Regime Change 2026-29: results from a market research project
Voters greatly UNDER-estimate the scale of immigration. NHS? Net Zero? Farage? Starmer? Badenoch? Cost of living? Welfare? Debt?
Yeah it’s harder to get a GP appointment than tickets for One Direction back in the day, you call in and you’re 55 in the queue, then it’s cancelled, it’s insane.
I don’t think he’s [Farage] Far Right, I’m branded Far Right but I’m not, I’m Right, and he’s just Right too, I feel moderate but the left has gone so far left it makes anyone seem like we’ve changed but we haven’t, and the BBC lies about it and calls us all fascists. But there’s not enough of a team. My worry is we have a split and we’re stuck with Labour.
We’re reaching the point where Labour got in cos the Tories were a disaster then we’ve had a disastrous Labour government, so give Farage a go just cos we need any alternative. The Tories are irrelevant, on the sidelines. Would it be good? Are any of them?! He’s different to the other two. But his Party isn’t up to being a professional government yet.
He’s convincing [Farage] but I question if he’s a team player, he’ll find it very hard to be PM, how will he run all the departments? I can see him winning but then failing as PM.
I live in a village called [X], in ten years it’s been overrun, we now call it Halal [X], it’s a small English village but it’s now got mosques, there’s rows and an edge, and there’s white flight, I‘m selling my house and I’m leaving, the people who’ve arrived don’t want to live by our rules and they’re not working. I work, my kids work, the immigration system is out of control. [And he UNDERestimated the level of immigration by a lot]
It’s like they [MPs] hate us, they’re not on our side.
Swing voters in swing constituencies…
The culture of Europe has deteriorated visibly within the memory of many who are by no means the oldest among us… There is no doubt that in our headlong rush to educate everybody, we are lowering our standards and more and more abandoning the study of those subjects by which the essentials of our culture … are transmitted; destroying our ancient edifices to make ready the ground upon which the barbarian nomads of the future will encamp in their mechanised caravans.
TS Eliot, Notes on Education and Culture
Nihilism has become the American way, which is a fatal shock to cultural development and the American spirit… If the value system collapses, how can the social system be sustained?
Wang Huning, close adviser to Xi
What has driven the rise of the French far right in the past 20 years?
“Immigration and also the total scorn of the elites. In France, immigrants from northern Africa, who are usually Muslim, don’t integrate well.”
Doesn’t integration take time?
“In France, it’s the reverse. It’s the second or third generation that is making trouble. We are witnessing a dis-assimilation. It’s a catastrophe.”
Houellebecq interview
I said last year I would spend less time this year on SW1 until the old system cracks open. This blog is finishing off a 2025 project. It has two sections.
A summary of a deep market research project I did in October/November. Voters’ top priorities? Views on Starmer, Kemi B, Farage, Jenrick and the parties? Views on Net Zero and conservation? The NHS? The cost of living? Immigration, boats, communities shifting ethnically? Welfare/benefits? The aesthetics of rightwing videos? (Aesthetics polarise emotionally even when people agree on facts/problem/policy.)
Some sketches of how SW1 Insiders are likely to respond to opinion. What will they absorb or distort, how will their behaviour change? How will the SW1 system evolve 2026-29?
It’s not about what I think should be built. I’ve explained that many times. The question is whether people with talent, money, ambition and willpower will decide to cross the Rubicon instead of fish in it. There’s a policy agenda which, with the right leadership and campaign, would deal with most of our most acute problems and have the support of a majority in Parliament — but the existing parties repulse, like an immune system repulsing an invader, the combination of the plan, the detail, the talent, and the campaign, and the combination doesn’t make sense to how Westminster en masse thinks of ‘politics’.
As you watch Starmer collapse, remember — SW1’s experts, heads of TV news, FT pundits, the Institute for Government etc told you Starmer and Sue Gray were ‘the serious grownups’ who would bring ‘calm stability’ after ‘Brexit chaos’. As Andrew Marr, ex BBC political editor put it:
We have to be optimistic. Just having a stable government there for five, ten years. With ordinary down-to-earth serious people talking like the rest of us in charge of the government. A plan that doesn’t shift very much. A wall of money coming in from around the world… A little haven of peace and stability…
MPs are hysterical over Epstein after spending 20 years suppressing investigation and reporting of industrialised child abuse here because it undermines their cross-party consensus on immigration policy. Outside SW1 you might think that the Epstein affair means they’ll now have to deal with the grooming gangs differently. After all, Epstein is an American paedo scandal but the gangs is a domestic paedo scandal on a much vaster scale, right? No, dear reader, Epstein will blow over, SW1 will move on to the months of soap opera over Starmer’s replacement and will continue ignoring the gangs, which will continue to operate, meanwhile Whitehall is incinerating documents over child abuse before it becomes a criminal offence when the new fake Inquiry starts… The system will continue working as intended… (Look at how much the BBC covered Rupert Lowe MP trying to uncover the gangs this week: 0.)
British politics is in a doomloop similar to many western countries:
A. The deafening verdict of voters in election after election (Brexit, Trump 1 and 2 etc) and the drop in support for old parties everywhere is that Insiders have failed and voters want change — a failure of ideas, institutions, and operational competence, a failure to take or impose responsibility for failure (cf. Iraq, Afghanistan, financial crisis, covid, Ukraine etc). Old parties, old state bureaucracies, old institutions of all kinds — from the EU and NATO to the media and universities — have seen an epic collapse of trust.
B. Insiders’ response to this repeated verdict is a) doubling down on more of the things voters keep rejecting, especially importing men from the worst places on earth, b) an increasingly deranged discussion among themselves that ‘the real problem’ is actually the voters, because — fooled by disinformation, ‘Russian interference’, tech oligarchs etc — they have embraced populism, racism, fascism, and c) the solution is to ‘restore trust’ in Insiders’ ideas and institutions and give them more power and money.
C. Those Outsiders who want to replace this doomloop between voters and Insiders can’t coordinate to build a political entity to do it.
To voters, Insiders are the villains and Insider failure is the cause of the collapse of their trust. To Insiders, they are the traduced victims and the cause of the collapse of trust is the evil treachery of other elites, the interference of evil foreigners (‘Putin did Brexit!’), and the ignorance and stupidity of voters.
Insiders destroyed their own OODA loops. They radicalised Left but can’t see it so their entire orientation is off kilter. Ironically it wouldn’t be hard to be a popular government — but the changes needed are fiercely resisted in a pathological self-defeating pattern by political-bureaucratic elites, because of the stories they believe, the powerful forces of mimesis which surround them, and the disintegration of feedback mechanisms. E.g ‘Stopping the boats’ is operational childsplay, doable in days according to UK forces asked to plan to stop them — not even in the 100 most complex/difficult government problems — and the entire problem is Insiders’ determination to prioritise keeping the legal barriers to solving the problem particularly the ECHR/HRA.
Voters think, ‘we keep voting for change but they won’t change’. When politicians try to change even modestly, they find it almost impossible to make the state bureaucracies evolved since 1945 follow orders. Officials across the west have dug in and grasp that the collapsed talent level of modern politicians, their incentives etc mean that officials can just refuse to change and almost always win. After covid, the old parties everywhere united in supporting the very bureaucracies responsible for killing millions and widespread disaster. Sunak and Starmer supported and empowered the precise Cabinet Office system which destroyed their ability to do what they said they would do, then both were totally bewildered by their political collapse then continued babbling support for what killed them.
These processes are part of a long-term cycle of regime change, very similar to the 1840s-70s.
So we’re in a holding pattern. The long-term entropic forces of Westminster’s pathological vandalism demonstrate themselves weekly in a torrent of humiliation — Westminster has made us a tragi-comic global internet meme. Westminster watches itself to see how it will react to the uselessness of two more duds in charge of the two old rotten parties — duds much of SW1 tried to elevate as ‘serious people’.
Farage tells people ‘after May’ Reform will start showing a transformation yet he’s spent his time recruiting some of the worst Tory dregs to help him persuade voters to vote for ‘change’. The voters are more angry and desperate than ever, but Westminster can’t cope with the feedback.
Elites have fragmented and many now also want something radically different, but this process is different in different countries. In America it’s been accelerated by Elon and the MAGA Silicon Valley network. In Britain, there’s a lot of private whining at dinner parties but very little public action. Most people with money and/or talent have kept hoping vainly that the old system might fix itself and don’t want to make enemies. Starmer has scuppered that hope but there remains no clear solution.
The gap between a) what’s really needed to solve our problems and b) what’s acceptable in Insider dinner parties is relentlessly growing — it’s much bigger than it was in 2020 and ‘what’s needed’ will seem more inconceivable for the median SW1 character the longer we continue on the Brown-Osborne-May-Sunak-Starmer trajectory. As this gap grows, elite fragmentation grows and it becomes harder for people to have meaningful discussion. Insiders seem more and more determined to try to drag what they think of as ‘the progressive arc of history’ back towards 1998, their comfort zone between the fall of the Wall and the fall of the Towers. They quote Blair on ‘open vs closed’ and ‘radical centrism’. They speculate on rejoining the EU and other changes to squash pesky demands for change — we had it cracked in the nineties, we just need to find our way back, they tell each other at Lake Como conferences on ‘alienation and populism’. This seems more and more delusional to Outsider elites who in turn seem more and more ‘extreme/fascist’ to Insiders. Bridges between networks become harder to maintain socially as informational lightcones separate on WhatsApp groups, X/Bluesky etc.
I think it will be resolved this year whether: A) Starmer and Kemi are binned as I said would happen last year, and the two old parties are irreversibly splintering, B) Farage’s promises are true or the cynics are right and it’s clear that a Reform government would be just another SW1 clownshow, C) whether elite fragmentation generates a serious alternative, or D) if not, then the rush to the exits — of talent and money — will accelerate as people realise that the next election is heading for either a Farage clownshow or a red-green-yellow-Hamas-troon-ScotNat-rainbow coalition, raising the probability of financial crisis and street violence, which may arrive anyway before then given SW1’s disintegration.
Westminster can’t solve the problems caused by Westminster and broader cultural forces acting over many decades. The historical solution is a section of elites allying with a majority of voters but it’s intrinsically hard for elites to coordinate before collapse given the asymmetries of risk and rewards, hence the pattern of regime collapse. Elon’s historic decisions changed America’s trajectory partly because huge errors by the Biden White House provoked a critical mass of dissident competent elites to take the plunge and coordinate. What would something similar here look like? And if it becomes clear all options in 2029 are worse than today, where does the energy and talent that does not emigrate go?
Everything will be under more pressure because SW1 united behind escalating the dumbest war in recent history and won’t be able to hide the disaster — or the vast historic prize NATO has given China — for much longer. The psychic nightmare for SW1, and the entire ecosystem which peddled Ukraine fairy tales, as they’re forced to confront this will generate more pathological responses. Tories and Reform will support mad ideas which emerge from the deep state to be burbled by Starmer as he fades out — a PM who at international meetings increasingly resembles a mentally impaired hobbit at a Gondor wedding staggering around in terror of being trampled by the Big Folk. Awful as things are, they can get much, much worse fast.
Such exercises in examining voters’ beliefs always generate many interesting things. One concerns immigration which I explore in detail below.
Those who consider themselves the ‘serious sensible people of SW1’ — i.e those who radicalised sharply Left post-2015 towards Greta-Gaza-‘trans’, but think the problem is voters radicalising Right — have continued their post-referendum doubling down and persuaded themselves of new fictions regarding immigration including the idea that the polls showing voter concern over immigration reflects media coverage which makes them greatly over-estimate the scale of immigration. If you believe this then you naturally believe other things about what’s happening and what political entities should do.
I suspected this is delusional so decided to see what voters think about this hypothesis. I was surprised by how deluded. It turns out that the mainstream voters I explored actually greatly under-estimate the scale of immigration — and not by 10% or 30% but by a factor between 5X and 30X. Over and over, normal voters estimate the scale of immigration since January 2021 at ‘200,000, 50,000, 300,000, 100,000, 700,000, 250,000’ — i.e roughly 5X and 30X times lower than it is. And when they are shown the real numbers and graphs since 1997 and 2021 — million after million after million — they are almost all ‘shocked’. They aren’t buying ‘diversity is our strength’. They are much more hostile to Labour and Tories and much more supportive of much stronger measures than most Tory MPs.
The lack of voter knowledge combined with what voters do think and know is an indictment of the SW1 Right but also a) a sign of where opinion will go as awareness of reality spreads and b) a huge opportunity. A competent campaign — think ‘£350 million’ but on immigration today — driving carefully chosen numbers and stories to jiujitsu SW1 fear and rage against themselves and hence build support to solve the problem, would be disastrous for Labour, Tories and Whitehall.
How could this be true when ‘the right wing media constantly exaggerates the problem’, I hear you ask?! I explain this and other interesting things below.
When I do these exercises on voter opinion, I’m trying to figure out the truth and avoid confusing a) what voters really believe, b) what I want them to believe or not believe and c) what I/others could persuade them to believe. Politics is plagued by research efforts that really are done to make money, produce evidence to support arguments/action people already want to make/do, curry favour, build relationships, get promoted etc.
I try hard not to kid myself about the difference between my views and normal voters. As I live mostly in London this has got harder, compounded by becoming famous so talking to people directly is refracted through a fog. I was surprised by lots of what we found. If you’re reading this blog, probably your life is financially easier than the median voter and you spend a lot more time looking at politics than the median voter. If you spend most of your time talking to comfortably off graduates, I urge you to discount what you want to be true, the emotions of your social network and how you and they feel about ‘political identity’, when you read what voters say below. Our first job is ‘not to fool yourself, and you’re the easiest person to fool’.
How to summarise what I found?
Voters are angrier and more fearful and more hateful of Westminster than ever before.
On the other hand, they greatly under-estimate the real scale of immigration; they are almost totally unaware of the insane immigration cases regarding sex criminals and murderers and terrorists; they do not understand the scale of the debt; they’re mad about the scale of benefits cheating but greatly under-estimate its scale; they don’t understand the depth of vandalism of the armed forces; they understand problems with the police better than MPs but still under-estimate them; they’ve become more realistic about the NHS and the implications of immigration and ageing for it but don’t trust any mainstream political force to make significant changes; they’ve become much more hostile to SW1’s consensus on Net Zero but don’t realise the scale of mad costs SW1 locked us into and how hard it will be to change to sensible policies on energy and environment.
Although voters are more pessimistic than ever and more realistic than Insiders, they are not realistic enough about the extent of the rot so there is scope for hatred of both old parties to grow a lot and desire for something new to grow a lot — and this dynamic is demonstrated in groups when one talks them through various things.
Further, consider that what you read below about voter hate for the old parties was before the resurrection of the Epstein scandal in the last week. Already record lows of trust and record highs of hate will be even worse now and, given the inevitable continual crumbling of SW1 in coming months, even worse by summer.
Another ‘conspiracy theory’ comes true
I’ve written many times how our political crisis is illustrated by how often high status Insiders, including people who present ‘the news’, describe something as ‘a conspiracy theory’ then it turns out to be true. Those people mostly fell hook, line and sinker for the actual big conspiracy theory of the past 20 years — the Russiagate hoax on Brexit and Trump, created by the likes of Jake Sullivan to undermine the legitimacy of Trump.
Here is another good example.
Last May I wrote on this blog about UAE bigshots appalled at how we’re dealing with Islamic nutjobs. I had just talked to a) a CTO of a tech firm who’d just been there and b) a British soldier who’d just been there. Both had been to dinners with bigshots and both told me, within a few weeks, the same story about their conversations. So I wrote this (bold added):
Aspects of the situation are tragi-comic. E.g if you talk to senior people in places like UAE, they tell you that bigshots in that region now tell each other — don’t send your kids to be educated in Britain, they’ll come back radical Islamist nutjobs! Our regime has spent thirty years a) destroying border control and sane immigration (including the Home Office’s jihad against the highest skilled, whom they truly loathe discussing and try to repel with stupid fees etc) and b) actively prioritising people from the most barbaric places on earth (hence immigration from the tribal areas most responsible for the grooming/rape gangs keeps rising) and c) funding the spread of those barbaric ideas and defending the organisations spreading them with human rights laws designed to stop the return of totalitarianism in Europe.
At Christmas, the UAE finally got sick of complaining in Whitehall and briefed that they are limiting students coming because of our problem with extremist radicalisation and mad universities.
People pointed out how my original blog had triggered The Rest Is Politics. Rory ‘Kamala will win easy’ Stewart and Alistair ‘45 minutes’ Campbell did their show about my blog last May, describing it as ‘a conspiracy theory’ and how it illustrated generally I’m a psycho who spreads ‘bullshit’ to cause chaos, that’s ‘very very Cummings’. You can see a clip of Rory here which they tweeted out.
In the clip they tell their fans that I claimed this information came from organisations with ‘ludicrous acronyms to sound like he’s on the inside line … and classified information nobody else knows about’ etc. As you can see above, I didn’t say anything about classified information or ‘acronyms’, I just stated it as a fact. Rory also repeats the myth that I write Elon’s tweets, which for some reason No10 spread a year ago and is also ludicrous, and claims I’m in the pay of the Emirates (just like I was ‘in the pay of Putin’), while I’m one of the few senior people in SW1 who has never taken a penny from them or even been there — Rory and AC cannot say the same! SW1 invents things about me then believes their inventions, a constant process.
Apart from the general process of elite polarisation and the collapse of consensus reality I’ve written about a lot — and touch on below — their claims about ‘conspiracy theories’ is connected to the radicalisation of SW1 on Islam illustrated by one of many dismal Christmas stories.
Over Christmas, it turned out that most of SW1 — Labour and Tory MPs, the FO etc — and much of luvvie world had mobilised to give an Egyptian nutjob British citizenship and lobby the Egyptian government to release him from jail, which they finally did. Already, characteristically pathological of SW1. But then it beautifully turned out that the nutjob had said all sorts of nutjob things on Twitter including open calls for violence against Jews.
The PM welcomed his release and described bringing another nutter to Britain as one of his ‘top priorities’. No10 therefore had to scramble to the ‘we were useless’ defence and claim the entire campaign over years — which they said was ‘top priority’ for No10 and the PM — had never involved anybody ever doing any checking on the nutjob before mobilising SW1 and Hampstead. So No10’s defence was — neither the PM, any other minister, or anybody else in Whitehall involved in the campaign to release this guy and bring him to Britain ever checked why the Egyptians might have jailed him. Forget all the capabilities of the deep state, nobody — from the Foreign Office to The Times leader writers — even did a quick google search. Absurd as it it, they had to say this as the alternative is ‘we knew what he said and that’s why we made him a priority’. (Obviously some people in Whitehall did know he was a nutjob but they couldn’t admit that.)
These two stories are related. Middle East regimes see Britain as a dangerous source of radicalised nutjobs and decades behind them in dealing with this problem. It’s similar to how Middle East regimes have leapfrogged European regimes in many technology areas and are now more important to Washington and Beijing than Europe is, but the European/yookay story is in a timewarp where obviously we are more advanced than them.
(At roughly the same time as No10 was tweeting that it’s their ‘top priority’ to import more Islamic maniacs, Whitehall was also banning this white Dutch young woman politician from entering the yookay because she tweets stories of illegal immigrants killing Europeans and criticises yookay immigration policy. More very logical government from a government giving away the Chagos islands, importing terrorists and giving them millions, and using government lawyers to attack British special forces via lawfare using lawyer friends of Starmer and Hermer, both friends of the disgraced lawyer who invented abuses by British soldiers and, obviously, escaped jail.)
The phenomenon whereby the authorities define something as a ‘conspiracy theory’, and the old media especially the BBC reinforces the claim, then it turns out to be true is particularly striking regarding stories about extremism/Islam.
For example, in 2024 much of SW1 supported Starmer attacking those claiming the killer of the three school children was connected to Islam — ‘dangerous disinformation’ and ‘a conspiracy theory’ they screamed, and used this to justify jailing people. Then No10 admitted weeks later the PM had been told immediately the killer had been downloading Al Qaeda manuals on terrorism.
In January 2025 as the grooming gangs story resurfaced, the PM gave a speech claiming ‘the real story’ was not the gangs themselves but the radicalisation of the far right, ‘disinformation’, and Elon spreading ‘conspiracy theories’ about Islam. The BBC and much of SW1 cheered Starmer. ‘Best PM speech’ said NPCs like Lewis ‘what’s Article 50’ Goodall. A few months later, SW1 had to do Narrative Whiplash and finally accept the need for an official gangs inquiry — which, obviously, they have delayed and delayed so that Whitehall can destroy documents and ensure that it drags out like the fake covid Inquiry for years, while the gangs still run riot.
SW1 cross party consensus has normalised weekly marches by Islamic nutjobs calling for another Holocaust — ignored in SW1 but watched around the world. This week the marchers are cheering Iran’s slaughter of 20-40 thousand. And in the background, the PM, Attorney General, the Cabinet Office and MoD send their lawyers to wreck the lives of British Special Forces who risked their lives to stop Islamic nutjobs killing us. Tories like Ben Wallace signed this off, Labour continued and sharpened it — and this is watched carefully around the world by people who understand what this means about our political elite. We will all pay.
The SW1 characters who live through cycle after cycle of Narrative Whiplash never face the cognitive dissonance. At the same time SW1 was praising Starmer for rejecting an inquiry into the gangs a year ago, its pundits were also herding to a) Starmer is doing brilliantly with his ‘coalition of the willing’ on Ukraine where Russia’s offensive has failed, and b) MAGA hostility to Zelensky is a disaster for Farage, ‘populism’s peaked’ etc. Remember that? No, neither do they…
Also bear in mind when you hear ‘conspiracy theory’ a new trend on the Left. For many years they described the Great Replacement as a ‘conspiracy theory’. But there is a growing trend for left politicians to adopt the term and argue — yes, we want to replace the old whites, replacement is good, replacement is inevitable, if you don’t like it you are fascist! Check out this Spanish politician. The Spanish government legalised 500k illegals last week. She took to the stage to state that they will then give them a vote to make real ‘replacement theory’, and this week the same government announced a big set of censorship measures to ‘counter hate’ from the natives. She is not a freak. The same dynamics are at work across Europe and in SW1. Our own NPCs have got a software patch and many are shifting this way…
