Possibly dodgy presentation of results here - the 0.6% to 0.8% range would be in aggregate; annual growth change more like approximately 0.1%/year. So productivity puzzle not solved by this.
I think much more likely that it is simply we do not have many high-value output jobs in the UK. And when we do, we tax them to smithereens so that we can afford high-priority items like trade union backhanders, welfare, Starmer’s pension, Chagos surrender payments, etc.
How can you make such blanket statements about Germany?
Have you travelled a lot in Germany, have you deeply researched modern German politics, can you speak German?
Germany has made some incredibly stupid decisions in recent years, especially on energy, but they had very strong growth for decades, so it's obvious why they were praised and seen as an example to look to.
Your problem is that you have become a total ideologue, probably driven mad by Brexit and then No10/the fallout.
You act as if you are a world-expert on everything, something which even the most intelligent and learned humans among us can never achieve.
I wasn't talking about the Ukraine war; I was referring to his blanket statement that Germany isn't a serious country and that it was wrong for people to praise Germany before their energy prises went sky high.
While Germany has made very unserious decisions on energy for a long time, the German economy was genuinely very strong for decades and therefore it makes sense that people praised Germany and wrote positive books about Germany.
Germany and Merkel and the EU are dragging us into another European war .
She was the one who wanted cheap energy for Germany and pushed to get German hands on Ukraine's riches to noble Poland (again). Trump told her and the EU it was dangerous but they carried on . We've fought two wars for Europe Not another one .
Energy, immigration, EU expansionism among other things.
To Dominic’s point, Germany has done well to maintain its industrialisation, as this is the bedrock of its economy. However, I’m not sure I’d agree that Germany has turned out to be the example Britain should follow.
I suspect that things will deteriorate from here as the combination of geopolitical instability, mass uncontrolled migration and insane energy policy come home to roost.
DC is a generalist with an interest in everything relevant to government. Contrasted with SW1 who are interested in nothing. The German model is self destructing and DC is right to criticise it and also right to say nobody in their right mind would follow it now. Merkel and the Greens have destroyed Germany and made it a laughingstock on almost every measure. Whether it’s possible to reverse this (eg the AfD) remains to be seen.
What science cuts are you referring to? Do you mean the ending of the egregious expenses policies of the various science foundations? That’s all that has been cut. Five star hotel bills for conferences.
In 'Beyond Good and Evil' Nietzsche makes a perceptive point about how much philosophising is more down to the character of the philosopher than any property of reality itself.
Similarly, much of your political style appears to hinge just as much on inherent aspects of your character and psychological profile and the effects of your life experiences as it does on anything factual or objective.
I have followed your work since 2014 (Babble in the Bubble!) and learnt a huge amount from it, but I read what you write about Ukraine with bafflement. I suspect we see the issue so differently that there is not much point in arguing over it, but I would make a few points.
1) The pro-Ukraine policy has not 'collapsed' - it has been reversed by Trump. He can do that - he is the president of the world's only superpower - but it is an active decision to cut off the flow of arms/intelligence/aid and that has consequences. I would agree with you that the pro-Ukraine side have failed to articulate a coherent theory of victory, but the anti-Ukraine side have equally failed to explain how they will handle a resurgent Russia allied with Iran, China, and North Korea and in a position to menace its neighbours. How Trump and Musk blowing up US alliances with Canada and Europe is going to help here is not clear to me. There is a lot of lack of strategic vision to go around! Look at what Singaporean ministers have been saying after Trump's pivot to Russia. There are ramifications to abandoning Ukraine that are hard to foresee.
2) You write a lot about how wrong all the pundits etc. have been, but your own record here is not unimpeachable - in Feb 22 you were retweeting pieces by Samo Burja about how the reformed Russian army would stun the world. A bit of epistemic humility is good for all of us. I think you are letting your substantive disagreements with L. Freedman (and perhaps with his son) colour your perception of their analysis. Freedman senior has been very clear and quite self-critical in his analysis. It is hard to reconcile the Cummings from whom I learnt about 'superforecasting' and 'prediction under uncertainty' with the way you write about how X predicted Y, Y didn't happen, and so X is a fool.
3) You have been very focused on the risk of nuclear war, but your assessment of this seems unbalanced to me. It is true that confronting Russia raises the risk of a nuclear confrontation (we might argue about how much it raises it), but letting Russia destroy Ukraine will teach small countries that they need nuclear weapons to survive. Nuclear proliferation will significantly worsen nuclear risk. There is a trade-off here!
4) In your analysis, you almost never feature the Ukrainians - except to make the point about how many of them are Nazis (Russia also has a bit of a Nazi problem, it might be noted). The Ukrainians are in a bad position after Trump's actions this week, but they retain a large and professional army, a developing strategic strike capability, and a significant defence industrial complex. They also - overwhelmingly as far as anyone can tell - do not want to be part of Russia and they seem pretty committed to ongoing resistance. They are going to play a role in whatever happens next and that makes the situation very hard to predict.
>how they will handle a resurgent Russia allied with Iran, China, and North Korea and in a position to menace its neighbours
Historically, both Russia or China have been content to sit within their borders. Russia's Tsarist empire was established with a view to controlling terrain bottlenecks for defence purposes and did a fairly good job of ruling with a light touch while abstaining from pushing further. China is extremely inwardly focused and its primary goals are concerned with unification of the seven Chinas, rather than adding to the stock of rightful Chinese clay.
Iran is a legitimate regional power in its own right and its neighbours will have to figure out how to maintain cordial relations with them without meddling from the West, just as European nations had to contend with the Germanic peoples.
The obvious aberration of marxism was the midwife of expansionism, but cultural norms have been restored by strong leadership and I see no reason for historical norms failing to reestablish themselves.
Both Putin and Jinping have a grasp on history that is comparable to professional academics. Only a fool would watch the real-time collapse of the Western empires and think to himself "I want some of that for my people."
In short, I don't think the boogeyman of global dominion from the East is credible. That view is pure projection from the West.
I am sorry - is your claim seriously that Russia and China do not have a history of expansionism? That is bizarre if so. Both Tsarist Russia and pre-Communist China were imperial enterprises which showed a pretty remorseless appetite for conquest and colonisation - we just tend not to think about why Siberia is part of Russia, or why China stretches into Turkestan and the hill country of South East Asia.
Given the low opinion of academic historians evinced by our esteemed host and most commenters here, I can only infer that you think Putin and Xi's grasp of history is rather poor!
The Russians were invaded from the Eastern steppe by the Mongols, so control of that territory is a rational strategic goal and an obligation of any responsible government. Every country requires defensible borders. There's a good argument that the settling of Siberia by ethnic Rus constituted an invasion and conquest and so is war by other means, but if you take that view of the past, then you should also be willing to apply it to today.
A cursory glance at the history of Russian wars shows that the overwhelming majority were defensive in nature, or a direct answer to foreign influence in areas of strategic national importance like Black Sea ports. None of this points to a country or culture that has ambitions of global dominion. The Russian bear has its cave and is content to lie there.
China has had the resources to expand beyond their shores for at least six hundred years, certainly since the "Treasure Fleet." However, they've shown no interest in pursuing expansion. None. Contrast this to the actions of western Europe, whose ships went abroad and planted flags. In terms of wars waged, the number one enemy of the Chinese is other Chinese.
I am sorry, this is very confused. Your initial claim was that Russia and China have been content to sit within their own borders. You have maintained that claim for China, but now seem to accept that Russia has expanded aggressively, it was just right to do so.
The Chinese example is easiest to dispose of. You are making a common mistake, which is to assume that there is this thing called China, with roughly the borders of the modern People's Republic, which has always existed and always been Chinese. But this isn't historically accurate. China as we know it was made by remorseless warfare that established Chinese power outside the core Han regions, in territories that had not historically been under Chinese direct rule and which were inhabited by non-Han peoples. Look up 'the Ten Great Campaigns', for example, but there is a history of this going back millennia.
Saying 'the number one enemy of the Chinese is other Chinese' is like looking at European history and going 'the number one enemy of Europeans is Europeans'. Sure, but those deaths are mostly in wars of conquest and expansion!
What you say about Russia is confused in a slightly more complex way. The various principalities of the Rus had been destroyed or subdued by the Mongols. But the Muscovite principality (the origin of the modern Russian state) got its start as essentially the enforcer of Mongol power in the world of the Rus. Having created an expansionary state, Muscovy went on to subdue most other Rus polities, attack Mongol successor states, and begin a drive to the east, into areas that were as much forest as steppe. It also repeatedly attacked its western neighbours, particularly Poland-Lithuania and the Ottoman Empire. In the nineteenth century, it proceeded to fight colonial wars of conquest throughout Central Asia, annex vast areas from Qing China, and then try to tackle the Japanese in 1905.
This is a centuries long history of aggressive expansion - in historical perspective, the reasonable position is that Russia is likely to want to attack its neighbours! It is your view that requires proper justification and I don't think you have provided it.
I think you think that this Russian expansion is not aggressive, because it is just into areas they consider important for their national interest? The point is, however, that they keep redefining the areas that are of strategic importance to them to justify conquest. That is, more or less exactly, what Putin has done in Ukraine.
I have deliberately left out the Communist periods of both countries, pro arguendo, because you said they were a special case, but I would note that Soviet Russia launched unprovoked wars against essentially all its neighbours from 1917-1940, including conquering various nascent independent states. Communist China invaded and conquered Turkestan and Tibet and tried to conquer South Korea and Taiwan. It also invaded Vietnam. The two Communist states also fought a de facto war against each other. Although people tend to focus on the Cuban Missile Crisis, probably the closest the world ever came to a proper nuclear exchange was between the USSR and the PRC at the height of the Sino-Soviet split.
Just a teensy weensy quibble about your statement: "The pro-Ukraine policy has not 'collapsed' - it has been reversed by Trump",
It strikes me that the previous administration's policy, to all intents and purposes, has collapsed under the pressures created, not least, by Ukrainian manpower shortages, a shortfall in external supplies unavoidable in the short to medium terms, increasing battlefield losses of men and materiel, poor strategic choices and the irrational decision to go to war with a much more powerful country purely on the promise of being supported by the fickle democracies of the West governed by those with a profoundly exaggerated sense of their own competence, knowledge and wisdom. In essence, the present administration is responding rationally to events by pursuing an adapted policy by seeking a peace deal between the two countries in conflict, albeit in reality between the US and Russia, in the full awareness that it is a choice between a peaceful settlement (which may take years to conclude) or the Ukraine's unconditional surrender to the Russian Federation.
On the other hand, there is a high degree of continuity in US policy towards the EU, the majority of its member nations and the UK despite the change in administration. First, through the sanctions regime, which had the predictable effect, for the Europeans, of locking them off from a major supplier of cheap energy and by-products - effectively hitting both Europe's industrial and agricultural sectors - and finance, along with a ready market for Western goods and services and leaving European economies less price competitive in both domestic and international markets; second, through the absurd but widely held belief that Russia's military, financial system and industrial and service sectors would keel over in a matter of months - if not weeks or days - and Russia would stand quietly on the naughty step while Westerners broke up the Russian Federation and looted its resources but, unfortunately, by a combination of intelligent decision making and import substitution, the reverse has been the case Not exactly a shining example of politico-military planning by NATO and its masters (and mistresses). But at least the US managed to destroy an economically and politically competitive ally, so something good came out of it for someone and the US can control the EU and plunder its scarce resources at will (although the IPR opportunities look interesting).
Russia is now an economic, energy and technological powerhouse (so much so that the demand for labour has had an inflationary effect the recessionary West might be grateful for, with the capacity to attract and reward skilled labour from any part of the world) with greater effective industrial capacity the the US, it has formed and confirmed strong relationships and alliances with the strengthening economies of the Global South, and it has the strongest battle hardened military in the world with which to defend its friends. And it no longer sees the Europeans as friends or even potential friends.
My view is that the West organised the coup in Ukraine in 2014, and that it was the West that went to war with Russia using Ukraine as its proxy to provoke a Russian response. This is clearly supported by Merkel and Hollande's statements concerning the reasons they gave for supporting Minsk 1 & 2, ie, to give the Ukraine time to build up, arm and train its military.
Ok, but that is different to what you initially claimed in crucial respects that vitiate your initial point.
It is a cherished talking point of the Kremlin and those in the West opposed to the war that there was a 'coup' in 2014, but it isn't true. Yanukovych sparked a constitutional crisis by 1) withdrawing from the association agreement which led to protests which he then 2) violently suppressed by killing a lot of protesters. He was then removed by a vote of the Ukrainian parliament and Ukraine subsequently had two rounds of elections that though disrupted by Russian military action were largely free and fair. You can call this process a lot of things, but it isn't a coup on any plausible view of events.
Yes, Merkel and Hollande made remarks about helping Ukraine rearm, because Russia had already invaded Ukraine! I don't see how this helps your case.
None of your points are true and, if I were a less kind person, I would class them are utter nonsense and the deranged warblings of someone having a bad ketamine trip, so I am forced to restrain myself.
In the real world, Yanukovych wanted time to determine whether he could jettison all the existing and very long established economic relationships with Russia in favour of an airy-fairy exclusive "association agreement" with the EU which committed the EU to nothing and the Ukraine to everything, attempt to reach a better deal with the EU which included trade with Russia, or leave it for the people to decide in the following year's elections.
And so the Nuland cookie revolution began. Yanukovych, hoping to avoid violence and in an attempt to reach a consensus, negotiated a deal with the opposition to bring the following year's election forward and which collapsed when Nazi snipers proceeded to slaughter people in the Maidan at random in a classic by the book false flag operation.
Yanukovych went into hiding because things were slightly more out of hand than they were, say, in Washington on January 6, and a parliament with a significant shortfall of members from the Eastern oblasts acted unconstitutionally by deciding he was no longer President. It was a coup pure and simple, and it was a coup which began with the violent death of hundreds, and is playing out with the deaths of hundreds of thousands.
You appear to have a very rose-tinted view of reality and it may be a good occasion to seek advice from a competent ophthalmic surgeon.
If you are tempted to respond, please try to stick to the truth otherwise no-one else will take you seriously either.
Thanks for your thoughtful and witty reply. You haven't actually answered the two points I made and you implicitly concede the crucial issue, which is that Yanukovych was removed by a vote of the Ukrainian parliament (nem con and almost 3/4 in favour). This cannot in the ordinary (non-Russian) sense of the word be described as a coup.
Even if you were correct about 2014 (which you are not), two subsequent elections gave big majorities to presidents who did not want to adhere to Yanukovych's pro-Russian course.
Again - this is just personal abuse. If you look through our thread, the discussion is not very edifying, but every time you have actually raised a point I have answered it.
If you were less enraged, you might find it easier to avoid mistakes of spelling and syntax.
1/ There was a general cross EU/UK/US agreement on a set of things from 2022. As long as it takes, whatever it takes, Putin must fail, UKR must retake all land etc.
This has clearly collapsed. Europe is now accepting negotiations leaving Putin in charge of a lot. The idea of rolling Russia back to 22 borders is clearly a gonner.
The UK policy and EU policy has collapsed.
2/ No one's record on these things is unimpeachable ever. Freedman senior has NOT been 'very clear' about what he's written - he now tries to preent what he thought in 2022 in extremely different light, suggesting that how things have unfolded is sort of how he saw. This is clearly rubbish. In Sep 2022 he was on TV saying a Russian total collapse was 'fifty fifty'. Look at the details and you'll see Im right. And it's important not cos of his Twitter-addicted son but cos he is a respected Prof who MPs and hacks take seriously. The quality of this community has been collectively dreadful - especially on the absolute core questions of the POLITICAL goals of war. It's as if none of them read Clausewitz (who is famously UNread but much quoted).
3/ 'Letting Russia destroy UKR' wd have bad effects for sure and nuclear proliferation is already happening. But the answer is not to double down on a failed policy of UKR joining NATO and fighting over it, it's to accept that we totallty fucked up from when the neocons persuaded Bush in 07 and when you totally fuck up you must accept there are costs. We must now pay these costs. NATO will be weaker too. That's all a price you pay for fucking up a war.
I don’t dispute that UK military forces are in an utterly dire state compared to how they should be and suspect I would agree will all your suggestions, but who else is going to be better? The US perhaps (although they will have their own problems), and maybe Finland and Poland, although neither of the latter will carry the same scale. Otherwise you’re looking at China which hasn’t experienced true combat since the 50s, Russia which is continuously finding new and innovative ways to screw things up with corruption, France who has a rather large history of failure, and the obvious problems with Germany.
Having been studying the organisational side of military history, as far as I can tell the overriding rule is that the UK will be s*** and everyone else will be even worse, and however bad you describe things here I’m struggling to see a reason why this still wouldn’t be the case?
Granted that everyone will be shit and the UK might be slightly less shit, then numbers will prevail, and those are not on our side. Not unless some new Napoleon can form all of Europe into a cohesive whole
It's generally the case that peacetime militaries make all sorts of terrible mistakes and develop bad cultures and all this only gets exposed when war comes.
Russia realised how a lot of corruption had worked in 2022. But they have adapted enormously.
PRC have special forces embeds with Russia sucking a lot of data about US systems, electronic warfare and the crucial drone dynamics.
UK observers who have tried to explain whats happening inside MOD get told by senior people - shut up, we don't want to disrupt the budgets. Procurement has got even worse since 2020...
Impossible to know who has learned most until other conflicts occur
>> a country of Chinese people visible from China.
Without contesting the underlying point, I think this line (which you've used previously) risks detracting from the power of your argument, because it makes people think you perhaps don't realise how far away the island of Taiwan is from mainland China ... you sacrifice geographic credibility for rhetorical flourish.
And politically, it's like referring to Ireland c.100 years ago as a country of British people visible from Britain.
(Yes, there are islands visible from the Chinese mainland that are governed by Taipei, but the people living on those islands have always referred to "Taiwan" as a separate and distant place.)
(None of which in itself means western countries should or shouldn't risk the repercussions of defending or indeed just promising to defend Taiwan from the PLA this decade.)
Not "dumb" at all: the blog text argues realistic calculations should be made about the pros and cons of Britain taking sides anywhere in the world, and points out their absence when it comes to our Ukraine response. It doesn't explicitly exclude Taiwanese opinions from those calculations. But those calculations would ideally be orders of sophistication higher than "polls suggest" or "most identify as".
I don't think the blog treats the TW issue at all seriously except to make the *extremely* serious point that Britain made and apparently continues to make unrealistic calculations about Ukraine and when the time comes will presumably make equally unrealistic calculations about TW too. 自作孽，不可活。
I think you’re missing the point. The tone of foreigners getting a vote in policies of national self interest is over. Sucks to be them. And anyway I dispute your figures. The pro-reunion forces in Taiwan are very popular. But it’s beside the point. We need to do what’s in our own best interests.
No, this is wrong because (1) saying "pro-reunion forces in Taiwan are very popular" is absurd, and (2) if the opinion of Taiwanese was to make their island near-impregnable, say, then that would modify the underlying calculations about British national interest (without necessarily changing the final answer).
Great work on this! Would be useful to link directors from Companies House website too.
One of the largest single entries is Victoria Square Woking. I used to live in Woking and, as far as I could tell, this development was basically two sky scrapers. I’m a Civil Engineer and I have no idea how such a development could possibly cost over £600m!
Dom, thanks for this. Stimulating as per. Focussing in on one area in particular, defence reform. Do you think there's a possibility an MP could be incentivised to try and copy some of the lessons of the Truman Committee's inquiries in late 1940s? If so, how do we go about doing it?
Dom has long argued that it is inconsistent for us to focus on the Putin invasion of Ukraine and not Sudan and the Congo. It is I agree an incredibly weak argument. News stories are largely about relevance and a new war in Europe is a huge story to all western media as it raises the spectre of WW3. And as you rightly say by NOT focusing on Sudan and the Congo Dom is just as ‘biased’ as his targets.
I think it's very interesting that you think Chris Curtis (Bluesky fanatic - [0] and Netflix show aficionado [1]) and Looking for Growth (founded by "Russia is bad" typecast metropole [2]) are good examples to follow.
There is a serious dearth in political talent because people have not built anything for a generation. "Those who can't, teach. Those who can, will leave for Trump's new $5m gold visa".
I'm increasingly of the belief that the only way to change this is to start exceptionally small. If we want to return to US levels of productivity (e.g. ~£65k GDP per capita) it's going to be far easier to start with a home, then a road block, then a town and build and build.
Trying to turn around the ship is a fools errand. Best hope is to grow exponentially, to be so small the system doesn't know you, to be so big it's already too late.
Im saying that it's interesting such arguments are now bubbling up from people inside the system - a big change to the last 15 yrs. This is interesting regardless of what you think of the individuals. Cos it suggests some broader phenomenon.
I agree that there are huge advantages to starting small in various ways and thinking about *how to improve my village* rather than *what to do about SW1*
Surely time to ditch the blanket coveralls of NPC and SW1? I know their origin but by now all they really seem to mean is ‘’mindless people I hate’ . We need something more specific?
It's hardly a major issue but it is used so much here that I raised it and perhaps you can explain why you think these terms are s so vivid? SW1, is the metropolitan bubble I guess. But bubble (though certainly a cliche) tells you far more than a mere postcode. NPC just means automata and certainly a 'non-playing character' is a more contemporary form of the insult but it's s also less immediate--- it has to be explained to non-gamers--- and substitutes three word for one. I don't by the way deny that the concept has appeal and I thought the list Dom gave
was a reasonable one. On that though while all outlets supply some propaganda and slant I did disagree with his observation that the BBC and Guardian and NYT provides MORE disinformation,. As his list shows this is not just left versus right. The Express, Mail and GBNews are surely just as likely (or more likely?) to provide disinformation and indeed some of the names he cites are from the Mail and the Telegraph.
'What force is big enough to make it when self-evidently neither the worst pandemic since 1918 and the worst land war since 1945 have not been big enough?'
That's easy. It's us, the demos, via Swiss Direct Democracy. No one's offering it. That's the only problem. Instead the Western Liberal 'elective dictatorship' idiots - Trump et al - are trying the Old Way. They're already failing, just like they did in 2016-2020. When will they ever learn? LOL. Idiots, as I say. I'm enjoying this.
Love the blog DC, thankfully once again some balanced analysis!! If I may opine; firstly who’s fucking children are going to war for Ukraine and the Neo-Cons?? Fight for your country ofcourse!! Fight for quite possibly the largest volume of entrants on the Panama papers, I don’t think so!!
Secondly, have any of the pundit war mongers got to grips with the new style of warfare?? So if anyone with half a brain looked at this major factor, plus ISR systems and manpower would realise we are significantly behind and would require trump esq radical changes in the Uk and throughout Euro land to even consider competing on the military front!!
Possibly dodgy presentation of results here - the 0.6% to 0.8% range would be in aggregate; annual growth change more like approximately 0.1%/year. So productivity puzzle not solved by this.
I think much more likely that it is simply we do not have many high-value output jobs in the UK. And when we do, we tax them to smithereens so that we can afford high-priority items like trade union backhanders, welfare, Starmer’s pension, Chagos surrender payments, etc.
How can you make such blanket statements about Germany?
Have you travelled a lot in Germany, have you deeply researched modern German politics, can you speak German?
Germany has made some incredibly stupid decisions in recent years, especially on energy, but they had very strong growth for decades, so it's obvious why they were praised and seen as an example to look to.
Your problem is that you have become a total ideologue, probably driven mad by Brexit and then No10/the fallout.
You act as if you are a world-expert on everything, something which even the most intelligent and learned humans among us can never achieve.
Are you going to volunteer ? Good luck with that . DC has got the analysis 110% right
Let's see how many of our MPs send their kids off . No-one where I live would go .
But I hope London Birmingham Manchester empties out its volunteers.
Volunteer for what?
I wasn't talking about the Ukraine war; I was referring to his blanket statement that Germany isn't a serious country and that it was wrong for people to praise Germany before their energy prises went sky high.
While Germany has made very unserious decisions on energy for a long time, the German economy was genuinely very strong for decades and therefore it makes sense that people praised Germany and wrote positive books about Germany.
Germany and Merkel and the EU are dragging us into another European war .
She was the one who wanted cheap energy for Germany and pushed to get German hands on Ukraine's riches to noble Poland (again). Trump told her and the EU it was dangerous but they carried on . We've fought two wars for Europe Not another one .
Merkel is no longer in power.
She made bad decisions on energy for sure.
Energy, immigration, EU expansionism among other things.
To Dominic’s point, Germany has done well to maintain its industrialisation, as this is the bedrock of its economy. However, I’m not sure I’d agree that Germany has turned out to be the example Britain should follow.
I suspect that things will deteriorate from here as the combination of geopolitical instability, mass uncontrolled migration and insane energy policy come home to roost.
But hey, who knows?
DC is a generalist with an interest in everything relevant to government. Contrasted with SW1 who are interested in nothing. The German model is self destructing and DC is right to criticise it and also right to say nobody in their right mind would follow it now. Merkel and the Greens have destroyed Germany and made it a laughingstock on almost every measure. Whether it’s possible to reverse this (eg the AfD) remains to be seen.
Also, strange that you haven't commented on the massive cuts to science funding that DOGE has implemented recently...
Is it because DOGE is in your political 'tribe' now?
You used to say you weren't a party person!
What science cuts are you referring to? Do you mean the ending of the egregious expenses policies of the various science foundations? That’s all that has been cut. Five star hotel bills for conferences.
In 'Beyond Good and Evil' Nietzsche makes a perceptive point about how much philosophising is more down to the character of the philosopher than any property of reality itself.
Similarly, much of your political style appears to hinge just as much on inherent aspects of your character and psychological profile and the effects of your life experiences as it does on anything factual or objective.
I have followed your work since 2014 (Babble in the Bubble!) and learnt a huge amount from it, but I read what you write about Ukraine with bafflement. I suspect we see the issue so differently that there is not much point in arguing over it, but I would make a few points.
1) The pro-Ukraine policy has not 'collapsed' - it has been reversed by Trump. He can do that - he is the president of the world's only superpower - but it is an active decision to cut off the flow of arms/intelligence/aid and that has consequences. I would agree with you that the pro-Ukraine side have failed to articulate a coherent theory of victory, but the anti-Ukraine side have equally failed to explain how they will handle a resurgent Russia allied with Iran, China, and North Korea and in a position to menace its neighbours. How Trump and Musk blowing up US alliances with Canada and Europe is going to help here is not clear to me. There is a lot of lack of strategic vision to go around! Look at what Singaporean ministers have been saying after Trump's pivot to Russia. There are ramifications to abandoning Ukraine that are hard to foresee.
2) You write a lot about how wrong all the pundits etc. have been, but your own record here is not unimpeachable - in Feb 22 you were retweeting pieces by Samo Burja about how the reformed Russian army would stun the world. A bit of epistemic humility is good for all of us. I think you are letting your substantive disagreements with L. Freedman (and perhaps with his son) colour your perception of their analysis. Freedman senior has been very clear and quite self-critical in his analysis. It is hard to reconcile the Cummings from whom I learnt about 'superforecasting' and 'prediction under uncertainty' with the way you write about how X predicted Y, Y didn't happen, and so X is a fool.
3) You have been very focused on the risk of nuclear war, but your assessment of this seems unbalanced to me. It is true that confronting Russia raises the risk of a nuclear confrontation (we might argue about how much it raises it), but letting Russia destroy Ukraine will teach small countries that they need nuclear weapons to survive. Nuclear proliferation will significantly worsen nuclear risk. There is a trade-off here!
4) In your analysis, you almost never feature the Ukrainians - except to make the point about how many of them are Nazis (Russia also has a bit of a Nazi problem, it might be noted). The Ukrainians are in a bad position after Trump's actions this week, but they retain a large and professional army, a developing strategic strike capability, and a significant defence industrial complex. They also - overwhelmingly as far as anyone can tell - do not want to be part of Russia and they seem pretty committed to ongoing resistance. They are going to play a role in whatever happens next and that makes the situation very hard to predict.
>how they will handle a resurgent Russia allied with Iran, China, and North Korea and in a position to menace its neighbours
Historically, both Russia or China have been content to sit within their borders. Russia's Tsarist empire was established with a view to controlling terrain bottlenecks for defence purposes and did a fairly good job of ruling with a light touch while abstaining from pushing further. China is extremely inwardly focused and its primary goals are concerned with unification of the seven Chinas, rather than adding to the stock of rightful Chinese clay.
Iran is a legitimate regional power in its own right and its neighbours will have to figure out how to maintain cordial relations with them without meddling from the West, just as European nations had to contend with the Germanic peoples.
The obvious aberration of marxism was the midwife of expansionism, but cultural norms have been restored by strong leadership and I see no reason for historical norms failing to reestablish themselves.
Both Putin and Jinping have a grasp on history that is comparable to professional academics. Only a fool would watch the real-time collapse of the Western empires and think to himself "I want some of that for my people."
In short, I don't think the boogeyman of global dominion from the East is credible. That view is pure projection from the West.
I am sorry - is your claim seriously that Russia and China do not have a history of expansionism? That is bizarre if so. Both Tsarist Russia and pre-Communist China were imperial enterprises which showed a pretty remorseless appetite for conquest and colonisation - we just tend not to think about why Siberia is part of Russia, or why China stretches into Turkestan and the hill country of South East Asia.
Given the low opinion of academic historians evinced by our esteemed host and most commenters here, I can only infer that you think Putin and Xi's grasp of history is rather poor!
The Russians were invaded from the Eastern steppe by the Mongols, so control of that territory is a rational strategic goal and an obligation of any responsible government. Every country requires defensible borders. There's a good argument that the settling of Siberia by ethnic Rus constituted an invasion and conquest and so is war by other means, but if you take that view of the past, then you should also be willing to apply it to today.
A cursory glance at the history of Russian wars shows that the overwhelming majority were defensive in nature, or a direct answer to foreign influence in areas of strategic national importance like Black Sea ports. None of this points to a country or culture that has ambitions of global dominion. The Russian bear has its cave and is content to lie there.
China has had the resources to expand beyond their shores for at least six hundred years, certainly since the "Treasure Fleet." However, they've shown no interest in pursuing expansion. None. Contrast this to the actions of western Europe, whose ships went abroad and planted flags. In terms of wars waged, the number one enemy of the Chinese is other Chinese.
I am sorry, this is very confused. Your initial claim was that Russia and China have been content to sit within their own borders. You have maintained that claim for China, but now seem to accept that Russia has expanded aggressively, it was just right to do so.
The Chinese example is easiest to dispose of. You are making a common mistake, which is to assume that there is this thing called China, with roughly the borders of the modern People's Republic, which has always existed and always been Chinese. But this isn't historically accurate. China as we know it was made by remorseless warfare that established Chinese power outside the core Han regions, in territories that had not historically been under Chinese direct rule and which were inhabited by non-Han peoples. Look up 'the Ten Great Campaigns', for example, but there is a history of this going back millennia.
Saying 'the number one enemy of the Chinese is other Chinese' is like looking at European history and going 'the number one enemy of Europeans is Europeans'. Sure, but those deaths are mostly in wars of conquest and expansion!
What you say about Russia is confused in a slightly more complex way. The various principalities of the Rus had been destroyed or subdued by the Mongols. But the Muscovite principality (the origin of the modern Russian state) got its start as essentially the enforcer of Mongol power in the world of the Rus. Having created an expansionary state, Muscovy went on to subdue most other Rus polities, attack Mongol successor states, and begin a drive to the east, into areas that were as much forest as steppe. It also repeatedly attacked its western neighbours, particularly Poland-Lithuania and the Ottoman Empire. In the nineteenth century, it proceeded to fight colonial wars of conquest throughout Central Asia, annex vast areas from Qing China, and then try to tackle the Japanese in 1905.
This is a centuries long history of aggressive expansion - in historical perspective, the reasonable position is that Russia is likely to want to attack its neighbours! It is your view that requires proper justification and I don't think you have provided it.
I think you think that this Russian expansion is not aggressive, because it is just into areas they consider important for their national interest? The point is, however, that they keep redefining the areas that are of strategic importance to them to justify conquest. That is, more or less exactly, what Putin has done in Ukraine.
I have deliberately left out the Communist periods of both countries, pro arguendo, because you said they were a special case, but I would note that Soviet Russia launched unprovoked wars against essentially all its neighbours from 1917-1940, including conquering various nascent independent states. Communist China invaded and conquered Turkestan and Tibet and tried to conquer South Korea and Taiwan. It also invaded Vietnam. The two Communist states also fought a de facto war against each other. Although people tend to focus on the Cuban Missile Crisis, probably the closest the world ever came to a proper nuclear exchange was between the USSR and the PRC at the height of the Sino-Soviet split.
Just a teensy weensy quibble about your statement: "The pro-Ukraine policy has not 'collapsed' - it has been reversed by Trump",
It strikes me that the previous administration's policy, to all intents and purposes, has collapsed under the pressures created, not least, by Ukrainian manpower shortages, a shortfall in external supplies unavoidable in the short to medium terms, increasing battlefield losses of men and materiel, poor strategic choices and the irrational decision to go to war with a much more powerful country purely on the promise of being supported by the fickle democracies of the West governed by those with a profoundly exaggerated sense of their own competence, knowledge and wisdom. In essence, the present administration is responding rationally to events by pursuing an adapted policy by seeking a peace deal between the two countries in conflict, albeit in reality between the US and Russia, in the full awareness that it is a choice between a peaceful settlement (which may take years to conclude) or the Ukraine's unconditional surrender to the Russian Federation.
On the other hand, there is a high degree of continuity in US policy towards the EU, the majority of its member nations and the UK despite the change in administration. First, through the sanctions regime, which had the predictable effect, for the Europeans, of locking them off from a major supplier of cheap energy and by-products - effectively hitting both Europe's industrial and agricultural sectors - and finance, along with a ready market for Western goods and services and leaving European economies less price competitive in both domestic and international markets; second, through the absurd but widely held belief that Russia's military, financial system and industrial and service sectors would keel over in a matter of months - if not weeks or days - and Russia would stand quietly on the naughty step while Westerners broke up the Russian Federation and looted its resources but, unfortunately, by a combination of intelligent decision making and import substitution, the reverse has been the case Not exactly a shining example of politico-military planning by NATO and its masters (and mistresses). But at least the US managed to destroy an economically and politically competitive ally, so something good came out of it for someone and the US can control the EU and plunder its scarce resources at will (although the IPR opportunities look interesting).
Russia is now an economic, energy and technological powerhouse (so much so that the demand for labour has had an inflationary effect the recessionary West might be grateful for, with the capacity to attract and reward skilled labour from any part of the world) with greater effective industrial capacity the the US, it has formed and confirmed strong relationships and alliances with the strengthening economies of the Global South, and it has the strongest battle hardened military in the world with which to defend its friends. And it no longer sees the Europeans as friends or even potential friends.
I am sorry, your view is that Ukraine went to war with Russia?
My view is that the West organised the coup in Ukraine in 2014, and that it was the West that went to war with Russia using Ukraine as its proxy to provoke a Russian response. This is clearly supported by Merkel and Hollande's statements concerning the reasons they gave for supporting Minsk 1 & 2, ie, to give the Ukraine time to build up, arm and train its military.
Ok, but that is different to what you initially claimed in crucial respects that vitiate your initial point.
It is a cherished talking point of the Kremlin and those in the West opposed to the war that there was a 'coup' in 2014, but it isn't true. Yanukovych sparked a constitutional crisis by 1) withdrawing from the association agreement which led to protests which he then 2) violently suppressed by killing a lot of protesters. He was then removed by a vote of the Ukrainian parliament and Ukraine subsequently had two rounds of elections that though disrupted by Russian military action were largely free and fair. You can call this process a lot of things, but it isn't a coup on any plausible view of events.
Yes, Merkel and Hollande made remarks about helping Ukraine rearm, because Russia had already invaded Ukraine! I don't see how this helps your case.
None of your points are true and, if I were a less kind person, I would class them are utter nonsense and the deranged warblings of someone having a bad ketamine trip, so I am forced to restrain myself.
In the real world, Yanukovych wanted time to determine whether he could jettison all the existing and very long established economic relationships with Russia in favour of an airy-fairy exclusive "association agreement" with the EU which committed the EU to nothing and the Ukraine to everything, attempt to reach a better deal with the EU which included trade with Russia, or leave it for the people to decide in the following year's elections.
And so the Nuland cookie revolution began. Yanukovych, hoping to avoid violence and in an attempt to reach a consensus, negotiated a deal with the opposition to bring the following year's election forward and which collapsed when Nazi snipers proceeded to slaughter people in the Maidan at random in a classic by the book false flag operation.
Yanukovych went into hiding because things were slightly more out of hand than they were, say, in Washington on January 6, and a parliament with a significant shortfall of members from the Eastern oblasts acted unconstitutionally by deciding he was no longer President. It was a coup pure and simple, and it was a coup which began with the violent death of hundreds, and is playing out with the deaths of hundreds of thousands.
You appear to have a very rose-tinted view of reality and it may be a good occasion to seek advice from a competent ophthalmic surgeon.
If you are tempted to respond, please try to stick to the truth otherwise no-one else will take you seriously either.
In the second line, "are", should read, "as", just to avoid confusing you even more than you are.
Thanks for your thoughtful and witty reply. You haven't actually answered the two points I made and you implicitly concede the crucial issue, which is that Yanukovych was removed by a vote of the Ukrainian parliament (nem con and almost 3/4 in favour). This cannot in the ordinary (non-Russian) sense of the word be described as a coup.
Even if you were correct about 2014 (which you are not), two subsequent elections gave big majorities to presidents who did not want to adhere to Yanukovych's pro-Russian course.
This isn't complex stuff.
Again - this is just personal abuse. If you look through our thread, the discussion is not very edifying, but every time you have actually raised a point I have answered it.
If you were less enraged, you might find it easier to avoid mistakes of spelling and syntax.
1/ There was a general cross EU/UK/US agreement on a set of things from 2022. As long as it takes, whatever it takes, Putin must fail, UKR must retake all land etc.
This has clearly collapsed. Europe is now accepting negotiations leaving Putin in charge of a lot. The idea of rolling Russia back to 22 borders is clearly a gonner.
The UK policy and EU policy has collapsed.
2/ No one's record on these things is unimpeachable ever. Freedman senior has NOT been 'very clear' about what he's written - he now tries to preent what he thought in 2022 in extremely different light, suggesting that how things have unfolded is sort of how he saw. This is clearly rubbish. In Sep 2022 he was on TV saying a Russian total collapse was 'fifty fifty'. Look at the details and you'll see Im right. And it's important not cos of his Twitter-addicted son but cos he is a respected Prof who MPs and hacks take seriously. The quality of this community has been collectively dreadful - especially on the absolute core questions of the POLITICAL goals of war. It's as if none of them read Clausewitz (who is famously UNread but much quoted).
3/ 'Letting Russia destroy UKR' wd have bad effects for sure and nuclear proliferation is already happening. But the answer is not to double down on a failed policy of UKR joining NATO and fighting over it, it's to accept that we totallty fucked up from when the neocons persuaded Bush in 07 and when you totally fuck up you must accept there are costs. We must now pay these costs. NATO will be weaker too. That's all a price you pay for fucking up a war.
I don’t dispute that UK military forces are in an utterly dire state compared to how they should be and suspect I would agree will all your suggestions, but who else is going to be better? The US perhaps (although they will have their own problems), and maybe Finland and Poland, although neither of the latter will carry the same scale. Otherwise you’re looking at China which hasn’t experienced true combat since the 50s, Russia which is continuously finding new and innovative ways to screw things up with corruption, France who has a rather large history of failure, and the obvious problems with Germany.
Having been studying the organisational side of military history, as far as I can tell the overriding rule is that the UK will be s*** and everyone else will be even worse, and however bad you describe things here I’m struggling to see a reason why this still wouldn’t be the case?
Granted that everyone will be shit and the UK might be slightly less shit, then numbers will prevail, and those are not on our side. Not unless some new Napoleon can form all of Europe into a cohesive whole
It's generally the case that peacetime militaries make all sorts of terrible mistakes and develop bad cultures and all this only gets exposed when war comes.
Russia realised how a lot of corruption had worked in 2022. But they have adapted enormously.
PRC have special forces embeds with Russia sucking a lot of data about US systems, electronic warfare and the crucial drone dynamics.
UK observers who have tried to explain whats happening inside MOD get told by senior people - shut up, we don't want to disrupt the budgets. Procurement has got even worse since 2020...
Impossible to know who has learned most until other conflicts occur
This is GREAT !
>> a country of Chinese people visible from China.
Without contesting the underlying point, I think this line (which you've used previously) risks detracting from the power of your argument, because it makes people think you perhaps don't realise how far away the island of Taiwan is from mainland China ... you sacrifice geographic credibility for rhetorical flourish.
And politically, it's like referring to Ireland c.100 years ago as a country of British people visible from Britain.
(Yes, there are islands visible from the Chinese mainland that are governed by Taipei, but the people living on those islands have always referred to "Taiwan" as a separate and distant place.)
(None of which in itself means western countries should or shouldn't risk the repercussions of defending or indeed just promising to defend Taiwan from the PLA this decade.)
It's also a bit dumb to exclude the opinions of the Taiwanese themselves. Polls suggest most Taiwanese don't want to reunite with the mainland.
Most also identify as 'Taiwanese' not 'Chinese'.
Not "dumb" at all: the blog text argues realistic calculations should be made about the pros and cons of Britain taking sides anywhere in the world, and points out their absence when it comes to our Ukraine response. It doesn't explicitly exclude Taiwanese opinions from those calculations. But those calculations would ideally be orders of sophistication higher than "polls suggest" or "most identify as".
I don't think the blog treats the TW issue at all seriously except to make the *extremely* serious point that Britain made and apparently continues to make unrealistic calculations about Ukraine and when the time comes will presumably make equally unrealistic calculations about TW too. 自作孽，不可活。
I think you’re missing the point. The tone of foreigners getting a vote in policies of national self interest is over. Sucks to be them. And anyway I dispute your figures. The pro-reunion forces in Taiwan are very popular. But it’s beside the point. We need to do what’s in our own best interests.
No, this is wrong because (1) saying "pro-reunion forces in Taiwan are very popular" is absurd, and (2) if the opinion of Taiwanese was to make their island near-impregnable, say, then that would modify the underlying calculations about British national interest (without necessarily changing the final answer).
GovSpendBase now has password protection removed, the categories page is particularly interesting I think -> https://www.govspendbase.uk/sic-codes
Great work on this! Would be useful to link directors from Companies House website too.
One of the largest single entries is Victoria Square Woking. I used to live in Woking and, as far as I could tell, this development was basically two sky scrapers. I’m a Civil Engineer and I have no idea how such a development could possibly cost over £600m!
Thanks have sent it to some people wholl understand it better than me!
Cheers!
Dom, thanks for this. Stimulating as per. Focussing in on one area in particular, defence reform. Do you think there's a possibility an MP could be incentivised to try and copy some of the lessons of the Truman Committee's inquiries in late 1940s? If so, how do we go about doing it?
Sam
https://x.com/Discoplomacy/status/1896830848554692795
It's possible but history suggests MPs will not push Whitehall on defence.
Everything has got more closed and the military less allowed to talk openly in SW1.
So I suspect 3 more yrs of no serious scrutiny
Why haven't you been tweeting about Sudan and the Congo then if they're so important?
You've certainly tweeted a lot more about Ukraine/Israel-Gaza compared to Sudan and the Congo, just the same thing you accuse the media of doing.
Is it because they involve black people and therefore you don't care as much?
They are not important , though obviously they should stop the stupid fighting .
Why are they not important?
Dom has long argued that it is inconsistent for us to focus on the Putin invasion of Ukraine and not Sudan and the Congo. It is I agree an incredibly weak argument. News stories are largely about relevance and a new war in Europe is a huge story to all western media as it raises the spectre of WW3. And as you rightly say by NOT focusing on Sudan and the Congo Dom is just as ‘biased’ as his targets.
For sure.
A clever idiot would be a fair summation.
Who ?
Mr Cummings - too clever for his own good. An observation based on .many years of experience.
What have you ever done ?
Plenty thank you
I think it's very interesting that you think Chris Curtis (Bluesky fanatic - [0] and Netflix show aficionado [1]) and Looking for Growth (founded by "Russia is bad" typecast metropole [2]) are good examples to follow.
There is a serious dearth in political talent because people have not built anything for a generation. "Those who can't, teach. Those who can, will leave for Trump's new $5m gold visa".
I'm increasingly of the belief that the only way to change this is to start exceptionally small. If we want to return to US levels of productivity (e.g. ~£65k GDP per capita) it's going to be far easier to start with a home, then a road block, then a town and build and build.
Trying to turn around the ship is a fools errand. Best hope is to grow exponentially, to be so small the system doesn't know you, to be so big it's already too late.
0. https://x.com/chriscurtis94/status/1824789876048335170
1. https://bsky.app/profile/chriscurtis94.bsky.social/post/3ljgcq53wwk2k
2. https://x.com/isnit0/status/1896832983690264971
Im saying that it's interesting such arguments are now bubbling up from people inside the system - a big change to the last 15 yrs. This is interesting regardless of what you think of the individuals. Cos it suggests some broader phenomenon.
I agree that there are huge advantages to starting small in various ways and thinking about *how to improve my village* rather than *what to do about SW1*
Surely time to ditch the blanket coveralls of NPC and SW1? I know their origin but by now all they really seem to mean is ‘’mindless people I hate’ . We need something more specific?
Disagree. They capture herd-like moronic culture in Westminster and the media very well
It's hardly a major issue but it is used so much here that I raised it and perhaps you can explain why you think these terms are s so vivid? SW1, is the metropolitan bubble I guess. But bubble (though certainly a cliche) tells you far more than a mere postcode. NPC just means automata and certainly a 'non-playing character' is a more contemporary form of the insult but it's s also less immediate--- it has to be explained to non-gamers--- and substitutes three word for one. I don't by the way deny that the concept has appeal and I thought the list Dom gave
https://order-order.com/2023/10/18/cummings-names-sw1-non-player-characters/
was a reasonable one. On that though while all outlets supply some propaganda and slant I did disagree with his observation that the BBC and Guardian and NYT provides MORE disinformation,. As his list shows this is not just left versus right. The Express, Mail and GBNews are surely just as likely (or more likely?) to provide disinformation and indeed some of the names he cites are from the Mail and the Telegraph.
'What force is big enough to make it when self-evidently neither the worst pandemic since 1918 and the worst land war since 1945 have not been big enough?'
That's easy. It's us, the demos, via Swiss Direct Democracy. No one's offering it. That's the only problem. Instead the Western Liberal 'elective dictatorship' idiots - Trump et al - are trying the Old Way. They're already failing, just like they did in 2016-2020. When will they ever learn? LOL. Idiots, as I say. I'm enjoying this.
Love the blog DC, thankfully once again some balanced analysis!! If I may opine; firstly who’s fucking children are going to war for Ukraine and the Neo-Cons?? Fight for your country ofcourse!! Fight for quite possibly the largest volume of entrants on the Panama papers, I don’t think so!!
Secondly, have any of the pundit war mongers got to grips with the new style of warfare?? So if anyone with half a brain looked at this major factor, plus ISR systems and manpower would realise we are significantly behind and would require trump esq radical changes in the Uk and throughout Euro land to even consider competing on the military front!!