A talk on regime change

Going: Kemi, Reeves, McSweeney then Rayner replaces Starmer? National Security Secretariat briefs No10 about imminent ethnic violence (and, not reported yet, financial crisis)

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.

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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.]

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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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