The US National Security Strategy published by the White House in November called for strengthening the growing influence of “patriotic” European parties such as Reform UK, Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National (RN), Fidesz in Hungary and Vox in Spain. As with the communist movements of the cold war, these nationalist, populist and in some cases far-right parties are best understood not as isolated national phenomena but as expressions of a shared intellectual project – a movement that is, to varying degrees, now being reinforced by a foreign power.
The movement that is – it’s not an intellectual one. There are people who try to intellectualise it, create a ssystem of thought for it and I’m sometimes one of them. But it’s not an intellectual project.
It’s far more a Great National Upchuck. This isn’t working. What “this” is can be argued – the lanyard class, say. But this, the current base political settlement. It’s just not right, see? There’s not much guidance of it let alone intellectual cohesion. It’s far far more just we don’t like our current rulers and their rules. And this is at a deeper level than which party is in government, it’s the whole system.
Now, obviously, that’s my idea about it which can of course be wrong. But there really isn’t any intellectual pathway being followed here, not that I can see. There’s a very strong incoherence against perhaps, but other than that I cannot even see the one single unifying idea.
I completely agree. There’s a lot of “venting” in it. A lot of looking back to a golden past that is gone.
There’s a Reform councillor in Leicestershire moaning about reopening the choo-choos, and it’s like GTFO. But it sort of taps that “life was better then” with silk worm farmers and buggy whip makers.
Well yeah. I do tend to whinge about things were better in the good old days when I was a kid.
My killer argument that nobody has ever been able to counter: doctors used to make house calls.
Yeah; and our GPs still did until – dunno – less than twenty years ago. Something quite recent: one bought an electric bike because it gave her a quicker way to get around than a car..
In the year leading up to her death, my Mum used to get house visits from her GPs.
Only because they wanted to avoid the hassle of a coroner’s court if she snuffed it and they hadn’t seen her in a few months.
There’s a fixable problem that we hired lots of part time women. But there’s also a problem that demands are generally higher because of more retired people.
Talking to a bloke in the pub yesterday. About my age (66) we reminisced about the good old days – when I, about ten or eleven years old, would buy a London Transport Red Rover for 8 shillings and go on the bus from Dagenham up to London during the school holidays. On my own. All the museums, Tower of London, that sort of thing.
He said when he was 12 his mum and dad put him on the train at Harwich to go to stay at his nan’s for a fortnight. Barry Island…..
Bogan, that’s because a lot of the things were better in the good old days.
When I was a teen (in the sixties) if I wanted to go into London from mid-Essex I would hitch a ride. Did so dozens of times and never had any trouble. Even got a ride in a Rolls once. The return journey was usually by train as it would have been late evening.
My wife once travelled up to Scotland by coach on her own when she was eleven. Nowadays parents drive their children 400 yards to the school in our road.
That’s not because things were better – it’s because people were a lot less paranoid. While it was at least as likely then that a child would fall victim to a serial killer or other criminal, people now see the risks to lone children as being so high they cannot be tolerated.
No, it wasn’t just less paranoia – when I was six my parents put me on a train in Glasgow and told the Pullman car attendant that my great-uncle was meeting me at King’s X confident that he, having worked for pre-nationalisation railways, would keep an eye out for this unaccompanied child. No-one would nowadays.
*Some* things were better then, lots of things were worse.
I like silk. Someone needs to farm it.
I think Douglas Murray summed it up best. “Is it fair?”. Everyone over the age of six knows that life isn’t fair and the universe doesn’t give a toss, as the poet said. But throughout history, rulers who aren’t fair eventually come to a sticky end. If you set yourself up as a socialist lawyer who values human life and thinks we are all equal then when you start using Zil lanes it all starts unravelling at the edges.
When you get your legal friends, who you keep sweet by paying them millions to act for invaders, to say that the law gives these invaders more rights than the people who pay your wages, you’ve skated onto the thin ice. As the Adenoidal Android is finding out…
Unlike communism, there is no ideology behind these movements.
It is less what they are for than what they are against. Unfortunately, this makes for bad government, because being in power means doing stuff and not just dismantling the present system.
Orban seems to be the exception. Hungary appears to be quite well run and he has a huge majority, but I couldn’t tell you what he actually believes.
Nah, things are bad enough that just dismantling will be an improvement.
Five years of that, then maybe we can think about having the government “do stuff” again.
I think the time has come to get rid of The Monarchy because it delegates Crown powers to Prime Ministers. It is no more (or less) acceptable for Starmer to impose electric cars on us as it was for Mary I to impose Catholicism on our ancestors. There should be vast areas of life which are no-go for Government interference.
The British Royal Family is the world’s longest-running reality show. As long as they’re getting the ratings, keep ’em, as figureheads, like Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Spain, the Netherlands and Belgium. Someone has to cut ribbons, after all.
Someone has to cut ribbons, after all.
There’s no reason why the First Lady, Cherie Blair, couldn’t do it.
That’s the best argument for monarchy that I can think of: President-for-life Blair.
I have some sympathy with your point of view. Sanchez, our domestic cretin, has just used Royal Proclamation to force through his plan to document our half a million plus – who knows? – illegal interlopers. Something he couldn’t get through the Cortez. But that’s not unique to monarchies.; France’s midget has used Presidential powers to force through stuff the elected representatives wouldn’t wear. And of course The Orange Man. Although he seems to be listening to his voters, unlike much of US political establishment.
It’s just what happens when you give politicians powers. Better not to..
I think the time has come to get rid of The Monarchy because it delegates Crown powers to Prime Ministers.
Non sequitur. As the powers have been delegated to the office of Prime Minister, abolishing the monarchy would of itself change nothing.
They say populist, I say grassroots.
The Labour government, whose whole reason for existing is to represent working people, is systematically destroying those people’s livelihoods with their deluded and quite literally insane net zero policies. I really can’t imagine why they are hated and any alternative is popular.
I s’pose what all these various political movements share is the belief that the voters know what’s good for the country rather than the current bunch of politicians. Tim’s used the term Hayekian in the past, Google informs me. Hayek an intellectual?
I would account for the differences between the parties. Their voters have had different experiences in the past, so have different opinions.
So is that an intellectual base or an anti-intellectual base?
He gets this bit right:
… its standard-bearers have a compelling analysis of the failings of liberal democracy and a pathway to power.
Mainstream parties across the whole of the West are not just failing European peoples but seem to be actively working to destroy them; through mass third-world immigration, de-industrialisation and insane net-zero policies. Despite what our rulers may think, we’re not all stupid and can see this with our own two eyes.
The rest of it is just special pleading for the Elites to be given one more go. Sorry pal, you’ve had your chance, now it’s time for someone else to have a go; after all, they couldn’t be any worse…
“I cannot even see the one single unifying idea”
Pity: I’d have thought “string the fuckers up!” might be classified as an idea – at least as much an idea as “socialism” is.
Its fairly obvious that representative democracy as we have it isn’t working. It creates a class of politicians who are psychologically the very worst type of people to put in charge of anything, and has resulted in a perma-government of unelected bureaucrats.
I would suggest its high time we took day to day power away from the politicians and bureaucrats and vested it in the public. In this day and age of universal instant communication there is no reason why virtually every large decision cannot be delegated to the public via plebiscites. The era of ‘Go and put an X in a box once ever 5 years’ belongs in the history books, because it was created in a time when there were no other ways of asking the demos what it wants. Now there are, and we ought to use them.
Join me as a Revolutionary Capitalist Anarchist, Jim. It’s fun destroying things. I do have a soft spot for Pol Pot. The piled skulls of intellectuals make fine lawn ornaments. Particularly those of economists.
Switzerland, then?
And another thing: why on earth is this Epstein business dominating our politics? It has only taught us two things we already knew – Mandelbum is the Prince of Darkness and Sir Dull Dimwit is a dud.
But otherwise it’s fussing about small numbers of American girls Epstein abused while ignoring the tens of thousands of British girls who were groomed and raped by Pakistani gangs. A leading Labour politician recently dismissed an allusion to that affair as “dog whistling”.
What in God’s name is going on? I think I might join the “string ’em up” club – the whole shebang – the pols, journalists, lawyers, civil servants, police. Metaphorically string ’em all up. Maybe, after a fair trial, string some up literally too.
It’s a distraction…
Because it’s current story and it’s cheap, as it’s in English.
Imagine if some bloke in Kyoto was running a little sex resort with blokes shagging 17 year old girls. And presumably watching tentacle porn. It would barely get covered, because someone at the BBC or The Guardian would have to hire translators and that’s a big cost. So our news is utterly dominated by the USA. We have endless coverage of primaries in Ohio. Who gives a fuck?
News is a form of entertainment and people’s buttons get pushed, at which point, politicians have to respond to it. Honestly, I couldn’t really give the slightest fuck that Mandelson knew Epstein. The bloke’s a bit of a cunt but in this matter, what did he do wrong? Starmer probably doesn’t give a shit either, but has to fire him to make this charade go away.
Never forget that there is a difference between “intelligent” and “intellectual”.
Which reminds me, one of Spud’s offerings has just turned up in my YouTube feed. I’ve no idea what I did to deserve that fate.
Spud is neither intellectual nor intelligent. He merely emotes and obsesses.
Indeed. Intellectuals can be very stupid, while the intelligent are not necessarily Intellectual.
Y’all have been living under fascism for so long, you think it normal.
The present system needs dismantling. That is the movement. The move is to freedom, freedom FROM government. What government can do should be limited. The argument shouldn’t be whether EVs, windmills, and heat pumps are a good idea, the argument should be over whether government has the authority to mandate such. They shouldn’t have such power.
40% of UK’s budget goes to commie NHS. Health service is not a legitimate function of government. Nor is charity. UK government needs to get back to protecting borders, adjudicating disputes, and fighting crime.
Being against windmills doesn’t make you a conservative. Being against government’s power to mandate windmills makes you a conservative.
No. That isn’t the movement. I wish it were, but it isn’t.
The country is not stuffed to the gills with libertarians who want government to be little more than borders, property rights and market failures. Most people vote to get “free” stuff. Even though the “free” is generally as tricky as Sauron’s ring. And if there’s a message of LOTR, that’s it. It’s the “power” that always gains more than the holder. You have to throw state education, the arts council into the fires of mount doom. You can’t go thinking “well, we’ll make them more how we want them to be”.
We’d be much richer if people were like that. Because overall, we’d all gain from removing the colossal amount of waste.
The Reform councillor in Leicestershire that wants a train from Coalville to Leicester just wants votes. And the people of Coalville will like it, if it happens, as people in Exeter and Norwich will pay for their stupid train. Never mind that of every £100 taken, £90 will go to the people running it and about £10 of benefit will go to the people of Coalville. They still think they got richer.
Like these “city of culture” things could just be a cash lottery. Pull a name from a hat and Swindon or Milton Keynes wins. if we win, we’ll do a whole load of useless street art bollocks with millions of pounds instead of the things people might prefer in Swindon, like fixing potholes. But getting some money, even for street art bollocks is better than nothing. The big winners are the arts council people who have phony baloney jobs because of it.
The reason it sometimes looks like a movement is that the Establishment is an internationally co-ordinated movement, certainly across Europe. The EU, UN agencies, etc. etc.
So the reason a lot of the ‘populist’ parties look similar in different countries is that the lanyard-wearers that they’re having a Great National Upchuck against are similar.
But it’s not a common philosophy, it’s a common enemy.
“I cannot even see the one single unifying idea”
There doesn’t need to be one single unifying idea – just overlapping similarities, much like family members share traits without all having one identical feature (cf Wittgenstein).
Some of the notions that these insurgent political movements tend to share are: opposition to technocracy, bureaucracy, and the professionalisation of management and politics; scepticism about elites; opposition to transnational progressivism; belief in the nation-state and national identity; scepticism about free markets….And there’s a dash of nihilism in the mix.
And there’s a dash of nihilism in the mix.
As there should be. Look where ideology and moralism has got us.
In small doses, yes. In large doses, it becomes satanic destructiveness – the Spirit of Negation.
Like feminism, nihilism is an informal ideology – an attitude, a way of seeing the world.
Nihilism is pure cyanide to the soul. Its little cousin Irony has been poisoning Western culture for a while.
Look where ideology and moralism has got us.
No doubt Steve’s African & Asian tribesmen are idealists & moralists according to their religion. As Spanner would claim to be. Ideals & morals are good if you share the ideals & morals. Heaven preserve you if you don’t. Idealists & moralists tend to be big on torture & painful executions.
You were big on suicide the other day, BiS.
I’d posit you have to be alive to do anything that matters, but I am the irrational believer in God.
Theo, you don’t get to define our revolution. Take your strawmen and go back home.
Nihilism:
Gamecock likes how they separate religious and moral principals. They are different.
One can believe . . . realize . . . life has no meaning, and still have moral principals.
a movement that is, to varying degrees, now being reinforced by a foreign power.
Note that millions of African and Asian tribesmen physically invading and occupying Europe is no big deal, because borders are racist social constructs, bigots.
But if the US government favours people who want Britain and Europe to continue to exist, that’s intolerable interference by a foreign power.
The movement that is – it’s not an intellectual one. There are people who try to intellectualise it, create a ssystem of thought for it and I’m sometimes one of them. But it’s not an intellectual project.
It’s like fascism, not in a pejorative sense. The word is tinged with the contempt of a century of seething socialists, much like the office of “dictator” once had positive connotations of an honest man you can trust to right the ship when everyone is in peril and now means “bad guy”.
Fascism was cheerfully anti-intellectual, despite the efforts of some weirdos, because it was just middle and working class blokes deciding to save their countries from being enslaved by communism.
I don’t think the New Thing is fascism though, I can’t see very authoritarian early 20th century style shorts coming back into fashion. But yet again, people are threatened with enslavement to very extreme and strange ideologies nobody voted for. Their livelihoods and the ability of their children to form families are at severe risk. So naturally, the public – those who aren’t dodos freshly miseducated at Yooni – is rejecting the status quo.
It’s far more a Great National Upchuck. This isn’t working. What “this” is can be argued – the lanyard class, say. But this, the current base political settlement. It’s just not right, see? There’s not much guidance of it let alone intellectual cohesion. It’s far far more just we don’t like our current rulers and their rules. And this is at a deeper level than which party is in government, it’s the whole system.
The more observant have been losing their minds over the last 25 years or so at the multiple looming, easily averted crises that our betters have insisted on creating for us.
Unsustainable welfare spending, paid for only in part by unsustainable taxes, that guarantees a generation game of musical chairs where lots of people are guaranteed to end up with nothing.
Government debt up the wazoo, with nothing to show for it
The multiple needless problems caused by importing the Third World.
Enron style national accounting that claims mass migration is “necessary” for the economy because immigrants “pay tax”, ignoring both the immediate and long term enormous welfare costs of importing low wage labour. If immigration is good for the economy, why are we so poor now?
The Net Zero cliff face, which they’ve insisted on flying us into, with no plans to mitigate the enormous, foreseeable, economic damage. Just delusional bullshit about “well paid green jobs” nobody who isn’t a Miliband has ever benefited from.
The strange “culture wars” officialdom has seen fit to wage against unsuspecting taxpayers for no obvious reason other than malice.
All seems rather unreasonable, no?
The strange situation in the West is that it is the “elites” who are the mad revolutionaries, apparently intoxicated with their odd new religious fervours and the “proles” who are the conservative counterrevolutionaries who just want their country back and for things to be normal again.
Nope, fascism is just national socialism, as opposed to the international socialism of communism. The reason the commies and Nazis fought each other was simply the People’s Front of Judea vs the Judean People’s Front
Narp. This is glibly reductive to the point of pointlessness. The Nazis weren’t a hivemind in any event, but a very particularly German coalition of patriots, veterans, reactionaries, racists and lunatics.
However, Hitler’s Germany pre-war was obviously much more economically free than Stalin’s USSR. In fact, in a lot of ways freer than the current EU economy and its millions of rules. Seems daft, therefore, to reduce them to the category of “socialists”.
Not that I was thinking of the Nazis anyway, I was thinking of the fascists. The Germans didn’t invent fascism, they just made it uncool.
The problem with most people’s perceptions of the Nazis is that it was based on various propaganda by governments (understandable during WW2), and then the media turning them into comic book villains.
Like the lie about Hitler snubbing Jesse Owens that everyone was told for decades. Actually, not true. He got into trouble for only congratulating German athletes, and so stopped congratulating everyone. Jesse Owens himself said ” after newspaper reports “Hitler didn’t snub me—it was Roosevelt who snubbed me. The president didn’t even send me a telegram.”. The only athletes invited to the White House after the Olympics were the white ones.
Ask most people if Hitler was into the occult and they might well agree with that. Because of Castle Wolfenstein and Raiders of the Lost Ark. Himmler was into all that stuff, but Hitler thought it was bollocks and told Himmler to pack it in as it was likely to upset the Christian voters.
Then there’s all the slightly pervy Herr Flick style SS officers who were blindly loyal to the Fuhrer. Absolute tosh. They were a variety of types. Some quite serious, most doing it because it paid more, often just blokes using their power to get bribes, sometimes with Jewish mistresses they were protecting. The corruption in the German military was absolutely huge.
I got a Dominic Cummings e-mail today. He seems to have been pondering on the same subject.
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?Dominic Cummings
Feb 7
∙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.
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:
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):
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…
God, he’s prolix.
Understatement of the century.
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.
And then he appears to go right ahead and do that. He’s as catastrophist as Allister Heath and AEP. Most of his predictions sound to me like wishful thinking, no matter how good his research and analysis.
AEP seems to swing from catastrophist one minute to ‘Everything’s going to be wonderful if we just go hard on Net Zero and AI’. I can only assume his SIPP is invested in the Mag 7 and copper miners.
in our headlong rush to educate everybody, we are lowering our standards
I was half-asleep at the time but I’m sure the wireless last week said the government intends to have 66% of young people in education. Not satisfied with utterly destroying the value of qualifications by forcing 50% of youngsters to have them, they want to nuke the ashes.