People, ideas, machines XII: Theories of regime change and civil war
"Inside the intelligence services, special forces (themselves under attack from the Cabinet Office and NI Office as they operate as our last line of defence, see below), bits of Whitehall, and those most connected to discussions away from Westminster, there is growing, though still tiny, discussion of Britain’s slide into chaos and the potential for serious violence including what would look like racial/ethnic mob/gang violence, though the regime would obviously try to describe it differently. Part of the reason for the incoherent forcefulness against the white rioters last year from a regime that is in deep-surrender-mode against pro-Holocaust marchers, rape gangs and criminals generally, is a mix of a) aesthetic revulsion in SW1 at the Brexit-voting white north and b) incoherent Whitehall terror of widespread white-English mobs turning political and attracting talented political entrepreneurs. They’re already privately quaking about the growth of Muslim networks. The last thing they want to see is emerging networks that see themselves as both political and driven to consider violence. Parts of the system increasingly fear this could spin out of control into their worst nightmare. In No10 meetings with the Met on riots, I saw for myself a) the weird psychological zone of how much order rests not on actual physical forces but perceptions among a few elites about such forces that can very quickly change, and b) how scared the senior police are at the prospect of crucial psychological spells being broken. We can see on the streets that various forces have already realised the regime will not stop them. What if this spreads? Whitehall’s pathology has pushed it to the brink of this psychological barrier and many of them know it.
Aspects of the situation are tragi-comic. E.g if you talk to senior people in places like UAE, they tell you that bigshots in that region now tell each other — don’t send your kids to be educated in Britain, they’ll come back radical Islamist nutjobs! Our regime has spent thirty years a) destroying border control and sane immigration (including the Home Office’s jihad against the highest skilled, whom they truly loathe discussing and try to repel with stupid fees etc) and b) actively prioritising people from the most barbaric places on earth (hence immigration from the tribal areas most responsible for the grooming/rape gangs keeps rising) and c) funding the spread of those barbaric ideas and defending the organisations spreading them with human rights laws designed to stop the return of totalitarianism in Europe. In parallel, they’ve started propaganda operations with the old media to spread the meme that our ‘real danger’ is the ‘far right’ (code for ‘white people’). As Tories and Labour have continued their deranged trajectory, they have provoked exactly the reactions they most feared including the spreading meme that our regime itself has become our enemy and the growing politicisation of white English nationalism.
These deep state discussions about the growing prospect of violence, like the focus group discussions about ‘civil war’, have seeped through to few MPs or hacks. And the evolution of the Cabinet Office in recent years has excluded ministers, spads and the PM from almost any visibility inside the NSS, the National Security Secretariat of the CO, which has acquired power from the rest of the security/intelligence system and runs a failing empire within a failing empire. When I said in 2020 that, among the general changes to the dysfunctional No10/CO system, the oversight of NSS must change so it became visible and legible again to the PM’s office so we could participate in debates like — what are the actual priorities of the intelligence services vis Putin and Xi — some senior officials tried to pretend that zero political scrutiny of NSS was somehow a constitutional principle. After I left, this system became even more closed and dysfunctional, hence the total lack of true strategic thinking connecting ends-ways-means over Ukraine and all things defence procurement becoming more and more Kafka-esque as the MoD shipped stuff to Ukraine. I repeat: the lack of legibility of the NSS is without historical precedent in the UK for centuries and is related to broader issues of Whitehall’s dysfunction, the disgraceful shambles of the MoD etc.
SW1’s OODA loop has operated for years as a massive denial-of-service-attack on its own perceptions of reality — constant cycles of ephemeral emotional hysteria and Narrative Whiplash while No10 has no capability to execute priorities. A great recent example: Professor Ansell saying that the Zelensky Oval Office interview meant that Farage’s prospects had ‘peaked’ (widely Bluesky’d approvingly!) — an emotional spasm entirely in tune with SW1’s NPC network reflecting OODA-as-DOS-attack. This has, as I’ve argued for years, made it more and more vulnerable to history’s remorseless pattern: slow rot, elite blindness, fast crisis, sudden collapse.
The old parties lost their last chance to fix things in a sort-of normal way when the Trolley and his girlfriend told everyone in 2021 they were going ‘back to normal politics’. SW1 cheered including the Tory MPs who got culled en masse in 2024. Sunak doubled down on optimising for *pats on the head from Permanent Secretaries and lawyers*. After Starmer won, SW1’s NPCs tweeted to each other how they now had ‘serious grownups’ and we’d return to ‘normal government’.
But this was just another cycle of delusional SW1 Narrative Whiplash. The Starmer project blew up on contact with the reality of Whitehall. Now both parties are led by Dead Players. Both old parties are structurally knackered. And the NPCs tweeting ‘hurrah for the grownups, Sue Gray is the Jedi we need’ a few months ago are now Bluesky-ing ‘disgusting rhetoric from Starmer’.
Starmer is speed-running Sunak’s demented combination of a) massively raising the salience of immigration/boats with b) a set of policies that everyone who understands the details knows cannot possibly do what he’s promising.
Why is he doing it? Because, like Sunak, he’s caught between a) political advice that the country is enraged over immigration/boats and wants action, b) the adamantine priority of the dominant faction in Whitehall — i.e the force that actually orients 99% of policy — is maintaining 1) the HRA/ECHR-judicial review system and 2) the cross-party HMT/OBR/university-endorsed immigration/asylum Ponzi. Being a Dead Player optimised to ‘defend the institutions’ at all costs however pathological, Starmer has, aping Sunak, synthesised the political advice of McSweeney and the priority of the officials/lawyers actually running No10/70WH and generated his own version of Sunak’s demented combination.
If you’re not in the meetings, you can’t accurately estimate the relative levels of dishonesty and self-delusion involved. Obviously there are officials and lawyers in the meetings who understand reality and are happy to feed ministerial delusions, as they did with Cameron, May, Boris and Sunak. And there are odd unusual officials who could bluntly tell the truth: PM, so there is no confusion, what you’re announcing cannot possible do what you claim. I know Sunak was super-delusional, not lying, only because I spoke to him in person twice. And of course many politicians develop weird super-position personalities, where they sort-of-know and sort-of-lie to themselves such than an impartial observer can rarely conclude either ‘they’re lying’ or ‘they’re deluded’: it’s a bit of both. It’s how many cope when promoted to jobs far beyond them. And it’s very poorly understood among business elites who always overrate the rationality of political players and underrate the prevalence of this super-position-personality phenomenon which means widespread avoidance of the real issues in meeting after meeting to an extent the median business elite has little experience of outside companies heading for bankruptcy. I suspect there’s more conscious dishonesty with Starmer than Sunak but the result is sure to be the same: political disaster.
I repeat what I predicted about Sunak when in 2023 the old media regurgitated endless nonsense on how No10 plans could stop the boats without dealing with the HRA and judicial review because [hand wave]. The BBC, ITV and SKY have repeated the process with Starmer’s announcements: no explanation, ever, of how and why the HRA works. Just as when Jenrick correctly said that the HRA means that UK SF is droning people instead of arresting them — which I revealed on this blog in 2021 but everyone ignored — the old media span the story as ‘Jenrick accuses SF of murder!’ When the actual story was that the lawyers were instructing it was LAWFUL, the opposite of murder, to drone but NOT lawful to arrest and this was the actual mad story — but the HRA angle had to be distorted then buried. (And NB. this droning-not-arrest driven by ECHR+CO lawyers+Kafka continues.) And the old media did not explain after Rudakubana attacked the prison guards that Britain does not keep even convicted terrorist killers about to be released from jail who are believed to be plotting a new attack under surveillance because legal advice is it is unlawful under the HRA — so a fortiori, Rudakubana can’t be kept under proper surveillance. And there are many hundreds of similar or worse absurdities. Terrorists literally being hunted from cave to cave in Afghanistan by JSOC (US classified special forces) have used satellite phones to procure London barristers to bring legal cases against the MoD for ‘human rights’ abuses and won secret payouts of millions while on the run. Such grotesque cases are classified by the Cabinet Office to stop MPs knowing what the ECHR actually does and close to zero MPs are informed of such lunatic dynamics. (Hence my advice to Sunak to declassify the ECHR/HRA effects on security, take them out of red STRAP files and publish them.)
I went through the boats in great detail in 2020 with both a) the military and b) the best lawyers inside and outside government and the conclusion was absolutely clear: operationally stopping the boats is very simple and could be done in days but CO legal advice endorsed by external experts is that the PM cannot do this simple thing lawfully because the courts will stop him using the HRA/ECHR. (In simple terms if the PM tried to order the Navy to stop the boats in a serious way, the courts would state that the PM’s orders are unlawful under the HRA therefore the Navy cannot execute them and the Cabinet Secretary would tell the PM that he cannot insist on his orders being obeyed as, in extremis, both the PM and officers could be arrested for contempt. The core operational and political problem of ‘stop the boats’ could be solved by simple primary legislation explicitly whacking the HRA though the broader issue of the Strasbourg court and other international law angles requires deeper action. I won’t go into the details of this here.)
You therefore must choose between (A) our priority is the HRA/ECHR over stopping boats, or (B) our priority is stopping the boats therefore the HRA regime (plus some other legal barriers) must be changed in primary legislation. Sunak chose A. So has Starmer. But both have spun the media that the choice does not exist and are pretending they’ve prioritised immigration. And if you rely on BBC or ITV or SKY you will not realise the choice exists because the broadcasters reflect the priority of officials: keep the voters in the dark on the subject.
I told Sunak he was deluding himself and his plans could not work. He said he understood ‘the complex details’ better than me or anybody else. His argument shifted over time to ever more baroque contortions ending in the inevitable humiliating failure — baffling given his intellect unless you grasp the problem of the super-position personality politicians develop to avoid facing reality, and the rarity of people around PMs who will tell them bluntly ‘you are deluding yourself PM’. Starmer will fail just the same whether he’s lying or deluded or in a superposition...
The Vote Leave strategy for turning the Tories into an essentially new party with a new electoral coalition was much, much more logical and easier to maintain given the big historical forces in play than it is for Labour to cope with the same cultural and electoral dynamics such as educational polarisation and the rapidly changing media.
Starmer has a truly nightmare situation because the issue of what to do about immigration is no longer susceptible to post-1991 SW1 politics-as-usual. Rich graduate London, crucial for what Labour has become, has radicalised itself (like the Democrats) such that it is on principle hostile to border control and treats arguments made by Bill Clinton and Obama as ‘racism’. But keeping them happy enrages most of the country outside London. And Starmer has done a Sunak and enraged everybody! Rich graduate London now rages at Starmer for his ‘appalling rhetoric’ and not-London hates him because it knows his rhetoric is just more lies and delusions and nonsense we’ve seen from SW1 for 25 years and everybody can see the boats keep coming on video every day proving we’re right. He’s said the trajectory has caused ‘incalculable damage’ yet he self-evidently does not even believe his own words given his trivial proposals — a perfect Sunak recipe for infuriating everyone and destroying your electoral coalition. Starmer’s rhetoric, like Sunak’s, could only work politically if you deliver and he’s already made clear delivery is not his priority, the ECHR is.
It was much easier and more logical for Sunak to prioritise voters, ditch the ECHR and actually stop the boats while Starmer sided with Jolyon and the human rights lawyers. Yes they’d have lost Osborne, Grieve et al. Good, more winning! It is much, much harder for Starmer to do the same because most of his MPs and activists and a good chunk of his voters in cities are with Grieve and Jolyon.
The VL strategy was easier to execute given the actual facts of electoral dynamics. But immediately after the 2019 election SW1 ran its denial-of-service-attack against itself and convinced itself that, like in 2016, our victory was a fluke because of ‘extreme circumstances’, ‘Corbyn’ etc and it would be ‘madness’ for the Tories to try to maintain that ‘incoherent’ electoral coalition because it would ‘pull the Party towards extremism’ (i.e doing what most voters want). They then cheered Boris-Truss-Sunak as they machine-gunned the entire coalition with the biggest wave of uncontrolled immigration ever, tax rises, vandalism on a vast scale, then declared ‘see the 2019 coalition could never have lasted’!
Why? Because the last thing any part of SW1 (outside some of the deep state) wanted to see was the Tories transformed into a different party that was super-tough on crime and immigration, super-focused on productivity and science-technology-startups-investment, super-disruptive of Whitehall’s core institutions, and supported by a national coalition uniting parts of the working classes and middle classes. Super-popular outside SW1 but a nightmare for SW1.
So both parties cheered by the NPCs have doubled down on a trajectory that is deeply unpopular to almost every constituency — the ‘mainstream’ has alienated everybody except Whitehall and some other London/university characters desperate to prop up the rotten edifice. They’ve revived their bogeyman, Farage. Sunak and Starmer are the last of the old party leaders who’ve clung to the dead scripts of the hollow SW1 simulacrum — hollow ‘leaders’ optimising for *pats on the head from Permanent Secretaries and government lawyers* even when it leads to their own implosion.
While the new government imploded, the Tory Party could not benefit. It has disintegrated in all areas. Its membership has either defected to Reform or retreated in disgust from politics, its donors have gone on strike, its local networks have collapsed, it cannot generate good ideas, it cannot campaign and communicate (its communication is so self-sabotaging they disintegrate faster when they try harder), and networks on which it depended for people and ideas have either themselves died or defected. In the recent elections, councillors got Thanos’d and if Kemi is still there in a year most of what’s left in England, Wales and Scotland will get Thanos’d. Now the party is just a hundred English MPs and a few thousand councillors rattling around in a hollow historical institution. Next May it won’t even be that.
The questions remain:...
What do Labour MPs do when they realise their PM has done a Sunak and machine-gunned both London-Remain and non-London-Leave?
How do parts of Whitehall prepare to sabotage Farage, copying their friends in Europe who routinely sabotage political threats to the old system?
How do other parts of Whitehall, particularly in security and intelligence, respond to the disintegration
How do voters respond to the meltdown of the old system and creeping chaos?
What new crises accelerate collapse? I said in 2021 — prepare for the grid to collapse and infrastructure everyone relies on to stop working. These trends will continue. The immigration Ponzi is blowing up. The Ponzi scheme of the modern financial system could blow any time.
How fast do violence and no-go areas spread? Do we start seeing networks emerge combining explicit anti-Islam, explicit violence/sabotage, and competent organisation, as the deep state fears?"
