#2 The Startup Party: reflections on the last 20 years, what could replace the Tories, and why

Brexit debate 2016-19, 'à corsaire, corsaire et demi'

‘My feeling about Brexit was not anger at anybody else, it was anger at myself for not realising what was going on. I thought that all those UKIP people and those National Fronty people were in a little bubble. Then I thought: “Fuck, it was us, we were in the bubble, we didn’t notice it.” There was a revolution brewing and we didn’t spot it.’ Brian Eno, with more self-awareness than Cameron, Osborne, Campbell, Starmer et al.

The first dealt with ‘what was the point of Brexit’, why did Vote Leave win etc.

The second deals with:

• the Brexit debate 2016-19

• was No Deal a bluff

• Irish protocol

• why fire the 21 MPs

NB. An example of Def Jam founder Rick Rubin’s argument that mainstream political news is fake and WWE is real. The day after I published the last blog on 3 June, the BBC published this piece on immigration after interviewing numerous Home Secretaries for the Laura Kuenssberg Sunday TV show. How many mentions of ‘ECHR’, ‘Strasbourg’, ‘Human Rights Act’, or ‘judicial review’? ZERO. The word ‘court’ does not appear. After millions of words written and endless TV coverage and Parliamentary debate of this issue over many years, the BBC tries to do a major piece with historical context and interviews supposedly key players and … totally ignores central issues and instead reports lots of MPs spreading fake ideas about the causes of the problem.

A Golden Rule of How Politics Really Works is that ministers are almost never live players, they’re the fake players while the permanent government of officials actually runs the show — but explaining this would break kayfabe. Fake analysis, fake politics, fake government, fake news.

You will learn more about how politics really works watching the Undertaker than the BBC.

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I recommend this piece by Marc Andreessen on the AI debate. He explains a lot of important misconceptions that have spread since the GPT story went mainstream. A very important dynamic which is invisible in UK coverage of this issue and enormously underrated in Europe: a powerful network of Democrats is using ‘AI safety’ to try to repeat what they did on social media, i.e grab control for the left then censor political opinion. They think that if they can grab control of the AI layer, which will control the other layers, this will be extremely politically powerful. I.e ‘AI safety’ has become another front in the war against Trump, fascism and ‘the end of democracy’. The GOP is as usual far behind the curve. (I discussed this last year but it’s become much more obvious in the last 3 months.)

This is all the trickier because there ARE many huge safety problems inherent in developing such an incredibly powerful general purpose technology. E.g There are already frenzied deep state meetings concerning use of LLMs to assist with deadlier/simpler/faster bioweapons and what happens when leading edge proprietary models get jail-breaked (freed!?) and open sourced and deployed for terrorism. The history of the west dealing with bio-risk over the past 20 years — after covid we’re still funding gain-of-function! — is awful so if the dangers become super-charged…

There is a fundamental question at the heart of ‘AI safety’ strategy: should we a) go down the path of trying to ban lots of things (e.g deepfakes), develop a cartel of big companies (e.g DeepMind, OpenAI, Anthropic) which have limited freedom provided they cooperate politically with Washington, or b) (as Marc suggests) do everything we can to build safety into AI systems and deploy them everywhere as fast as we can and rely, as we did post-1945, on the advantages of the Anglo-American model (including speed) versus the Brussels or China model? Rely mainly on centralised government control and regulation or mainly on decentralised build build build? Do you largely trust those who controlled covid policy with vast new powers over AI or do you think this unlikely to work and you prefer to rely on engineers building safety bottom-up? Is there a political force that could a) accelerate building safety systems per Andreessen and b) do the centralised things to slow/stop where needed deftly and wisely? (I can’t see it — hence another reason for the Startup Party!)

Another political dynamic hugely underrated in Europe and almost invisible in UK media: AOC, Bernie and practically the entire Democrat network have fallen into line on Ukraine because of the power of the ‘Trump was a Putin agent’ meme, so the ‘war against Putin’ is, for Democrats, part of the war against Trump, which is the war against fascism. The hysteria and irrationality over Ukraine among Insiders across political divides and media organisations can only be understood if you grasp the emotional force of this meme. (Even though I watch this carefully I only sensed its power when I went to America last year and talked to people. You can’t see it watching US news on the internet.)

The ‘Trump + Brexit = Putin + Jedi technology = end of democracy + fascism’ Insider meme can only become weirder because of a) Trump 2024, b) we are early in the AI exponential — models in November 2024 may be ~10X or 50X more powerful than GPT4, which is impossible for most including me to imagine. There’s no going ‘back to normal’, the halcyon days between the fall of the Wall and the fall of the Towers, it’ll only get weirder and weirder.

Connected: if any subscribers have read this book and can link to good reviews please do, I plan to read over summer… During the Cold War many of the most brilliant minds, including those who built nuclear weapons, were like the worst undergraduates on politics, sometimes leading them to think they should help Stalin acquire nuclear weapons. Similar problems are visible now.

(When Stalinism was at its peak, appalling opinions became mainstream among educated elites. Similarly we can see the spread of the trans cult. Cults have their phases of growth and decay. Those giving drugs and surgery to children will be seen as child abusers. But for the moment this revolting cult is spreading its tentacles throughout the graduate classes and down into schools. In America there’s a full stack cult infrastructure from Disney to the Stanford Medical Centre and doctors removing ovaries from 11 yr olds. And the problems are worse in more elite schools (i.e money makes it worse not better). As things stand it will make no difference who you vote for in 2024, none of the old parties in Westminster will actually dismantle the child abuse cult’s march through the institutions. This is accelerating the home school movement in America and will do the same here. As with AI safety, you can look at California now to see our future debates. Westminster consistently underrates the madness gripping US elites and how they’re fracturing under the pressure. Another reason for a Startup Party…)

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Brexit

What happened with the dynamics of the Brexit debate 2016-19?

What I hoped

Before 23 June 2016 I hoped and assumed that if we won it would force serious reflection and change among Insiders.

They’d have to confront how they could hold almost all the cards against a startup handicapped by appalling infighting among many ludicrous characters then lose. What did that mean for their models of how voters really think and what they care about and how electoral campaigns really work?

They’d have to confront the end of the cross-party agreement that the EU and Single Market were at the core of our national strategy. What would replace it? How would policy change across so many areas? I thought Whitehall would have to prioritise productivity stagnation and science and technology much more than previously because what else would you do if forced to leave the Single Market and you had to confront core issues you’ve all been ducking?!

They’d have to confront Whitehall: the unavoidable need to change a huge amount would smash into the incredibly high friction in getting anything done, how would MPs and officials respond? How would they even do negotiations given the Foreign Office’s chronic uselessness (visible, by the way, in Alanbrooke’s diaries, showing much of our rot is older than assumed)?

They’d have to confront that all parties would have to rethink their electoral coalitions and core ideas in ways that are deeply uncomfortable. The Tories would have to deliver on the £350 million because not doing so would be blowing both feet off. They’d have to grapple with many issues they hated discussing like procurement and R&D and civil service reform. Labour would have to face extremely difficult electoral problems, e.g roughly two thirds of constituencies voting Leave gave the Tories a potentially huge advantage if the Tories could figure out how to exploit it. Would Labour continue to let the opinions of a relatively small set of younger, richer London graduates pull it away from mainstream opinion and shoot itself in the feet by obsessing like undergraduates over sex and race?

I didn’t think people like Starmer, May, the median Tory/Labour MP would read my blog and suddenly become a fan for ARPA/JASON and Red Teams in No10 but I did think self-interest might get them to:

We hate Vote Leave but we’ve just had a disastrous defeat that we didn’t see coming (especially since we spent the last week celebrating how much the country supposedly loves MPs) so for our own sake we’ll have to change or we’re guaranteed more horrid shocks and if we [Labour/Tories] don’t change but the others [Labour/Tories] do change, we’re screwed, and maybe someone will set up a new party to replace us given the tremendous changes coming…

After the referendum I predicted (privately) that the shock would force Insiders to update fundamentally.

Wrong.

And after Trump’s victory, I thought ‘well now, surely, at least a bit’.

More wrong.

Remain’s loss was a powerful signal of the old system’s rot. So was their response. So was Trump. But these signals were not, could not be, well-interpreted by the old system. Its OODA loops (observe-orient-decide-act) were broken and remained broken.

Since the referendum I’ve had much more interesting discussions about why Remain lost / Leave won in San Francisco than in Westminster.

What happened

1/ Remain Insiders created an emotionally appealing fake reality for themselves.

Insiders ignored their errors. They thrashed around screaming about ‘lies’ and how Britain was suddenly full of ‘hate crime’ then Trump won. Trump’s win made it psychologically and emotionally much easier for them to avoid changing their minds and, instead, to create a fake reality which they spread across the old media based on the core belief: Brexit and Trump show we were morally and intellectually in the right and the real danger is NOT Insider failure but ‘the global tide of populism’.

Insiders developed a story and spread it:

1. We are the victims of a global tide of dangerous elite-defecting ‘populists’.

2. We are the victims of ‘lies’ and ‘disinformation’.

3. We are the victims of a global conspiracy connecting Putin-Trump-Brexit via the sinister technology of digital marketing, Cambridge Analytica’s Jedi-like ‘psychographic’ marketing, and Facebook all of which has ‘industrialised disinformation’.

4. Idiot voters (‘lower educated’) don’t get their news from the Times and CNN, they live in ‘information bubbles’ outside big cities and were conned into voting against their own economic interests.

5. We didn’t lose because the system isn’t working — because of stagnant real wages, out of control borders etc — it was lying populists and Brexit that broke the system! Brexit is so stupid, so impossible (because of Ireland), it broke the Rolls Royce civil service!

6. So the solution is — everyone should trust us more and we need more power and money! Crush populism, defend the old institutions, more gatekeepers from the old parties, media and universities!

Quickly after Trump’s win, a network stretching from the Clinton campaign to old media (particularly the NYT) and the old universities (e.g. Timothy ‘pretend nuclear deterrence doesn’t exist’ Snyder) and others started a campaign to portray Trump as a ‘Russian agent’ and his victory the result of a Russian ‘disinformation campaign’. I won’t go into this in detail here (my old blog has lots of detail on these conspiracies) but it swept through Insider networks across the West.

Four factors strengthened this.

A. ‘Blame tech’. The old media, especially the NYT, wanted to blame the tech companies for Trump’s win a) to divert attention from the effects of their own coverage (especially Hillary’s email server), and b) embroil the tech companies (who they feared were destroying their business model) in Washington politics and regulation.

B. Insider ignorance about technology. Not one in a thousand of the elected politicians and old media hacks understood how digital marketing in general and Facebook in particular worked. Cadwalladr’s grotesque fantasies and misunderstandings of technology went mainstream not just among Insiders but among Guardian-reading graduates seeking an explanation for Brexit/Trump. One of the reasons Facebook handled the story so badly was that the Valley was slow to realise that politicians could actually choose to believe totally fake ideas about how digital advertising actually worked.

C. Hypocrisy. Their complaints about ‘lies’ ignored, obviously, their own lies. One example: Cameron and Osborne claimed repeatedly on TV for months, almost always unchallenged, that their new deal meant ‘after six months if you haven’t got a job you’ll have to leave’. This was unarguably false. The FT, Guardian et al, so keen to blame ‘lies’ for their defeat, amplified such lies because they thought they were ‘noble lies’. In the last few weeks of the campaign Gove gave a speech. The FT ignored all the serious arguments and tried to turn it into a weird ‘Gove says we should be like Albania’ story. When Gove challenged them, one of their senior hacks, Chris Giles, shrugged, ‘We’re in campaign mode now.’ These are the same people who write columns about ‘Vote Leave lies’! Unfortunately for them, their ‘campaign mode’ simply amplified ALBANIA, which was our message. I am not sympathetic to establishment whining about £350m. They started what they thought was a knife fight and bragged about their ‘ruthless’ campaign using all the powers of the state, we took out a shotgun, they complained it was ‘unfair’.

D. 'Second referendum’. In 2015 I suggested thinking about two referendums, one on the principle, one on on the deal. Everybody screamed NO including the PM, Labour and the Remain campaign. They wanted to crush Leave and insisted one vote to ‘settle it for a generation’. During the campaign we made clear we should leave the Single Market. Remain campaigned on this saying ‘VL wants to leave the SM, this is the core issue in the vote’. The media was swamped with stories from No10 saying this was ‘a huge strategic blunder’ by us. After losing they suddenly said ‘the Single Market and Customs Union weren’t on the ballot’, the opposite of what they said just weeks earlier. Then they started campaigning for a second referendum. Millions, including millions of Remain voters, could see that Remain Insiders simply didn’t want to enact the vote because they didn’t agree with it. This is partly why GET BREXIT DONE worked so well. Remainers could agree with it without agreeing ‘Brexit is good’.

The way high status Insiders latched onto Putin conspiracies, told themselves fairy tales about the defeat, and drove themselves into a circular firing squad for three years all contributed to our success in 2019. But this Brexit-Trump-Putin dynamic continued to influence policy, politics and media over covid (where the Remain network created the conspiracy that me and others were driving ‘herd immunity’ because we are evil), and over Ukraine, where it’s generated extreme Insider herding behind support for the cycle of escalation.

2/ The May government’s disastrous ‘strategy’ drove Britain into a cul-de-sac.

May and Hammond hadn’t supported Leave. The Cabinet didn’t understand what had happened. They couldn’t grip Whitehall. They rushed into disastrous announcements to show the media they were ‘committed to Brexit’ and were cheered by the ERG.

The May government did the opposite of what Vote Leave said we should do on every major issue. E.g immediately triggering Article 50, using EU citizens as negotiating chips, David Davis making absurd threats, critical errors on accepting the EU’s terms on Ireland and so on.

When they inevitably failed and the government drove themselves and the country into a cul-de-sac, the conventional wisdom was that ‘this shows how stupid Brexit was’.

The fact that a government run by two Remainers had repeatedly done the direct opposite of what the official campaign had said should happen was ignored. This pattern repeated.

3/ The Leave voice was dominated by clueless Tories with no actual plan.

The May government talked about Brexit. The ERG talked about it. All sorts of nutters we’d marginalised talked about it. Boris swung back to his own blend of Global Britain/amnesty for illegals/ERG nonsense. The media echoed it all.

VL disappeared. There was nobody to explain why we’d done it and present a very different picture of the goals and strategy. We wanted to reboot the Tories fundamentally because we thought they were appalling, the Tory MPs obviously didn’t agree! Understandably the old media focused on the views of the (most foolish) MPs.

Unfortunately during the 2016 campaign because of a) how the campaign was plagued by in-fighting among Tory MPs/UKIP and b) the media had no interest in exploring the real issues in depth, we failed to focus attention on lots of crucial issues. Instead much of the national debate focused on ‘Farage is racist so you should vote Remain’.

Once VL had gone, you therefore had a) different Tory elements arguing hopelessly for Brexit, often with ludicrous arguments and doomed negotiating ideas, and b) an enraged Remain-Insider network intent on portraying Leave as crazy-stupid-racist.

By summer 2019 there was a widespread view that, because of the disastrous position the May government had got into over Ireland, the Irish impasse proved ‘Brexit is basically impossible’. Tories who didn’t agree often pushed back against this with arguments that did not fit with the reality of the EU system or Belfast Agreement or anything else.

When I arrived in No10 one of the very first things I said to the Cabinet Secretary, PM and other key people was — forget all this bullshit about Ireland, the tail has wagged the dog for three years, the priority isn’t keeping everyone in Ireland happy, the priority is to leave, all ideas that ‘the Belfast Agreement makes Brexit impossible’ should be dropped, Ireland will work out somehow in the chaos but it is not repeat not the priority.

I was helped enormously by the fact that Boris didn’t have a clue about Ireland and didn’t care. I just told him that if we accepted the conventional wisdom on Ireland he’d be out of No10 and Chequers pronto.

4/ VL took over No10 and started to change the story.

From the start we changed the story on Brexit and carried this through to polling day. Our approach was attacked, as during the referendum, as ‘totally incoherent’. This is because the VL approach, as you can see from the previous blog, does not fit into the party system so IS incoherent in Tory v Labour terms. But this is not a good measure of whether it is the best approach for the country!

The 2020 crackup with VL and Boris/Carrie meant all sides in Westminster could ignore why VL did Brexit and what No10 started building 2019-20 has been airbrushed from public debate and replaced with myths. Everyone in SW1 is happy about this and believes almost every nonsense thing they read.

But that’s for another day…

Did you want No Deal, was it a bluff?

In July 2019 I wanted a deal but I preferred No Deal to delay.

I.e the order of my preferences was: good deal > No Deal > delay / bad deal.

No Deal was not a bluff from me, David Frost and Oliver Lewis. The notion of any coherent view — ‘bluff’ or ‘actual opinion’ — obviously did not apply to Boris who had different views every hour/day. But he did realise that if he was seen to be another Tory who talked tough then surrendered, he was toast.

There were endless pieces about supposed ‘game theory’ ideas I was supposedly applying and talking about in No10. This was all invented. ‘Game theory’ played no part in my thinking.

The Benn Act / Surrender Act changed calculations. I wanted Boris to be much more aggressive in how he handled it. He trolleyed around sometimes agreeing, sometimes telling officials he’d do as they told him. In the end he signed an anodyne letter written by the Cabinet Office which I advised him to bin.

When the crunch point hit (after some shocking calls over the previous days particularly with Merkel) I briefed Forsyth at the Spectator. I told him that a) the negotiations were headed for the rocks and that if this happened b) I’d push through an election and this would inevitably be on the basis of ‘vote for us, we’ll just leave after the election without a deal, no more wasting time the country has to move on to deal with the economy, NHS etc’ (it would have been hopeless promising ‘vote for us and another phase of talks’), therefore c) the leverage the Irish had because of the May team’s uselessness was about to run out.

Though this was seen by the media as ‘another bluff’ it was not. I meant it. When we met the Irish for the talks in the hotel shortly after, the Irish PM’s senior staff told me they saw the logic that we were heading for an election in which we’d say ‘we’re leaving in January and we’ll sort things out after’ and their leverage would vanish. If the deal hadn’t happened we’d have forced an election, won, then left immediately. (Might this have been for the better? We’d have won the election but probably not by so much. But on the other hand the Tories have totally wasted the 80 seat majority so…)

I didn’t clear this briefing with Boris before doing it because his morale had collapsed and he was extremely flaky. He freaked out but then the Irish called saying let’s talk and he perked up.

What did you think about the Protocol negotiated in 2019 to deal with Ireland?

It was deliberately contradictory because both sides wanted to punt issues to the future. It was self-evidently not a longterm solution nor seen as one by us, Ireland or Brussels.

I thought it was the best of a bad job given where we were starting from, the difficulty of juggling competing pressures plus Boris, and after the election we could resolve the problems, if necessary by binning it.

Boris mostly stuck with the plan in 2020 but he started to collapse in December 2020, the EU team could sense his collapse and the UK team had to accept a worse deal than we could have got.

My attitude before I left (November) was: ‘either we get roughly what we want or no deal, let’s have all the problems now when we’ve already got chaos with the second covid wave and when we’ve got four years to rebuild’. This would have led to either a better deal or no deal. This was the sort of ‘face problems now so we can sort them out by 2024 instead of punt things now and make them worse in the future’ disagreement that contributed to our fall out.

Why did you sack the 21 MPs in 2019? The crazier the better…

My priority was getting Brexit done so the country could move on.

The country had watched Westminster fight and fail for three years. They’d driven the country into a humiliating position.

Millions wanted to cancel the referendum.

More millions wanted someone to show leadership to end the humiliating farce.

I knew that firing the 21 would go down very well with relevant voters who were desperate to see someone show leadership. The boss firing people who contradict their fundamental goal is normal — it’s leadership. I knew normal voters would see it different to SW1.

I knew the media and MPs would go berserk and this would help. The crazier, the better. It showed we needed to GET BREXIT DONE so the country could move on!

Hague, a classic establishment figure, represented the mainstream view when he said it was the craziest act of self-harm in politics he’d ever seen.

The pundits screamed — morons, they’ve destroyed their own position, Cummings is finished!

It all helped us, just like their screaming about £350 million did in the referendum.

To me this showed Insiders don’t understand politics well and really don’t understand what it means to have real priorities. It reminded me of my very first experience in 1999 (previous blog) when the MPs didn’t realise basics about opinion on the euro.

Sacking the 21 was an obvious move if you shared my priorities. If your priority was ‘being seen as a normal SW1 player who is friendly to the underlying system’ — i.e the priority for ~100% of Insiders — then it was crazy/appalling.

How far would you have gone?

I told Boris that we should consider him advising the Queen not to give Royal Assent and therefore stop the Surrender Act becoming law. This would have meant the 31 October deadline stood and the MPs were snookered. The Supreme Court would have had no legal basis for interfering — it’s legally impossible for them to order the Queen to do anything, never mind give Royal Assent. If they’d tried to declare our action unlawful using some fake argument, I’d have told Boris to defy them as Lincoln defied the Supreme Court in the Civil War.

It hadn’t happened for centuries but my view was that we were facing people happy to cancel the biggest democratic vote in our history and have another referendum I feared would have led to serious violence. All bets were off. If necessary I’d have summoned people to march on Westminster and the Supreme Court from across the country.

Boris was too frightened just as he was too weak on the letter in October.

If he’d been prepared to contemplate it I’d have researched it properly with the public. (I suspect even if I’d been able to get Boris to go for it officials would have successfully said to him ‘this will embarrass THE QUEEN PM, you can’t do it’ and he’d have folded. He folded over smaller things.)

It’s an interesting counterfactual because you’d have had no Surrender Act, Brussels would have realised we were not bluffing on No Deal, so we’d either have left in October with No Deal or, preferably, we’d have got a deal, not perfect but better than the one we ended up with in important ways. It would have been a delicate balance on each side.  

There would have been absolute bedlam from the MPs.

Was this an example of me ‘going too far’?

In an emergency one cannot be hypersensitive about methods — à corsaire, corsaire et demi.’ 

To be continued…