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

And building a Q&A on Brexit, what really happened in No10, covid etc

I’ll post a few blogs over the next 8 weeks answering as well as I can some big questions about the past 20 years.

This is partly (A) necessary background to thinking through what comes next, here and in America. In particular, is there an effort by a subset of the entrepreneurial elite that can build to ally with a large section of voters to replace the rotten Tory Party, or do we see the same dynamic as America — as politics disintegrates in a clownshow, those who can build respond by retreating further to their walled gardens and ‘fish ponds’, as Cicero put it, rather than trying to save the Republic.

We can’t start doing things like creating a legal structure for a new party, figuring out how to launch and build it, what should its electoral strategy be etc without having some solid ground for understanding the different perspectives on questions like — why Brexit happened, what were we actually trying to do in No10, why did our attempt to turn the Tory Party into something extremely different fail (mostly, so far), was our attempt doomed because of its own logic, because of Boris/Carrie etc.

It’s partly (B) trying to answer a set of important questions about what really happened coherently in one place, given the crazy fairy tales believed across Westminster.

It’s partly (C) a product of having to write my official covid statement and face some hard questions honestly.

It’s partly (D) skimming through the essay I wrote in 2013 a decade later and thinking ‘what do I think of it now, having left the DfE, done the referendum, Trump, gone to No10, GE2019, covid, Ukraine and so on’ — in the context of (A), what comes next.

---

Introduction

Over the next few years there will be a lot of argument over:

• why did Britain vote for Brexit

• has it been a success or failure; do we measure this by mainstream Westminster perspectives, public opinion, Tory MP perspectives, Vote Leave’s perspective, HMT/mainstream economics etc

• is the Eurozone fixing its problems and becoming more attractive or sinking further behind America/China in the important metrics (e.g ability to manufacture GPUs, build an ecosystem for multimodal LLMs)

• is ‘distrust in our institutions’ a big problem, maybe the biggest (SW1 conventional wisdom) or is our real problem that there’s too much trust in our institutions by political-academic-media Insiders (I’d say my pre-2016 view is vindicated by 2016-22 but clearly there is extreme resistance to this conclusion)

• connected to the point above — to what extent is the shift in Insider opinion from ‘Westminster basically works’ (2015) to ‘Westminster is broken’ (2023) because a) Insiders are catching up with decades of rot they didn’t want to see (so in at least one way Brexit is working as intended in stripping Insider illusions) or b) most of them have simply shifted from one delusion ‘Westminster basically works’ to another delusion ‘it was working but Brexit broke it’

• what did we (a network of advisers and officials, not Boris) really try to do in 2019-20 and why, why did things crack up with Boris/VL, how much of it succeeded/failed, was the project to remake government and the Tory Party doomed, what does this mean for the future direction of Tories/Labour

• why did the Tories generally fail so badly in general 2010-24, how constrained was Sunak by the overall deadweight of his party, how much by the Boris-Truss blowup, how much by his own bad decisions

• why did the Conservatives win in 2019: how much was the core strategy, how much was Boris v Corbyn, how much was Labour strategic errors over Brexit and the campaign, how much a continuation of historical dynamics already visible in 2016 (particularly educational polarisation, also important in US, which was so underrated that many pollsters did not weight by education in 2016)

• was the electoral coalition formed between the referendum victory and the 2019 victory something that — with the plan for government, changing the Tory Party, and building a new communication machine — could have been built on if we could have got Boris to do roughly what we wanted 2020-24 (as I think), and is it something a revived/replaced Tory Party should aim for again, or was it unnatural, an aberration, a dead end (as high status pundit world is now telling SW1)

• is it possible to win elections while really trying to reverse longterm trends on productivity, Whitehall failure, R&D, education corruption, procurement disasters etc (me), or is it an illusion to think that a radically different approach is possible and the only future for British party politics is ever more regulation and tax (branded ‘fiscal responsibility’, ‘to save the planet’ etc) plus the old economic model (rely on the City, horrific housing market, HMT pushing infrastructure to south east etc) plus No10 as media entertainment service plus elections pretending to be about significant differences between elites which are actually trivial (e.g 2010, 2015)

• could the Tories be transformed into a party that is simultaneously a) more Hayekian (lower tax, lower regulation, pro-competition, on the side of startups against incumbents using political power to entrench themselves, more market forces to solve many public service failures), b) much more aggressive in (re)building state capacity and more interventionist / less laissez faire in some areas (e.g investing for strategic advantage in niches of science and technology, much more aggressively blocking Chinese legal/illegal acquisition of technology), c) trusted with healthcare, schools etc, d) much tougher and more serious than the Tories on crime/security/defence so increasingly seen as ‘extreme’ in SW1 (but seen as ‘obviously sensible’ by relevant voters) — or is conventional wisdom right that this is ‘incoherent’ (as they described VL’s message in 2016) and impossible and the only future for the Tories is something like Cameron, i.e a light touch on the brake from New Labour (I’d describe this as ‘keeping up appearances among Insiders in London as the country keeps disintegrating’)

• is there a huge opportunity for a party that focuses on a) real problems, b) how power really works and c) the voters — rather than the media — or are the MPs right to focus almost exclusively on the media (I’d argue the referendum and 2019 showed MPs don’t understand communication therefore, to the extent they think about this rigorously rather than just respond to their environment, wrongly think they have no choice)

• is it better to try to revive the Tories or replace them

• what’s the interaction between A) the quality of the old parties, the quality of the old Whitehall bureaucracies, the quality of the old media, and B) why we can’t reverse decline, improve productivity etc — to what extent are we really talking about the need to retire a subset of our elite and replace it with a subset of the entrepreneurial elite that can build, and how practical is this given politics and the bureaucracies actively drive away those who can build (in London and DC)

• what do the trajectory of the Democrats and GOP in the 2024 cycle imply for whether America sees a lot more political violence and, even, can hold together as a country (it’s common to hear US elites discuss privately ‘civil war within 10-20 years’); what are the implications for the UK, future of NATO; should we be more worried by people like Steve Bannon or that so many senior officials in US intelligence agencies told so many lies to the mainstream media to help Biden beat Trump

• is our real problem ‘a loss of trust in mainstream media like the New York Times which play a vital role in democracy’ (mainstream Insider view) or is this mainstream media itself the biggest source of lies and fake news and thereby undermining public confidence in democracy

• should ‘conservatives’ (i.e liberals with minor reservations about the leading edge of the left) try to capture centralised institutions like the Department for Education and ‘reform’ them (mainstream view) or focus on building a full stack alternative decentralised system outside the bureaucracy’s control (Marc Andreessen’s view); should politicians try the normal path of ‘reform centralised institution X’ (say the Pentagon/MOD) or instead ‘create a startup to do some of what’s needed 10X faster and better, cannibalise X then quietly close X’

• how will politicians cope as advanced technology (e.g multimodal LLMs. text, video etc) force themselves into political debate, given they’re mostly bad at using TV; how will political entrepreneurs use new tools to break the power of the old parties/media, with echoes of how radio, cinema and TV changed politics

• will Tories and Labour face the disaster of them ignoring a) China’s aggressive infiltration of critical infrastructure, b) the rot and corruption of the MOD and much critical infrastructure around WMD, c) the implications of some new technologies for national security and prosperity (even survival), or will they carry on as usual with ‘world leading’ rhetoric as capabilities hollow out

• should we be strengthening confidence in the UN, EU, World Bank, IMF, WHO etc (mainstream Insider view) or are they actually blocking what we need to build for global cooperation and themselves huge dangers; is ‘the rules based international order’ a great asset or just another hypocritical, rotten Insider delusion; if it’s doomed what should we try to replace it with

• is it possible to reverse the disintegration we see everywhere in politics before we hit crunches like 1914/1930s or will history follow its normal path — slow rot, elite collective blindness, rare prophets ignored or ridiculed, fast crisis, sudden collapse…

I had a view of:

• crucial problems, globally and UK;

• a plan for government — e.g how to tackle the stagnation in productivity, making strategic advantage in parts of science and technology central to a PM’s job/focus and post-Brexit national strategy, fixing the MOD horrorshow;

• a plan for how to do the plan given most of Whitehall can‘t / doesn’t want to change much, including changing the core institutions of No10 and the Cabinet Office, changing civil service personnel and HR;

• a political strategy to develop the coalition that emerged 2016-19, turn the Tory Party into something very different, and to change enough of the people to make it stick — i.e ally a large section of voters with a subset of the entrepreneurial elite who can build brought in to replace a chunk of the old ruling elite;

• a political machine to drive it.

The below Q&A explains some of what I thought/think and what really happened in No10. If we’re going to try to replace the Tories, there needs to be a much clearer picture of what actually happened over the past few years, what worked, what didn’t, why, and people outside the Insider-Westminster-world have to develop a view on how accurate that world’s conventional wisdom is on many crucial questions. A lot about bureaucracies below applies to the next President, e.g do you try to ‘reform’ the Pentagon or create new entities to do its work. And I get asked the same questions a lot so it’s useful to put answers in one place.

You will have got a very weird impression if you relied on the political media since 2015.

Rick Rubin, cofounder of Def Jam records, said recently that WWE is real and it’s mainstream political news that’s fake. This will sound nonsensical, or ‘a sign of the terrible lack of confidence in our precious institutions’, if you’re a political Insider or trust political Insiders and the New York Times. If you realise just how much political news really is invented (with lower production values than WWE) and how much of supposedly ‘real’ political action is fake responses to fake news, it makes sense.

One of the most interesting things about the last decade is the way a subset of the entrepreneurial elite has quietly split away from the political elite in basic attitudes towards mainstream political news. In 2015 the two were much more closely aligned, with huge overlap around what you could loosely think of as Blair-Clinton-Obama, and the entrepreneurs focused mainly on business. I failed to persuade them that political Insiders were mostly living in a fake world.

Now I have extremely divergent experiences talking to these groups. The entrepreneurs share political news and discuss how surreal it is that mainstream political figures treat obvious fakes as real, then respond to the fakes (they think of as real) with more fakes, then deplore the public for not trusting their fakes as real and exhort us all to trust the mainstream (them) again. Often such entrepreneurs use private time with political Insiders to try to figure out how much of the fake the Insiders really believe is real and are realising — almost all of it.

The political Insiders talk to me as if they believe their fakes are real and I should start believing them and stop telling people it’s fake. The idea they’re more fake than WWE is incomprehensible, gratuitously insulting, deranged. If you want a shortcut to see these diverging viewpoints, follow Marc Andreessen (team entrepreneur) and people like George Osborne, Starmer or Biden (team ‘trust us’).

The people who most trust mainstream political news and analysis are political Insiders whose politics are far from the median voter and spend huge amounts of their time trying to figure out why it’s so hard for them to communicate effectively, why almost nothing they say is heard and the little that’s heard is not believed. They’d communicate more effectively if they learned from WWE.

The public believes less and less of what they’re told by the mainstream media and politicians and this will surely accelerate given how they’ll be bombarded with ‘fakes’ that seem more ‘real’ than the ‘real/official news’. Insiders are sure to panic further and accelerate the forces they dread. Given their responses to Brexit, Trump, covid and Ukraine, how likely is it Insiders will reflect on how it’s them who are the biggest suckers for ‘fake news’ and ‘information bubbles’?

Obviously lots of the questions/answers below are interrelated.

Please suggest other Qs in the comments.

If you think what I’ve said is wrong, particularly if you were there 2019-20, please leave a comment or get in touch.

There’ll be 5-10 of these over the next 6-8 weeks.

I’ll look at comments and other feedback then put updated versions on the Q&A page so they’re all in one place and indexed.

Broad areas:

• Big picture: background to Brexit, the ‘unrecognised simplicities’ of high performance, do people learn from them, why is learning so hard

• Brexit: why we won, why I did it / what was the plan, the 2016-19 Brexit fight (firing the 21 MPs etc)

• Covid: procurement case study for regime failure and determination not to face failure; the inquiry

• Ukraine / Russia / China

• No10: some Golden Rules for how politics really works, how I actually spent my time in No10, what was the real plan behind announced changes to government communications

• Boris/Carrie: what went wrong with Boris/Vote Leave, why etc

• US/Trump

• Misc

[UPDATE 4/6. An example of how mainstream news is fake. The day after I published this on 3 June, the BBC published this piece on immigration after interviewing numerous Home Secretaries. How many mentions of ‘ECHR’, ‘Human Rights Act’, or ‘judicial review’? Zero. After millions of words written, endless TV coverage over years, the BBC tries to get some historical context and totally ignores central issues and reports lots of dopey quotes from MPs. Fake analysis, fake politics, fake government.]

---

Big picture

What are the most important reasons why you did Brexit, what you tried to do in No10, what you think Britain/America should be doing now?

I’ve made the same basic points about the big picture in politics before the referendum and before No10: cf. my 2013 essay, 2014 blog The Hollow Men, 2017 blog on ‘expertise and a quadrillion dollar business’ re pandemics and nuclear weapons, ‘systems management’ and Apollo vs Whitehall, a 2019 blog on the failure of UK crisis management in the next big crisis and what should be built.

The world is ‘undersized and underorganised’ (von Neumann) because of a collision between four forces:

1) Our technological civilisation is inherently fragile and vulnerable to shocks such as war, regime collapse.

2) The knowledge it generates is inherently dangerous.

3) Our evolved instincts predispose us to aggression and misunderstanding.

4) There is a profound and growing mismatch between a) the quality of i) individuals in crucial roles and their understanding of both politics and technology and ii) ‘mission critical’ institutions which are similar to those that failed so spectacularly in summer 1914 yet face b) crises moving at least ~10³ times faster (e.g minutes to decide nuclear strikes) and involving ~10⁶ times more destructive power able to kill ~10¹⁰ people.

Carl Sagan called this mismatch ‘a combustible mixture of ignorance and power’.

Another way of thinking about this is we have a combination of:

• 21st Century markets plus science plus technologies: they disrupts all traditions and regimes and enable ever fewer people to wreak ever more destruction faster and faster, making the scale and speed of crises bigger and harder to cope with.

• 20th Century state bureaucracies: centralised, slow, anti-adaptive, close to unreformable in any significant way by anybody other than near-revolutionaries (e.g the UK Cabinet Office in charge of critical state functions).

• 19th Century crisis management consisting of very similarly educated men sitting around tables like the Cabinet table in 1914 with Asquith scribbling notes to his girlfriend. I wrote in 2019 that the next crisis would see similar scenes around that table and similar failure. Less than a year later I was sitting at that exact table with a growing feeling of doom as I watched Boris texting his girlfriend as the worst crisis since 1945 overwhelmed core institutions.

• Pre-19th Century, even pre-Newtonian, education and training for political leaders and officials. Political and intellectual elites do not have good ideas about how to govern and have practically no understanding of things they have to make critical decisions about (e.g viruses, exponential growth, the scaling hypothesis of machine learning).

• Stone Age instincts drive violence and collectivism when we’re under pressure and inevitably operating with low fidelity causal models of politics.

On one hand, the information-discovery process of competitive markets plus science generate more knowledge, more wealth, greater productivity, and creative destruction as companies grow and die, knowledge is abstracted and compressed, startups drive progress and so on.

On the other hand, crises seem to follow a power law in which the scale of destruction and possible destruction gets bigger and bigger. The wealth, knowledge and power that science and markets generated allowed the Anglo-American world to squeak through two world wars. Political and military leadership was often terrible but our error-correcting institutions worked better than Germany’s and (despite Germany’s frequent tactical and operational superiority) we made fewer huge blunders than Hitler (cf. my recent blog on Alanbrooke and the Chiefs of Staff Committee in WWII). It’s hard to see how we keep getting lucky. We fluked our way through multiple nuclear crises (e.g partly because JFK had read about 1914 a few months before the Cuban missile crisis and ignored military advice).

The ‘combustible mixture’ caught up with us on Iraq and covid. It may catch up with us on Ukraine/Russia. Eventually it will catch up with us on WMD, biological engineering, AI etc — it’s just a question of time. A ~1% chance per year is ~100% long-term. The only way out, if there is one at all which there may well not be, is a mix of a) profound changes to political institutions embedding the ‘unrecognised simplicities’ of high performance and b) new forms of international cooperation. (Further, humanity’s survival longterm in the teeth of inevitable natural phenomena (supernovas, asteroids etc) also requires a jump to a different form of technological civilisation than the hybrid ancient and modern civilisation we now have.)

For example, I said a few years ago that I wanted Britain to advocate and start practical work with similarly minded players (e.g Bezos, Elon) on a permanent manned lunar base with whites, Chinese, Russians, Indians, blacks, Japanese etc all living up there building long discussed space infrastructure, a focus for humanity to think of us against the universe instead of us against each other. (See below.)

Regarding the UK: Brexit as ‘icebreaker of the revolution’

There was a cross-party consensus spanning Cameron-Blair supporters and most of the media behind a set of foundations for British politics which I thought was largely deluded and doomed to be washed away by the forces sketched above:

• rely on the EU and Single Market, ‘the rules based international order’ and ‘the special relationship’ as foundations of national strategy;

• rely on the City and foreign capital coming to London and buying its services thereby funding public services for the rest of the country and enabling MPs to ignore the astonishing lack of productivity outside a few parts of the south (including loads of dodgy loot from the world’s mobile oligarchs that corrupted policy, party funding, the legal profession etc); 

• a nightmare property market allowing some politically weighty groups to cash in and encouraging a cycle of NIMBYism in Parliament and media; 

• some world class research mainly in the south east with pharma, biosciences etc masking the decay of R&D, the relative decline of universities, all sorts of real capabilities remorselessly weakened, Treasury budgets relentlessly vandalising long term building, and no real interest in the interaction of a) basic science research funding (eg Bell Labs or ARPA), b) the startup ecosystem, and c) government (particularly military/intelligence) priorities and funding — the ecosystem that lies behind huge advantages of America over Europe in advanced technology with all this implies;

• massive immigration and the claim ‘this is actually good for public services because they pay taxes’ (this helped us win the referendum as people saw the reality of both parties failing to build infrastructure and public services across the country, hence immigration, like most things, disproportionately helping the rich); 

• all parties focus on the professional management class, not entrepreneurs who come up with new ideas, and this systematically biases government to be anti-entrepreneur;

• the combination of the Human Rights Act/ECHR membership plus the Equalities Act plus the way judicial review works plus civil service culture and incentives means that vast areas of policy and public administration operate in a fog of policy/management/legal uncertainty that guarantees delays, perverse consequences, and waste — even worse, almost all the craziness and costs are totally hidden from MPs and the media, and the dynamics mean left to itself it gets worse and worse every year even if people are trying to improve it;

• rhetoric and gimmicks about ‘deregulation’; reality ‘relentlessly more regulation’;

• rhetoric: ‘we want a low tax economy’; reality higher taxes;

• rhetoric: ‘we will reform government and cut waste’; reality ‘reform means give the broken things more power and money, waste grows everywhere, nobody actually cares or cares about how Whitehall works’ (a result being extremely misguided assumptions about what ‘serious’ politicians can credibly claim about future taxes);

• rhetoric: ‘world leading’; reality: capabilities hollowed out everywhere from science throughout the deep state including the nuclear enterprise;

• rhetoric: ‘Rolls Royce civil service’; reality ‘Clousseau car civil service’ with great younger people pushed out and the worst promoted, another vicious circle…

My experience of Westminster 1998-2015 led me to think:

1. The political parties are appalling. The Tory Party is rotten. Not only do they not have an actual plan, they aren’t interested in what’s important, they aren’t even pretending to have an actual plan, they just want to babble to hacks all day and they’re rubbish even at that.

2. Whitehall is systemically dysfunctional and there’s little chance of improvement given, for example, the Cabinet Secretary is so deluded as to say things like ‘we’ve nothing to learn from the private sector’ on management.

3. This combination of political and official dysfunction contributes to the Big Picture problems above.

4. It also means we have no serious plans to deal with our problems on productivity, public services, science and technology etc, and Whitehall couldn’t execute even if a No10 got serious.

5. The political media is a farce that makes serious debate on anything impossible but it’s all the MPs ever focus on. This is a disaster and an opportunity.

6. Brexit could be an ‘icebreaker of the revolution’. It will be good in its own terms. And it will force political Insiders into a deeply unpleasant confrontation with reality that is sure to generate change from the MPs, the parties, Whitehall and the media. We could bring together: better selection of people for government, better education/training, and better core institutions (with incentives to get great people aimed at the most important problems) at the apex of state power. There is huge potential in the intersection of ‘the unrecognised simplicities’ of high performance management plus ‘systems’ thinking plus the potential of new technologies/tools plus deploying what really works in communication. No10 can only work seriously on profound problems if it can partly escape the tyranny of permanent chaos that has gripped it for decades and means nothing much can change without the PMs attention which is fractured by many constantly changing demands. The fracturing of elite attention and inability to focus is a cycle that must be broken. It needs a system that can improve crisis management and drive priorities regardless of whether the lighthouse of the PM’s attention is on crisis management. And the icebreaker will force the creation of new forms of international cooperation desperately needed to grapple with the Big Picture problems above — at the very least there will have to be ways for Britain to discuss security and other international issues outside the EU and over time these might grow into something valuable.

7. A combination of actual plan for government, a plan to deliver it, a political strategy and a political machine is a sort of ‘systems politics’, a systems approach applied to governing and politics. While Westminster’s attention spins, lighthouse-like, to shine on the latest specific debacle in the news, the important dynamics are more fundamental, more abstract and never discussed.

Back in 2015-16 my view of Westminster as fundamentally broken was a very fringe view. People would read my blog The Hollow Men about the Department for Education 2010-14 and tell me ‘you must be exaggerating’. Without exception those who read it and then get involved in government later say things like: ‘Before I came in I thought it must be an exaggeration but after a few weeks I realised it’s an understatement.’ Long time officials would say, ‘those outside [actual power] think it’s an exaggeration but obviously you couldn’t tell the whole truth about the madness’.

After the referendum

A government led by two Remainers (May/Hammond), supported by the mainstream of the Tories and cheered by the ERG and the Tory newspapers, embarked on a disastrous negotiation strategy, ignoring everything Vote Leave had said about how to do it.

This drove the government, the Tories and the country into the biggest constitutional crisis for at least a century.

Having been confronted with unpleasant reality, as I wanted, Westminster contrived to blame Brexit / Vote Leave.

I saw the crisis as ‘caused by Westminster’s long-term rot colliding with reality’ — that we won proved the rot and Westminster’s subsequent collapse hammered it home.

Some of the VL team very reluctantly did a deal with Boris in summer 2019 to save him/the Tories in return for some commitments on Brexit and government priorities.

Westminster interpreted me/Vote Leave in government as ‘at war with everybody’. In fact, almost our only allies were in the civil service.

It is better described as a ‘war to change the Tory Party and Whitehall in alliance with some of Whitehall/public servants and some entrepreneurs against others in Whitehall plus the Tory MPs plus old media, with Boris changing sides at least three times’.

The media presented me as constantly talking to them and ‘campaigning’. I spent almost no time talking to the media and, in 2020, close to zero time on politics and zero on campaigning. I spent my time on the actual plan. This contributed to, but didn’t cause, the crackup in relations with Boris/Carrie (but if I’d focused more on the media this would have accelerated the crackup).

The Tory MPs saw VL leaving No10 as victory for them. Short term this was true. They could go back to normal, role playing in the SW1 simulation pretending to be players while officials and a handful of spads turned No10 back to Media Entertainment Service: everyone happy. They thought ‘let Boris be Boris!’ (as the Telegraph cheered), free of the appalling VL influence, would be a political triumph. But it doomed them because it meant the government had no actual plan, no political strategy, couldn’t get anything done, and just became a stage for the Boris/Carrie implosion.

Hence the Vote Leave perspective and the median MP/hack perspective have diverged further.

See ‘Why did you do Brexit’ below and ‘How did you spend your time in No10’ for more detail.

What do you mean by ‘the unrecognised simplicities’ of high performance?

[Coming soon]

Brexit

Why did Vote Leave win?

Three big forces made it possible.

1/ The immigration crisis building for years and all over TV 2014-16.

2/ The 2008 financial crisis making people desperate for change and undermining their confidence in ruling Insiders.

3/ The euro crisis a) undermined the long term story that ‘the EU is a success, we gain from being part of it’ and b) made people fear the costs of having to pay for the failure of the euro/EU project.

Then:

4/ The Remain campaign made critical errors. They had enormous advantages: e.g they wrote the question, the timing, the rules; they controlled almost every institution with power (CBI, unions, the City etc) including thousands of officials; huge influence over the state broadcaster. But they blew it: e.g their message, failure to answer VL’s message on £350M/NHS and Turkey, it could have killed VL and fought the referendum against a campaign run by assorted incompetents but didn’t. Remain optimised for Insiders/pundits which is normal: e.g Remain blew the last week of the campaign by being sucked into the emotions of richer people in London who trusted the mainstream news and strongly supported Remain, which disconnected them from the rest of the country.

5/ A) VL’s message was optimised for winning, not for keeping Insiders happy. This is unusual because it massively increases short term social friction for Insiders including those running the campaign. And it was high risk — the entire campaign was nearly destroyed because of this friction. It was a necessary risk because given Remain’s huge structural advantages we had to get the strategy/message bang on to have any chance. B) VL had ~10 exceptional people who would be competitive against any team in the world. C) In the last month we ‘hacked the medium’. The political media was 100X more interested in speculation about who would lead the Tory Party than important Leave/Remain issues (e.g the future of procurement) so we gave them a leadership story (what they wanted) with our message embedded in it (what we wanted), so even though hacks did not want to report our message (‘Turkey is joining’) they had to.

False: ‘Leave won because of the campaign.’ E.g. Without 15 years of out of control immigration, our message of ‘take back control’ would not have had enough traction. Campaigns can ride big waves but they almost never make them.

False: ‘Leave won because of a big force [e.g immigration], the campaign was irrelevant.’ If our message had had been what Tory MPs including Boris wanted — i.e ‘Global Britain’, ‘trade deals’, ‘deregulation’ — we’d have been crushed.

True: Leave won because 1) three big forces created conditions in which the contest could be made competitive, AND 2) Vote Leave exploited the situation (imperfectly but) effectively, AND 3) Cameron/Osborne made big mistakes. If either (2) or (3) had been different, it’s very likely Remain would have won. If Remain had been run by the core VL team with Leave run by Farage and the ERG, Leave would have been crushed in 2016.

I wrote a long account of the campaign here.

Where did Take Back Control come from?

From listening to voters who said it over and over.

During the campaign to keep the pound (1999-9/11) the best core message we could find was ‘KEEP THE POUND, KEEP CONTROL’ so it was natural to look for ideas like this. (GET BREXIT DONE similarly came simply from listening to voters from early 2019 through the summer, not a creative agency.)

UKIP, the ERG and Boris wanted to use GLOBAL BRITAIN. It was always rubbish. I scuppered it in 2016 and the 2019 election but Boris always wanted to use it and (rightly) calculated it would get him points with the ERG. After the 2019 election, as with many things, I could no longer stop Boris following his instincts and it sadly has spread like a weed. It remains incomprehensible / irrelevant to normal voters and encourages delusions among Tories. (I also tried to stop Boris saying ‘special relationship’ but failed here too.)

The logo was stolen from Steve Jobs. We couldn’t afford to hire a top agency and they wouldn’t have worked with us anyway. So I thought about Jobs’ advice on simplicity and ‘the best artists steal’ (see above!) and did some google searches. Surely there’s something he did with manic determination I could steal? After he left Apple in the 1980s, for his new company he got one of the top designers in the world to do a logo. I looked at it and thought, ‘good enough for Steve good enough for us, we can put a hole in the top so it looks like a ballot box’. Total cost: almost nothing. I made a lot of decisions like this because the savings in time and money were far greater than the marginal improvements of spending more time and money on them (if this would even bring an improvement).

What slogan should Remain have used?

Probably SAFETY IN NUMBERS.

Like TAKE BACK CONTROL normal people used it naturally when thinking about the issue. I’m confident it would have been much better than their actual slogan.

I didn’t mention this before 2020 in case there was another referendum.

Why did you campaign for Leave?

The EU is incompatible with Britain’s more advanced political culture… [E]rror correction is the basic issue, and I can’t foresee the EU improving much in this respect… [P]reserving the institutions of error correction is more important than any policy… Whether errors can be corrected without violence is not a “concern” but a condition for successfully addressing concerns. (David Deutsch)

The background was the Big Picture motivation for getting involved in politics, see above.

There were ‘defensive’ reasons, such as lowering the chances of dangerous extremism regaining power in Europe.

There were ‘offensive’ reasons, such as the possibilities to develop a new national strategy with science and technology at its heart — for the economy, for security, and for the reform of government itself — and change No10 to make this a core focus of the PM’s job.

Overall Leave seemed to me much less dangerous, for Britain and the rest of Europe, than Remain. The media portrays me as supporting Brexit because I’m a ‘risk taker who likes to move fast and break things’. This is not at all how I saw the choice.

Insiders describe me as ‘so reckless/aggressive’ etc but it seems to me they’re the ones gambling on the euro working (contrary to historical experiments with multi-national currency unions), they’re the ones happy to gamble on obviously duff institutions preparing for crises like pandemics, they’re the ones escalating recklessly over Ukraine — while I’ve been trying to hedge against the euro’s risks, screaming ‘fix crisis management before a pandemic hits’, and urging caution over nuclear weapons rather than gung ho ‘it’s all bluff!’

Seems to me they’re the ‘reckless’ ones and I’m actually much more cautious and conservative than widely believed…

A. Immigration and extremism

The combination of free movement (extended even to child killers let out of prison early and other categories widely seen as appalling) plus a historic wave of migration from Africa and Asia plus repeated failures on Islamic terrorism (partly because of the ECHR) plus the EU’s chronic inability to cope and insistence, in response to concerns, ‘tough, there’s no alternative to free movement’ — this was generating support for extreme parties across Europe, even near-fascist parties have got a third of the vote in places like Austria and Greece (see below).

I thought (and said before the referendum) that taking back democratic control of immigration policy would: kill off extremism here, shift immigration from being the top public priority to a medium or low priority, retire Farage/UKIP, and allow a better immigration policy similar to the Australian points system, including making Britain much more open to high skills and exceptional talent, plus tougher action on illegals would gain public support for a new immigration system. The FT, Economist et al predicted the opposite — that leaving would ‘turbo charge UKIP’ etc.

We were right, the FT/Economist et al wrong. All data shows unarguably that hostility to immigrants dropped consistently in the years after the referendum and immigration dropped from the public’s top priority to a much lower priority (however you started it, every focus group in 2015-16 turned to immigration within 2 minutes). Even strong Remain and ‘more immigration always’ supporters like Professor Portes accept this. Much of the media, especially the Guardian, tried to run campaigns claiming the opposite, that Britain was a new centre for ‘hate crimes and racism’. This is so far out of whack with the data that, although it worked on the BBC initially, it has not worked overall.

We succeeded in making it easier for exceptional talent to come (though it’s still too hard). The Tories have mangled aspects of immigration policy and are letting in far too many while continuing to fail to build needed infrastructure, i.e what we promised not to do in the 2019 election.

They cannot grip illegal immigration because they cannot face the problem of the ECHR/HRA and judicial review. I’ve said repeatedly that No10 got to the bottom of this with lawyers in 2020. Legal advice was clear. But Boris didn’t want to confront the truth and didn’t think he had to (because he thought Starmer too rubbish to exploit it). No10 has generally lied to MPs and the media about this since 2010 (except when I was there).

(I predicted that Sunak would grasp the nettle because it was so foolish to promise to ‘stop the boats’ and ‘finally grip the ECHR issue’ then — do a Cameron but with less excuse and peddle nonsense again. This is an example of me making a wrong prediction for a reason I often criticise others for — arguing ‘X is so stupid / self-defeating not even the Tories will do X’. I don’t often make this error but I thought it was so foolish for Sunak, and so obvious, and he had no excuse as it’s all been explained, that I overrated his rationality and underrated his conformism.)

I also hoped that if we left the EU might change course on free movement and therefore lower the potential for extremism and trade wars. (Hasn’t yet.)

[UPDATE 4/6. An example of how mainstream news is fake. The day after I published this on 3 June, the BBC published this piece on immigration after interviewing numerous Home Secretaries. How many mentions of ‘ECHR’, ‘Human Rights Act’, or ‘judicial review’? Zero. After millions of words written, endless TV coverage over years, the BBC tries to get some historical context and totally ignores central issues and reports lots of dopey quotes from MPs. Fake analysis, fake politics, fake government.]

B. Economic stagnation and danger of crisis

The Eurozone has suffered low growth, high debt, high taxes, unfunded pensions, and an anti-entrepreneurial and anti-technology elite culture. The euro has worsened economic problems and caused serious hardship and political tension especially across the south. After the 2008 financial crisis the entire structure wobbled and was saved by breaking their own laws: ‘when the going gets tough, you gotta lie’ as Juncker famously said. This wrecked Greece. And it remains highly unstable and vulnerable to disaster.

I saw the euro experiment as the economic equivalent of the famous ‘when genius failed’ LTCM hedge fund disaster in 1998 — an attempt to justify the economic rationale of ‘picking up nickels in front of a steamroller’ that would likely end similarly.

Insiders’ assumption is that the centralised uniform regulation of the Single Market is good for growth. I think this model is more a force for stagnation than dynamism and a force for boosting profits for a few big well-connected companies rather than a more competitive and healthier ecosystem.

I think that political and regulatory diversity is valuable. Post-Renaissance Europe developed science and the Industrial Revolution partly because there were both a) strong elements of a common culture and b) regulatory competition. If you couldn’t get funding/permission in one country you could get it elsewhere. The centralised bureaucratic uniformity of China generated stagnation and a culture that burned its own navy to stop interactions with the world. The American Founding Fathers enshrined competitive federalism and the ideas of Hume and Adam Smith. Hamilton’s vision has been much more effective in protecting individual rights and encouraging productivity than the Monnet-Delors project (which was explicitly hostile to the Anglo-American model).

Of course some uniform ‘platform’ rules for free trade could be beneficial but the Single Market, as Delors et al repeatedly stressed, was never about ‘free trade’ (a dangerous Anglo-American idea) and the euro was never about squeezing some nickels out of forex costs — they were intended primarily as a catalyst for ‘political union’ (see below).

And the ratchet of Brussels towards greater regulation and making error-correction extremely hard is sure to get worse with the EU’s Charter of Fundamental Rights (NB. this is NOT the ECHR), which gives the ECJ carte blanche to entrench bad regulations in unchangeable legal judgments and extend the scope of EU’s power. It’s easy to see today exactly what we warned about in the referendum — the Commission is writing crazy new regulations for data/AI and these can be entrenched and extended by the ECJ in the name of ‘human rights’. All this can only make the EU more of a backwater relative to America and China without solving the problems they say they want to solve.

Leaving gives us the freedom to regulate our economy better, including on new technologies, and avoid the costs of the EU/Eurozone stagnation and potential crises. And we have greater freedom to fail. The higher variance is net positive for Europe.

C. Political dangers of deeper centralisation

On top of the problems caused by immigration and economic stagnation, the EU project seemed dangerous politically.

The explicit logic and bureaucratic incentives of the Single Market mean ever more centralisation of power in Brussels. Every crisis is used by Brussels to deepen their power, in the tradition of the EU’s founder Jean Monnet. This process blocks swift error-correction and turns problems into crises (e.g banking regulation, their disasters with vaccines in summer 2020).

Long-term, the project of Delors-Mitterand-Kohl for economic and monetary union was intended to force ‘political union’, i.e central taxation powers and political authority to control it via a federal government similar to America’s. The EU system has less protection than in the US Constitution for the individual and the states, but consider how even these protections have allowed the US federal government to acquire vastly more power than was envisaged by the Constitution’s architects. For the Eurozone, both failure to take a great leap forward to ‘political union’ and actually making the leap seem highly dangerous and could easily generate dangerous crises and costs.

The real goal of political union is common and undisputed knowledge in Brussels. Westminster has been delusional about it since the Foreign Office abjectly failed to deal with Monnet after 1945. The dominant Insider argument in Britain has been an anti-historical attempt to justify the euro and the EU on economic grounds. This has been partly ignorance, partly dishonesty. Many Insiders over the past twenty years have been ignorant of the actual motives of the architects of the Single Market and euro. A small number have understood the history well but were highly dishonest in their public discussion, as uber-Remainer Hugo Young catalogued to their embarrassment (cf. many FO mandarins). The private mandarin view has consistently been that British voters could not be persuaded on political union so would have to be persuaded it was all about ‘free trade’. They pushed this fraud on ministers, hacks and voters. Sometimes ignorance and dishonesty merged in public figures who sort of know the history but waved it away as if there was a much better British rationale for the project, ‘ignore all that grand talk, just focus on trade dear boy’ (ironically this approach was very similar to the Bill Cash school that likes to lecture Europe on its errors). Whether or not political union will prove viable, it was not viable to keep selling the EU as ‘all about free trade’ because Insiders thought voters were too racist and old fashioned to be told the truth. Even after it became obviously counterproductive they never came up with a better strategy and this helped us win the referendum.

Many of its supporters, from the Commission itself to supporting academics such as Garton Ash, see the EU as a new form of ‘empire’. But the history of Europe dealing with stagnation, ethnic/racial tensions, and political extremism is one of repeated extremism and bloodshed. And the EU — both the Commission and leading politicians — is hopeless on challenges such as new technology, the shift of wealth, science and power to Asia, or Putin. (Remember when Trump warned Germany about its dependence on Russian gas, elite Remainer-world laughed at him and treated it as an example of his stupidity?)

The EU’s legal system is fundamentally incompatible with the English common law, judicial review and civil service. Forcing these to co-exist necessarily causes havoc in ways that do not apply to France. I’d said this would happen in a crisis and it happened in spring 2020 (cf. procurement below).

The view that by being part of the project we could ‘influence’ it in fundamentally different directions was delusional particularly after the euro was born. This delusion also guaranteed bad relations as we persistently lectured the others that they ought to change course and they replied with growing exasperation ‘we’ve created the Single Market and the euro and we believe in them and we’re fed up of being told it’s a mistake by London politicians who keep conning their own voters our project is about free trade!’

This delusion is common to Insider world which also is obsessed with the idea of ‘Britain punching above its weight’ while simultaneously refusing to face the realities of our institutional failure, the nightmares of the MOD, and all the ways we kneecap ourselves from ‘punching’ at all.

I prefer to focus on fixing our own institutions than the cant and sanctimonious lectures we’ve delivered on the world stage for decades. ‘Punching above our weight’ should, like ‘the special relationship’ and ‘Global Britain’, be scrubbed from official statements. We need a spell of sorting ourselves out instead of encouraging our politicians to pontificate on the global stage for their own gratification while neglecting their actual jobs

D. A powerful impetus for a new national strategy.

I thought that leaving would force us to confront things Westminster could/would not face so long as we had the EU and Single Market as the foundation of national strategy.

I hoped it would push Britain to a combination of:

1/ A new strategy for the economy and public services.

• Focus on long-term productivity problems rather than pretending ‘the Single Market’ was the solution to productivity and growth.

• Changing our planning system which destroys so much value, makes our housing problems worse, holds back business and research.

• Changing the long term path of state-controlled schools/exams/curriculum vandalising real education, the destruction of the old idea of universities, the vandalism of apprenticeship etc.

• Intense focus on the ecosystem for science, technology and entrepreneurs (venture capital, universities, startups etc) — see below.

• Lower taxes for most people and firms, e.g increasing the 40% threshold substantially (roughly doubling it instead of sucking more into it per Johnson and Sunak).

• Dramatically less regulation almost everywhere, improving regulation for advanced technology.

I thought there would be chances for new ideas:

• A shift of taxation away from labour/income to consumption.

• Empowering parents so new educational institutions replace much of the existing state system.

• A contributory welfare system.

• A big shift of taxation away from the centre to reverse the extreme shift of power and money from local to central government since 1945.

2/ A hard reboot of Whitehall, the civil service and critical institutions like the Civil Contingencies Secretariat (which blew up in 2020), JIC/JIO and prediction (precious and neglected), the National Security Secretariat (Byzantine), MoD (horrowshow) etc.

Example: procurement. We spend roughly £300 billion every year on government procurement. As I argued before and after the referendum, this system is disastrously slow, destructive, corrupting, wasteful and would kill people in the next major crisis. The gains just from improving how we spend this ~£300 billion per year would outweigh the small costs of leaving. This is near universally seen in SW1 as ‘impossible’. Also near universal in SW1 is knowledge that me and others from 2011 abolished the quango responsible for school building and brought in new people. The new system for school building now saves, according to HMT and other analyses, about a third of the costs relative to before our changes. This is known in niches of Whitehall like the IPA but has zero media coverage because Westminster does not care about management and how to save money.

Such progress could be extended across Whitehall. During covid this potential was dramatically demonstrated (see below).

3/ A huge focus on science, technology and data as a foundation for each of economic renewal, Whitehall renewal, public service renewal, and military/intelligence/security renewal.

Generally I wanted Westminster to shift its priorities from Brussels arguments over things like the CAP to more important questions about the future.

And I thought our culture — public debate, educational institutions etc — would all greatly improve with this shift of focus.

Imagine if over the past decade since Google bought DeepMind for peanuts Westminster had actually focused on AI capabilities, as I and many others suggested, instead of the endless turgid ‘we should influence Brussels’, ‘special relationship’, and ‘vision’ speeches of our ministers? This was treated as deeply eccentric even in January 2020 when I wrote my ‘misfits and weirdos’ blog. The mainstream is now suddenly updating post-Chat-GPT/GPT4. I hoped that Brexit would push the system towards having to take these things more seriously.

The strands of this new approach are deeply connected. For example, a much better procurement / state aid regime would a) raise productivity, b) improve Whitehall and save loads of money, c) it’s fundamental to fixing the horrorshow of the MoD and emergency response, d) help a serious science-technology-data plan, e) help startups.

Only a British state really making science and technology a fundamental priority could contribute to the biggest global problems and help create new ideas for international cooperation.

E. A political reboot.

I thought the parties would obviously have to change a lot in all crucial areas mentioned above.

They would be forced to take responsibility and drop the ‘this is an EU issue so there’s nothing we can really do’ attitude which has been so corrosive.

In all sorts of ways, EU membership corrupted Whitehall and encouraged Insider delusions. For example, before Brexit the Whitehall ‘write around’ process, whereby departments/ministers formally agree policy, included documents whereby ministers had to give ‘approval’ for EU legislation that they had no actual decision over. I remember when Gove, enraged by such a letter, replied ‘not approved’. An instant wrench in the gears. The Cabinet Secretary arrived: what are you doing, you can’t actually make any decision, your approval is a formality, just sign them all and pipe down. Elaborate Potemkin processes reminded me of the rotten Habsburg Empire pre-1914. It was all so modern Westminster — everybody concerned to be polite and not drop a clanger by pointing out government is increasingly fake and pretending to itself the fake is real.

In particular I thought that the Tory Party would have to change profoundly. As the architects of the euro said, we’d ‘blown up the bridges behind us’. And leaving would shake up the political situation so it would be possible to create a new electoral coalition to support a new national strategy.

The 2019 election showed the potential. Mainstream Westminster views this result as an aberration. Pundits are arguing ‘2019 was weird because of Brexit and Corbyn, the coalition that gave the 80 seat majority is unnatural, it can’t be maintained, trying to keep it will destroy the Tories’.

This is part of a general inertial force in Westminster that we saw after 2016 in which most players try to pull the arc of history back to the trajectory the world would have been on had Brexit not happened, a happier world for most Insiders. They want the Tories, like everything else, to go ‘back to normal’ which in Westminster means for most — the glorious 1990s, those halcyon days between the fall of the Wall and the fall of the Towers.

I planned to change candidates radically for 2024, to close CCHQ and reopen campaign HQ in the Midlands (‘live in the village don’t attack the village’) and many other things to transform the rancid old Tory Party to something with much wider and deeper appeal (see below).

Safer to leave

Overall I thought Remain was highly dangerous, economically and politically. The economic gains of the Single Market seemed trivial while its costs were potentially much larger longterm. But even if I turn out to be wrong about this, on top of these economic costs are potentially enormous political costs, such as the euro blowing up and the violent extremism that killed so many millions in the 20th Century and could easily return.

I thought that the apparent ‘triumph of liberal democracy’ in Europe was/is paper thin and inherently fragile if put under pressure again by economic shocks and political extremists. Since World War I and 1917, European intellectuals have been repeatedly drawn to dangerous experiments and destructive extremism. In the 20th century, from one end of Europe to the other, torture chambers were installed. In Ukraine in 1941, the torture chambers of the NKVD fell into the hands of the advancing Nazis who found them abandoned, full of horrors. After the tide turned, the advancing NKVD reoccupied them from retreating Nazis, full of new horrors. Over the past 18 months a familiar pattern has been seen as torture chambers change hands in Ukraine, even in the exact same cities as 1941-45. These European demons, which people hoped were dead in 1991, live on. Britain and Switzerland, almost alone, escaped partly thanks to accidents of geography, partly thanks to political institutions. These political institutions should be preserved, for Europe’s sake as well as our own.  

Leave would have some definite costs but these costs, mainly some trade friction, are relatively trivial relative to the dangers of the project’s natural dynamics and the sort of crises and regime collapses we see repeatedly in history. Leave was the safer option.

I also thought that after a spell we would have better relations with European countries instead of us being half-in with lots of condescending lecturing.

[MORE TO COME EARLY NEXT WEEK…]