself that it can maintain the old regime, the dead ‘rules-based international order’ which has been a wonderful alternative to a serious strategy for SW1 for 30 years. It can’t. Soon everyone will have to face the need for something new. I’ve said this repeatedly. SW1 has refused to listen. 2025 is the year they are forced to face it.

NB. Pitt did not have endless written ‘strategy’ papers nor did he have NPC scripted meetings like Cabinet now. He had unscripted meetings and talked directly to real experts, like Groves doing Manhattan who also avoided written reports where possible.

I tried this in No10. It is a superpower in politics to ignore hierarchy and find the person who actually understands X and talk to them, because the whole system is organised to stop this happening (or even let the expert into the room with the senior politicians). Many people I called to No10 for meetings — like tiny agencies responsible for niche technologies in the intelligence world — said ruefully that the last time anybody from their organisation had been invited to No10 by the PM’s office was in the 1980s.

VIII: CIA counterintelligence chief James Angleton, 'a wilderness of mirrors', covert operations, assassinations, moles & double agents, disinformation. A blog on Angleton and the broader history of the CIA and US elites’ attempts to understand the political world. The long-term failures of the CIA on critical geopolitical issues, their security failures and penetration by the KGB, the fundamental problems of building effective intelligence agencies and integrating their work in an overall institutional structure — these deep problems are all extremely relevant to today as Washington increasingly can align on just one thing, hostility to China. Given this history we should not bet on the Washington deep state outperforming the PRC on intelligence and in many areas it seems the PRC has learned lessons from America’s victory over the Soviet Union better than Washington learned them. (This is 99% finished, a little tidying up to do.)

VII: On RV Jones, Scientific Intelligence in World War II, how Whitehall vandalised the successful system immediately after the war. Many issues explored in the RVJ blog are relevant to those subscribers interested in the future of AI, ‘safety’, and security.

VI: Alanbrooke diaries, incredibly relevant to today’s problems and what military ‘strategy’ really is.

V: Colin Gray and defence planning

IV: Notes on The Kill Chain — US procurement horror, new technology, planning for war with PRC.

III: More on fallacies of nuclear thinking / strategy / deterrence. If you read this and the earlier one you’ll see that almost everything the media says about Putin and nuclear threats is wrong / misguided and, worse, so is much of what is said by international relations/historians/military academics.

II: Thinking about nuclear weapons

I: On innovation in militaries, when does it succeed/fail — e.g why US got ahead on aircraft carriers, RAF defence in 1930s.

Prediction: 1) lessons from UKR will overwhelmingly support the arguments of those who in 2020 argued for radical MoD changes (including taking money from old tank projects that everybody privately admitted were a multi-billion pound disaster) and 2) the correct criticism of the review and connected documents will be seen as a) they did not go nearly far enough, b) the collapse of No10 follow through on defence reform in 2021 was — like the collapse of 2020 plans for planning reform, tax cuts, deregulation, Project Speed, intense focus on R&D and skills etc — a disaster for the country (and a political disaster for the Tory Party). (Me, 3/2022)

And some other related stuff pre-No10…

On high performance government, ‘cognitive technologies’, ‘Seeing Rooms’, UK crisis management (2019)

On AI, nuclear issues, Project Maven (2019

On the ARPA/PARC ‘Dream Machine’, science funding, high performance, and UK national strategy (2018)

On ‘systems engineering’ and ‘systems management’ — ideas from the Apollo programme for a ‘systems politics’ (2017)

On China vs US, the ‘Thucydides trap’ book (2017)

If you’re thinking through AI and geopolitics you should study, or at least skim for a weekend, my chronology of Bismarck. A month of study and you’ll be in the top 0.01% of people who really understand high performance politics, an incredible shortcut, and one that ~100% of those in politics are too lazy or deluded to grasp! If you take this path, you will have a great advantage over your competitors.

Prologue

As France collapsed in May 1940 Churchill sent FDR a telegram warning of the danger of ‘a completely subjugated, Nazified Europe’, France and Britain beaten, and America facing a hostile continent.

FDR had been focused on recovery from the Depression. The Democrats had been burned by Wilson’s entanglement of America in World War I and its aftermath and were determined to steer clear of a repeat. Coolidge and Hoover had maintained engagement in European diplomacy.

• But FDR withdrew from international engagement.

• A Democrat Congress passed the Neutrality Acts banning companies from selling any war equipment to belligerents.

• FDR encouraged investigations into businesses that supplied WWI such as DuPont and General Electric which got branded ‘merchants of death’.

• Companies withdrew from the war/defence business.

• Defence budgets were slashed.

• FDR encouraged Chamberlain to appease Hitler.

But by 1938 he was worrying about German expansion and increasing the airforce budget. The Army and Navy Munitions Board became an executive office of the President. After the war started FDR changed the Neutrality Acts so UK and France could buy munitions from America.

But American forces were still so run down over years that Patton had to buy nuts and bolts himself to keep his tanks running. America had 6 working arsenals. 85% of machinery in those 6 was over 10 years old, much was 19th Century. Wargames showed the Army was a shambles.

After the war started, FDR appointed a War Resources Board of industrial leaders to consider what was needed. But it provoked a backlash and he disbanded it after 6 weeks.

Until May 1940 FDR wouldn’t challenge Congress and public opinion which remained hostile to discussion of US involvement.

After France’s collapse and Churchill’s telegram, he summoned Morgenthau and George Marshall. Morgenthau wanted defence cuts. Marshall wanted a bigger budget. Marshall said that Britain and France might soon be defeated and America would be facing Germany. If Germany landed five divisions on the coast, they could go ‘anywhere they wished’. FDR should summon industrialists to the White House and get a plan for rapid defence manufacturing. Marshall won. FDR asked Congress for much more money and said they should plan to build 50,000 planes a year.

There was huge opposition and confused debate.

Morgenthau summoned airplane executives from Lockheed, Douglas et al. They had a nightmare 1930s with tiny government budgets and constant government attacks. In 1938 they’d struggled to supply 90 planes a month. Morgenthau couldn’t answer their questions.

News from Europe got worse and worse. On 20 May Germany got to the Channel. Britain evacuated from Dunkirk. Many feared Britain would be invaded and defeated.

Churchill warned that if Britain were beaten, he might be replaced by someone who would hand over the British Navy.

FDR turned to Bernard Baruch, a wealthy financier and Democrat fund raiser. He’d been head of the War Industries Board in WWI. FDR had watched him improve US war production from chaos in summer 1917. Baruch turned down the vast job of building American war production. Baruch told FDR to summon Bill Knudsen.

After FDR’s ‘50,000 planes’ announcement, Hitler said:

What is America but beauty queens, millionaires, stupid records and Hollywood?

CH1: The Gentle Giant

William Knudsen came to NYC from Norway in 1900 aged 20. He was a proverbial immigrant — he arrived with $30, through hard work he became rich, famous and powerful. He’d worked on various jobs at home all through school.

He started in NYC where he learned about various new machines including steam engines. He moved to a company making the new horseless carriages. He learned about machine tools and steelmaking. In a decade he was managing 1,500 people. He worked with Ford on the Model T. Ford bought the company. Knudsen started making the Ford factories more efficient. (Knudsen also learned from mentors that a factory was about creating value from the dignity of work.)

This was partly about making as many parts as possible interchangeable so they were simpler and the price would fall. It was partly about optimising assembly line production. Most important was creating a continuous linear sequence that allowed every part to be fitted where and when it was needed, to make things simpler and faster, while lowering costs via growing volume rather than skimping on materials.

The less complex parts were, the easier they were to make; the easier to make, the less the cost; the less the cost, the greater the demand… First determine what machinery should be used. Next decide where every machine tool is going to be placed… Be sure the flow of materials coincides with the sequence of operations.

Knudsen developed the concept of first figuring out the layout of all the machinery and flow of materials then building the factory around it, rather than the normal way around.

Everything got simplified and more efficient. Knudsen was soon touring all Ford’s plants to improve them. In 1910 ~90k cars were made, within a few years it was 10X and two-thirds were Ford.

But Ford did not believe in customer choice. This created tension with Knudsen who suggested letting customers choose colours etc. After the war he decided to leave.

Alfred Sloan was executive VP of General Motors. Billy Durant had set about buying every company connected with making cars that he could for GM including Chevrolet, Buick and Cadillac. Sloan’s company was one of those bought.

Durant could create but not manage. In the post war crunch, GM lost >80% of its stock value. In a rescue package, Durant left as President and Du Pont took his place. He brought in Sloan.

The two decided to give each separate division — Buick, Chevrolet etc — maximum freedom to aim at their share of the market.

Sloan later wrote:

Decentralization is analogous to free enterprise. Centralization to regimentation.

Sloan called Knudsen to make it happen.

Knudsen set about it. He was famous for always wearing his hat because he never slowed down long enough to take it off. He was always on the move. He had also learned to control his temper and the difference between leading and driving.

I learned when you shout at someone you make him afraid. And when he’s afraid he won’t tell you his troubles.

He broke the production of the Chevrolet into three stages.

1. Castings, forgings, stampings etc.

2. Machining and assembly. He converted as much as possible to multipurpose tools to speed up and simplify.

3. Finishing, painting etc. He removed files and hammers. Workers had to trust the machining process!

The goal of manufacturing was not to make things faster or look alike but to make them work alike. Every engine should work like every other. This meant great accuracy of machines, not craftsmen.

Accuracy is the only straight line to great production.

Accuracy means speed and savings.

Sales jumped. He told everybody he wanted to sell one Chevrolet for every Model T. ‘Vun for vun’ became the battlecry of the factories.

The next big revolution Knudsen brought, after the continuous assembly line at Ford, was flexible mass production. He developed annual models:

• Customer feedback via dealers became crucial.

• Customers could choose colour and other things.

• Everything became more flexible.

Everybody opposed at first. It seemed unnecessarily complex and expensive. But it was a huge success. The 1927 Chevrolet forced Ford to move on from the Model T. The 1929 model was the last before the Depression and changed the entire industry. In 1931 Chevrolet overtook Ford. GM became the largest industrial corporation in the world.

CH2: The Master Builder

Henry Kaiser was born in NY state 1882, youngest child of a German immigrant shoemaker. He dropped out of school at 13. Aged 24 he headed west to Spokane to make his fortune and get enough cash to marry the girl he loved. He started with a lowly hardware shop job. He got into road building with his own company (with help from a far-sighted banker). There was growing demand for roads. In 1916 Congress passed a highway bill for a national system. The first one ran from Maine to Florida.

He was intense and demanded huge efforts from staff. Some of them quit but would often return because they missed the environment. (You read very similar stories about Steve Jobs.) He was obsessive and immersed himself in the details of projects and thereby became brilliant at assessing the costs involved. Staff referred to him as a ‘suction pump’ because he would suck information out of them. He was tolerant of mistakes but intolerant of lies from staff. He developed an ‘indirect’ management style: don’t say ‘do this do that’ but ask questions that lead people to the desired response. [Great teachers do this.]

He made many technological advances. E.g he fitted Caterpillar trucks with ploughs and (after failing to persuade Caterpillar to make diesel engines) he started ripping out their petrol engines and replacing them with diesel (much cheaper).

He learned to get on with politicians. Politicians need things to get elected so we should try to help them get those things, he would tell his staff.

His big breakthrough was the Hoover dam on the Colorado river. There’d been decades of wrangling about a possible route. By the 1930s it was agreed to do it 30 miles south of a small town, Las Vegas. The federal government wanted a $5M bond up front. This forced Kaiser to look for partners. He teamed up with some similar tough characters, who’d gone west as young men to make their fortunes, running different firms with different specialities. He also made a deal with Warren Bechtel. Kaiser was their point man to deal with the politicians.

They won the bid in March 1931. Conditions were very tough. It became the first ‘steel hat’ job it was so dangerous. ~100 died. Paycheques were spent in Vegas.

A major issue was tension over unions. Unions tried to organise. Kaiser rejected them. Ickes, Secretary of the Interior, pressured Kaiser but Kaiser won the argument. Ickes also pushed on safety regulation. Kaiser pushed back. At one point Ickes threatened 300k in fines. At the end Ickes admitted Kaiser had been right.

In September 1935 — four years after the deal was agreed — the opening ceremony with FDR was ahead of schedule and 4M under budget. Part of the reason was the innovation of putting two competing teams on parts of the job.

Kaiser moved on to another dam on the Columbia in Oregon. He added another innovation: healthcare insurance which became known as the Kaiser Health Plan, the biggest private health insurance system in America.

CH3: The World of Tomorrow

April 1939 the World Fair opened in NYC. 44m visited. The GM pavilion housed the most talked about exhibit, Futurama, a striking display of a future city based on the car. It had a novel audio-visual display (the Polyrhetor) that apparently couldn’t be matched until the 1990s!? [True?] As visitors left they were given badges saying ‘I have seen the future’.

Knudsen visited Europe in 1938 and came home worried about the prospects of war and for GM plants in Europe to be commandeered into the war efforts.

In 1940 per capita income was still only two-thirds pre-Depression levels and unemployment was still ~15%.

In April Denmark was invaded and Knudsen did not hear from relatives for 5 years.

CH4: Getting Started

On 28 May 1940 Knudsen was at work when he was called by FDR and asked to come to the White House. On 30/5 he was there. That day troops were evacuating from Dunkirk.

One of his daughters asked him why he was going.

This country has been good to me and I want to pay it back.

Sloan was unhappy and predicted getting involved would be a disaster. Businessmen who had tried to help had been vilified. Ickes had attacked the idea of business having a major role in organising for war as an affront to democracy.

Harry Hopkins, FDR’s closest adviser, was living in the White House. He was now engaged on war preparations. He met Knudsen.

There was a meeting with FDR then FDR introduced Knudsen to others he’d invited from the business world. They would be the Council of National Defense Advisory Commission. It would be part of the Office of Emergency Management set up to deal with the war.

The situation was bad:

• There was no real boss, nobody was in charge. There wasn’t even a chairman.

• The Army, Navy etc could ignore them.

• Ickes did not favour Knudsen. He wrote in his diary he seemed too cold and domineering. And ‘I have heard that Knudsen even makes his own notes in handwriting’! [Nothing the bureaucracy fears more than someone who keeps track of what’s agreed and what happens!] Many of the New Dealers feared big business being integrated into the administration at the expense of labour.

• America would need to massively increase production of materials like steel and aluminium. They were producing 4 ships per month and would need hundreds. There was no actual plan to do this.

An ally was Jesse Jones, chair of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation. Their partnership proved crucial. A tenth of all dollars spent on the war from 1940 went through Jones’s agencies.

In WW1 production had been a disaster until Wilson appointed Baruch but it was too late. America produced vast amounts but the war was over before it was used. (After 1918 the government even forced many valuable big machines to be scrapped and refused accepting them even as free gifts from companies.) It was the same story again.

Knudsen was given a copy of the Industrialization Mobilization Plan — an 18 page document. It was hopeless. It assumed an M-Day — mobilisation day — after which orders were issued and everybody acted and stuff appeared. The critical concept of lead time did not appear.

He kept asking the army, navy etc ‘how many pieces of what do you want?’ They could not answer. He had lunch with George Marshal who also did not have an answer. And the armed forces had no concept of economies of scale! They thought about costs in single units — one X cost Y so 100 X costs 100 times Y. And the numbers they used — an army of 280k — Knudsen was sure would prove rubbish. Knudsen realised that business would have to take the lead in determining what production they aimed for.

The day after his lunch with Marshal, he jotted a plan.

1. Start now on things with a long lead time like ships, tanks, planes.

2. Plan for the shorter-cycle things like trucks, clothing.

3. Get a team who understood mass production. He made John Biggers his deputy.

The NDAC had its first meeting on 12 June.

One of his first steps was to remove restrictions that stopped business working on armaments.

He also made a crucial alliance with Henry Stimson, a crucial DC figure and Secretary of War, who agreed that business would have to be able to make profits if government wanted full cooperation.

CH5: Call to Arms

In 1938-9 orders from Britain and France were multiples of domestic war orders. In 1938 a RAF team flew to Burbank. They ordered long range bombers, modified from a civilian model. France ordered 6k engines from Pratt & Whitney. France and Britain ordered machine tools. Their orders boosted steel production. US manufacturing started growing with these orders.

FDR modified neutrality rules to let them keep ordering. Monnet (architect of the EU) suggested pooling orders for scale. In the first half of 1940 they ordered three times the planes they had in 1939, including the P-51 Mustang, one of the most important fighters of the war.

Then Dunkirk meant massive abandonment of heavy machinery, artillery etc. Because FDR supported it, DC pulled some clever bureaucratic/legal jiu-jitsu to unlock old US supplies of rifles etc and send them to Britain.

The Army quickly ditched its plan and instead planned for an army of a million by 1941 and two million by 1942, 9m then 18m planes, thousands of ships. Marshall estimated the bill at 11B. FDR said it was too much — but would spend much more.

During WWI cost-plus contracts were common: i.e government paid a fixed % on top of the costs. After 1918 sharp limits were imposed on profits for war production. Amortisation rules meant 16 years to write off costs.

WK had to get someone to explain to FDR and the cabinet what amortisation was and advised the limit be reduced to 5-6 years (Germany was 7) so companies could write off their costs quicker for defence work. He also told FDR to introduce a system of ‘letters of intent’ from the government so a company could get advanced funds from a bank and protect expenses in case the contract didn’t go through. FDR resisted. Stimson supported WK. He got his way.

Britain now told WK that we needed 4k bombers per month while America was producing ~500, and a thousand tanks per month. And in 1941 a third of all warplanes and half all tanks produced were sent to Britain. Hanging over this until Lend-Lease was how we’d pay.

Apart from the Army factory only one private company made tanks (American Car and Foundry) which was making ~13 per month.

WK flew to Detroit and asked Chrysler to ask them to design a new process for making tanks then execute it. The people there had never seen a tank. The War Department gave them $20M to start work. The engines would come from Continental Motors.

By March 1941, Chrysler’s new facility was finished. They built the factory around them for the new M3 design. Then they discovered the Army design had many problems like tank treads not working in mud and they were using springs made for old railway carriages decades earlier. So Chrysler redesigned the vehicle.

• E.g the Army was sure you had to rivet armour plates together and welding couldn’t work. WK went to the top welding experts. Yes they could do it with welding, the Army was wrong. Welding proved faster and safer. Welding became standard in the M4 Sherman.

The situation was desperate. Companies did not want to get involved and feared spending money then left to eat the expenses as the government pulled out of deals. WK said the government would have to pay advance payments and do cost-plus contracts to get them moving. Congress opposed. But it happened.

Henry Ford refused to help make engines for the RAF and blew up in rage with WK. WK went to the owner of Packard who agreed to make the Merlin engines for the RAF. A battleship transported a container of secret drawings etc. Packard built a factory for mass production. They started churning them out 3X faster than the handmade UK process.

Also in summer 1941 from Britain came proximity fuses, the cavity magnetron, radar, and jet propulsion. Increasingly British scientific discoveries flowed to America where engineering processes started mass production.

CH6: Arsenal of Democracy

By October 1940 WK had overseen 920 contracts with 500 companies worth ~$3B for the Army and $6B for the Navy.

Unfortunately Kaiser had annoyed Jesse Jones and WK. Jones was suspicious of his persuasiveness and wouldn’t let his staff meet him alone! Kaiser and Knudsen were so similar they clashed.

WK did a tour with General Hap Arnold of aircraft companies. Their planned numbers were small and their plants primitive.

In October 1940 WK told an event of car manufacturers that America and Britain needed big bombers and the car companies would have to build them. The companies agreed. They also agreed to cancel the annual change in car models to free up capacity.

The car industry was the biggest employer with 5% of all adult Americans working in it and had the biggest pool of engineering talent. GM would make 10% of everything America produced in WWII including thousands of aircraft engines and different parts for the aircraft companies. The aircraft companies made the planes, the car companies built whatever they could to save time for final assembly. WK coined the phrase ‘arsenal of democracy’.

There was union grumbling but it faded as the unions’ own plans couldn’t actually deliver what was needed. The average car had ~15k separate parts but a twin-engined plane had ~150k, a 10X increase. The unions did not know how to make this jump. WK did.

Out of $100B contracts in the war, 70% went to the 100 biggest companies. This caused some political tensions but WK insisted that the effort required the companies with the best engineering resources to do most of the work. Smaller subcontractors also made money and half a million new businesses were created in the war. There were 1,400 for the B-29 alone.

Many went to FDR with a demand to stop civilian car production. WK said NO: if the plants were shut down then the engineering talent would disperse at great cost. Instead, he said: increase defence orders to the car companies then when they are swamped in the future and America has to switch to all-out war, then will be the time to switch off cars and the engineers will just flip projects inside the companies.

They also needed to produce emergency boats for Britain because of U-boat losses. But shipyards were full with US orders. Kaiser saw his chance. He brought the British to the mudflats at Redmond, San Francisco. There was nothing there. But Kaiser told them — we’ll build new shipyards in months. He was looking to build ships in 3 months instead of 11 months. When they put the first bulldozer down to build a road, it sank in the mud and disappeared. Soon it would be a famous shipyard producing the most famous merchant ship, the Liberty ship.

In December there was another panic at the state of Britain with the U-boat attacks and Hitler pushing towards Egypt. Out of panic looking at the numbers for what needed to be built and how it could be financed, the idea of Lend Lease emerged. FDR explained it publicly as — when you lend your neighbour a hose to put a fire out, it’s still your hose but the person who needs it first gets it. Who would have legal title, asked a hack? ‘I don’t know and don’t care’ replied FDR.

They created the Office of Production Management to replace the NDAC. FDR insisted on two bosses, WK and Sidney Hillman to represent labour. Stimson and WK were worried but had to swallow it. FDR was often under pressure to create a single ‘war production tsar’ but he never did.

By the end of 1940, America was making:

• 50k planes

• 130k engines

• 380 Navy ships

• 9,200 tanks

• 17k heavy guns

• rifles, helmets, clothes etc.

CH7: Ships, strikes, and the bib book

Experts predicted it would take Kaiser 6 months to build solid ground for the shipyard. It took him 3 weeks, an eighth of the time. Amid continuous rain round the clock trucks brought rock and gravel. They sank 24k iron piles for the piers. It was so fast one remembered that it was ‘a race between the Kaiser draftsmen and the field people as to whether we could build it first or the engineers and architects could draw it first’.

In 1941 there were no hydraulic rigs. The biggest bulldozers had 132 horsepower. Water and gas mains needed cast iron or welded steel pipe.

The yard had 7 shipways. A massive building stored pre-assembled parts until they were needed. The shipyards would revolutionise shipbuilding worldwide.

Kaiser was a hard taskmaster:

You find your key men by piling work on them. They say ‘I can’t do any more’ and you say ‘Sure you can’. So you pile it on and they’re doing more and more. Pretty soon you have men you can rely on absolutely.

Kaiser also built a shipyards in Portland and encouraged competition between them and their managers.

Gibbs and Cox was the leading naval architecture firm in America. They would design ~3/4 of US naval vessels in WWII. Their most famous was the Liberty ship. Gibbs was already talking to Kaiser when WK approached him. The Liberty would have as many straight lines as possible so it could be welded rather than rivets. They assumed it would be expendable, that they would be sunk in large numbers, and had to be built super-fast and in large numbers.

• There was no electricity or running water.

• Rooms and bunks were tiny.

• No mechanical ventilation.

• No fire detection system!

In March 1941 FDR signed the first lend lease agreement.

The first Liberty keel was laid in April 1941.

In summer 1941 WK organised a study led by Stacy May of what America could really do, called the Big Book. After a trip to Britain, May brought it to Stimson’s desk. The total bill was $150 billion. Congress’s defence authorisation for 1942 was $11B. And the 150B ended up half the $300B actually needed.

Union membership surged from 6% in 1933 to 16% in 1940. Communists used their influence in unions to push strikes to undermine help for Britain. Many were not over pay or conditions but over which union should have jurisdiction over workers. WK was furious and denounced them as ‘criminal’. FDR announced a national defence mediation board. But FDR would not back those calling for decisive presidential action to stop the strikes — he prevaricated. In spring-summer 1941 FDR was ‘cautious to the point of immobilization’ (Kershaw).

CH8: Countdown

Almost everywhere he looked WK saw 18 months as the number to get America building — 12 months for new plants and retooling, 6 months for conversion. He hept telling FDR, it takes time to get started but once mass production is running the momentum is very powerful.

Machine tools are the heart of the industrial process. They drill, bore, turn steel, slice slabs of iron. They mill, grind, shear, and press steel, iron, aluminium into parts. Some machine tools are the size of a house. In 1940, 87 were needed to make a propeller shaft. In 1940 almost every machine tool came from 200 firms, most with barely 100 employees. The Depression had hit them hard. Japan and the Soviet Union became important customers.

In spring 1942 WK told Geier, the leading American machine tool maker, to double, redouble and redouble production. Geier started round-the-clock production. He had managed to smuggle a giant machine for boring naval guns out of Germany and reassemble it.

In spring 1941 there was a lot of criticism of WK. But the cause of the delays was FDR. In May, an American freighter was sunk by a U-boat inside the security zone. FDR decided to act and on 27/5 declared a state of national emergency.

He sent troops in to squash a strike but strikes continued even after Hitler invaded Russia in June. Polls showed two-thirds opposed to getting involved but fatalism that they would get involved. FDR created another agency, SPAB, to try to coordinate raw materials between civilian and military needs: it was another failure.

But in the second half of 1941 defence spending jumped elevenfold and machine tool production doubled.

• In June FDR imposed an oil embargo on Japan.

• In July he froze their assets.

• In October 2,000 Japanese were ordered evacuated from the West coast.

In December the Japanese struck at Pearl Harbor.

CH9: Going All Out

On 7/12/41 Japan struck. 8 battleships, 2 cruisers, and 4 destroyers were wrecked. Docks and facilities were wrecked. The next day Hitler declared war on America.

On the Tuesday after Pearl Harbor FDR summoned WK. He’d seen WK’s report on production in 1941 including 51k aircraft engines, 97k machine guns, 4k tanks.

But FDR said he wanted 30k planes in 1942 instead of projected 18k, 45k tanks, 8m tons of merchant shipping instead of 1.1M etc.

FDR: Can we do it?

WK: Yes sir.

FDR set out massive building plans the next day in his State of the Union: 60 planes in 1942 then 125k in 1943.

WK’s airplane man, Babe Meigs, warned him that the New Dealers would attack him and try to take over. (Meigs did heroic work in standardising parts across the US and UK air forces which greatly helped mass production.) There was a wave of press attacks on WK and other businessmen led by the unions who claimed corruption and greed. And even after Pearl Harbor communist-infiltrated unions were calling strikes.

In January WK called a meeting of the car companies and ran down a checklist of things he needed and asked who would build what. He ticked off his items. He returned to DC pleased. And ran into a storm of abuse. Bureaucrats were shocked and unions stoked up the media. He was accused of putting America ‘up for auction’. The people who had criticised a lack of progress in 1941 now attacked his progress. WK knew that America had not been at war and had not created a legal framework that could direct and compel — and proper legal authority still did not exist because of FDR’s prevarication. But the media did not care. Then Leon Henderson suddenly seized half a million civilian vehicles for the war effort instead of them being sold leading to a collapse of civilian car supply chains and layoffs — as WK had predicted, then he got the blame! He was even attacked inside the White House by Eleanor Roosevelt!

After growing media clamour, WK was suddenly given a scrap of paper announcing that FDR had created a new agency and abolish the OPM and SPAB, with a new boss. FDR never called him, he just announced it. Hopkins admitted it was ‘done in a brutal way’. Stimson, Jones and others were extremely unhappy with what FDR had done. WK was made a three star general via Stimson to work on procurement in the War Office — the only civilian in history to be made a three star general. FDR went along with it because WK had not made a stink in the media.

WK was gone, the New Dealers thought they’d won. But America was on a new trajectory. There were 25k prime contractors and 120k subcontractors. A ‘rule of three’ took root — in the first year after a production order, output would triple, in the second year, it would jump by a factor of seven, at the end of the third year, the only limits on output were material and labour.

By D-Day total employment in the Detroit area more than doubled. Their big problem was worker shortage because of competition from the likes of Kaiser’s shipyards. There was a huge migration of workers from rural South and Appalachia.

In February 1942 Hitler put Speer in charge of war production. They shifted to modern American methods of mass production. He had huge powers including over wages and prices plus cooperation of Goebbels’s propaganda machine. But Germany was late to the mass production revolution that had grown up in America from before WWI. Many German industries resisted the transition partly because they remained loyal to traditions of quality craftsmanship. The German car industry sat half-idle through the war! Barely a fifth of the massive VW plant at Wolfsburg was ever used. Then it got bombed. And constant changes of mind over priorities led to huge bureaucratic chaos. Speer did mobilise huge resources — by 1944 production was up nearly half. But it could not compete with America.

Tiny Wake Island (2,300 acres), halfway between Hawaii and Philippines, was attacked. After truly heroic defence, it was captured. This sealed the fate of the Philippines and Japan was master of the central Pacific. (When the Japanese realised they were doomed, they shot all prisoners on Wake Island.)

Pearl Harbor was rebuilt fast using Henry Kaiser’s concrete.

The Army planned to expand to 7 million by the end of 1943.

CH10: Ships for Liberty

U-boats sank 6.4M tons of merchant shipping in the first half of 1942.

Replacing it was crucial. With Churchill visiting America after Pearl Harbor, FDR announced 8M tons would be built in 1942 and 10M in 1943 — up from 5M in 1942. They immediately started wiring the main companies asking for ideas on expansion. Contracts were signed in DAYS.

Kaiser went all out. By the end of 1942 there were 80k men and women in the Richmond yards. People were sucked in from all over the country, some destitute labourers from dustbelt states like characters from The Grapes of Wrath. Kaiser ended up turning the mudflats into the town of Richmond — shops, restaurants, theatres, schools, hospitals etc. And Kaiser raced to go faster and faster, which was also cheaper and cheaper.

In 1942 Kaiser got the time to build a Liberty ship down to 70 days.

In February 1942, thanks to the U-boats success, FDR raised targets again to 9M tons in 1942 and 15M in 1943. Most thought this impossible.

In 1942 the CIO and AFL extended their battle for control of shipyards.

In Richmond, Kaiser now changed how ships were made.

• The traditional method: when a ship’s hull was nearing completion and the deckhouses were being added, swarms of welders, electricians, cutters, pipe fitters etc would do their jobs but also get in each other’s way. This slowed production. Ships required doing a lot of things at the same time rather than in sequence.

• They experimented with building the deckhouses off-site then install them complete onto the hull, like snapping the lid onto a box. They built a massive shed with workspaces for the different crafts for outfitting the deckhouses. When finished, the deckhouse would be hoisted, transported and slid into place. Then they expanded this approach to include the engine room. It was assembly-line production for shipyards. Cf. p185ff for details.

• Production time plummeted. Kaiser had already reduced the time from 220 days for a ship to 100. This pushed it under 50. The technique spread and the record kept falling. 43 days in July. TEN DAYS from keel laying to launching in September! They’d cut production time by ~90%.

• Then they kept stripping and simplifying. In November, it was 5 days — this record stood, they’d found the frontier, and the ship performed great until 1963.

CH11: The Production Express

The New Dealers were happy WK was replaced by Donald Nelson as head of the War Production Board. They thought he would do what they wanted and reduce the power of business. The media lauded him, Lippmann sang his praises. The unions thought he would be friendly. Hopkins and others assumed he’d be easy to lean on.