TSP #5: What comes in 2025-6 as both parties & Whitehall fail? What can be done?

Mimesis failing; preference falsification/cascades and elite fragmentation

We’ve been fundamentally overestimating the extent to which even very high IQ people actually have beliefs… The level of just outright trend following dominates everything.

Overheard Washington/DOGE/Silicon Valley discussion

So little trouble do men take in the search after truth, so readily do they accept whatever comes first to hand.

Thucydides 1.20

Yes, all the papers say the same thing, that’s true. So much the same that they are just like frogs before a storm! You can’t hear anything for their croaking.

The old prince, Anna Karenina

The nature of the breakdown of civilisations can be summed up in three points: a failure of creative power in the minority, an answering withdrawal of mimesis (imitation) on the part of the majority, and a consequent loss of social unity in the society as a whole.

Toynbee

Bureaucracy is a bad European system of government, created by the use of permanent public officials, a system that does not, should not, and cannot exist in England.

Palmerston to Queen Victoria, 1837

Below are some thoughts on the dynamics of British politics and what should be done to change the trajectory as the majority sees the failure of SW1’s creative power and withdraws mimesis from the Hollow Men. It’s an attempt to bring together a lot of things to help situational awareness of the UK’s dire state.

Big forces have destroyed all the main pillars of Insider conventional wisdom:

1. Brexit.

2. The old parties’ decay.

3. Collapse of UK state capacity. The starkest aspect is how the delusional and deceitful story of ‘mass immigration is a success, integration is working’ is dramatically collapsing in rape gangs, riots, arson, vigilantes, and spreading discussion of mass conflict — while Westminster focuses not on the problems but on keeping the coverups hidden and changing the subject from 30 years of self-sabotage. But Whitehall’s pathological vandalism is accelerating the disintegration of capacity on all fronts (police, armed forces and the punchiest parts of the deep state, R&D, schools and universities, NHS etc). Meanwhile the courts are using the ECHR/HRA to destroy border control and make us an international laughing stock: this week they simply declared that Gazans can come here because ‘human rights’ and a child not liking chicken nuggets interferes with ‘right to family life’ so criminals can stay. The Court of Appeal declared recently that it doesn’t matter how horrific a crime they will never deport criminals to some countries. The ECHR system we set up to stop Europe sliding to totalitarianism is now being used — thanks to cross-party consensus — by sex criminals and terrorists to force us to prioritise them in ever more grotesque ways. Much of SW1 is clear they’ll suck up the courts effectively banning deportations and making explicit that their top priority is helping the very worst people on earth, and will label as ‘fascist’ those who oppose the madness.

4. MAGA + Silicon Valley network + DOGE is an attempt at US regime change, a government that controls the government replacing the broken old system that’s driving up debt by $1 trillion every 100 days. The Overton Window is blown open. Ideas that were ‘extreme’ even six months ago are happening. The demonstration that ‘you can just do things very fast’ is inevitably causing pure panic in SW1 where a foundational principle for decades has been that the basic idea of war and business ‘does not, should not and must not apply to government’. Central to understanding modern SW1 is appreciating how both parties fought to maintain this principle as a cross-party foundation even during a once-a-century pandemic and the worst land war in Europe since Hitler. And they succeeded. In 2019 we campaigned against this principle. In 2020 we started dismantling it. Boris-Carrie surrendered and reinstated it. Every important system accelerated its decline 2021-4. Labour and Lib Dems attacked all attempts to move fast as proto-fascism. Across the West, the old parties converged on defending the old system’s 2020 collapse and did not seek political advantage by suggesting the government change the old system to stop killing people in droves and destroying vast value. The Valley-comes-to-DC story is therefore an existential menace to the old regime across the West as it explicitly challenges the protected status of the permanent administrative state to which politicians have handed power since 1945. Cf. This by Joe Lonsdale on DOGE, technical teams and ‘root access’ to understand some of why it’s hard for the regime media to cover this story. If you ask Cabinet Office officials ‘how many people work here’ they can’t answer. If you ask ‘how many people do you pay’ they can’t answer. Part of what the PM’s data science team we set up in 2020 was doing was what Lonsdale describes here for DOGE which is partly why McSweeney stopped the Cabinet Office closing it after he was tipped off by some good officials. And see this piece on Ron Conway, a Valley legend: ‘AM ON IT’ is the exact spiritual opposite of SW1 and will be a superpower in DC where DOGE deploys people to work all night in government buildings largely ‘WFH’. Hence the Democrats trying to use the courts to declare the combination of root access and AM ON IT unlawful: speed and technical competence are the enemy of the old regime and the courts their most reliable weapon. As in Britain, lawyers and judicial review are the core defence of the permanent regime against the voters’ demands for change.

5. The consensus reality of the mass media age has passed into history. We’re into a world that in some ways resembles 1815 (no consensus reality) more than 1980 (powerful consensus reality). Technology changes will push this for a while (though may end up driving centralisation again). Elites are fragmenting fast. Political elites and regime media have lost control of, and even much understanding about, how stories are generated and spread. Across every part of society, the realisation is spreading for the first time in over a century: I can rationally just not care what the old political media says, it won’t harm my life, my family, my business.

6. Rapid realisation in UK outside SW1 that the old system is broken and something radically new is urgently needed. This is particularly fast and important among the young generally and a tech-savvy subset of the young. But also older richer people are shifting towards: ‘the old system I sort of trusted is done, what happens to my kids, can it be turned around or should they leave’. The immediate flat spin of Starmer blew up the widespread SW1 meme that Whitehall was fundamentally sound and just needed to expel the Tories: the constant farce has continued in exactly the same ways and it’s so stark Labour MPs are shocked.

7. A network of political/deep state/technical/investor people are planning for a world in which models are expert human-level in many domains in 1-3 years and we have another, highly compressed, Industrial Revolution. SW1 is full of people laughing at the idea X will happen in Y years time but if you talk to people working on the frontier you know X is already happening today. And the US v PRC race is on: massive budgets, bulldozers digging holes, data centres built, underground bunkers built, black projects proliferating, very aggressive espionage at scale, massive projects on military drones and autonomy, rapid planning in both countries on ‘how do open standards evolve globally, how does this affect alliances and militaries and intel agencies’, cf. DeepSeek CEO interview and Zuckerberg interview recently on open standards for AI. I’ve followed the AI debate since reading Bill Joy’s essay in 2000. The big lesson from 25 years is: those most optimistic about progress were ignored by the mainstream then constantly ridiculed yet (amazingly) consistently proved the most accurate, but the mainstream is programmed to not update to this lesson. My assumption talking to those building the future in the labs is this will continue for at least another 2-3 years. (When I had my first meeting with Sunak December 2022 to discuss my terms for helping him, top of my list was continuing what we started in 2020 to get UK capabilities to the frontier. Again Tories preferred failure and paralysis to leadership and growth. Again a tragic story of British science and engineering betrayed by British politicians, a core post-1945 story.)

8. The EU has kneecapped itself and is failing in all important areas: productivity, debt, public order, immigration, defence, technology, political extremism. Brussels chose self-sabotage on advanced technology. Unlike Britain which at least has DeepMind here, the EU has none of the leading labs. As the Commission said, we will be leaders not in AI but ‘trust in AI’! Mission semi-accomplished comrades! Brussels can kneecap itself and other countries that choose to follow its regulations but it will not compete with US and PRC or shape the global struggle over AI. Valley companies have already made clear they will simply not release models in the EU rather than follow EU regs. Taliban today can download new models now blocked for Brussels elites. Those who think AI will be like aspects of post-war car regulation are wrong. AI is ultimately about power and Great Powers will not let Brussels set the rules. I’ve watched SW1 repeat soundbites from the EU for 25 years on ‘strategic autonomy’ and ‘now we’re going to get serious on technology’. They’ve always been hollow. I said in 2022-4 that covid predicted that not even wanting to prevail in Ukraine would force either the MoD or Brussels to stop the delusions. They babbled and watched. They left defence industry and procurement a farce. They encouraged deindustrialisation and sabotaged industrial production while babbling about net zero. Thanks to Brexit and the work we did in 2020 with the secret part of the Integrated review exposing the disaster zone of the MoD and agreeing a plan for radical change, we could have sorted ourselves out. Instead, 2021-4 the Tories worked with the worst parts of the MoD to continue the lies and delusions and followed the EU into escalating a dumb war which could have been avoided. The latest defence review is a disaster and the UK and EU will be humiliated month after month.

9. The SW1 system is more delusional about itself and the world than even 2016 and 2019-20. Further, the Elon/DOGE re-orientation to MAGA has made SW1 even more crazy on technology as well as politics. But SW1 is also polarising and cracking. The bulk is in a last ditch reality-distortion field but elements are quietly realising the game is up and change will come to SW1, the question is how fast and how aggressive. As in America, there will be rapid preference falsification cascades. At the heart of it all is the rot of elite culture, elite values and elite education over decades — we’re experiencing the same process described in classics about dead cultures and we’re facing the same intense difficulty others have faced in trying to reverse deep multi-decade trends.

10. #7, #8 and #9 reinforce #6 in a feedback loop.

What to do?

Summary: shove out Kemi ASAP, take over Tories, get Trump/Elon to facilitate a merger with Reform, tip in a Third Force of elite talent and mass energy so voters see an essentially new political force whose essence is a decisive break with 1992-2024 (remember voters keep voting for change but the old parties keep refusing), break the coalition supporting Starmer, take over No10, do regime change. Immediate action: vote Reform in all local elections and help start the avalanche to remove KB: push what’s falling.

The government that takes No10 in 2029 should not be ‘Conservative’ or ‘Reform’ or simply a merger. The Tories are dead in every way — talent, money, ideas, organisation, reputation — and their performance 2021-4 has left them strategically shattered. Reform-2024 version was almost entirely Farage, as he has said it had no real organisation, it has almost no infrastructure and isn’t an alternative government (but could try to become one, see below).

A significant fraction of talented people in Britain have to get involved in order to turn around our appalling politics. This will probably only happen by 2029 if those two parties combine and a significant Third Force from the country joins and improves them then persuades people to defect from Labour. The public can only force the radical change of direction they want by a combination of a) a subset of SW1 elites defecting from the old system, b) a subset of non-SW1 elites deciding to get involved in politics, and c) the energy and legitimacy of a large fraction of the masses. The critical element here is (b): their actions can motivate and change (a) and (c). This usually happens historically in times of crisis, cf. DOGE.

This is what’s needed if you define the goal as *maximising the probability of winning the 2029 election then doing regime change, not another normal government*.

Many will think this plan a desperate and unnecessary gamble with little chance of happening.

But it is not necessary to hope to persevere, optimism of the will… Most people in politics achieve little-to-nothing and part of the reason is they’re terrified of looking silly to the ‘mainstream’ while they try to climb its hierarchies. People who change big things see bits of the future already here and redefine the mainstream by taking risks, not worrying about looking silly to people who just talk and copy each other all day. It’s impossible to know how these complex dynamics will pan out so people should just try to build as much of what’s needed as possible and see how the cards fall. SW1 is always super-mimetic when crises come so work on building things that seed the memes.

Conventional wisdom in 1999 was ‘joining the euro is inevitable’, in 2004 it was ‘Blair has a massive lead in the polls on regional assemblies’, in 2015 it was ‘there’s almost no chance of Leave winning’, in 2019 it was ‘there’s no way through the impasse’, in 2020 it was ‘covid vaccines are practically impossible’, and in 2021 it was ‘no chance you push out Boris’. Pushing out Starmer with some new force doesn’t feel more improbable than those examples did at the time.

Beating Starmer in an election is the easiest part. The hardest part is unifying a force on the Right that voters prefer given that much of ‘the right’ in SW1 would rather stay failing, stay fighting each other as they’ve been trained to by culture and incentives, and leave Starmer in office and see the country taken over by the IMF rather than do what’s needed to win and turn the country around. Often in history people cannot be saved, only ‘retired’. It’s possible the Tories can only be buried as quickly as possible but this can’t yet be known, it depends on how the cards fall. And if that does prove necessary, this means little chance of a serious government before ~2032 by which time many problems will be profound and serious violence harder to avoid.** We should try the easier path first.

If you want British politics to have a better chance of escaping its farce, then probably the main thing you can do is help the ‘third force’ do what Monnet called ‘preparing the future’. There are some specific projects sketched below.

There’s a lot of great people self-organising. The obvious Idiocracy and grim prospects for fixing it are pushing some young people to America but are also generating creativity. But almost all this is happening far from Tories (dead) or Labour (nearly dead). Lawrence Newport and others have started just building things. I urge you to help them.

The suggested way forward can only be Straussian until crisis comes — i.e all parties should publicly deny sympathy with the concept regardless of private discussions. It can probably only happen in the circumstances of crisis that creates new possibilities. But it’s worth sketching openly some sort of map for Live Players to ponder. The ‘iron filings’ have to align…

(P.S It won’t stop the usual media chatter but for clarity: I can help people build some of what’s needed but my hope is, as it was in No10, to encourage and help very able people to get involved in politics, not to play a leading role myself. I strongly dislike SW1, do not want to return to it, and the feeling is mutual. I strongly advise you to ignore regime media stories about me and what I’m doing. E.g recently the FT and other papers suggested I’m ‘writing Elon’s tweets’. This is totally false. The stories they told about how we were reorganising No10 in 2020 were all fake news but like a lot of fake news — cf. Russiagate hoax — the regime media and pundit complex herds to believe the lies they create. Ironically Labour realises this best and it’s Labour spads/MPs and No10 officials who are most interested in the truth of the systems we started building 2020 because they realise they need to reinvent it if they are to have any hope, hence e.g why McSweeney intervened to block the Cabinet Office and partially save things we created and the Cabinet Office tried to close.)

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I’ll set up another page like the Q&A page for thoughts on the TSP project so they’re all in one place and I can update easily.

Below I sketch some thoughts on:

• Some context. Why Starmer’s failing and won’t change Whitehall. Why I don’t think McSweeney will get what he wants and is trapped in a similar situation to us in 2020. The failure of the Establishment’s Kemi project.

• How should people think about the ends to aim for? What are the crucial elements for regime change at an abstract level that people need to build?

• How could SW1 events play out? Do the Cameroons shuffle in Cleverley and sink themselves for good? Prospects for a Tory-Reform deal? What can others do to influence SW1 dynamics?

• Questions and problems

This is a version of what I’m saying privately to people with different backgrounds all desperate for change and rapidly realising there’s no easy answers when the political system becomes cancerous.

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I’ve almost finished the blog on Metternich, Pitt and the Napoleonic Wars, only the final conclusion needs tweaking. As our system melts it’s been fascinating to read about how Whitehall under Pitt 225 years ago was more like SpaceX 2025 than Whitehall today is like SpaceX 2025.

I added a summary to the long blog on the CIA, Angleton, counter-intelligence, fundamental problems with intelligence services etc. Some of this is global news again as Trump seems to be sticking to his promise to publish the remaining CIA files on Oswald. I guarantee you will be shocked by revelations about the Zapruder film being taken to the CIA’s classified photo lab, NPIC, the weekend after the assassination. The truth is so extraordinary it would struggle to get past Hollywood scriptwriters.

Child protection was put into the Department for Children, Schools and Families by Brown when he gave Ed Balls his own department. I therefore worked on this from 2007-14, in the renamed DfE 2011-14. We tried to push through a big change towards an assumption of publishing and openness for mistakes on child protection. Much of the system repeatedly tried to coverup bureaucratic incompetence using the ECHR/HRA. I had many meetings on the institutionalised Whitehall conspiracies to suppress the truth on child abuse which I witnessed. I will be doing something on this shortly. SW1 is full of people saying ‘Elon is spreading disinformation that there was a national coverup’. Wrong again, Elon is right. There were attempts at national coverups. I saw them. The coverup culture was so profound officials planned to incinerate documents en masse to prevent publication. The SW1 cliché is that ‘it’s always a cockup not a conspiracy’. But on child abuse my experience in government is that it’s much more accurate to assume conspiracy.

Another truly disgraceful — treacherous and disgusting — affair is the way that Whitehall has generated a rolling campaign to investigate and ruin the lives of special forces soldiers. It’s happened over Ireland. It’s happened over Afghanistan and Iraq. It’s happened on other operations. Tories and Labour have allowed the most disgusting axis of Whitehall officials, lawyers, and Britain’s enemies to use our own laws and legal system to persecute heroes who risked their lives to keep us safe. They were told to do operations by politicians including Thatcher, Blair etc. And told after the operation ‘you did a brilliant job’. Now the ECHR and Human Rights Act are being used to attack them and defend our enemies. We can’t deport convicted child rapists because of their human rights and the same rules are used to attack our soldiers. Apart from the moral disgrace, it’s also extending Whitehall’s vandalism to critical capabilities. Why should such soldiers conduct similar operations knowing Whitehall is controlled by people who will ruin their lives as soon as human rights lawyers are hired by our enemies in our own courts?

This is easily soluble — it is not in the category of things like NHS waiting lists which is complex and hard. Like the ludicrous ‘small boats’, I went into it in detail in 2020. But officials throughout the system, including in the corrupt cesspit of MoD, prioritise terrorists and lawyers and the Guardian and staying in the ECHR. If you grab a minister dealing with this you usually grab slime. But the ministers who ordered the operations do NOT get dragged into the legal cases, only the soldiers. Solders in their 70s have their lives ruined but ministers like Tom King who authorised operations and generals who said ‘do it’ are left to die in peace. People who see special forces as more of an enemy ‘to the rule of law’ than terrorists now effectively control the AG office and the Cabinet Office legal service. We have an AG, Hermer, who not only supported a revolting character who invented war crimes against UK special forces but continued to support him after his lies were revealed. This cancer in Whitehall and the courts (cf. judges like the grotesque Humphrys) must be burnt out one way or another. (There should be a simple Bill passed through Parliament that a) cancels all so-called legacy investigations into special forces (Ireland, Afghanistan etc) and commands all entities in the UK to cease and desist such investigations and explicitly makes clear no court anywhere has any power to revive any of them — with ‘notwithstanding’ clauses everywhere to make totally clear to the courts that the ECHR/HRA are 100% nuked, and b) explicitly states that British forces are not subject to the ECHR or the HRA or the Strasbourg court. Investigation of possible war crimes needs a new process from which ECHR/HRA/Strasbourg jurisdiction are entirely excluded.)

The coverups over child abuse and the persecution of special forces are probably the two most disgusting things I’ve witnessed in 25 years of SW1 involvement. It is not coincidental that the ECHR/HRA and the handover of political control to lawyers and the very worst elements in Whitehall are central to both. After 14 years of presiding over this, the Tories put in a new leader who still supports the ECHR/HRA. It’s also not coincidental that J Powell — central to the surrender by the British state to the IRA — worked with lawyers to push through a ‘deal’ involving us giving £350 million per week to bribe Mauritius to take Chagos from us — all because a bunch of Starmer’s lawyer friends worked with a Chinese judge (!!) to babble about ‘human rights’! Whitehall now is often effectively working for our enemies, as was some of Whitehall on Brexit.

If you have any influence, please exercise it to pressure senior people in the MoD and armed forces and Parliament to mobilise against Whitehall waging a campaign against British heroes. And we need a network inside the deep state to push the AG out of office by any means necessary. I guarantee that there will be scandals galore to dig up. Let’s find them and get him fired. Spread this meme around MI5, MI6, and GCHQ where many will agree. I think senior parts of the No10 spad team will ‘push what’s falling’ and join in as many in No10 realise he is a disgrace and another sign of Starmer’s abysmal judgement (see below).

The response to the Southport stabbings from Whitehall was: coverup over Al Qaeda angles, scream ‘disinformation’, jail people for social media posts, then blame online shopping for selling knives. Then they moved on to the rising tide of violence and announced — a ban of kitchen knives with pointy ends. And regime media pundits go along with the madness.

PS. Having avoided the speaking circuit I’m now doing paid talks to raise money for a) Maths Circles (a nonprofit network giving primary children elite maths education) and b) the TSP project. Fees depend on who/what you are and how rich you are. I do some free (e.g schools), some discounted, some expensive…

The below is a mix of things written over the past two months.

It should be edited and compressed. But I don’t have time. So I’ll just post it then over the next few weeks do some shorter things on some of the themes. This is a blog, not finished essays! Hopefully it’s useful for different people grappling with these issues…