This blog is mainly focused on localism and related aspects. But not always. By contrast I hope that readers will be interested in the views of Dominic Cummings. This a copy of his most recent posted today. It is a very long read.

Bear wwith me please if you can’t follow the text – copying was not straight-forward. I hsve not knowingly edited Cummings’ words of wisdom.

Voters greatly UNDER-estimate the scale of immigration. NHS? Net Zero? Farage? Starmer? Badenoch? Cost of living? Welfare? Debt?

Feb 07, 2026

Yeah it’s harder to get a GP appointment than tickets for One Direction back in the day, you call in and you’re 55 in the queue, then it’s cancelled, it’s insane.

I don’t think he’s [Farage] Far Right, I’m branded Far Right but I’m not, I’m Right, and he’s just Right too, I feel moderate but the left has gone so far left it makes anyone seem like we’ve changed but we haven’t, and the BBC lies about it and calls us all fascists. But there’s not enough of a team. My worry is we have a split and we’re stuck with Labour.

We’re reaching the point where Labour got in cos the Tories were a disaster then we’ve had a disastrous Labour government, so give Farage a go just cos we need any alternative. The Tories are irrelevant, on the sidelines. Would it be good? Are any of them?! He’s different to the other two. But his Party isn’t up to being a professional government yet.

He’s convincing [Farage] but I question if he’s a team player, he’ll find it very hard to be PM, how will he run all the departments? I can see him winning but then failing as PM.

I live in a village called [X], in ten years it’s been overrun, we now call it Halal [X], it’s a small English village but it’s now got mosques, there’s rows and an edge, and there’s white flight, I‘m selling my house and I’m leaving, the people who’ve arrived don’t want to live by our rules and they’re not working. I work, my kids work, the immigration system is out of control. [And he UNDERestimated the level of immigration by a lot]

It’s like they [MPs] hate us, they’re not on our side.

Swing voters in swing constituencies…

The culture of Europe has deteriorated visibly within the memory of many who are by no means the oldest among us… There is no doubt that in our headlong rush to educate everybody, we are lowering our standards and more and more abandoning the study of those subjects by which the essentials of our culture … are transmitted; destroying our ancient edifices to make ready the ground upon which the barbarian nomads of the future will encamp in their mechanised caravans.

TS Eliot, Notes on Education and Culture

Nihilism has become the American way, which is a fatal shock to cultural development and the American spirit… If the value system collapses, how can the social system be sustained?

Wang Huning, close adviser to Xi

What has driven the rise of the French far right in the past 20 years?

“Immigration and also the total scorn of the elites. In France, immigrants from northern Africa, who are usually Muslim, don’t integrate well.”

Doesn’t integration take time?

“In France, it’s the reverse. It’s the second or third generation that is making trouble. We are witnessing a dis-assimilation. It’s a catastrophe.”

Houellebecq interview

I said last year I would spend less time this year on SW1 until the old system cracks open. This blog is finishing off a 2025 project. It has two sections.

A summary of a deep market research project I did in October/November. Voters’ top priorities? Views on Starmer, Kemi B, Farage, Jenrick and the parties? Views on Net Zero and conservation? The NHS? The cost of living? Immigration, boats, communities shifting ethnically? Welfare/benefits? The aesthetics of rightwing videos? (Aesthetics polarise emotionally even when people agree on facts/problem/policy.)
Some sketches of how SW1 Insiders are likely to respond to opinion. What will they absorb or distort, how will their behaviour change? How will the SW1 system evolve 2026-29?

It’s not about what I think should be built. I’ve explained that many times. The question is whether people with talent, money, ambition and willpower will decide to cross the Rubicon instead of fish in it. There’s a policy agenda which, with the right leadership and campaign, would deal with most of our most acute problems and have the support of a majority in Parliament — but the existing parties repulse, like an immune system repulsing an invader, the combination of the plan, the detail, the talent, and the campaign, and the combination doesn’t make sense to how Westminster en masse thinks of ‘politics’.

As you watch Starmer collapse, remember — SW1’s experts, heads of TV news, FT pundits, the Institute for Government etc told you Starmer and Sue Gray were ‘the serious grownups’ who would bring ‘calm stability’ after ‘Brexit chaos’. As Andrew Marr, ex BBC political editor put it:

We have to be optimistic. Just having a stable government there for five, ten years. With ordinary down-to-earth serious people talking like the rest of us in charge of the government. A plan that doesn’t shift very much. A wall of money coming in from around the world… A little haven of peace and stability…

MPs are hysterical over Epstein after spending 20 years suppressing investigation and reporting of industrialised child abuse here because it undermines their cross-party consensus on immigration policy. Outside SW1 you might think that the Epstein affair means they’ll now have to deal with the grooming gangs differently. After all, Epstein is an American paedo scandal but the gangs is a domestic paedo scandal on a much vaster scale, right? No, dear reader, Epstein will blow over, SW1 will move on to the months of soap opera over Starmer’s replacement and will continue ignoring the gangs, which will continue to operate, meanwhile Whitehall is incinerating documents over child abuse before it becomes a criminal offence when the new fake Inquiry starts… The system will continue working as intended… (Look at how much the BBC covered Rupert Lowe MP trying to uncover the gangs this week: 0.)

British politics is in a doomloop similar to many western countries:

A. The deafening verdict of voters in election after election (Brexit, Trump 1 and 2 etc) and the drop in support for old parties everywhere is that Insiders have failed and voters want change — a failure of ideas, institutions, and operational competence, a failure to take or impose responsibility for failure (cf. Iraq, Afghanistan, financial crisis, covid, Ukraine etc). Old parties, old state bureaucracies, old institutions of all kinds — from the EU and NATO to the media and universities — have seen an epic collapse of trust.

B. Insiders’ response to this repeated verdict is a) doubling down on more of the things voters keep rejecting, especially importing men from the worst places on earth, b) an increasingly deranged discussion among themselves that ‘the real problem’ is actually the voters, because — fooled by disinformation, ‘Russian interference’, tech oligarchs etc — they have embraced populism, racism, fascism, and c) the solution is to ‘restore trust’ in Insiders’ ideas and institutions and give them more power and money.

C. Those Outsiders who want to replace this doomloop between voters and Insiders can’t coordinate to build a political entity to do it.

To voters, Insiders are the villains and Insider failure is the cause of the collapse of their trust. To Insiders, they are the traduced victims and the cause of the collapse of trust is the evil treachery of other elites, the interference of evil foreigners (‘Putin did Brexit!’), and the ignorance and stupidity of voters.

Insiders destroyed their own OODA loops. They radicalised Left but can’t see it so their entire orientation is off kilter. Ironically it wouldn’t be hard to be a popular government — but the changes needed are fiercely resisted in a pathological self-defeating pattern by political-bureaucratic elites, because of the stories they believe, the powerful forces of mimesis which surround them, and the disintegration of feedback mechanisms. E.g ‘Stopping the boats’ is operational childsplay, doable in days according to UK forces asked to plan to stop them — not even in the 100 most complex/difficult government problems — and the entire problem is Insiders’ determination to prioritise keeping the legal barriers to solving the problem particularly the ECHR/HRA.

Voters think, ‘we keep voting for change but they won’t change’. When politicians try to change even modestly, they find it almost impossible to make the state bureaucracies evolved since 1945 follow orders. Officials across the west have dug in and grasp that the collapsed talent level of modern politicians, their incentives etc mean that officials can just refuse to change and almost always win. After covid, the old parties everywhere united in supporting the very bureaucracies responsible for killing millions and widespread disaster. Sunak and Starmer supported and empowered the precise Cabinet Office system which destroyed their ability to do what they said they would do, then both were totally bewildered by their political collapse then continued babbling support for what killed them.

These processes are part of a long-term cycle of regime change, very similar to the 1840s-70s.

So we’re in a holding pattern. The long-term entropic forces of Westminster’s pathological vandalism demonstrate themselves weekly in a torrent of humiliation — Westminster has made us a tragi-comic global internet meme. Westminster watches itself to see how it will react to the uselessness of two more duds in charge of the two old rotten parties — duds much of SW1 tried to elevate as ‘serious people’.

Farage tells people ‘after May’ Reform will start showing a transformation yet he’s spent his time recruiting some of the worst Tory dregs to help him persuade voters to vote for ‘change’. The voters are more angry and desperate than ever, but Westminster can’t cope with the feedback.

Elites have fragmented and many now also want something radically different, but this process is different in different countries. In America it’s been accelerated by Elon and the MAGA Silicon Valley network. In Britain, there’s a lot of private whining at dinner parties but very little public action. Most people with money and/or talent have kept hoping vainly that the old system might fix itself and don’t want to make enemies. Starmer has scuppered that hope but there remains no clear solution.

The gap between a) what’s really needed to solve our problems and b) what’s acceptable in Insider dinner parties is relentlessly growing — it’s much bigger than it was in 2020 and ‘what’s needed’ will seem more inconceivable for the median SW1 character the longer we continue on the Brown-Osborne-May-Sunak-Starmer trajectory. As this gap grows, elite fragmentation grows and it becomes harder for people to have meaningful discussion. Insiders seem more and more determined to try to drag what they think of as ‘the progressive arc of history’ back towards 1998, their comfort zone between the fall of the Wall and the fall of the Towers. They quote Blair on ‘open vs closed’ and ‘radical centrism’. They speculate on rejoining the EU and other changes to squash pesky demands for change — we had it cracked in the nineties, we just need to find our way back, they tell each other at Lake Como conferences on ‘alienation and populism’. This seems more and more delusional to Outsider elites who in turn seem more and more ‘extreme/fascist’ to Insiders. Bridges between networks become harder to maintain socially as informational lightcones separate on WhatsApp groups, X/Bluesky etc.

I think it will be resolved this year whether: A) Starmer and Kemi are binned as I said would happen last year, and the two old parties are irreversibly splintering, B) Farage’s promises are true or the cynics are right and it’s clear that a Reform government would be just another SW1 clownshow, C) whether elite fragmentation generates a serious alternative, or D) if not, then the rush to the exits — of talent and money — will accelerate as people realise that the next election is heading for either a Farage clownshow or a red-green-yellow-Hamas-troon-ScotNat-rainbow coalition, raising the probability of financial crisis and street violence, which may arrive anyway before then given SW1’s disintegration.

Westminster can’t solve the problems caused by Westminster and broader cultural forces acting over many decades. The historical solution is a section of elites allying with a majority of voters but it’s intrinsically hard for elites to coordinate before collapse given the asymmetries of risk and rewards, hence the pattern of regime collapse. Elon’s historic decisions changed America’s trajectory partly because huge errors by the Biden White House provoked a critical mass of dissident competent elites to take the plunge and coordinate. What would something similar here look like? And if it becomes clear all options in 2029 are worse than today, where does the energy and talent that does not emigrate go?

Everything will be under more pressure because SW1 united behind escalating the dumbest war in recent history and won’t be able to hide the disaster — or the vast historic prize NATO has given China — for much longer. The psychic nightmare for SW1, and the entire ecosystem which peddled Ukraine fairy tales, as they’re forced to confront this will generate more pathological responses. Tories and Reform will support mad ideas which emerge from the deep state to be burbled by Starmer as he fades out — a PM who at international meetings increasingly resembles a mentally impaired hobbit at a Gondor wedding staggering around in terror of being trampled by the Big Folk. Awful as things are, they can get much, much worse fast.

Such exercises in examining voters’ beliefs always generate many interesting things. One concerns immigration which I explore in detail below.

Those who consider themselves the ‘serious sensible people of SW1’ — i.e those who radicalised sharply Left post-2015 towards Greta-Gaza-‘trans’, but think the problem is voters radicalising Right — have continued their post-referendum doubling down and persuaded themselves of new fictions regarding immigration including the idea that the polls showing voter concern over immigration reflects media coverage which makes them greatly over-estimate the scale of immigration. If you believe this then you naturally believe other things about what’s happening and what political entities should do.

I suspected this is delusional so decided to see what voters think about this hypothesis. I was surprised by how deluded. It turns out that the mainstream voters I explored actually greatly under-estimate the scale of immigration — and not by 10% or 30% but by a factor between 5X and 30X. Over and over, normal voters estimate the scale of immigration since January 2021 at ‘200,000, 50,000, 300,000, 100,000, 700,000, 250,000’ — i.e roughly 5X and 30Xtimes lower than it is. And when they are shown the real numbers and graphs since 1997 and 2021 — million after million after million — they are almost all ‘shocked’. They aren’t buying ‘diversity is our strength’. They are much more hostile to Labour and Tories and much more supportive of much stronger measures than most Tory MPs.

The lack of voter knowledge combined with what voters do think and know is an indictment of the SW1 Right but also a) a sign of where opinion will go as awareness of reality spreads and b) a huge opportunity. A competent campaign — think ‘£350 million’ but on immigration today — driving carefully chosen numbers and stories to jiujitsu SW1 fear and rage against themselves and hence build support to solve the problem, would be disastrous for Labour, Tories and Whitehall.

How could this be true when ‘the right wing media constantly exaggerates the problem’, I hear you ask?! I explain this and other interesting things below.

When I do these exercises on voter opinion, I’m trying to figure out the truth and avoid confusing a) what voters really believe, b) what I want them to believe or not believe and c) what I/others could persuade them to believe. Politics is plagued by research efforts that really are done to make money, produce evidence to support arguments/action people already want to make/do, curry favour, build relationships, get promoted etc.

I try hard not to kid myself about the difference between my views and normal voters. As I live mostly in London this has got harder, compounded by becoming famous so talking to people directly is refracted through a fog. I was surprised by lots of what we found. If you’re reading this blog, probably your life is financially easier than the median voter and you spend a lot more time looking at politics than the median voter. If you spend most of your time talking to comfortably off graduates, I urge you to discount what you want to be true, the emotions of your social network and how you and they feel about ‘political identity’, when you read what voters say below. Our first job is ‘not to fool yourself, and you’re the easiest person to fool’.

How to summarise what I found?

Voters are angrier and more fearful and more hateful of Westminster than ever before.

On the other hand, they greatly under-estimate the real scale of immigration; they are almost totally unaware of the insane immigration cases regarding sex criminals and murderers and terrorists; they do not understand the scale of the debt; they’re mad about the scale of benefits cheating but greatly under-estimate its scale; they don’t understand the depth of vandalism of the armed forces; they understand problems with the police better than MPs but still under-estimate them; they’ve become more realistic about the NHS and the implications of immigration and ageing for it but don’t trust any mainstream political force to make significant changes; they’ve become much more hostile to SW1’s consensus on Net Zero but don’t realise the scale of mad costs SW1 locked us into and how hard it will be to change to sensible policies on energy and environment.

Although voters are more pessimistic than ever and more realistic than Insiders, they are not realistic enough about the extent of the rot so there is scope for hatred of both old parties to grow a lot and desire for something new to grow a lot — and this dynamic is demonstrated in groups when one talks them through various things.

Further, consider that what you read below about voter hate for the old parties was before the resurrection of the Epstein scandal in the last week. Already record lows of trust and record highs of hate will be even worse now and, given the inevitable continual crumbling of SW1 in coming months, even worse by summer.

Another ‘conspiracy theory’ comes true

I’ve written many times how our political crisis is illustrated by how often high status Insiders, including people who present ‘the news’, describe something as ‘a conspiracy theory’ then it turns out to be true. Those people mostly fell hook, line and sinker for the actual big conspiracy theory of the past 20 years — the Russiagate hoax on Brexit and Trump, created by the likes of Jake Sullivan to undermine the legitimacy of Trump.

Here is another good example.

Last May I wrote on this blog about UAE bigshots appalled at how we’re dealing with Islamic nutjobs. I had just talked to a) a CTO of a tech firm who’d just been there and b) a British soldier who’d just been there. Both had been to dinners with bigshots and both told me, within a few weeks, the same story about their conversations. So I wrote this (bold added):

Aspects of the situation are tragi-comic. E.g if you talk to senior people in places like UAE, they tell you that bigshots in that region now tell each other — don’t send your kids to be educated in Britain, they’ll come back radical Islamist nutjobs! Our regime has spent thirty years a) destroying border control and sane immigration (including the Home Office’s jihad against the highest skilled, whom they truly loathe discussing and try to repel with stupid fees etc) and b) actively prioritising people from the most barbaric places on earth (hence immigration from the tribal areas most responsible for the grooming/rape gangs keeps rising) and c) funding the spread of those barbaric ideas and defending the organisations spreading them with human rights laws designed to stop the return of totalitarianism in Europe.

At Christmas, the UAE finally got sick of complaining in Whitehall and briefed that they are limiting students coming because of our problem with extremist radicalisation and mad universities.

People pointed out how my original blog had triggered The Rest Is Politics. Rory ‘Kamala will win easy’ Stewart and Alistair ‘45 minutes’ Campbell did their show about my blog last May, describing it as ‘a conspiracy theory’ and how it illustrated generally I’m a psycho who spreads ‘bullshit’ to cause chaos, that’s ‘very very Cummings’. You can see a clip of Rory here which they tweeted out.

In the clip they tell their fans that I claimed this information came from organisations with ‘ludicrous acronyms to sound like he’s on the inside line … and classified information nobody else knows about’ etc. As you can see above, I didn’t say anything about classified information or ‘acronyms’, I just stated it as a fact. Rory also repeats the myth that I write Elon’s tweets, which for some reason No10 spread a year ago and is also ludicrous, and claims I’m in the pay of the Emirates (just like I was ‘in the pay of Putin’), while I’m one of the few senior people in SW1 who has never taken a penny from them or even been there — Rory and AC cannot say the same! SW1 invents things about me then believes their inventions, a constant process.

Apart from the general process of elite polarisation and the collapse of consensus reality I’ve written about a lot — and touch on below — their claims about ‘conspiracy theories’ is connected to the radicalisation of SW1 on Islam illustrated by one of many dismal Christmas stories.

Over Christmas, it turned out that most of SW1 — Labour and Tory MPs, the FO etc — and much of luvvie world had mobilised to give an Egyptian nutjob British citizenship and lobby the Egyptian government to release him from jail, which they finally did. Already, characteristically pathological of SW1. But then it beautifully turned out that the nutjob had said all sorts of nutjob things on Twitter including open calls for violence against Jews.

The PM welcomed his release and described bringing another nutter to Britain as one of his ‘top priorities’. No10 therefore had to scramble to the ‘we were useless’ defence and claim the entire campaign over years — which they said was ‘top priority’ for No10 and the PM — had never involved anybody ever doing any checking on the nutjob before mobilising SW1 and Hampstead. So No10’s defence was — neither the PM, any other minister, or anybody else in Whitehall involved in the campaign to release this guy and bring him to Britain ever checked why the Egyptians might have jailed him. Forget all the capabilities of the deep state, nobody — from the Foreign Office to The Times leader writers — even did a quick google search. Absurd as it it, they had to say this as the alternative is ‘we knew what he said and that’s why we made him a priority’. (Obviously some people in Whitehall did know he was a nutjob but they couldn’t admit that.)

These two stories are related. Middle East regimes see Britain as a dangerous source of radicalised nutjobs and decades behind them in dealing with this problem. It’s similar to how Middle East regimes have leapfrogged European regimes in many technology areas and are now more important to Washington and Beijing than Europe is, but the European/yookay story is in a timewarp where obviously we are more advanced than them.

(At roughly the same time as No10 was tweeting that it’s their ‘top priority’ to import more Islamic maniacs, Whitehall was also banning this white Dutch young woman politician from entering the yookay because she tweets stories of illegal immigrants killing Europeans and criticises yookay immigration policy. More very logical government from a government giving away the Chagos islands, importing terrorists and giving them millions, and using government lawyers to attack British special forces via lawfare using lawyer friends of Starmer and Hermer, both friends of the disgraced lawyer who invented abuses by British soldiers and, obviously, escaped jail.)

The phenomenon whereby the authorities define something as a ‘conspiracy theory’, and the old media especially the BBC reinforces the claim, then it turns out to be true is particularly striking regarding stories about extremism/Islam.

For example, in 2024 much of SW1 supported Starmer attacking those claiming the killer of the three school children was connected to Islam — ‘dangerous disinformation’ and ‘a conspiracy theory’ they screamed, and used this to justify jailing people. Then No10 admitted weeks later the PM had been told immediately the killer had been downloading Al Qaeda manuals on terrorism.

In January 2025 as the grooming gangs story resurfaced, the PM gave a speech claiming ‘the real story’ was not the gangs themselves but the radicalisation of the far right, ‘disinformation’, and Elon spreading ‘conspiracy theories’ about Islam. The BBC and much of SW1 cheered Starmer. ‘Best PM speech’ said NPCs like Lewis ‘what’s Article 50’ Goodall. A few months later, SW1 had to do Narrative Whiplash and finally accept the need for an official gangs inquiry — which, obviously, they have delayed and delayed so that Whitehall can destroy documents and ensure that it drags out like the fake covid Inquiry for years, while the gangs still run riot.

SW1 cross party consensus has normalised weekly marches by Islamic nutjobs calling for another Holocaust — ignored in SW1 but watched around the world. This week the marchers are cheering Iran’s slaughter of 20-40 thousand. And in the background, the PM, Attorney General, the Cabinet Office and MoD send their lawyers to wreck the lives of British Special Forces who risked their lives to stop Islamic nutjobs killing us. Tories like Ben Wallace signed this off, Labour continued and sharpened it — and this is watched carefully around the world by people who understand what this means about our political elite. We will all pay.

The SW1 characters who live through cycle after cycle of Narrative Whiplash never face the cognitive dissonance. At the same time SW1 was praising Starmer for rejecting an inquiry into the gangs a year ago, its pundits were also herding to a) Starmer is doing brilliantly with his ‘coalition of the willing’ on Ukraine where Russia’s offensive has failed, and b) MAGA hostility to Zelensky is a disaster for Farage, ‘populism’s peaked’ etc. Remember that? No, neither do they…

Also bear in mind when you hear ‘conspiracy theory’ a new trend on the Left. For many years they described the Great Replacement as a ‘conspiracy theory’. But there is a growing trend for left politicians to adopt the term and argue — yes, we want to replace the old whites, replacement is good, replacement is inevitable, if you don’t like it you are fascist! Check out this Spanish politician. The Spanish government legalised 500k illegals last week. She took to the stage to state that they will then give them a vote to make real ‘replacement theory’, and this week the same government announced a big set of censorship measures to ‘counter hate’ from the natives. She is not a freak. The same dynamics are at work across Europe and in SW1. Our own NPCs have got a software patch and many are shifting this way…

Summary of market research

What did we do?

After the party conferences in October, over ~4 weeks we investigated British voters in depth for the first time since the 2019 election.

We did 30 focus groups. I did not moderate them. I had two different people moderating roughly half of the groups each — Scarlett Maguire’s Merlin Strategy and Joe Slater. Both did a great job and the results were consistent. I watched every group. (SM and JS ran the groups for me but the analysis here is mine, call them if you want their opinion)

We explored:

People who voted Conservative 2019 (CON19) then Reform 2024 (REF24).
People who voted CON19 then Labour 2024 (LAB24).
People who voted CON19 then LibDem 2024 (LD24).
People who voted CON19 then CON24 but now say ‘Reform’ for next election — to see how they differ from CON19>REF24.
People who voted LAB24 but now say LD or Green.
Tory members.

The constituencies were chosen from seats considered (by people closely engaged in thinking about it) as interesting for the next general election. Some were 18-25, some older but all under 60. This is important to bear in mind when you read the views on immigration as over 60s are MORE hostile.

I wanted to see mainly how the coalition Vote Leave created in 2016/19 had fragmented, why, what they most feared and most wanted to see change, what they think of the old parties and Farage/Reform, what sort of political strategy and stories might work, what SW1 is misunderstanding and so on. But I also had a little look at Tory members and young lefties for contrast.

A big fact often ignored or underrated in SW1 is that Leave won in 2016 by 52-48 but Leave won in about two-thirds of constituencies, while Remain was largely London, Scotland and some cities with lots of graduates.

We also tested some videos, ideas for communication etc. I did some other things I won’t go into now but which did not contradict the core findings below.

Indented are quotes from voters, verbatim but occasional light editing of pauses, repetition, restarts, mmm, errr etc.

NB. I am necessarily generalising and explaining dominant trends, not making claims about every person in a set of ~200. ~200 people might not seem much but trust me — if discussion dominates with 200 it will replicate. If you’re a hack, speak to others doing groups all the time, they’ll tell you they see the big picture below — or else they’re charlatans!

I also generalise about ‘SW1’ but as always remember that there are intelligent good people in the system too, I’m talking about the culturally dominant network.

I do not go into the Tory member groups below.

The most important political issue: ‘the cost of living’

The most important political issue by far is the cost of living. It is easily the most often cited thing. This holds across demographics and geography. Even if someone picks something else as most important, they will almost always agree that the cost of living is a huge issue and often they’ll say ‘yeah it’s more important than [what they said was #1].

‘Cost of living’ is such a dominant phrase I’ll abbreviate it to COL. (In America now Insiders refer to it as ‘affordability’ but my memory of 2023 focus groups is Americans also said ‘cost of living’.)

It’s very important to consider that there is always an issue defined by polls as ‘the top priority’ but this is not necessarily *an issue that dominates discussion*. Commentary is overwhelmingly produced by people who look at polls but spend very little or zero disciplined time talking to normal voters. They rarely grasp this difference. But intensity is important and you can’t judge it only from polls.

It’s possible to identify dominant subjects when they exist — for low six figures! — and it’s very valuable when you can. The main impediment is that politics and old media do not incentivise realism!

E.g 1. In the groups we did in 2015, immigration dominated discussion. Whatever you started talking about, within 2 minutes they’d be discussing immigration. This changed after the referendum as voters thought — whether they were Leave or Remain — well the government will now change approach on immigration so it’s no longer our priority, the referendum means they’ll deal with that. Immigration was no longer the dominant issue, or a top 3 issue, until the Trolley, Sunak and Tory MPs decided on an extreme surge in legal immigration while also allowing the dinghies to spin out of control while babbling nonsense about both. In the 2019 election, the crucial two issues were a) Brexit or second referendum and b) the NHS.

E.g 2. In the groups we did with swing voters in swing states in America Q1 2023, the cost of living dominated discussion with the southern border chaos and ‘the President is too old/senile’ the next most important. These three things were clearly dominant across demographics and states. Many told me I was wrong at the time and that abortion or ‘January 6’ would be central. Post-election analysis confirms that those three things were decisive.

Now the cost of living and immigration/boats dominates political discussion. It’s crucial to realise that dominates means — much much more important than 99% of all the things that SW1 has spent its time discussing since GE24. These two things aren’t 10% or 30% more important, they are the absolute core focus of voters and if you do not have credible stories on these two things then you don’t have a credible story about being the next PM.

For Reform voters, immigration is the main thing they discuss with COL a close second. For everybody else it’s the other way around. For almost everybody the NHS is in the mix and part of a story that fits with COL and immigration, see below.

What do people mean by COL? The main things are:

Prices ‘up up up’ for goods (e.g food) and services (e.g childcare and kids clubs).
Energy, water bills.
Mortgage/rent.
Taxes.
The feeling that all these things are ‘going up faster than my income’.

Characteristic comments on COL:

Bills up up up, everything up, I run out of money by the end of the month.

We both work harder and harder but there’s not much left over, it’s a real struggle.

Everything is up except my wages.

Discussions of anything else in the economy and public services — problems and ‘what to do’ — quickly come back to COL.

Immigration

‘Immigration’ is partly legal, partly illegal including the boats and asylum hotels etc.

SW1 discusses ‘net migration’ but this is not a concept that’s part of normal discussion, it has to be explained, and seems confusing to most — ‘what, you mean that number isn’t the number of immigrants but the number of immigrants minus the number who’ve left, so what’s the number of immigrants then?!’.

The main themes are:

pressure on the COL generally and taxes specifically,
pressure on public services especially NHS,
pressure on infrastructure,
fears of violence (e.g ‘there’s a hotel near me and I’ve got a daughter’),
a general sense of ‘my area / the country is changing in many/most ways for the worse’,
and the sense that ‘the politicians aren’t on our side / aren’t even trying to control it / have no plan’ so it will all get even worse.

The last point is similar to pre-referendum when people would say things like ‘in London they’re not even trying to control it, look at the people running through the Tunnel, it’s a tunnel, if they wanted to stop people in a tunnel they obviously could, it shows they don’t want to’.

There is also discussion of the long term dynamic of seeing areas shift from white to overwhelmingly brown which is obviously connected to fears about the spread of Islam. And the surge of people from places like Somalia, Pakistan etc and the growth of stories about black/brown immigrants committing terrible crimes of violence/sex — and the grooming gangs nightmare — are also entangled. Though there’s not much awareness of the scope and detail of grooming gangs, SW1’s long-term effort to minimise coverage — particularly on BBC — has been generally successful.

So discussions mix up — pressure on services, Islam, white flight, crime, vague ideas of ‘we’re losing our country’, in the context of a) ‘we can’t trust what politicians say’ and b) ‘we can’t trust the media’ / ‘it’s hard to know what’s true’. And also in the context of people being nervy about how much of what they think they can say openly on some of these things. Most people are cagey discussing some fears openly and the cancel culture of the past decade has made many fearful of saying what they think for fear of serious consequences.

My feeling watching these groups is that immigration is much more politically polarised now than in 2015. For some, it is a much bigger deal than it was then. But the legacy of the Brexit battles, the return of Farage, the polarisation of SW1 and the old media so they portray opponents as ‘far right’ etc, also means that LAB24 and LD24 voters are also more likely to attack some attacks on immigration and self-consciously defend pro-immigrant views — even if they also agree that immigration is imposing big costs on services, they think the Boriswave was ‘mental’ etc.

This is complex because many such people when presented with the numbers and basic arguments about the pressure on services largely agree with the anti-immigration people on the core problems, but they are very sensitive to language, tone, aesthetics etc. See below on aesthetics and communication.

I don’t want my kids getting beaten up by boat people.

I’m frightened, it’s out of control, I feel a stranger in my own country.

Every service is at breaking point, I can’t see any plan to get out of this.

We’re a soft touch compared to other countries.

Asylum hotels, we’re paying for them, young men on the boats – I’ve got a 15 year old daughter, I get off the train and look at them and I really worry.

If you don’t want to fit in, bugger off – but we’re getting outnumbered, it’s been a plan for a very long time.

Of course there are some comments along the lines of — lots of them contribute, it’s not all bad, there’s loads working in the NHS, it’s easy for politicians to play on fear etc.

But the overall view of these voters is that politicians have disastrously failed on immigration and it’s been bad for the COL, for safety/crime, and for pressure on services.

Now this is before we get to the experiment we did on numbers.

We asked people to write down two numbers for legal and illegal immigration since Jan 2021.

Then we would tell them that legal net migration since Jan 2021 is about 2.9M plus another half a million illegals (officially) so a total of 3.4M. In some groups we also gave them official figures since 1997. (More in 2025 obviously.) In some groups we also discussed — what is net migration, how many people actually came here and left that goes into this ‘net’ number.

In most groups, the range capturing most guesses in a group was roughly 30k-700k, so wrong by a factor of 5x to 100x. The number of people who put 10k to 50k was surprising to me. Very few guessed millions. Out of 30 groups of 6-8 people, so ~200 people total, only ~5 people over-estimated. One person wrote 3.4M and he worked in a company working in the immigration system.

Although most greatly under-rated the total, they also mostly had the balance between legal and illegal wrong, thinking the ratio is much closer to 50-50 than it is. This is one of the few things SW1 is right about but it’s actually more bad news for SW1! Why? Because when they realise they are wrong, and legal is so much higher than they thought, they are even more strongly in favour of tough action!

Reform voters guessed higher than LAB or LD but still few guessed over 1 million. Tory members were closest to the official figures.

We also showed them a graph of net migration broken down by EU/non-EU.

This is also very surprising for most and provokes some discussion about Brexit. Why would we have left the EU then seen this huge change? Is this surge Ukraine? Some think that Europeans went home because of Brexit so the government compensated by bringing in non-EU people — ‘but then, why so many, and why bring in less skilled people?!’ What, most of this is from outside Europe altogether?!

Views are summarised by the words ‘crazy’, ‘shocking’, ‘scary’.

This graph is crazy, scary. [Repeated many times]

The official numbers were ‘shocking’ for most people. Many described them as ‘scary’. A phrase that recurred in group after group was: ‘not sustainable’.

It’s important that even the most pro-immigration groups who strongly rejected various videos we showed them attacking what’s happened on immigration also said ‘not sustainable’. A few were polarised enough that their reaction was ‘the amount of immigration is not an issue, I find it tricky to engage with any debate on it’ but such people tend to have jobs like ‘lecturer’ and generally be clearly out of whack with mainstream opinion.

It was interesting, and bad for the Trolley and Tories, that the phrase ‘Boriswave’ has broken through from social media to normal discussion.

Many referred to the pictures of the boats and how ‘it’s all young men, which is scary’.

That explains the hotels nearby!

I’ve heard they call it the Boriswave.

Out of control. Also they’ll have 5 or 6 kids. So it’s why our towns are being taken over, our way of life’s being taken over.

We’ll be bankrupt.

We can’t look after our own people, NHS waiting lists are awful and we let in more to join the queue.

Is this what they call the Boriswave? Theyre coming from countries with large families. We’re bringing in a worker with a wife and five kids.

No more bringing people in who have to be in the prayer room at work five times a day, I’m sick of it.

We need some immigrants but we need them to be western in their outlook, don’t expect benefits, they should be net contributors. Now it’s uncontrolled.

We should be as strict as Australia is on us when we try to move there! [Common theme]

We keep voting to cut immigration, why won’t anyone listen and do it?!

I don’t know what to say, how is this being paid for? Flippin’ ’eck, it’s bonkers.

This is why my kids are moving abroad.

I’m just flabbergasted, where are they going, what’s the effect on housing and rent?! Kids will move abroad!

My God. Makes sense of what you see on the street.

You shudder at the prospect of where it’s going. There’s no proper discussion of skills we need which we were supposed to do after Brexit. That one illegal who they sent back is back again! [Referring to Starmer/No10 making a big deal of their ‘deal with France’ whereby we supposedly send back boat people — but the first one quickly returned here on another boat.] We need a real plan to deal with a national emergency.

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!]

I felt ridiculous saying 2 million and I’m way under! It’s really worrying, England isn’t going to be England any more, the Jews got targeted in Manchester, it worries me and it isn’t slowing down, it’s getting worse.

There’s more cash businesses under the radar, all the barber shops and nail bars, it can’t be real, people know there’s something going on but I don’t see anything happening.

Immigration bleeds into concerns over crime:

Stop soft sentences. People around here with masks, it’s chaos, they get away with it, drug dealers. I want someone to smash the gangs, get more police, take the masks off!

We then gave voters three options. The specific wording varied a bit as we changed ideas over the course of the groups but the core distinction was:

A. Keep the status quo.

B. Pro-immigration, we need more of it, diversity is our strength.

C. Drastic action, drastic reduction.

Most voters chose ‘drastic action’ including including LAB and LD. Almost nobody said B even when they self-describe as ‘pro-immigrant’. In many groups everybody chose C, including in groups where most said ‘I’m pro-immigrant’. Some LAB and LD say things like ‘change but not drastic, drastic sounds a bit frightening’, ‘I’m sort of between status quo and drastic, I want change but not drastic’. And some want big changes but they don’t want to think of themselves as ‘anti-immigrant’ because that’s what the bad people are.

NB. The ‘stop’ or ‘drastic action’ option was chosen deliberately to see how people responded to language that in SW1 would be described as ‘extreme’, it was not optimised for maximum support. There are obvious ways to phrase a policy which both motivates those fine with ‘drastic’ and brings along those more nervy about such language. The core point is the support for ‘drastic’ measurers across groups particularly after they see some of the real numbers.

This is also a shift from 2015-16. During the referendum, if someone said ‘it’s a disaster, drastic change, stop almost all of it / pull up the drawbridge’ etc, the others would say ‘no, we need some, we just need to get it under control, pulling up the drawbridge will backfire’. Such comments are much rarer after the Boriswave. A decade later there is much greater support for drastic action especially after they realise the scale is so much bigger than they realised.

It was interesting for me — having pushed the idea of ‘copying the Australian points system’ in the referendum and 2019 election and started to implement it in 2020 — that voters see our useless system as still the opposite of an Australian points system and ‘having a serious Australian points system which is as tough on immigrants coming here as Australia is on us’ remains the overwhelming desire of voters! I.e a campaign for this today would work again and SW1 would scream ‘idiots you’ve already got one’!

The two main things people want in a new immigration system are a) much tougher action on stopping or deporting violent criminals than most Tory MPs support and b) ‘they can support themselves and their family financially’, which voters connect to ‘have they got skills we need’ (hence also to Australia). If they don’t meet these conditions, then ‘send them home’. The idea of a ‘banned country list’ was polarising — Reform voters much more likely to support it, LAB and LD hostile (though I think there are ways of explaining this better than I did in this experiment).

It’s also very important to consider that very few voters are aware of the constant string of insane cases mixing immigration and crime/terrorism/extremism etc. Again, SW1 thinks ‘voters are radicalised by right wing media stories’ but almost none of these stories have got through and close to zero political activity from Tories and Reform on such cases has got through. Current opinions on immigration exist largely unaffected by these crazy cases.

For example, there are ECHR/HRA cases much worse than this recent Christmas one every week. None has broken into the mainstream. They circulate among those already aware but voters like those I talked to here are barely aware of any such cases.

SW1 assumes voters know much more about the grooming gangs nightmare than they do. The years of coverups have been quite successful. It’s also a useful corrective on Twitter as there’s a clear distinction between those who have learned a lot about it from Twitter and the majority who have seen little and only have vague ideas. The gangs is a story where the details are so bad they almost sound like they must be fake to many people — similar to some of the ECHR cases which sound so demented ‘that can’t be true’. As with the immigration numbers, this suggests a lot of potential upside for greater hostility to immigration as people become more aware of the truth.

Welfare/benefits

It was interesting how much the discussion on immigration naturally led to a discussion on welfare and ‘how many English/British people are on benefits / won’t work’.

I was also surprised by how many in the LAB and LD groups voiced this.

The benefits system is seen as deeply unfair. Voters think the politicians and media ignore the scamming. NB. SW1 thinks the issue is ‘exaggerated in the right wing press’. If SW1 people are distant from normal voters, they are even more distant from the world of benefits, scams etc so a whole set of conversations which are normal in much of the country — about how people actually scam the systems — do not feature in the non-work social life of almost anybody who works in SW1.

Aggressive action to curtail benefits regardless of citizenship/ethnicity was strongly supported.

There’s too many on benefits because it pays more than work.

Huge issue, doesn’t get much attention,

There’s so much benefits cheating.

They get a better car than me on benefits and I work, it’s not fair.

This connects to the sense that the young are too into ‘influencer’ culture and ‘don’t want to knuckle down’.

We need some sort of cultural reset. Why are kids walking to school in designer trainers with iPhones?! We had to scrimp and save. Now the young won’t wait they want everything now.

I’ve scrimped and saved, people need to understand sacrifice, the whole ethos is wrong.

Some people need a reality check on what’s essential and what’s aspirational.

NHS

Waiting lists for GPs, hospitals, specialists, scans and A&E — and how it’s got so much worse since covid — is a huge theme. Along with COL and immigration, it’s the third big theme.

In every group people describe nightmares from personal experience or immediate family. In every group someone will describe the dilemma of waiting versus paying to go private, so this theme also feeds into the COL theme.

Voters are more critical of the NHS than 25 years ago.

More money? Voters are much more sceptical that more money will improve much in the NHS than 25 years ago or when I last did this in 2019. They are much more voluble about ‘incredible waste’ than 25 years ago.

They are more fatalistic that the combination of immigration with SW1’s uselessness/sabotage of the country means the NHS is ‘doomed’ and ‘won’t be around’ for their kids/grandkids.

We’re lucky to have it. But it’s under pressure from the borders.

Money down the drain, bottomless pit. People are going private because it can’t deliver.

It’s being bled dry, it needs better management and an overhaul.

There’s no GP appointments, urgent means a scan in 6 or 12 months so I had to go private.

Theres no capacity because of immigration.

I’ve got a 4 yr old son, it took me 9 months for an MRI, then 9 more for results. Crazy. And immigration is making this worse. Why are people coming here and getting the NHS when they haven’t paid into it?

It’s a bottomless pit. More money would probably be wasted.

It is a nightmare trying to get appointments. It’s a fabulous system but not fit for purpose, it needs a total upgrade.

So much waste, it needs modernising before more cash.

It needs more cash, it’s overwhelmed, staff are underpaid, but it needs better management to spend it better.

Bottomless pit. We need to do better on prevention.

There’s scams with agency workers getting three times the pay for the same work.

So much waste and so much immigration.

I was in A&E last week, half a dozen couldn’t speak English so needed interpreters, we’re paying for this!

I sell devices to the NHS, there’s so much waste, the management doesnt’t know what they’re doing, scrap managers and it would work. And we have immigrants being treated who don’t pay a red cent, no — bugger off!

The level of bureaucracy is unbelievable, I work on NHS building projects, everything takes forever.

I’ve had to deal with it a lot recently, it’s been a eye opener. It’s got so much worse recently, so many staff can’t speak English, two hospitals can’t communicate records with each other, there’s no system, it’s frightening. Needs not just money but restructuring everything.

My sister in law goes in to hospital for her chemo then is told ‘oh did nobody tell you we can’t do it today cos your bloods aren’t right’, nobody called her, it’s terrible.

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.

The idea ‘it’s overwhelmed’ and ‘so much waste’ recurs in group after group.

Phrases like ‘money down the drain’ and ‘bottomless pit’ recur and there’s a lot of anger at ‘people who don’t pay in are bleeding it dry’. Often in a group someone working in or around the NHS will explain to the group amazingly stupid ways the NHS wastes money, delays everything etc because of ‘the terrible management’. This is behind repeated calls to ‘slash the management’, ‘give it more but cut management’. (But of course what it needs to avoid the insane waste is a) non-insane incentives from the top plus b) better management.)

But people also mention ‘cuts’ even after they’ve looked at graphs showing a remorseless rise in spending since the 1990s.

Themes of the NHS, immigration, COL and taxes come together:

Yes more money, but it won’t solve anything because it wastes so much, the NHS was a great idea but it’s in big trouble, swamped by immigration, it needs some sort of big reboot, but I don’t know what, it’s really sad.

There’s much anger at ‘immigrants who don’t pay in bleeding the NHS dry’ and support for restricting access to immigrants ‘who haven’t paid in’. But such changes would also have to be communicated carefully — people support ‘stop immigrants who haven’t paid in clogging up A&E’ but they also don’t want immigrants turned away to die in a true emergency! In the latter case, consensus on, say, a Somali who has paid nothing in is probably something like ‘treat the emergency then deport him so he doesn’t cost us any more and send others back who don’t contribute’.

Discussion of the NHS is repeatedly entangled with immigration, especially but not only in Reform groups:

Haven’t paid in, you cant use it!

I’d privatise it. The NHS doesn’t work. Wastes so much money. Needs more structure and less waste, like Switzerland. Everyone pays in so you can’t abuse it.

Goes back to immigration!

It needs more money but we got to stop the immigrants coming in accessing for free.

I’m not sure it’s sustainable, we’re going to need to pay more, it pains me, but we can’t continue with a bottomless pit and everybody coming in. We’re past the point of no return.

It’s so unfair, my grandparents paid into it all their lives now they can’t get appointments, it’s so unfair so many people now use it without paying in. My dad was getting phone calls to his flat to talk to him about appointments when he was in the hospital, how could they not know this?!

The NHS was the best idea in the world but we let everyone in and now it can’t work, it’ll be privatised.

There’s also a double-edged discussion on immigration and staff. On one hand, there is much more anger at ‘staff who can’t speak English, it’s crazy, dangerous’ etc than 25/5 years ago. But also ‘the NHS now relies on foreigners/immigrants’ and ‘lots of them are great and have contributed a lot’. Generally voters see the burdens from immigration as greater than the gains to the NHS but SW1 tends to think the opposite.

There’s almost no realisation of the appalling way that Whitehall, pushed by HMT, has incentivised importing staff rather than training people — and, even crazier, the way HMT does budgets means we pay for people to train as GPs then don’t give them jobs. (And the NHS has changed how jobs are allocated in crazy ways.) So again — there is scope for campaigns to highlight very stupid things both parties have gone along with to mobilise support for change.

There’s sympathy for staff, especially nurses and especially from people who’ve witnessed nightmare scenes of crowded chaos, but also more willingness to describe terrible staff than 25 years ago.

The argument that ‘free at the point of use’ inevitably means rationing and waiting lists unlike other European countries doesn’t really work with most in these groups (still after 25 years). It’s too abstract and few voters know how others organise health in Europe beyond a vague ‘they have some sort of insurance’.

We showed a graph of waiting list numbers in Britain vs European countries. This does get them talking but it doesn’t lead to ‘we should change how health works here to how Europe does it’.

But there is definitely more support for radical changes, including tax breaks for going private, than 25 or 10 years ago. Especially if it is presented as a) ‘fair’ because if you have to go private because the NHS can’t see your family, then ‘it’s not fair to pay twice’ etc, and b) this will take the burden off NHS waiting lists. Reform voters are most open to the view that ‘the old model has failed and we have to try something new and it’s fair to give tax relief if you have to go private’. But there are also LAB and LD voters open to the argument.

Sounds a great idea but is it feasible, sustainable?

Might just benefit upper middle income.

It’s a sticking plaster for the real issue, which is how we spend the money.

Logical but not sure how it would impact me, and what about the people who can’t afford to go private?

Two minds. If we open the floodgates there’s no closing them. But we can’t keep going how we are. Somethings got to change. It doesn’t work now, it needs upgrading somehow.

Yes to tax breaks but they won’t do it.

I’m in two minds — I don’t want private health, but the old system was great but isn’t working any more, I don’t know what to think.

Sounds ok but what about the people who can’t afford to go private. [This was repeated. Even in groups quite open to the idea, many say ‘reasonable idea, I can see how it works if you can afford to go private then reclaim, but what if you can’t afford to go private?’]

Absolutely fair, why not.

I think we should have insurance. We can’t afford to keep putting money into the NHS.

I’ve never heard of this idea on private tax relief, it’s good. The NHS doesn’t need more money, they’re rubbish at how they spend it. Management is absolutely rubbish. It was ludicrous putting it in the Olympics, it’s crap, it’s got to stop being a sacrosanct subject.

There’s no other choice, I’ve got to use private cos we just can’t get an appointment. We should be able to claim it back or it will be privatised like America.

I’d never have thought about it ten years ago but now I use private, I can’t get an appointment, the NHS doctor doesn’t answer the phone, I can’t get an appointment. Yeah, claim it back.

I used private a few weeks ago for a knee operation and it was embarrassing how fast it was compared to a friend on the NHS. It was good for me, it’s not fair, but the NHS can’t sort itself out.

Frightening graphs. I don’t see why you shouldnt be able to claim the money back, seems fair. We need to discuss what the NHS offers. But it wont happen.

Great idea but I can’t see it happening. If everybody’s claiming their money back, how will the government make the taxes work out?

But there remains a lot of fear about ‘going private’ because it is assumed that the combination of politicians and big businesses will generate an unfair system. Voters do not trust Labour, Tories or Reform to introduce a new, fair and competent insurance scheme here because they assume politicians are dishonest and/or useless so they will suffer. And many a) do not connect tax relief with reducing the NHS burden and/or b) think it will suck staff from the NHS and therefore be a ‘vicious circle’.

I don’t know what Europe does. Making it private is bad. Just support it! I dunno…

Anything private is for profit so would be very bad.

The problem is a lack of health professionals. Improving money in private would just pull the staff over to private and the NHS would suffer. Too much privatisation already. People leave the NHS, join an agency and get paid double.

The NHS is already outsourcing operations to private which is a waste of money.

Privatising NHS is scary. Look at America, bills to get in an ambulance.

Agree. Don’t want be lining pockets of big insurance companies.

My main worry about Nigel is privatising the NHS. Will this claiming back of tax lead to privatisation, will they pull the rug out from under us?

Disagree with it. If you start refunding people, you’re just adding costs, the NHS is the rock on which the country is built so I don’t like defunding it like this.

I feel privatisation is coming but i don’t know how it will work. The NHS will be bled dry and will have to privatise. Maybe it will be great but I really worry about huge inequalities.

Sounds like robbing Peter to pay Paul. The NHS loses money. If you can afford to pay for it, you can afford it!

Voters are not familiar with the cash/real terms distinction and few could confidently explain it.

I think something like this represents a broad consensus of these voters:

It’s had loads more money and it’s still failing and heading downhill.
I/family have suffered from waiting lists [GP/A&E/scans etc].
It’s overwhelmed by demand including, but not only, immigration.
Many of the staff [not management] are underpaid and have very tough jobs.
The management is rubbish and wastes massive amounts.
Yes it should pay nurses and doctors more.
But this won’t fix the problems.
It needs better management and priorities.
It should focus more on prevention.
Stop immigrants scamming it.
Feels like it’s going private, I don’t like this but it feels inevitable.
Don’t want the American system where you’re bankrupted.
Sceptical about any political plan because our politicians are rubbish. There won’t be any serious political debate about the problems or options for action.
The discussion depresses me, maybe my kids should leave but where?

I was interested that there was no organic mention of any of the terrible scandals of the past decade. This also suggests there is scope for a focused campaign informing people of facts about NHS failure as a foundation for arguments about what to change.

I remain very sceptical about the ability of mainstream politicians/organisations on the right to persuade people of a major change of approach. I think it can be done and one can see how to do it but a) it is objectively hard and b) the yookay right is so rubbish at campaigns/communication there is almost no chance of it being done properly and it could easily be counterproductive.

For many years I’ve told people on the right the way to change the NHS is to build a campaign for change led by health professionals and NHS staff. They are the ones with most moral credibility. Labour MPs who are happy to blast Tory MPs and think tanks will flee from TV rather than argue with GPs and nurses. But the Right can’t build and it’s easier to scam donors to write endless papers nobody reads. Real campaigns take hard work and time and are not the sort of thing that gets funded.

The big picture: over 25 years, belief in and confidence in the NHS has fallen significantly, people are much more fatalistic it will survive, the fatalism is driven by mass immigration and the uselessness of successive governments, people don’t want a private system but think ‘the politicians’ will give them it out of venality or uselessness, they don’t know how other countries work or how insurance works in places like Switzerland/France, and ‘it won’t be around for our grandkids if we carry on like the last twenty years’.

‘Productivity’, ‘growth’

We gave them a paragraph on the unprecedented stalling productivity and real wages since 2008 — the worst period since Napoleon! — and a graph of Britain vs Poland GDP per capita growth, with Poland heading toward overtaking us in a few years.

Sadly for me, though not surprisingly, the relatively abstract discussion of ‘growth’ and GDP — and the importance of growing by 2% or 4% over a few decades for normal wages — did not work well. Most people do not think about productivity or the connection between productivity and their wages.

Most defaulted to discussing the COL crisis and familiar problems, not the arguments they were asked to discuss.

There is general support for the idea that small businesses are ‘strangled’ by regulation and taxes. There is a sense that business and individuals are leaving Britain because of the regulation/tax regime which ‘sucks people dry’. There is much more support for measures framed as ‘for small businesses’ than ‘for business’ as there is more suspicion that big businesses will scam/exploit.

Many I know are thinking of leaving England, it’s really hard for a young person to start a business, the government hits you with taxes, so people want to go elsewhere so they can do something.

I’m self employed, it seems we’re punished for everything, we work hard we get taxed, we own something we get taxed, we build a pension we get taxed, of course we’re getting poorer, they’re taxing us out of existence, how can we get building when they tax the people who build for the nation, it’s disgusting, how can we get rich again, how can we even be a safe country, cos we’re not safe especially for women!

Yeah I’m in construction, I do NHS projects, it takes sooooo long to get projects going, I work on projects for 3 years just talking, then sometimes they get shelved, it’s so depressing.

My kids are looking to leave because of wages and taxes. It’s really sad for me.

There is deep hatred for utility companies. I’ve tried for 25 years to persuade the Right about how much damage the 1990s privatised utilities have done to support for business and capitalism. I failed. In No10 I said we should radically change the whole regulatory structure for these companies and how senior management are paid, to align incentives properly. HMT officials looked like they wanted to puke. Whitehall is strongly opposed to action and the MPs go along even though it’s a huge political open goal from Greens to Reform.

They fail, they put up bills, they pay huge dividends and bonuses, it’s corrupt.

Some companies need a lot MORE regulation like water and energy companies.

There is support for the idea of bringing manufacturing back and reversing the offshoring trends of many decades but they assume the MPs will never do it. Westminster people find it extremely hard to think how people outside London think about this. See this gem in the NPC Bible, the FT, by one of SW1’s most delusional pundits, Stephen ‘Liz Truss doesn’t care about optics’ Bush.

Voters listening to Icelanders on Steinways are not so interested in manufacturing in the Midlands but that’s not a good guide to general opinion.

There is a feeling among those over ~45 that younger people ‘they all want to be influencers so they don’t have to work’. The Polish success prompts reflection on British work ethic.

The Poles are grafters. A lot of English people don’t want to do the job. I can see they’re [Poland] growing because they have the right mindset.

Some people already disposed to agree agreed but one cannot claim that such discussion will be a communication success. A lot of people respond along the lines of:

It’s all a bit above me, I just don’t know about this / don’t understand it.

All a bit bit baffling to me honestly.

If you are trying to build support, change minds etc with mainstream voters, you should focus on stories, not abstractions from seminars, and you should not talk like normal Today program hosts/guests.

I suspected this would be the case but part of the point of this exercise was to check whether things I saw for many years are still true.

Debt and interest payments

Voters did not engage with the debt figures and debt repayment.

Many do worry about debt when confronted with the numbers. But the numbers are so big they’re incomprehensible so the problem seems so big it’s better ignored. Some worry that controlling the debt means less spending ‘so where do they cut?’

Can’t get my head around it, the numbers are too big!

Would be nice to get it [debt] down but where would the cuts come? Don’t we need to invest in things like education?

I can’t think about this, it’s too big, the politicians are paid to do it.

Mince were nine pound fifty last week!

Honestly I don’t understand debt and how countries pay it, I don’t understand the whole thing, what are all the countries paying to who?

I don’t understand what 100B is or whether I shd worry, Im struggling to be bothered honestly.

Look at Greece, it got bailed out, it was all a bit made up, the whole concept of debt is made up, it’s why billionaires borrow against assets to avoid tax. When the Tories started repaying debt it was the stupidest thing. The whole world works on debt. But we should spend the money well which we’re not.

Either something will fix it or it’ll blow up and we’ll be gone, I don’t understand it.

Austerity is why we’re in the problem we’re in, let’s try something different!

Huge issue, doesn’t get much attention, debt repayments higher than department budgets is staggering.

Agree it’s a problem but everything needs more money so how do we do it?

Spending is crazy. HS2 is crazy. We’re living outside our means.

The penny’s just dropped that we’re paying all these taxes to pay the debt interest!

It’s very hard to persuade people about debt when they’re struggling so much now, they don’t want to go back to Osborne and austerity, so it may be true but it’s a hard sell.

It’s a vicious circle, immigration out of control, spending up, debt up, it’s all connected.

It’s worth strategic politicians warning on the debt so they have credibility when the balloon goes up but, absent a Lee Kuan Yew level leader, nobody in SW1 will be able to get voters to focus on this before a crisis forces attention (even if they try really hard with serious resources, which is unlikely). After all, the MPs and high status pundits don’t engage with this, as with other critical issues, so why should voters.

But it can be a powerful play for a politician to take a long term view, tell the truth, explain things seriously, even though at the time almost everyone around will ignore, mock etc. When crises come, those seen as having seen it coming have more moral credibility. And the farce of monetary policy Ponzi will hit the buffers, we just don’t know when. An ambitious politician should experiment with how to explain the debt best a) visually, b) what language to use.

How views on Net Zero have changed 2019-24

I last focused hard on British voters in 2019. May did the Net Zero pledge and all SW1 was locked in. Five years later it was interesting and surprising to me how much this has changed and, seeing this, how clear it is that SW1 in stuck in the past.

We showed them a graph of British and PRC emissions (taken from Our world in data) with a paragraph of text.

Text shown to groups:

Britain is only one percent of global carbon emissions, we’re irrelevant to the effects of climate change. But you are paying much higher energy bills because governments have been trying to push this green line [i.e on the graph] to zero while the China line heads to the moon.

It’s crazy for us to impose huge costs on British families and businesses while China increases carbon emissions every year by much more than all Britain’s emissions.

We should change priorities on the environment. Our priority should be cleaning pollution in our food, air, and rivers and water supplies – not global carbon emissions.

Our best contribution to climate change is inventing new technology which the whole earth can use. We should stop putting up families’ and companies’ energy bills and stop the drive to zero carbon emissions by 2030 which is bankrupting us pointlessly.

Unlike on debt and productivity, this landed.

Crudely, Reform voters almost all agreed with the basic argument here, often said effectively ‘spot on’, and are happy to ‘ditch Net Zero’.

LibDems and Labour voters prefer a softer message and there are more who say ‘I don’t want to ditch Net Zero’ but overall there is clear support for a big shift of policy.

I agree with the statement. it’s not worth the costs. I’d prefer to focus on pollution and technology.

We’re doing so much and it’s costing us a fortune while other countries do what they want.

Why did we send so much production to China? Who pushed it?

The graph shows what we’re doing is a drop in the ocean. Yeah maybe focus on pollution might be money better spent.

I’m worried about backtracking when everyone has been aiming for this and investing in it.

I think we’re doing too much relative to other big countries, we’re pushing and pushing and it’s stunting growth and investment. New technology is great. We shouldn’t disable ourselves from growing just to rush to Net Zero.

We sold off our infrastructure to private companies who rip us off, pollute, and pay off to the billionaires who now own them.

Totally agree. We’re a drop in the ocean while China’s chucking up power stations and burning coal. We need to pivot and look at the environment in Britain.

It’s misleading because theres so many more people in China and they’re doing loads of green energy. Oil companies are against clean energy. This argument is coddwallop, we should have started earlier and we could be on a post-empirical [not a typo but unclear what ‘post-empirical’ was supposed to mean!] path, and it’s racist blaming China. It should all be per capita. [Lib Dem lecturer]

I still think we can’t give up but agree the last two paragraphs.

That graph is shocking. China obviously doesn’t care while we’re working towards targets, I don’t know what to say!

We’re a drop in the ocean. We had to set a precedent but we’ve reached a point where priorities should shift to pollution and local problems.

100% agree. Kick Net Zero out the door. We’re just outsourcing manufacturing to China. I know climate change is happening but the Net Zero thing is absolute bollocks.

We signed up to it by a certain date. China won’t and is taking over the world. It’s a nightmare.

I’m for saving nature but we’re 1% – why should we be paying for this.

America and China aren’t going to do it so why should we be suffering?

Agree, China imports everything here, the government’s probably getting a back hander from China to screw us.

We shouldn’t be putting energy prices up more. [Often repeated] We’ve been too focused on net zero. What about our water companies? Why keep putting up prices on energy bills?

I’ve flown over China and see the coal stations pumping out smoke. The cost to us is astronomical. It could cripple the country.

Global warming is an issue but China and America emissions are up up up, ours are tiny, we’ve got much bigger problems. It’s [UK policy] deckchairs on the Titanic.

We’re paying too much for our energy and not making much impact so yeah agree.

Agree. We shouldn’t be charging families a fortune when other huge countries outweigh us.

France runs our energy companies. We pay to subsidise Europeans.

These energy companies are putting up prices, they exploit winter!

The phrase ‘drop in the ocean’ recurs across groups.

Again (see above), a view which unites voters is hatred for the utility companies who seem to profit from higher bills, pay themselves a fortune, and provide rubbish service.

The core of a winning argument is something like:

You’ve been paying much higher energy bills making the cost of living worse…

To reduce British carbon emissions which are a drop in the ocean compared to the big countries…

While the big countries have massively increased their emissions…

So you’ve been suffering pointlessly…

We should change priorities…

Focus on technology to deal with carbon emissions and stop increasing your energy bills…

Focus on pollution in our water, air, food by companies which have ripped us off…

This shift means lower bills, more conservation, better environment…

For those interested in this issue, this graph will be food for thought. Another big difference between Europe/UK and America now is that the White House and Silicon Valley are really trying to increase electricity production urgently because the AI race with China is seen as so critical, while the EU let the Commission kneecap AI and drive its young researchers abroad while the UK has been kneecapped by Tory/Labour energy policy for over 20 years.

Brexit

A huge subject but I wanted to explore other things so did not probe it. Obviously it was mentioned, particularly in the context of a) immigration and b) the general chaos of the past decade.

People who voted Leave are very depressed/angry with Trolley and Sunak and the Tories. Those who voted Tory in 2019 feel extremely let down. (I share their pain!) They voted for change but feel ‘we voted for change in 2016 and 2019 but they won’t give us change’.

People who voted Remain think it’s been bad.

SW1 misreads the polls showing people think ‘Brexit hasn’t worked’ because SW1 is dominated by people who are unreconciled to losing in 2016/19 and want the government to start rejoining. They therefore think ‘Brexit hasn’t worked’ will translate into ‘support for Rejoin’.

Wrong. Voters want a government to focus on the COL, immigration, fixing NHS, crime etc. The last thing most want to see is SW1 arguing about Brexit and the constitution again.

And, under-appreciated in SW1, if an entity as hated as this government tries to make the case for Rejoin, its unpopularity would discredit the argument. Look at what happened to ID cards, popular for years until Starmer adopted it then the polls collapsed.

Of course there is a set of voters who do want to Rejoin and were never reconciled to Leave. And this set of voters has a lot of SW1 MPs, hacks, spads and officials in it so it is very voluble. But this set of people have, on average, political views far from mainstream, especially on immigration, security and crime.

There is also a lesson here for those of us who want to repeal the HRA. This campaign will work if and only if it is tied to immediate core concerns — immigration, crime, terrorism, chaos. It will fail if it is treated abstractly. The SW1 Right did not understand this on Brexit so there is scope for them to botch the HRA/ECHR.

Similarly, despite my interest in Ukraine this is another big subject I did not delve into. The most striking thing about Ukraine was how little it was mentioned and the way people spoke about the war as in the past, almost as if it’s over. It’s main point of reference was its effect on energy bills and COL, though some also mentioned immigration from there (though nobody knew the scale of this).

In future projects I’ll explore Brexit and Ukraine.

Views on SW1/leaders?

Voters are undoubtedly more angry and depressed than I’ve seen them since I first did focus groups in 1999. They were more angry and depressed in 2019 than in 1999 but the experience of Tory disaster then Starmer has made them even more angry and depressed.

SW1 has greatly underrated how much hatred there is for them, even after experiencing the expenses scandal. If you think back to the last week of the referendum, SW1 inadvertently displayed just how out of touch it was. In response to the terrible murder of Jo Cox, SW1 flung itself into pro-MP and pro-Westminster rhetoric in the last week of the campaign. MPs tweeted out emojis: ‘We ❤️ our MP’. This was completely out of touch with the country outside the M25 but MPs were, as so often, overcome with an emotional wave inside SW1 and didn’t realise it. (It’s now forgotten that the Leave supporting MPs almost all thought the murder had killed Leave’s chances and effectively gave up on the campaign, and it was only because we were doing focus groups outside London we knew in HQ that SW1 had greatly misjudged the mood, though as usual we couldn’t persuade MPs.)

To stress again: we won the North East referendum in 2004 by turning it into a referendum on whether voters liked and trusted SW1. This was 20 years ago. Since then, they’ve had repeated vast failures — Afghanistan, Iraq, the financial crisis etc. Then the referendum. Then three years of SW1 trying to get out of the referendum and making the country a laughing stock (2016-19), then the constitutional crisis and election of 2019, then covid, then the Trolley’s collapse then the farces of Truss, Sunak and Starmer. Their hatred for MPs and Westminster has grown and grown. Every time there is violence against MPs the pundits emote about how lucky we are to have them. This is now how voters respond.

There is a lot of suspicion that MPs must be being paid to do the dumb things they do as this is one of the few ways to make sense of how dumb and hostile SW1 seems.

Over and over again you hear the same phrases:

The government’s working against us.

They’re all the same — promise things, don’t deliver. Overpromise underdeliver.

Out of touch, they don’t care about normal families.

They lie all the time.

It’s like they hate us, they’re not on our side.

They suck us dry.

And worse language.

Starmer

The views on Starmer were the most relentlessly negative, with close to zero redeeming feature, I’ve ever heard in 25 years about anyone in SW1.

Some phrases/themes which recurred many times in bold:

Not a leader / no leadership.

No backbone / so weak / sits on the fence.

Lots of promises, haven’t happened.

Useless.

Terrible priorities.

Very disappointed, he inherited a Tory disaster but I don’t see any drive or a plan.

We needed a change of party but he’s not the man for the job.

I wanted change then he took the money from the old people.

Can’t wait to get rid of him.

No idea what he stands for, flip flops on everything. Now everyone hates him. The people who really run things will leak something and get rid of him when they want to change.

How can you have an opinion on him when he changes his mind every day?

He said ‘honest politics’ but he’s the biggest liar, worst ever PM.

Looks like a clown on the world stage, no real authority, other leaders are direct, not him.

A joke, appalled, nothing else to say.

Winter fuel sums up his disastrous priorities and the general problem with SW1 — we need to save money but the politicians always choose the worst ways to do it, hitting the wrong people, not immigrants and benefit scammers who should be where savings come.

News about minor matters seems another sign of uselessness when your core reputation is so bad. Bill Clinton could talk about third order issues and voters thought it a sign he was in touch. For Starmer it’s the opposite, a sign he’s out of his depth and can’t do the job (e.g ‘on about a sugar tax when everything’s going wrong’).

He’s enraged everybody on immigration. Those who think it’s a huge issue and want action think he’s useless and weak. And others who think immigration is exaggerated as an issue attack him from the left for empty rhetoric that just helps Farage and pointlessly diverts everyone from other important issues — ‘he isn’t even sorting out immigration so what he says is pointless’.

This is one of the few things I agree with a lot of pundits I normally disagree with — his approach to immigration is a disaster whether you agree with me on it or are a normal SW1 lefty. Having watched Sunak’s disaster on the boats, Starmer has copied it — raising the salience of an issue and promising to fix it then extremely visibly the problems get worse and worse yet he carries on with rhetoric that’s clearly divorced from reality and is easily mocked — e.g people noticed the ‘one in one out’ farce with France leading to us paying someone to go back to France who then got on another boat and returned. To anybody who noticed this story it’s aperfect emblem of British immigration policy for decades — a farce.

It’s almost unrelenting negativity. The only relief he gets is ‘he inherited a nightmare from the Tories so it’s not all his fault / he got a hospital pass’.

SW1 is full of debates about different ‘communication strategies’. This is all displacement activity. Starmer’s persona seems the opposite of a real leader to his allies in No10, never mind voters. The idea of ‘better communication’ changing the above is laughable. The only way to change the above is to actually be a completely different sort of PM and No10 and change the things the voters want changing.

This can’t happen for the reasons I explained in 2024-25. Starmer is fundamentally an utter dud plus doing what voters want now means war with powerful interests in SW1 he won’t fight. He’s trapped and Labour is trapped as long as he’s in No10.

All the chatter about relaunches, communication and staff is displacement activity to avoid facing he is an irredeemable dud and the voters know it.

Kemi

There’s not much to say about KB.

Voters know almost nothing about her. She’s much closer to invisible than I’d realised. Nobody discusses anything important she’s said and almost nobody can name a single thing they think she’s said, done or promised. She’s close to a black hole.

The reason is not all her fault or because of her failings. It’s partly because these voters pay so little attention to the Tories now.

The Tories have just lost all relevance, I don’t know anything about her because they’re not relevant any more so I don’t pay attention to them.

Agree, me neither.

She was brought in to do the graveyard shift. She’ll never be PM. Weak. Useless.

No impressions at all.

Useless.

I’ve not seen anything she’s done, I’ve got no view on her.

I don’t see anything from the Tories any more, they’re just not relevant.

Unlike Starmer, there is not a wall of negativity about her. It’s more a wall of indifference/blank looks because they don’t pay any attention to the Tories. Much of the vocal negativity about the Tories has also faded because they aren’t seen as providing any sort of alternative so voters don’t discuss them as if they might be a new government. ‘Not relevant’ was a regular phrase.

People talk as if the next election choice is between Labour and Farage, not Labour and Tories.

When you see people say ‘her disapproval numbers aren’t bad / better than Farage’, remember — this is because she has made such little impression most people have no serious views about her of any kind. An average ‘median voter’ has much more knowledge about, and opinions on, David Beckham’s son than Kemi.

Jenrick

[NB. The section immediately below was written before he was fired by KB on 15/1. I add a PS at the end of the section.]

I was surprised how invisible he is. Like SW1, I’d overestimated the reach of his videos and coverage of them.

Almost nobody recognises him, never mind knows anything about him. In many groups nobody recognised him or just one thought they might but couldn’t remember his name or position. If someone does know his name there’s only one.

No idea who he is.

Ahhh whatshisname, rhymes with Kendrick?!

Is he Lib Dem leader?

Weak. Private school boy.

Face rings a bell.

Name rings a bell, face doesn’t.

More importantly, when we played videos that his team thinks are successful, almost everyone strongly reacts against him including Reform voters who most agree with his videos.

This is because:

Unfortunately for Jenrick, people don’t like his look or voice. This is very bad for politicians because it isn’t something they have much control over. I was reminded of watching people discuss Hague 1997-2001. People would pull faces at him on screen and say ‘I can’t stand watching him, and his voice, my god, I grab the remote when he comes on to switch him off’. All the SW1 chat about ‘brilliant at PMQs’ just fooled SW1.
The aesthetics of the videos does not work for non-Reform voters. They make him seem more untrustworthy, more of a ‘normal politician’ which is a huge negative. This aesthetics issue is a much broader issue than just Jenrick and is relevant to communication generally, see below.

Very manipulative.

Very aggressive.

Inflammatory.

Marketed towards children, not real information.

Propaganda.

Divisive.

Everything thats wrong with politics.

Very untrustworthy.

Race baiting.

We do need change but I’m worried about that approach.

Bit too Trumpy, incitement, but I agree with the message!

And such comments come not just from those who hate Tories and/or describe themselves as pro-immigrant but also from people who voted Leave and/or are more hostile to the last twenty years of immigration than 99% of SW1!

There was occasional praise, like ‘Jenrick is the only one in the Tories doing this, hats off to him.’ But even when people liked the video they tended to say things like, I agree with it but it would be more persuasive if done differently and/or I agree but I don’t like the look of him.

I didn’t look much at other characters SW1 is interested in partly because it was clear early that very few voters know who any of them are. E.g It was surprising how little recognition there was of Cleverley, never mind less prominent people. I looked at some other possible candidates to replace Kemi but won’t go into that here.

PS. Written post-15/1 when RJ was fired…

He will be a little more known now but probably not positively given most of the coverage was about the farce of the circumstances.

Unless he changes how he communicates he will not be able to reach out to new voters for Reform. But also per above there’s a lot he can’t do much about even if he tries to change. He can’t change how he looks and sounds and he can’t change his past views and support.

Farage: he’ll act on immigration but there’s ‘no team, no plan’

Voters no longer see NF as PM as an outside chance, a weird idea of low probability. Many regard it as (very) likely whether they are positive or negative. This is obviously connected to the sense that a) both old parties have collapsed, b) people want change they can’t/won’t deliver, c) the Tories let immigration out of control.

NF is obviously polarising.

A minority are real fans. He’s right about Brexit. Right about immigration. He’s what we need. Not a normal politician. Says what he thinks. He’ll be a good PM.

Others think of him as: odious, liar, feeds on fear in the news, would be a disaster.

Many are unsure: he’s right on immigration but what else would he do, what would he do on the cost of living, I’m not sure he could do the job of PM, I haven’t made my mind up yet.

He gets credit for consistency on immigration and generally being right that both old parties have been a disaster on it.

Nobody has a sense of what else he would do. As with Tories and Labour, the conventional ‘announcements’ from Reform make near-zero effect because they are not repeated and do not fit into an overall story that is resonant and consistent.

Doubts about him as PM are widespread including among those saying they’ll vote Reform. A common thread in discussions is:

He’s been consistent on immigration for twenty years so he’ll probably do a lot there, he’ll stop the boats and get numbers down and this will help the COL and services.
But he’s got ‘no team’ and ‘no plan’ — ‘no substance’ — apart from immigration.
What will he do about the COL? He might collapse like Truss and make the economy even worse.
I’m worried he won’t be able to do the job of PM, he won’t be able to deliver and it’ll be another disaster.
But we need change and I can’t vote Tory or Labour so I suppose give him a chance, what else can we do?!

These fundamental things are crucial and linked: can he do the job of PM when he’s got no team and no plan?

People feel something’s gotta be done, borders have got worse and worse, a huge impact on all services, and he’s outspoken on it so he’s on the up.

Feeds on fear in the news

Odious. Bolshy.

Ok in cabinet but not PM.

Cosies up to Trump, nasty man, full of lies and propaganda.

Tries to relate to people but don’t think he really does.

He’s smart but if he’s PM, not much substance.

Not going to follow through on most things. Good at headlines not substance.

I’m quite positive, I think he could do it.

My fear is he can’t really deliver.

He’ll probably win because people are desperate for change. I want change.

Yeah he’ll probably win because of immigration. Bit like Trump. People are very frustrated and moving right. But can he deliver?

He’s good at highlighting issues like immigration. But what about the economy? Could be damaging, his lack of depth.

Im terrified of him as PM. Women’s rights. People on benefits. All out the window. He spouts what the white skinheads and embodies racism. I don’t want him as PM.

He’s extreme but it’s extreme times, he’s got a good chance.

I’m very mixed. He’s popular on immigration. But what other policies has he got?

Honest not like the others. He cares about the north.

He’s got backbone. He sticks to his ideas like Thatcher, others skirt around.

He speaks his mind.

Straightforward, says what others wont.

Destructive but thats what we need!

He needs a good team. He can’t do any worse than what we’ve had.

Immigration would be tackled but I don’t know about anything else. [Common theme]

Might win, he’ll say anything, but couldn’t organise a piss up in brewery.

I worry who is around him, what idiots he brings in. I know the current thing is broken but he might break it even more.

He’s not changed his tune on immigration, not flipflopping like Starmer, stuck to his convictions, we need some of that in politics.

He’s for our country, he might get it back to where it was, that’s good, but he’s a bit out there, but could it be any worse, no, six years ago I’d have said No, but now maybe, he’s on our side.

All our politicians talk, promise, then don’t do it, nothing materialises, I want our country back the way it was twenty years ago, if we keep going the way we are we won’t have our country, but my fear is politicians are corrupt, in it for themselves so, I’m not convinced.

I don’t think he’s 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.

It’s going his way because everybody’s lost faith in everybody else.

Best of the rest, he’s more in touch with the working class.

I’m warming towards him, straight talker, stands for the ordinary people more which is what we need.

Clear on immigration, good. But the rest of his policies are unclear, he needs to get deeper on stuff other than immigration.

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.

I don’t think anybody will make a difference.

He’s more a leader than the others, he can’t be any worse, give him a go.

I’m fed up of all of them, we all feel let down, happy to give him a go but dunno if he’s up to the task. At least he says what he thinks.

He’s convincing 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.

He’ll win but it’s almost a vote against the other parties cos they’re so bad, more than a vote for something.

Give him a chance cos Labour and Tories failed, he might do something on immigration, worth a try but I doubt he can run the country.

To stress, there is a small minority who are big fans. But the above sentiments reflect the perspective of critical voters who want deep change but are not decided who they’ll vote for.

How stories on policy, leaders, SW1 come together

There’s a pattern in conversations among these sort of voters that links the core themes above.

It goes something like:

The cost of living is a nightmare.

Immigration is a nightmare.

The Tories screwed us.

Now Labour is screwing us.

They’re destroying the country, it’s like they hate us.

What can we do?

I’m voting Farage.

Yeah, he probably will do something about immigration, he’s been consistent on that for 20 years. But what about the economy? He hasn’t got a plan. He hasn’t got a team. What if it’s just a shambles? What if he gets in and the economy goes tits up and we’re in an even bigger mess? What if the cost of living gets even worse, we’re screwed?

Yeah, I agree, no plan, no team. But what else can we do? We can’t vote Tory. We can’t vote Labour. We’ve got to roll the dice on something new haven’t we?

Yeah — or leave. Maybe we’re finished, maybe they’ve [Westminster] just screwed us.

I want my kids to leave.

Me too.

But where?

Australia has a proper points system.

That’s why I voted for Brexit!

Me too, I hate them so much!

People are considering Farage out of desperation but they fear ‘no plan, no team’. And the general depression leads to discussion of ‘are we finished’, then ‘should our kids get out’, but ‘where can we go?’.

The aesthetics of right wing videos

I won’t go into it much but the basics are simple.

There is a set of ideas on things like immigration, Islam, crime that can win support across party lines and Leave/Remain lines.

But aesthetics are particularly important on controversial and polarising cultural issues.

Graduates who absorb lots of news are very different to swing voters.
Tory and Reform communication is dominated by their relations with the old media and a small section of voters, not the mainstream of voters.
Video done to optimise for social media metrics pulls you towards a certain aesthetic, whether left or right.
There is a ‘TikTok aesthetic’ (broader than TikTok) of imagery, music, cuts/editing, transitions etc which, if you combine it with messages touching on ethnicity (e.g crime rates of Afghans), a) is liked by voters who’ve crossed a Rubicon but b) is somewhere between unpersuasive and repellent for others. The responses to the aesthetics are much more emotionally polarising than the responses to the core facts diagnosing the policy or core statements about what should change.
Much content is moderately popular with a narrow niche but either incomprehensible or strongly counterproductive with others.
Communication optimised for the mainstream is usually seen inside SW1 as ‘incompetent’ so incentives push Insiders to optimise for Insider responses and narrow niches.

In these groups, there is a clear difference in emotional response between a) Reform voters and a section of Tories and b) voters saying LAB/LD and some Tories, even when they largely agree on the problem and the need for action which most Tory MPs would have said is ‘far too tough’ over the past 30 years.

I don’t want to help dummies spoil good ideas but I think it’s clear that a great campaign team could bring together a) the most effective core stories and b) superior aesthetics, to make a huge impact and unite a majority.

However, getting it right in objective terms vis voters inevitably means uniting SW1 networks in attacking you.

So this is probably a regime-complete problem.

Further, the mainstream Right has been aesthetically repellent to most artists for decades. Artists gravitated towards communism in the 1930s so powerfully it remains critical. Old conservative parties and entities feel so dead they cannot possibly change this. But new anti-left entities could tap into the revulsion of the young, and many artists, at the putrid old regime.

Steve Jobs said about conventional political communication from the old parties, ‘what your industry does, if you call it an industry, is bullshit, you guys don’t know anything about communication’. This is largely fair. The SW1 Right speaks, like the left, mostly in a banal patois which only sounds normal in SW1 and switches off attention outside it. There’s little interesting use of technology. Everything is reactive and intensely dull or repulsive. They cannot tell stories about themselves, about opponents, about things voters care about, about what’s important. They cannot be funny, artistic, sexy or anything interesting. They have little interesting to say on the extraordinarily interesting events that spill across everyone’s screens. They learned to talk about politics in the old media ecosystem which does not translate to the new ecosystem, hence why so few could do a 4 hour podcast without blowing themselves up — e.g Kamala, Starmer, Kemi. They cannot sustain focus on anything for 7-10 days, never mind months. In any week, it’s often the case that a random X account is more influential than the entire output of Tory HQ. The energy, interesting ideas, humour etc are almost all outside SW1’s parties.

Sometimes the aesthetics of regime change are such great art they truly replace the real story and are treated as history! If you haven’t watched Eisenstein’s October I strongly recommend.

MISC

There are other things I can’t go into here.

For example, there are fascinating dynamics with Gen Z. One very striking aspect of this is the unprecedented in decades polarisation between young men and women. Young men in America have reacted extremely negatively towards the cultural radicalisation left. Ironically, a powerful effect of the post-2012 radicalisation — which emphasised so much ‘toxic masculinity’ and created Soviet-style speech codes to police young men — was to push young men towards voting for Trump to end the madness.

Meanwhile young women graduates radicalised left. They voted for the Greens much more than any other demographic group in the 2024 UK election. In America you see armies of Stalinist/Maoist young women advocating openly for the murder of people like Charlie Kirk and the creation of a communist dictatorship via TikTok from their college bedrooms. In the yookay too, young women have been radicalised on Gaza Gaza Gaza. They are very depressed about their lives and politics! There are spikes in mental health, loneliness, TikTok madness, rage about dating etc. Both young men and women have in common rejection of the status quo peddled by established political elites from Clinton, Obama, Blair etc to the old GOP and old Tory party. ‘They’re all fake, they’re all rubbish’. Figuring out how things like dating are related to politics is tricky, it seems to me normal politics world is even more out of their depth on these things.

My impression of dealing with young men in the last 3 years is — some have been broken by the internet but those who somehow survived are super-well informed, and some very-capable, in ways that were impossible in 1991 because of internet self-education. Silicon Valley talent scouts, VCs etc corroborate this. A generation of politically very anti-left and very capable young men will be another incredible shock to SW1 and DC. Meanwhile many of the the girls their age will prefer to jail them than date them.

Scarlet Maguire explores some UK data here.

There was an article in Compact which got a lot of attention on DEI and discrimination against US young white men.

BAP weighed in here. BAP does not want young men to act like victims. He points out that the emotional wave of pro-black pro-women DEI STASI hiring was not just about a ‘victim’ story but also a positive story of the ‘virtues’ of blacks/women. The left also successfully ridiculed the old WASP establishment over Vietnam, Watergate etc. Without the successful ridicule and positive stories of success in sports, art etc, the pro-black left could not have won. And the shift to pure victimisation, BAP argues, from ~2010, was responsible for the left movement discrediting itself with the bulk of American consciousness.

Further, as the left establishment absorbed arguments about Trump as a phenomenon partly generated by ‘the plight of the left behind’ — in communities ravaged by de-industrialisation plus fentanyl etc — this actually led to contempt in New York Times land both for the communities and for Trump! (This is an acute psychological point by BAP.) BAP opposes shifting responsibility to vague historical forces like globalisation and wants to keep the focus on the unworthiness of the new political Insider class to rule.

I think it would be a much stronger case if all such articles focused on the compounding mediocrity of all life under the decisions and activities of the “new elite.” As it now gets amplified, this article will be understood as a victimization and a sentimental begging for sympathy instead of as a just condemnation of corrupt and clumsy power. (BAP)

BAP also points out that the rot set in long before ~2010. The DEI mind virus was poisoning universities long before.

This is the main reason I left America: I left in disgust at having to be around the people the author describes as having possibly liked to work around…

Delusional leftist and some “dissidents” like to speak of a vast “Straussian” conspiracy, but for the most part the Straussians had been kicked out of all top universities before 2016… But, more important, that’s a proxy for something else: it wasn’t just “conservatives”… everyone of any unusual thoughts or bold ideas was also excluded. It was conformist company men only. It’s why culture broadly speaking sucked before 2010 as well.

This is why I find the article unpersuasive, because it’s not clear actually that journalism, academia, or Hollywood have gotten that much worse. They were terrible before 2010 as well…

Even his [Compact author’s] concluding “emotional image” example is regret at not having worked on some ridiculous show about time machines. So now others get to write that crappy show, but not him. Again the legitimate question, which leftists are already asking, is why does this matter. If it’s going to be Netflix garbage and the 1260th HIV-AIDS grant, what matters the ethnicity of the person who gets it?… [A]t the level of cultural production, the final end-product is public and can be seen and should be judged not at an ordinary level, but at the level of the exception. The exceptional was thoroughly excluded even before 2012… No jobs for spergs or eccentrics or anyone boldly creative in Hollywood before 2012 either…

There were frogtwitter 20 year old guys in 2015-6 making stuff these billionaires were enjoying to my knowledge, and they never offered them any support for projects; never met or talked to them for encouragement. In many cases those guys had to stop doing what they were doing and get jobs in finance, etc., and in other cases went into difficult situations and turned out badly. These were people who, unlike the author of this piece, chose to try to do things on their own, at least anonymously. They received zero support. Instead now we’re all supposed to seal clap for the tragedy of people who didn’t try to do anything on their own but are complaining they didn’t get jobs working in TV. I’ll grant you TV is nearly unwatchable now, but it was almost that way before as well. Why am I supposed to care about the demographic composition of those who write garbage and who were and would have been company men even before 2010, and who excluded relentlessly anyone who wasn’t a company man?

BAP estimates the number of ‘straight white American men’ in elite universities pre-2012 as ‘maybe 3%’ — ‘it was ethnic cleansing’! When witch hunts spread against white men pre-2015, nobody including the ‘conservatives’ spoke out. Then the phenomenon spread and became much worse for liberal men as the Maoists spread.

If the article gets liberals acknowledging antiwhite racism in general… I suppose, good. If the purpose or the effect is to reestablish the status quo ante 2010 in journalism, academia, Hollywood… I don’t see why anyone who cares about writing, literature, movies or the arts has a stake in that.

BAP’s article is a reminder of the difficulty that the young left today is generated in many ways by the output of struggles over things like Vietnam and Watergate that the young left themselves generally know little or nothing about. The current left movement can’t be understood without understanding a lot of 20th century history though the people going viral from TikTok do not themselves generally have much grasp of the forces which put them on the street in Minnesota in front of a camera jabbering protest rhymes.

He is also right in the basic point that the goal should not be ‘try to turn the clock back to just before the left’s radicalisation hysteria kicked in around 2012’. It must be real regime change which is a much deeper thing.

How will SW1 Insiders respond?

I also thought the [US] administration would struggle to reduce irregular migration as per their first term, but they have reduced it very significantly, primarily via use of the military on the southern border… I was being UK-brained when thinking about the challenges of stopping immigration. It is just easier to close a land border [i.e America’s southern border] than to stop boats crossing a small channel.

Sam Freedman 23/12/25 explaining that it’s easier to close the 2,000 mile US southern land border than for a navy (of a state which used to have a navy that could dominate any sea on earth!) to stop dinghies in the Channel!

Another awful lobbyist for infinite immigration explains the spread of asylum hotels was because the Tories tried to *close* the borders!

NB. NPCs representing the mainstream of SW1 will generate any level of nonsense necessary to maintain ‘infinite immigration’ propaganda while calling voters ignorant/fascist…

Billion/trillion dollar bills vs nuances

When I do these exercises I try to focus on what is relatively simple, clear and important, not nuances. Nuances are useful for very competent organisations engaged in competition with similar organisations — such as OpenAI competing with Google or Warren Buffett trading.

SW1 is very much not like OpenAI vs Google. If I’m involved in a campaign then I’m interested in nuances but I’m much more interested in — what are the really big things that could provide huge advantage especially because competitors have programmed themselves to miss or misunderstand them?

Politics lacks anything like market signals in financial markets. In financial markets, obvious opportunities are quickly exploited. But in politics the biggest and most obvious things can sit there, like a trillion dollar easy arbitrage trade nobody makes.

This is partly because Insider political world is structurally blind to such things and fools itself with stories. Elections are distant and learning from them among senior people is low and shrouded in fog and noise (and genuine irreducible uncertainty). Players are mostly optimising for things other than ‘win election’.

Most people in politics look at really complex things and conclude ‘they’re really complex’. But often — in politics as in other things — if you keep digging and thinking past a point that seems reasonable, things simplify in very powerful ways, and if they do then this can be very valuable.

Example 1. In the referendum, the huge thing staring me in the face in 2015 was how unifying the message was around — we send all this money to Brussels, we get much less back, it could be better spent, we’d prefer it to be spent on the NHS. From there, a disciplined process led to the £350 million theme. There were infinite interesting nuances in the EU debate but this central theme dwarfed almost all (viz winning). It was the most persuasive theme across almost all demographics therefore allowed us to simplify in a super-powerful way. (NB. A sub-theme of the Russiagate hoax was the false idea that we won through ‘micro-targeting’.) SW1 was structurally blind to its resonance so it also provided an opportunity to goad our opponents into fighting over something that would sink them. Having Leave focus on it was the difference between history changing or not changing. The same dynamic operated in the 2019 battle.

Example 2. As I wrote here in 2023-24, much of elite Democrat world spent vast time and money fooling itself that the three critical things 2023-24 were not — the cost of living crisis, the southern border, Biden being visibly gaga — and trying to persuade themselves that ‘January 6th / Trump crimes-fascism’ and abortion could be made to overwhelm these three themes. Never forget — swing voters in rural Wisconsin spending little time on the news understood Biden was gaga in 2021-22 and I reported it on this blog in Q1 2023, while DC elites who personally met Biden proclaimed themselves ‘shocked’ at the debate performance in 2024.

A line to bear in mind when considering such things is Bismarck’s often quoted line — Unda fert nec regitur — by which he meant roughly, you can ride a wave but not make one. It’s much easier in politics to raise a little sail and be blown by the storm than it is to create a storm, many of the things you have to deal with are vast forces you can have little to no effect on, and if you are going to do the highly unusual and make a storm, it will take time.

SW1: radicalisation, polarisation, fragmentation, narrative whiplash etc

Considering how SW1 adapts and changes 2026-9 must be seen in the context of the big forces acting on that sub-culture which affect how the players in that sub-culture perceive reality, the informational ‘lightcone’ in which they live and work and speak and influence power.

I’ve written a lot about this and won’t repeat it all here, I’ll summarise and give some recent examples.

The ten years of politics in Britain and America since Leave and Trump won in 2016 have been defined by a combination of overlapping historic forces:

A) The Insiders’ radicalisation process (‘the mind virus’) whereby — since ~2012 but especially after 2016, with waves of different intensity — they herded towards Greta-eco-socialism, trans-nutjobs, Islamic nutjobs, and actively fighting to preserve immigration systems which promote a) importing violent/sex criminals at scale, b) a legal regime (ECHR/HRA) in which the worse your crime and the worse your home culture, the more unlawful it becomes to deport you.

Thanks to successive court judgments, it is now established law in Britain that the most horrific criminals from the worst places on earth — such as Somalia and Pakistan — are the most safe from deportation. For example, our courts have defined the law recently as — a man who sexually assaults his step-children cannot be deported home (Pakistan) because a) his rights to family life would be infringed (i.e his rights to see the children he’s assaulted) and b) he might be mistreated at home because of his crimes here. It is now settled law that the right of a foreign criminal not to be abused at home trumps the rights of English people not to be murdered or raped — and the threshold has been raised such that no degree of crime (up to and including mass murder) done here justifies exposing the criminal to mistreatment at home. And it’s also settled by the courts that the standard for mistreatment is no longer ‘might be tortured/killed’ but has evolved via ECHR case law to ‘might be slapped by a policeman’. At the last election, Tories, Labour and LibDems all supported maintaining this legal regime.

We now have a weekly spectacle of an illegal immigrant, often here via a Channel dinghy, who has raped or killed and gets a joke sentence and/or cannot be deported.

We have jihadis called literally ‘Jihadi’ who film themselves on a dinghy singing about jihad, and post it to TikTok — and after arriving they do jihad. The courts explicitly prioritise their rights and safety over our safety.

This radicalisation process has driven Insiders to the position that those who describe such a system as wicked and urgently requiring deep change are themselves ‘the real problem’ — our real political problem is fascism encouraged by tech-oligarchs and disinformation, which requires new laws so the state can control the news and stop disinformation.

For radicalised Insiders such as ministers and the BBC, all anger on immigration now is either a) ignored, the mad case isn’t ‘news’, let’s tweet about Elon’s fascism instead, or else b) the case is transformed from its core elements — illegal immigrant commits horrific crime, legal system’s response a bad joke in the eyes of normal people — into another instantiation of ‘voters are stupid/misled by disinformation, look at the dangerous new Far Right, we need more censorship’.

This radicalisation process has driven them to articulate such obvious nonsense as Freedman above — that closing a 2,000 mile land border is much easier than a navy stopping the dinghies, which is routinely described as ‘impossible’ by the exact same Insiders who also demand that the British armed forces impose our will on the borders of east Ukraine against the world’s biggest nuclear power.

This radicalisation process is epitomised by the way much of SW1 — particularly its most culturally influential parts — supported Starmer in January 2025 when he described the multi-decade grooming gangs horror as a ‘far right conspiracy theory’ and Elon tweeting about it was ‘the real story’, ‘the radicalised far right’, why we need new laws on social media etc.

And if you look at some of those who supported Starmer on the ‘conspiracy theory’, more and more of them explicitly argue that a) the logic of the evolved asylum system is clear, yes it extends to billions throughout Africa and Asia and we have no right to stop any of them, b) it’s impossible to stop the waves of millions other than with measures which equal ‘fascism’, c) actually the replacement of the white European population is both inevitable and good — economically and culturally. Their position has evolved from ‘The Great Replacement is a Far Right conspiracy theory’… Narrative Whiplash… ‘It’s great whites are being replaced and we’re all turning brown, it can’t be stopped, if you don’t like it you’re a fascist who should be jailed and nobody can vote for you.’

You now see politicians in America, Europe and SW1 articulating explicitly not only that they want to see whites replaced but also that they are doing this in order to win elections and make the process impossible to stop/reverse.

SW1 — like the Democrats — has radicalised on immigration even though — perhaps, ‘because’?! — it’s been electorally disastrous for them.

B) The fragmentation and polarisation of elites.

It’s epitomised by ‘we political pundits understand running tech companies better than Elon, he fired so many staff Twitter is about to collapse!’ After it failed to collapse, and — surprise surprise, firing loads of people improved the company, an impossible concept in SW1 — this Official Line polarised further, driving them to a condition in which they spend hour after hour, day after day, month after month, screaming on Bluesky for European governments to ban X/Twitter.

Meanwhile many elites polarised in the opposite direction to — thank God Elon bought Twitter, it was a true history changing act by an individual, it exposes so many lies and so much incompetence from the old regime, we need more Elon and more DOGE.

Another example is the recent ICE killings. If your response to the video is ‘multiple camera angles, not immediately obvious what happened, looks different from different perspectives’ — you’re ‘enabling fascism’. The BBC and NYT are under heavy Bluesky bombardment for suggesting there is any non-fascist response other than ‘clearly murder by ICE’. If your response to the general issue is — ICE deported people under Obama, Trump won the election saying he would deport illegals, the left is mobilising to stop lawful deportations, the left has repeatedly mobilised violently since the 1960s, we should generally support ICE continuing deporting illegals — you are fascist.

Hence also partly why entrepreneurial elites have fragmented with more joining MAGA, more supporting Brexit, more opposing the EU, more supporting withdrawal from ECHR/HRA, more supporting a radical change of direction on immigration etc etc.

As the left mobilises further on ICE and tries to submerge the issue of deporting illegals in a broader emotional wave of ‘resist fascism’, others polarise to: it’s an organised extremist insurgency mirroring the tactics of Islamic/commie insurgents abroad, declare martial law and send in soldiers to smash it then seize the illegals then arrest all those involved in the massive Somali fraud, then move on to California etc and do the same there, and deploy RICO powers etc etc.

Another obvious example is anti-semitism. It’s extremely striking how anti-semitism took off like wildfire among the left then spread across the media and universities. Very few predicted that the response to the Hamas atrocities would have been a wave of enthusiastic support from the ‘words are violence’ people on campus FOR the rapists and torturers. But on Israel, it rapidly became morally superior to demand more violence against Jews. BLM tweeted lovingly images of paragliders and quoted Mao that revolution is not a dinner party!

And both anti-semitism and its opposite have spread through the right too. You see polarisation with other parts of the right wearing IDF merchandise and calling for the razing of Gaza etc. (A theme I’m starting to see on social media is that some Jews in hospitals are given ‘anglo’ names because of fears that Muslim staff will kill them. E.g apparently victims of the Bondi shootings were assigned different names in hospital because of open statements by nurses. I’m not sure how true it is — like many apparently unbelievable stories, it falls in the category of ‘I would have assumed false 5 years ago but now it wouldn’t surprise me’.)

As polarisation and fragmentation increase, the collapse of consensus reality accelerates and deepens.

C) The collapse of consensus reality and the cycle of Narrative Whiplash, in which the Official Line constantly changes — often from one nonsense to another — but Insiders speak like they’re consistent.

Much of the old Insider network is in one lightcone. It has its ‘news’ and its official ‘facts’. It has its heroes and villains. Insiders define ‘truth’ and ‘rationality’ inside this lightcone.

Some recent examples…

The Carney flip on regime change

Many have argued for over a decade that the old international system loved by Europe’s political Insiders — the ‘rules based international order’ and its institutions such as the UN and EU — was knackered, fake, doomed to collapse, pathological etc. The old ideas about free trade, the WTO, the wonders of global supply chains, shifting manufacturing offshore, infinite immigration, the Single Market etc etc were played out — failed and lost the support of the voters.

This was fiercely rejected until the last year. SW1’s NPCs couldn’t stop laughing at the argument. But cracks have appeared in the Matrix over the past year then Carney stood up in Davos a few days ago and said the ‘rules based international order’ is gone, we must move on, Davos elites can’t stay stuck in the past. The last few decades have shown the ‘risks of extreme integration’. Integration has become ‘a source of subordination’ and ‘coercion’, it’s understandable and reasonable countries are seeking independent power, he said!

And SW1 Insiders who had hysterically opposed such sentiments herded to: BRILLIANT! WONDERFUL! IF ONLY STARMER HAD SAID THIS!! Such views suddenly whizzed across Bluesky. Narrative Whiplash has kicked in and Official Truth has flipped from ‘only nutters say the old regime is dead’ to ‘serious people know the old regime is dead’.

It’s another great example of how the process of word diffusion among Insiders is almost entirely based on emotional waves plus mimesis. The Whiplash kicked in almost entirely because Carney was seen as ‘on our side’ and trying to find a new path for us to keep power and keep telling ourselves we were always right. If you take exact quotes from Carney and put them in the mouth of a MAGA, then the pundits who swooned would spit venom instead.

But, while they will now start saying the opposite of what they’ve been saying for decades in their description of many problems, their solutions will be the same… Aaaannnnddd THAT’S why we must Rejoin the EU, raise taxes, impose censorship, open the borders, and change the voting system! So the old policies will be given a new branding, a new rationale. The new branding will be given an Orwellian phrase like ‘values based pragmatism’ or ‘pragmatic radical multilateral progressivism’ and the NPCs will jabber it and actually believe it’s new, fresh and radical.

Carney’s speech is a useful summary of how the process will work. The old regime doesn’t admit its mistakes. Carney sounds half like someone doing a bad impression of an argument for Brexit but then doubles down on: so that’s why me and my friends must retain power and find ways to continue going in the same direction. His SW1 imitators will do the same.

Blackouts and Iran

In the first week of January there were days of blackouts in Berlin because Far Left terrorists destroyed the power grid. And there were days of riots/protests in Iran, online assassinations of Iranian security figures machine gunned off the road, statues toppled etc.

Both stories were almost totally ignored in SW1 which continued chirping away about Elon and US culture wars as usual.

BBC News front page, screenshot 11:23 on 8/1 — Prince Andrew and diets and sport Yes, riots in Iranian cities No…

Zero mentions of Iran on the entire Guardian homepage , screenshot 13:01 on 8/1 (look at my search window top right, ‘not found’)

Here’s John Simpson explaining the BBC’s silence — the same Simpson who managed to spend year after year covering Gaza despite Hamas and constant warfare including airstrikes. (NB The BBC was recently shown to not only hire Hamas supporters but even to put on the BBC employees of Hamas TV.)

I look at the NPC network much less since they fled to Bluesky but I scanned through some of them while the Iran and Berlin stories were playing out in early January. Even as place after place in Iran erupted in riots, their focus remained Twitter and Will Stancil’s running commentary on ICE in Minnesota — even academics whose nominal job is international relations. Commentary on TV shows and football got much more attention from the FT’s political hacks than Iran. These people constantly discuss Trump and ‘fascism’ through the language of ‘violence’ — violent ICE, Elon encouraging violence against Somalians etc etc. But when a regime actually does real mass violence, machine gunning civilians at scale, SW1’s NPCs continued yapping about Elon’s tweets.

Many on the Right keep posting ‘astonishing’, ‘shocking’ etc about this phenomenon and asking rhetorically ‘why no coverage’, ‘what’s going on’ as if this is all aberrant and weird. They should stop this. You shouldn’t be shocked by this in 2026. It’s the new normal and will stay normal for years.

A critical aspect of this radicalisation-polarisation process is how different social networksselect topics to be or not be ‘news’ at all. In many ways, whether a network defines topic X — say immigrant crime — as ‘news to discuss’ or ‘ignore’ is more important than particular angles and arguments. This process is subject to top-down influences but is not as it was when the FDR or Nixon White House called the Post. Obama tweets, his staff tweet, but how and what is deeply affected by what they see. As the information landscape fragments, we increasingly live in different informational realities because social media, WhatsApp groups etc select different topics/stories to be news at all. So if you’re a normal SW1 character on Bluesky, then many things DO NOT EXIST AS NEWS. You will see ‘professors of politics’ supposedly expert on ‘disinformation’ display this phenomenon in their own output.

Here is an odd example from November. In November, for a few days a lot of SW1 got excited about the BBC being caught out dishonestly editing a Trump speech — splicing different sentences together to give viewers the false impression that Trump said a bunch of sentences one after the other which together amounted to a call for violence.

Days after this story was one of — if not the — dominant stories in SW1, leading to the resignation of the BBC’s boss, even some of the Insider SW1 network itself had not seen it! Why? Because it contradicted the Narrative: Trump lies, Trump is evil, the old media is our friend in explaining this. So a whole subculture of Insiders’ social media networks simply ignored it for days.

This was illustrated by a ‘professor of political science’ who has been given the job of writing official histories of UK elections (!) who also has spent 16 months calling near daily for Twitter to be banned!

(Other parts of this subculture which did see the story tried to argue that it was a ‘non-story’ because ‘Trump did call for violence’ so the story was spiritually true even if literally false.)

Remember these are the people who write academic papers about ‘filter bubbles’ and ‘disinformation’ and ‘low information voters’.

So for much of the most influential networks in SW1… The Supreme Court judgment on trans rights did not exist as a topic… The Iran protests and Berlin blackouts did not exist as a topic… The daily cases of murder and rape by illegal immigrants does not exist as a topic… The weekly crazy court cases where judges use the ECHR/HRA to impose mad sentences, set murderers and rapists free, outlaw deportation etc etc does not exist as a topic. They don’t see it and they don’t discuss it.

A few weeks ago it was reported that the police hired a child rapist to improve their DEI quotas. News in some parts of SW1 but unmentioned in most and of course the BBC is less interested in this than in Iran protests.

Similarly, a convicted terrorist involved in the 2005 tube bombings was recently released early from jail. The terrorist is a paranoid schizophrenic who still believes in violent jihad. The judge releasing him wished him ‘all the best’ and told him to ‘take your medication’. Because of the HRA and legal advice, the police are not allowed to make him wear an electronic tag. We can’t track him. NB. Similar people have been released in the past and then killed again. I had to deal with such a case in 2020. Whitehall went to great lengths to hide the role of the ECHR in preventing surveillance by MI5.

Close to zero coverage. Defending this system is serious and civilised. Opposing it is ‘fascism’.

Similarly, our government recently paid millions to Abu Zubaydah, one of Bin Laden’s key henchmen who helped plan and execute 9/11. Why? Because Zubaydah — from American jail — brought a legal case in London against MI6 using the ECHR/HRA. In No10 I was involved in similar cases which were covered up. When I discussed this a few years ago, people like Rory Sutherland and prominent QCs said I must be inventing it because it sounds so crazy.

Close to zero coverage. Defending this system is serious and civilised. Opposing it is ‘fascism’.

When there is an overlap of topics of interest across warring networks — like the shootings by ICE — there is immediate polarisation.

It’s obviously not just the mainstream/left who’ve gone through this process. Groups on the right, like the ERG MPs, similarly developed informational lightcones that are often crazy. But they are much less culturally influential in yookay.

D) The collapse of the business model of, and trust in, the old media, old universities, and old bureaucracies.

E) The process of pathological bureaucratisation .

F)The process of powerful mimesis and herding.

I’ve described how all this combined with other trends makes this time resemble previous periods of cyclical regime change such as the 1840s-70s.

This collapse of consensus reality is central to why Insiders’ responses to the disintegration of SW1 systems and institutions seem increasingly deranged to Outsiders, and why Insiders keep doubling down on what seems derangement to Outsiders — a process I think best described by the word ‘pathological’.

These processes, ideas, memes are deep and very hard for almost any individual to have almost any influence over. We must assume that they will continue to shape SW1 in the next few years. And those who dislike these forces have been hopeless at building counter-forces. Human agency is real but constrained by these forces.

PUNDIT DERANGEMENT

These forces mean that the main source of analysis for MPs, pundits in the old media, is systematically deranged.

There is no serious strategic culture in SW1 for domestic politics. By this I mean — a culture of expertise in which people discuss ends, ways and means in domestic politics in the way people do about armies in war — or at least, are supposed to, but as you can see on Ukraine the central failure of the politicians, the militaries and the ‘analytical community’ has been a near total failure of ‘the experts’ to face honestly the core strategic issue of political priorities and risk in a potentially nuclear crisis.

I can only mention a few recent examples.

Pundit world analyses current party politics as if the conventional wisdom of 10-25 years ago still applies when it often didn’t even apply then. Over and over you read comments like Professor Ansell this month — invited by BBC to give Reith lectures — say things like ‘when the Tories were dominant they didn’t bang on about immigration’. Yes, that was in an era before Blair and the Tories let in roughly ten million and collapsed border control and communities all over the country went from English towns to mosques and white flight!

Ansell then says a) the Tories should avoid discussing immigration because discussing it just helps Reform and b) focus on the economy which will be ‘a salve’ that’ll recapture Reform voters. Err, immigration is the number one or two issue for over half the country and voters think rightly the Tories from 2021 were a disaster for the economy!! Obviously Ansell praises Stride for defending the OBR — which has been a true policy disaster because the CON/LAB dolts began wrenching economic policy to aim at decimal points of OBR forecasts, truly retarded policy, but supported by ‘the serious grownups’ loved by professors like Ansell.

This is the same Professor Ansell who in Jan 2025 declared a) peak populism and b) the Trump-Zelensky row would dish Farage.

Emotionally, a great recent example is a logical emerging new line of argument in SW1: our real problem is the voters.

E.g In the FT, there was a story by its political editor (31/12) much shared on WhatsApp groups.

The anger directed at the Labour leadership has sparked a debate about how much this says about Starmer and Reeves but also what it says about the British public.

One ally said: “There have been seven prime ministers since the iPhone was invented and seven in the 42 years before that. Everywhere around the world there are unpopular incumbents but of course we want to do things that are popular. That’s why 2026 will be the year when renewal becomes a reality.”

Tom Baldwin, Starmer’s biographer and a former Labour adviser, argues that the polling data reflects what he believes is Britain’s drift towards “ungovernability”, adding: “There’s a rising tide of inchoate rage. The idea that Keir Starmer is worse than Boris Johnson or Liz Truss is nuts. Something is going on with the electorate.”

This is funny if you live outside SW1 but normal inside it. There they increasingly do see the problem as the voters going ‘nuts’.

Similarly, look at this recent gem of a piece by Tim Harford in the FT on populism. Its argument in summary is: populism is succeeding because the voters don’t have, therefore don’t understand, our mental sophistication.

‘People are not rebelling against economic elites,” writes Heath. Instead, this is “a rebellion against [cognitive] executive function”. In this view, populism is a movement that appeals to people who trust their gut’.
He gives an example: the proposition ‘if we let immigrants come here and work, they’ll take our job.’ It seems obvious but elites think it’s wrong.
‘But to reach that conclusion [the elites’] requires considerable time and effort to sift through the evidence or work through the theory. To make the case without sounding self-satisfied and superior is almost impossible… It’s about cognitive effort.’
Similarly, showing ‘cultural sensitivity’ is ‘an opportunity for some to demonstrate cognitive agility and self-control, and a source of resentment for others’.
This theory also ‘accounts for the apparent affinity between populism and misinformation’. Aha! Elites can see through this because they take ‘a moment of time and effort’ to review the evidence!!
‘This may explain why so much misinformation seems to favour populist viewpoints.’ Ta-daaa!
He then quotes a misinformation ‘study’ showing how much more Trump voters believe misinformation than Hillary voters. [Almost all such studies are bullshit cargo cult science but never mind that for now!]
So Harford conludes, ‘The question is: is there a way to encourage voters to calm down, slow down and think twice, in an information environment that pushes us all to hurry up and feel? Nothing easy or certain, to be sure. But any solution has to start with getting voters to take a genuine, curious interest in policy.’

Absolutely priceless. ZERO discussion of a single example of how political elites swallowed nonsense in the past 20 years and how this — rather than our inability to think — might be why we lost confidence in them.

Remember how the public health experts laughed at Caprice about closing the borders in a pandemic then a few weeks later were all on TV parroting Caprice’s policy?!

Anybody at the FT wondered if this might be behind the drop in confidence?!

Insiders of the FT pundit variety tell themselves Blair was right that politics is about ‘open v closed’. It wasn’t 20 years ago and it isn’t now. They think British parties to win have to be ‘open’ and Blairite. They don’t. This distinction just confuses them, like ‘the centre ground’.

The main effect of MSM discussion of ‘strategy’ is to give MPs and staff really bad ideas and there is zero chance of this changing short-term. To the extent good ideas permeate SW1, it will be almost 100% from outside the mainstream.

AI: Another sign of the collapse of consensus reality among elites

I said in 2024 that SW1 would continue doubling down on its delusions over AI because AI had become sucked into American culture wars therefore sucked into SW1 culture wars.

Over the past few weeks, we can see the first paper in an elite physics journal, by my friend Prof Steve Hsu, based on ideas provided by models — on research in quantum field theory. Models are not just doing well on IMO level problems but are being used by professional mathematicians to solve open problems. Terry Tao, one of the top mathematicians on earth, has verified this sudden improvement and validated some specific proofs. The use of formal verification programs is part of the workflow — a model helps with a proof, the verification program checks the result. (For the history of formal verification, connections to mathematical foundations, Turing, Gödel etc see my paper on the history of this.)

The advances made by Steve Hsu for his physics paper were made by having AI agents ‘discuss’ the problem with each other, i.e crudely, different versions of the model are generated and they work on the problem together. This is different to the consumer models most use but post-GPT history shows that experiments in the labs with elite people very quickly disperse to consumer models so get used to agents everywhere. All three labs are working on versions of what Steve did using agents with ‘scaffolding’ for science.

All over the internet, people are posting astonishing examples of how the models are helping — astonishing even if you’ve been paying attention.

I saw this posted by Tobi Lutke, founder/CEO of Shopify. He had an MRI, saw the normal legacy software for examining it was ludicrous, asked Claude to build a new app to replace it and display his MRI, and Claude did it.

I saw this posted by Karpathy, one of the world’s experts on AI, about how his workflow has been revolutionised in the last few weeks.

Note the last sentence — there is a huge gap between those working in AI and everybody else.

And check out the new social media platform for agents, Moltbook!

All over America and China, companies and the national security bureaucracies are making and planning vast investments while mocking Europe for letting Brussels kneecap Europe.

Meanwhile back in planet SW1, pundits and ‘professors of political science’ (particularly if deranged by Bluesky) are STILL doubling down on ‘it’s all bullshit / hype / fad / scam / bubble / plausible nonsense’ — in between their schemes for breaking up Russia and rejoining the EU.

I repeat what I told you last year. Look at Ciaran Martin, formerly senior GCHQ official. As well as giving full play to his far left Remainer politics, and campaigning to undermine coverage of China’s penetration of critical yookay infrastructure, he also spends his time encouraging NPC Bluesky to delude themselves on AI. AI is just ‘plausible nonsense’, Martin tells SW1, feel free to continue your deranged ranting about Silicon Valley!

The dominance of officials like Martin helps explains Whitehall’s failure to do what was started in 2020: overcome Whitehall’s inertia to make technology generally and AI/robotics particularly a core priority of the PM’s office, schedule, and political capital. Instead, the normal clownshow has deepened. All over the deep state people have meetings that go nowhere about our dire situation despite London being the best concentration of talent outside California and China. (Yes there has been some small progress since 2020 — some people have got Whitehall to do more than it would have done, but the success is tiny relative to the scale of what should and could have happened since the 2019 election and relative to the scale of the opportunities and dangers this technological revolution mean for us.)

Why is there a market for such absurd views in SW1 even as reality is all over the internet?

Because ‘AI’ got entangled in SW1/DC views on MAGA, Silicon Valley, Elon and Twitter and, in the yookay, Brexit. AI has to be ‘fake’ so that the VCs and companies could be mocked and attacked. It has to be ‘fake’ so that I was wrong to start re-orienting Whitehall and the deep state. It has to be ‘fake’ to justify leaving Whitehall and procurement to rumble on in business as usual despite covid and Ukraine.

AI and technology generally became entangled in the US culture wars therefore imported into SW1 so political identities became entangled with assessments of the technology and capabilities. As with immigration and other issues, once political identity is triggered among elites who spend all day looking at news and interacting with others in a social network, then polarisation and in/out group logic kicks in and serious thought tends to switch off. (Another aspect of this is that much of the ‘AI safety’ community supported the move to align the models with AOC’s politics 2020-24 and thereby contributed to the polarisation and ironically shot themselves in both feet. Near zero of the prominent people in this movement spoke out against this before Trump’s win.)

One of the most remarkable things for historians of the future will be explaining how European/UK political elites got AI wrong — not in 2010, or 2020, or after Chat-GPT, but even in 2026 as the models were solving unsolved maths problems, the highest IQ people in the world were all beavering away to integrate them into their personal workflow, and America and China engaged in a dramatic race involving vast engineering projects and trillions of dollars.

When you read the next big stories on the MOD and intel agencies fiascoes, remember that they were among the leading culprits in promoting incompetents, importing the pronoun trans-nutjob madness, and putting Remainer fanatics from Heywood’s stooge network into critical deep state technical roles.

You can trust your eyes on what world class talent posts live on the internet or trust SW1’s political experts reassuring you it’s ‘plausible nonsense’. In 2026 more of your friends will integrate these models into their life and work while the network in SW1 we count on to regulate such things, and build technology into security, burble it’s fake — then, Narrative Whiplash, and ‘it’s really dangerous that’s why WE must control it!’

SW1 responses by topic

A. Cost of living.

SW1 does not appreciate how the COL dominates political discussion, how important it was to Tory failure and Labour winning and Starmer’s/Labour’s failure, or how important it is to emerging preferences.

Even those in SW1 who think ‘I appreciate this better than others in SW1’ are mostly underrating it. I also underrated it until I did this exercise. It’s hard to grasp such things unless you make a disciplined effort and listen to voters a lot and often. I think almost anyone living a comfortable life would do. I suspect pollsters who do not also listen to focus groups underrate it too.

We should assume that all main players will continue unable to prioritise this issue even though they will keep being told by pollsters ‘the COL is number one issue’ and even though they will sometimes refer to it as ‘my priority’.

Starmer said in early January that ‘Every minute that we’re not talking about the cost of living is a wasted minute’.

NB. not ‘acting’, not ‘doing XYZ to…’ — but ‘talking about’. This sums up SW1 well — a culture focused on words with little connection to reality. A culture where Sunak says ‘I’ll stop the boats’ and the Left say he’s ‘lurched to the right’ because of his words, but the boats continue. And a culture where the PM says we must ‘talk about’ the cost of living while the government continues the Tory trajectory of making it worse and worse.

And No10 is shattered with a dud PM and team and battered by the implosion of the international trade and security systems/institutions.

Kemi cannot campaign on anything so will not exploit it.

This means there is a huge opportunity for Farage/Reform to connect their immigration story to public services and COL.

If Reform fails to grasp it, there is a huge opportunity for some other entity to exploit this theme.

B. Immigration.

The 2016 referendum was defined by Insider delusions about public opinion. Insiders controlled the question, the rules, the timing and almost all institutions with power, money and influence (e.g BBC, CBI). The Cabinet Office brazenly manipulated ‘rules’ to give Remain a huge spending advantage (nobody noticed or cared). Those who opposed them were largely a useless shambles.

Yet Insiders lost. Central to this was Insider delusions over voters’ views on immigration and themselves, the Insiders. Vote Leave managed to hoist a little sail and aim it and let itself be blown by a wind Insiders could hardly see and never understood.

As I’ve said before, it’s embarrassing now to admit that I thought before 23 June 2016 that our victory would lead to a big rethink and mental updating from Insiders. The opposite has happened for a decade and not just here.

After 2016 then again after 2020, SW1 polarised and radicalised further on immigration and created ludicrous stories that were repeated across SW1.

A core argument of Insider world over the past year has been that ‘voters angry about immigration greatly over-estimate the scale of immigration because they are so influenced by the right wing press and disinformation from the Far Right’.

This is intrinsically ludicrous. Voters were angry and fearful about immigration in 2015 and it is the main reason Leave won the referendum. After that the Tories vastly increased it. After I left No10 in November 2020, everything we started doing 2019-20 to reduce it drastically — change policy, change law/regulations, start building infrastructure to count people in/out properly etc — was abandoned from 2021. Instead the Trolley and Sunak increased immigration to over a million a year — the Boriswave — while defending it as great news and simultaneously letting the ludicrous dinghies spiral out of control.

The SW1 lefty mainstream herded:

They presented Sunak 2023 as a ‘big lurch to the right’ as he continued legal immigration at historically unprecedented levels and sided with the left/Whitehall in prioritising the ECHR/HRA over stopping the dinghies.
It became conventional wisdom for pundits to explain every week how voters greatly exaggerate the scale of immigration.
Pundits like Fraser Nelson said over and over that the right approach for the Tories was to talk tough on immigration but not act tough.
Pundits everywhere babbled about how ‘incredibly complex’ the dinghies problem is and how it is ‘impossible’ to actually stop the boats — in between their babble about how Whitehall could sort out the borders of east Ukraine and Gaza with just some exertion of willpower. Stopping dinghies in the Channel: impossible. Restoring Ukraine’s 1991 borders against the world’s biggest nuclear power: just a question of will power and not allowing ‘self-deterrence’ over nukes!

The comical description of Sunak ‘lurching to the right’ is now matched by the same pundits describing Starmer as ‘lurching to the right’ — the guy who is giving away Chagos, opening the jails, importing Islamic nutters etc! Why? Because he criticised the Tories’ immigration policy and said it should be controlled! Again — words are everything for pundits, actions irrelevant, cf. lefty Economist hack:

The structural polarisation among American elites on immigration/asylum — and recently ICE — has flowed downstream to SW1. I can’t go into details here but it’s big and unarguable. If you look back at Clinton 92 or Obama 08, you will see both made statements on immigration, deportation of illegals etc which now are defined as ‘fascism’. Under Obama, ICE deported 3 million. Cf. Obama, Bill and Hillary Clinton being ‘fascist’ before it was fascism, and Obama here on holding illegals to account.

Did you notice all the protests and global coverage about Obama and ICE? Why not? US elites were not polarised and radicalised on immigration 1992-2012. The polarisation took off sharply from Trump’s campaign in 2015 and this polarisation has flowed culturally downstream to Europe.

You saw this in 2020 when the BLM hysteria swiftly jumped the Atlantic and British graduates acted out scenes in the street depicting US slavery as if they were relevant to London and this hysteria seemed entirely normal in many social networks. BLM demonstrated elite fragmentation, polarisation and radicalisation — on both sides of the Atlantic, some elites responded to BLM by mimicking the hysteria, others updated towards ‘people are going loopy, I’m on the other side’. (NB. The summer 2020 hysteria was entirely memory-holed in the fake covid Inquiry, where they repeat vast amounts of fake social science about summer 2020 which completely ignores the effects of BLM protests.)

The BLM hysteria and its effects had feedback effects among which was the Biden White House sabotaging the southern border 2021-3, which created a huge issue for Trump to exploit, even though it was mad from the perspective of winning the 2024 election. Biden’s own elites — donors, activists, ‘strategists’, DEM politicians — demanded it even though they were also saying ‘we can’t let Trump win again’.

This polarisation, fragmentation and radicalisation is why the Trolley, Sunak and Labour all supported the Boriswave and rejected stopping the boats. It’s why so many ‘conservatives’ went along with the nonsense about ‘stopping the dinghies is so amazingly complex’. It’s why the Tories flew in thousands of Afghans by military plane and housed them in barracks. It’s why Starmer and Labour copied the Sunak approach of letting the dinghies cross even after watching Biden’s border disaster and even after benefiting from Sunak’s self-destruction on the boats! It’s also why Tory MPs were no different to the Far Left on many related issues such as serious violent immigrants, refusal to deport, freeing them to kill more etc etc.

And it is why now SW1 elites and surrounding networks have mobilised to identify immigration, deportation and asylum as the central issue they will fight on. In one sense it appears mad. These same elites lost the Brexit referendum because people were opposed to much lower levels of immigration. Why drive people mad by doubling down? If Labour and Democrats had a Clinton-Obama approach to immigration, they could fight the Right on much more propitious ground. But as I’ve explained for five years in this blog, political elites do not follow the mainstream theory of how democracy works — i.e they do not focus on winning elections or voters, they focus on the old media and promotion, and they are herded by emotions and mimesis.

And there is another feedback effect. As this polarisation occurs, a section of very highly engaged mainly graduate voters have similarly polarised and radicalised, so it becomes somewhat true to say ‘well now we have a section of Labour voters in university towns who take their cultural lead from the Guardian and NYT and Bluesky and they want socialism and think any restrictions on immigration is fascism’ etc. This group is relatively small and extremely out of touch with the rest of the country — here and America — but it is integrated with graduates from the most high status universities so it’s much more influential than working class voters.

Since the 2024 election, this dominant SW1 hack/pundit swarm — very influential on MPs — has convinced themselves again that:

‘The issue is the media and salience, if No10 stops discussing it then the media will discuss it less and the voters will care less.’
‘Voters greatly exaggerate the scale of immigration because they are fooled by the right wing press and disinformation from fascist tech bros / Putin.’
‘More immigration means more growth, look at the Treasury’s models — plug in a higher number of immigrants, output more growth and money for services. So the government should explain that if you want the NHS to work you must support more immigration, make the case that diversity is our strength!’

So No10 and Labour generally are caught between two powerful forces.

Force A: mainstream voters.

Force B: SW1 elite and university emotions/polarisation.

Repeatedly, MPs focus on and respond far more to B than to A. Why would this change?

Further, the defection of Labour voters to Greens and LibDems gives SW1 an excuse to say ‘see your rhetoric is alienating the left, you should be MORE PRO-IMMIGRATION if you want to recover’. This is both insane from one perspective and highly persuasive from another!

As the above analysis shows, the dominant SW1 view is totally delusional viz mainstream voters. Voters discuss immigration mainly because of what they experience in services, visible asylum hotels, their area changing ethnically (‘I can’t understand most of the mums at the school gate any more it’s scary’), the constant episodes of immigrant violence, terror attacks, the visible farce of the state unable to stop dinghies barely able to float etc.

Voters greatly underestimate the numbers by a factor of 5X to 30X in the average group and are appalled when told the numbers. The very widespread view in SW1 that voters over-estimate the scale of the problem is delusional and the opposite of the truth.

But the obvious logic of SW1 elites is: the boats have driven media coverage so stop the boats, not, obviously, by stopping the boats in the sense voters want, but by doing a deal with France whereby we simply fly the people from the asylum camps on the French coast into Britain and remove the need for boats. No more boats, no more coverage, ‘illegal’ redefined as ‘safe and legal’, problem solved.

The logic of Bluesky has repeatedly dominated other logic in SW1.

Yes it will help Farage but they have other plans for Farage.

The other thing you can already see coming is the hilarious argument — immigration is decelerating (i.e still increasing but slower than in the Boriswave) and this is an ‘economic disaster’ so we need to ‘educate the voters’ about how ‘falling immigration means tax rises, if you want more money for the NHS you’ll have to accept more immigrants!’

Much of SW1 has already been trained to believe such things since 1997 so it will feel normal for most. Many a Times pundit will explain how this is the sensible mainstream view. This is also insane from one perspective but logical from another.

Ps. After writing the above, new figures came out showing net migration down on previous recent years. But total immigration remained above any historical record except for the Boriswave peak (>800k) while total emigration was at a record high.

At the same time, YouGov published a poll showing people ‘don’t know immigration is falling’. This was inevitably used by the media to attack voters as idiots, fooled by disinformation etc and to tell No10 yet again that they should abandon trying to reduce immigration ‘because you can’t win the argument, even when it’s falling fast nobody believes it’ etc. Here is the bullshitter James O’Brien, often a good representative of the worst of SW1, quoting this chart.

But voters are more right than the experts. Immigration is NOT falling. It continues to grow at a rate that would have been inconceivable 30 years ago, just not as fast as peak Boriswave. The way SW1 responded a few weeks ago strengthens my confidence they will continue to radicalise and try to remove the boats as an issue by simply defining it out of existence and flying people here. After all, the Tories secretly flew thousands of Afghans here and kicked soldiers’ families out of their homes to house them, then went on TV and demanded praise from voters for their heroism. If the Tories can do that, Labour can ‘solve’ the boats.

Socialist Worker articulating cross-party consensus

C. Benefits.

Voters think SW1 doesn’t take benefits cheating/unfairness seriously while SW1 thinks the issue is exaggerated by the ‘right wing press’.

There’s much stronger support across party lines for much tougher action on benefits than SW1 has wanted to face. This also surprised me — particularly how those now saying they’ll vote LAB or LibDem often sounded like Reform voters on the subject.

The combination of 1) ‘out of control’ immigration with 2) the ‘unfair’ benefits system during 3) ‘a cost of living crisis’ drives more hatred for SW1.

But Labour won’t act here for similar reasons to immigration. Working class and middle class non-graduate voters have much less influence on Labour now than London and Oxbridge graduates. Their activists, the NGO complex they prop up with taxpayers’ money, the Unions (now largely captured by graduates) etc are committed like the Democrats to constant expansion of the welfare system, the fraud and the NGO complex surrounding it.

Any attempt to discuss the problems, never mind act, will be immediately denounced.

Starmer’s position is so weak he couldn’t even win on cutting less than £5 billion recently.

It’s close to inconceivable that Labour will act on this in any serious way before 2029. The entire orientation of the modern Party, its supporting networks, and the media favour pouring more billions into it and denouncing opponents as ‘extreme’ despite Labour voters in traditional Labour areas wanting action.

Again, therefore, there is a big opportunity for Farage/Reform. In some ways the opportunity here is bigger than on immigration because concern about this is less polarised than immigration. I don’t see this reflected in SW1 discussion but it seems an important sign of the future.

D. Climate/environment.

There’s an obvious opportunity to shift focus from the current SW1 conventional wisdom on Net Zero to:

Stop putting up bills for Net Zero given China’a emissions, scrap things that put up bills and cut bills instead to help COL.
Focus on pollution of water, air and food and conservation.
UK efforts on Net Zero should be on technology which can scale and help the world and we make money from.

Again, Labour are super-locked in to the old view — with Miliband very popular and their activists committed and worried about losing votes to Greens.

So are most of the hacks.

Farage is already hostile to the old view but doesn’t have a clear new story/focus. The Tories will shift towards Farage but incompetently and with a lot of squealing from the majority of the Party which supported disastrous energy policy for 20 years, i.e ‘the moderate mainstream’.

Again, the Right has the problem that its campaigning machinery is rubbish so framing a different position well and getting the aesthetics right are not possible unless/until new forces are built.

E. Productivity / debt.

Starmer is locked into HMT’s trajectory: put up taxes, change nothing except more regulation and more of the same for 20 years.

His replacement will put taxes and regulation up even more. There will be endless babble about the Single Market being ‘key to growth’ while the Single Market continues to kneecap technology in Europe. The only constraint will be market feedback.

I can’t see any SW1 facing the debt horror until crisis hits. It’s a regime-complete problem. No existing entity could tell a convincing story about it with a plausible new plan.

As I’ve said before, one of the big and very under-discussed aspects of SW1 over the past decade has been the collapse of interest among MPs about the economy and productivity, despite the referendum. This mainly reflects a mix of a) the low quality of MPs now plus b) the emotionally resonant issues on their phones are US culture wars. Neither will change soon.

SW1 has been hostile to SMEs and entrepreneurs since Thatcher. The Tories were shocking and Tory MPs have lost their historic connections to these networks. I saw their indifference and how like Labour they just parroted nonsense from the CBI, one of the most repulsive institutions in British public life.

I suspect most Labour MPs just didn’t grasp the effect of their budgets on business taxes and how it would drive SMEs out of business. This will be destructive but neither party has cared about them so it won’t be a big issue. Tories will give quotes to the papers but they are now culturally separated from these communities.

There’s an obvious opportunity for Reform to exploit Tory/Labour hostility to SMEs and entrepreneurs. So far they haven’t.

A YIMBY blindspot. I have tried over the past two years to get this through to a few YIMBY/pro-growth people:

Because of the Boriswave and anger about immigration plus the boats and boat people in hotels and being disbursed around the country now — plus the general problem of house prices and rent — pro-growth people can’t just say ‘build build build’ without provoking a backlash from an important set of voters who reply — no thanks, I don’t want to see a load more building over England just to house millions more immigrants. If you want to build support for building more, then you will have to be much tougher on immigration than much of YIMBY world feels happy with. This is part of the new quid pro quo with voters that’s needed to build a sustainable coalition.

I failed.

YIMBY world has a big social crossover with Insider world in London. So long as they stick to planning reform and infrastructure, SW1 is happy largely ignoring them. But if they started pushing on immigration, they’d be lumped in with ‘the fascists’. YIMBY types instinctively feel this. They will therefore carry on raising money and doing what they do but they will lack influence and to some extent generate opposition to their own ideas by their aesthetics.

So long as the growth/YIMBY people refuse to face the disaster of mass immigration, they will continue to fail to build the political support they want for pro-growth policies because those things will be seen as designed mainly to help a set of people who are in parallel destroying social order.

The main players?

Remember…

They are not optimising for ‘win the election’, they are optimising for career progress and what’s in the media on very short timescales.
They do not accept the voters’ verdict that our crises are because of Insiders’ failures.
Almost everything in SW1 is mimesis and herding, not ‘independent thought from rational actors’.

A. Labour

Labour and the No10 team, like the Tories 2021-24, are no longer an entity capable of processing information above, making plans and executing. They are locked into a cycle of chaos and collapse. It doesn’t matter that some players with power and influence try to do sensible things — their limited agency will be swamped by the structural dynamics including the personality and skills of Starmer.

As I said last year I think Starmer will be replaced by Miliband, Rayner, Nandy or Burnham. I had to deal with Burnham when he shadowed the Gove team. He was useless. So it’s fitting SW1 is trying to pretend he’s a ninja. If he takes over he will get big support from the old media then fail fast and hard.

There’s no need to repeat my analysis in 2024-25 of Starmer as PM, the failure of him and his team to control No10 and the centre of power etc. (Cf. 9/24: You can already see Starmer as repeating the Trolley’s collapse, their prisons approach will be a political disaster, McSweeney won’t be able to make up for Starmer’s rubbishness etc — and here on how No10/70WH officials thought from the start that the new Labour team had never watched Yes, Minister.)

SW1 will largely ignore the structural reasons Starmer failed like predecessors and start their usual soap opera on his replacement in terms of ‘who could grip the levers of power’ by ‘bringing in the grownups like [insert people just like Starmer]’.

Whoever takes over will shift Left on most things. The story they tell themselves is that a) Starmer just carried on with Osborne-Sunak style government which voters hate (true), b) voters want change (true), c) we should shift to the left (mostly wrong).

This argument will be supported by most of the media. SW1 hates anybody who argues Whitehall wastes hundreds of billions and savings are easy and necessary, and loves anybody who says ‘the serious sensible thing is to raise taxes and give the old system more power and money’. They praised Trolley and Sunak for this. They attacked Starmer for saying ‘no tax rises’. They praise Starmer for breaking his promise, which has been a disaster for him in the polls. And they will praise his successor for raising them more. Those who liked the Cameron project will tell the Tories ‘the path to regaining credibility is supporting Labour on the inevitable need for tax rises’. (This has some logic — if your primary goal is preserving the old regime, then you can’t change how it works so saving money is impossible!)

Labour will continue to be greatly influenced by the US culture wars and Democrat debates. They can see that the energy among the Democrats is with the AOC-Mamdani network. Mamdani won. They will argue that ‘Clinton style centrism got us into this mess, Mamdani shows that real radicalism will win’.

This argument will be mostly delusional but the details won’t matter. The emotional story will be persuasive and Insider mimesis will do the rest.

I cannot see Labour escaping the gravitational pull of a) its activists and b) Whitehall, both of which want more power and money for the old regime and oppose changing the big things which must be changed to do what voters want. E.g like the Tories, most Labour MPs would rather lose than do what’s needed to stop the boats or improve the standard of living for those on median incomes outside London.

B. Tories

I said last year I think Kemi will be replaced.

Jenrick has gone. This increases the chances of a wildcard.

But it also increases the chances of no contest because Tory MPs delude themselves about their situation and swallow fairy tales about ‘Kemi finding her feet’.

In the last few weeks SW1 has seen a new emotional wave about KB’s ‘recovery / resurgence’.

It would be no surprise if they fool themselves for a while longer that ‘she’s found her feet, the government’s collapsing, don’t rock the boat just now old boy’.

And if Labour starts pushing Starmer out, you can see short-term this strengthening the hand of those saying ‘wait’, just as Starmer’s autumn disasters strengthened the hand of Tories saying ‘wait til May’.

What’s really happened is a) Starmer continues to implode, b) Farage continues to fail to provide a clear alternative particularly on the COL, c) KB has done a little better at PMQs which is irrelevant to voters but relevant to the media coverage, so some past CON voters are now saying to pollsters ‘Kemi’ and the polls have inched up.

What is the core of KB’s problems?

She’s rubbish.
She’s lazy.
She can’t hire even beta talent so her team is rubbish.
People hate the Tories for the farce of 2010-24.
The wider Party and its networks are knackered for talent, ideas, money etc.
Voters have moved on from thinking about the Tories.
Much of her own party activist base has died, retired or defected and this has its own doomloop momentum.
If she does things voters would like, then she’d enrage much of the old media and her own MPs. If she optimises for keeping them quiet, then she necessarily fails with voters. Escaping this dilemma — similar to what Sunak faced and botched — necessarily involves accepting short-term problems for long-term gains. (In 2019 we optimised for voters and this unavoidably made short-term problems of managing the MPs harder.) She isn’t capable of thinking through and executing 10% of what this means.

None of these things will change. Starmer can implode faster and this can look like she’s ‘recovering’ but it will be ephemeral.

As soon as she is under serious pressure, she can only fail. Like Starmer or Kamala, the more she talks, the more she self-sabotages.

The old Remainer-Insider faction represented by Cameron, Gawke, Grieve et al are delusional in thinking they could revive by ‘ignoring immigration’. They’ve lost MILLIONS of votes to Reform and their main issue is immigration. They’re also delusional in thinking that re-assembling the old guard Tory MPs who voted Remain and want to ‘talk about the economy not immigration’ can revive the party. Every new iteration of what they say amounts to ‘we can and must return to the 1990s’. They refuse to accept the world of the 1990s, which formed them, has gone and realty and voters demand new ideas.

The ERG faction is similarly delusional about what to do — lots of them think the answer is a return to the 1980s!

No faction of Tory world is capable of building a new campaign machine at scale so the ludicrous SW1 debate between different versions of a delusional ‘strategy’ is redundant. Having explained intra-Tory world debates for years, it’s pointless continuing. It’s best just ignored.

None of the currently existing ‘strategies’ discussed in SW1 can work because none of them get to the core problems.

It’s quite possible it is so broken nothing could not revive it. But if it is revivable, it is only possible by effectively closing it, reopening it, the new leader doing what I keep saying the voters want — i.e explicit massive talent recruitment exercise conducted in public to show how the new thing is fundamentally different. And this will almost certainly shatter what’s left of it so that the splinters fly off in different directions. Maybe out of this the new thing survives and grows. Maybe it implodes. But one way or another the old thing is knackered and will splinter anyway.

When the situation shakes out with Reform, the logical thing is for those like Gawke and dozens of other Tory MPs to retire or else join Labour or LibDems. There will be no political space for a party continuing to pretend that it is 1995 or even 2015. If you want moderately not-left economics, either switch off the news or accept you will also have to vote for a party aimed at much tougher immigration policy and doing many other things you won’t like if you’re a natural Cameron supporter.

I don’t want to get into Ukraine in this blog but a subplot of the Tory mainstream is how they emotionally aligned strongly with Whitehall and Brussels on Ukraine. I predict that some of the more prominent pro-Brexit figures will start saying things like ‘if we have to choose between a) admitting defeat on Ukraine or b) doubling down with Brussels and giving up on Brexit, then Slava Ukraine!’ I’m not joking. Rejoin and Slava Ukraine are already highly correlated — also highly correlated with pro-infinite immigration and river-to-the-sea-Greta-trans-communism. These correlations will tighten and many Tories will fall in line.

I wondered last year whether a wild card could still save them. I’m now mostly convinced it’s unlikely. If a wildcard wins and tries to close and rebuild it in the only way that would work with voters, they will probably be sabotaged by their own MPs who mostly would rather continue losing than destroy social relations in London.

In their lingering death throes, their main effect will be raising the probability of an even worse government in 2029.

C. Farage

1/ The huge historic opportunity is an entity which focuses on a) voters and our real, huge problems, and thereby rewrites SW1 stories — not b) current SW1 stories and social relations.

I’ve written here before that NF needs to build the team and plan in public. People are so desperate millions like those described above would swallow their doubts and vote Reform if NF does it. They want to see him on a stage with ten very serious people empowered to run the core fields — economy, immigration, security, defence etc — articulating a specific plan. They want to see consistency and how the important parts fit together in a credible overall story of how the country can be rebuilt over a decade.

2/ Reform has no serious campaign entity. The party’s handling of the recent lame attacks from the Guardian/BBC and No10 on NF’s school days show how far off the pace they are. There are some able people but no sign of a fundamental transition.

It remains unclear a) how many key Reform people grasp what’s needed, b) how many want to make the necessary sacrifices and face the problems of really building what the moment demands.

Building what’s needed to crush the old parties then command No10 and profoundly change the country means upending the power structure and social networks around Farage. If he hires ten serious people to stand on stage, they will each hire ten serious people. It means creating a hardcore top team which, by definition, cannot be treated like his stooges are treated today.

What then happens to those with senior jobs today? A historic break in quality of government — being a government that controls the government and changes course — is inherently dangerous to many careers.

Destroying the Tories does not need such disruption.

Arguably even winning the next election might be possible without huge disruption depending on a) how much the old parties continue to collapse and b) the effectiveness of plans to smash up Farage with lawfare etc.

Farage can tell himself his goals are destroying the Tories and winning the election and he can rationalise that ‘it isn’t the right time’ to upset old friends now in order to build what’s needed ‘after we win’. This can continue all the way to the election.

There are always powerful arguments for delaying painful decisions and continuing to trust old allies, that’s why history is the way it is.

3/ There are signs of Reform focusing increasingly on SW1 rather than voters and trying to reduce its attack surface vis the old media. For example, Richard Tice spoke out in favour of seizing Russian assets to churn into the Ukraine mud, which was popular with SW1 pundits but was binned even by the EU leaders who keep escalating and losing. What’s needed is an entity that can discuss the UKR disaster intelligently. We already have a bunch of parties who supported the disaster and are delusional.

Similarly, there is no sign of a serious plan to deal with deportations, extremism, serious organised crime — problems which strongly overlap. Again, we already have parties committed to the 30 year consensus.

You can paste this to big issue after big issue including the state’s war on the family and vandalism of education. What’s needed is an approach radically different to the last half century. There is little sign of a party taking this seriously.

In general Reform increasingly resembles the Tories intellectually, organisationally, and aesthetically.

Many apparent Outsiders are not really mentally Outsiders but are desperate to be become honoured Insiders. They crave approval from the people they ostensibly oppose or even hate. Many in Reform (like the Tories) really want peerages and invitations to palaces and those who sneered at them for years to honour them. SW1 is very good at sniffing this out and providing social acceptance in return for dropping threats to existing power and money. Officials who are absolutely hopeless at their nominal job are world class at making ministers feel like little kings in return for nodding through business as usual.

4/ So far NF has recruited some of the worst dregs of Tory world like Jake Berry.

These Tory defections are seen in SW1 as ‘good news’ for him. They clearly are bad news for the Tories and purely from the perspective of destroying the Tories they are clearly good news. But if NF wants to be a successful PM, then he needs to build a coalition for deep change — yet recruiting Tory dregs clearly undermines this, both with voters and with potential elites he should be trying to recruit. Farage is on the record calling most of them useless, liars or worse. His opponents can post pictures of Farage with the dregs and his old quotes. It will be impossible to present them as serious ministerial prospects illustrating a different and serious approach to government, especially given the voters already despise former Tory ministers on principle.

The Tory recruits are on YouTube defending the Boriswave. They sat in the Cabinet when Trolley ditched the 2020 position and opened negotiations with Starmer’s mates over Chagos. They supported the HRA/ECHR. They nodded along with flying thousands of Afghans back and putting them in barracks. They supported ditching the tax promise I wrote into the 2019 manifesto in 2021. On and on and on. Nadhim Zahawi is on the record supporting mass immigration, sending billions back to Somalia etc and he was vocal in supporting the Boriswave. Danny Kruger is different but it’s unclear how much influence he will have.

NF’s choice of London Mayor is another bad signal. I don’t know anything about her, this isn’t a personal judgement. But if Reform were on the right trajectory, they would be looking for a candidate who is clearly in the top tier of talent and possibly famous (or illustrious in their field) — someone that jolts SW1 into ‘bloody hell X is a really great candidate, I’m shocked’ — not a standard candidate of the type the other parties choose.

Choosing Goodwin as a byelection candidate is a similarly bad sign, a Remainer academic who grabbed a chance for power and money. (When you watch SW1 attack Goodwin, remember that when I said he was a charlatan in 2016 his colleagues supported him — they only denounced him because his politics flipped!)

5/ Reform could have closed the gate on other insurgents in 2025 but didn’t. This means many are still considering the possibility that a) Tories and Labour collapse, b) Reform stays as it is therefore is programmed to fail in No10 even if it wins the election, c) Farage could be smashed up by the old system before the election, d) something new will be needed.

SW1 — including NF’s circle — underrates the possibility space in such a chaotic environment. Young talent is at an inflection point unprecedented in decades. Some have gone. Others are planning to go. Others will either have a crack at upending the current system before going. And there’s plenty of people with money and skills who really don’t want to go. It will not be stable.

6/ Many say — the crucial thing is to replace Starmer so surely Tories and Reform will come to a sensible deal and not do the worst thing and allow a red-green-yellow-Hamas-ScotNat-rainbow coalition?

The history of the right for 30 years is not understanding what the hell is happening, doing dumb things, and losing.

This could easily happen again because of local incentives. If Farage optimises for ‘destroy Tories’ and the Tories optimise for ‘survival as an independent entity’ — and neither optimises for ‘a government that controls the government’ — then the median scenario is the nightmare rainbow coalition.

Most in Tory and Reform world will optimise for their career short-term. They will identify this with the good of the country. And almost nobody will think ‘the critical change is massively raising the talent in politics by bringing in elites now alienated from politics’. This is not how political elites think. The worse the calibre of people, the more resistant they are to recruiting elite talent. So there will always be powerful forces rationalising delay in recruiting new people.

7/ Reform is almost entirely based on Farage. Accidents happen. SW1 is encouraging physical attacks on him while also denying him official security.

D. The emerging SW1 ‘sensible consensus’

I mentioned above Carney’s speech and how Insiders are shape shifting.

What does this mean for SW1 in 2026?

There will be six big elements of the Insider story. All exist already but will be strengthened and harmonised into talking points you see much more often.

Higher taxes, more power for Whitehall, no challenge to old power and budgets.
Double down again in Ukraine. SW1 is in many ways the regime which went most insane over Ukraine and is most emotionally committed. It’s arguably the place most resistant to facing reality of any on earth. No10 has worked to sabotage peace because it prefers to double down. SW1 supported it. SW1 will keep doubling down until external reality imposes itself on them, like the Pentagon with Vietnam. SW1’s rancid culture got them into this mindset and will keep them there. And they ALL joined in, there’s not one serious player who stood against the herd. They’ll double down until Russia makes it physically impossible. Then pretend it would have been a triumph if only DC had been prepared to pretend nuclear war is impossible.
Revive the Russiagate hoax and push the Rejoin campaign. I said a year ago this would happen in 2025 and it has. It will accelerate regardless of the EU’s problems because it’s based on powerful emotions. The more radicalised parts of ‘the mainstream’ have never reconciled themselves to losing in 2016, swallowed Russiagate, and desperately need to believe that Brexit is the core reason for the old system’s crises. They are also desperate for a story about ‘growth’ which does NOT involve actually changing how SW1 works! So Rejoin is perfect! It’s a one-stop shop for spin on ‘economic recovery’, reuniting the left and stopping defections to Greens etc, and the destruction of their political opponents. The exact same people who mock every argument for domestic deregulation and babble ‘regulation is good actually’ flip 180 degrees as soon as they discuss the EU — suddenly the supposed (fake) deregulation of the Single Market ‘cutting Brexit red tape’ is real and good! Scale means they can pretend problems like ‘we can’t take on California tech companies’ melt away. It’s a panacaea and an emotional support pet. It’s perfect for a political culture living in fantasy land.
Campaign for censorship and lawfare against Farage and others. Our fundamental problem since 2015 is we lost narrative control and didn’t use the full power of the regime to crush the extremists. This must be reversed. The Democrats should have jailed Trump, forbidden Elon from buying Twitter, and told entrepreneurs ‘get behind us or jail’. We mustn’t make the same mistakes again. We need a new system to counter disinformation [i.e state control of news] and to use state powers to dismantle the fascist threat [i.e lawfare to destroy Reform without relying on votes]. France scuppered Le Pen. The EU has developed a toolkit for east Europe and will deploy it against the AFD. Part of getting closer to Europe again is adopting their approach to outlaw opponents and defend democracy against fascism. Democracy cannot survive a free internet. Once the Democrats retake the White House, we can have a transatlantic deal between Washington, London and the EU which finally crushes the fascists and restores sanity.
Start the ‘fair votes’ electoral reform campaign (i.e PR to ensure the old regime can only be replaced by physical coup). Some Insiders realise how lucky they got with the Trolley rejecting the system’s surrender in 2020. They realise how a competent anti-Insider force can use the flexibility of the British constitution, particularly over appointments/dismissals, machinery of government changes, and powers of a PM that are constitutionally real and available to be used but which the system goes to extreme pains to conceal from successive PMs. The prospect of Farage is already prompting reflection on all this. Officials and lawyers will try to accelerate their destruction of the old British constitution in order to try to make it legally even harder for a new government to challenge the old system, particularly on Whitehall itself, the ECHR/HRA etc. These people had no qualms about trying to cancel the result of the referendum. They will have no qualms about rigging the electoral system to try to ensure the permanent state stays permanent and cannot be displaced. I would not be surprised if they try something as desperate as simply giving millions of foreigners the vote. And they will also start talking about another referendum in which they give millions of EU citizens the vote so the result cannot go wrong again. With Rejoin, PR, and censorship, old Whitehall is safe from everything except an armed coup (which ironically they will also encourage people to think about more and more).
No compromise with the forces of change, all opposition to the old regime is now ‘fascism’. And the ‘fascism’ is connected to a powerful foreign enemy, ‘fascist Putin’. Putin works brilliantly as the focus of out-group hate for the mainstream because Putin/Russia are WHITE. ‘Fascism is the enemy at home and abroad’ justifies things that otherwise would resemble … fascism. (Cf. Ansell’s piece on why Insiders should link Putin, Trump and the EU.)

These things fit logically together: censorship, rig the electoral system, Rejoin, double down on immigration and ‘if you’re not with us you’re a fascist who should be jailed’ — democracy is saved!

It provides a simple moral story with goodies (FT pundits, officials, anti-fascist activists etc) and baddies (Brexit, Farage, fascists, oligarchs etc). This moral story justifies things otherwise impossible for people who want to think of themselves as ‘liberal’ to justify. This is how Hillary et al explained why they must replace the ‘historic error’ of the First Amendment — they were simply defending democracy against tech-bro-oligarch fascism.

People underestimate the determination of many Insiders to double down all the way to ‘end democracy to save democracy’.

Just in the last few days, you can see:

The French government raiding X offices.
The Spanish government legalised 500k illegals while its left wing politicians explicitly stated on video that they will then give them a vote to make real ‘replacement theory’(!!), then the same government announced a big set of censorship measures!
The French left leader Mélenchon similarly talks of ‘the new France of the Great Replacement’. There’s a general trend of left politicians who used to say it was a conspiracy theory now adopting the term.
And here the former Tory leader, fully paid up Insider, signalled his support for all the left demanding censorship. And the Green leader who also wants state control of social media so it is pro Islam and anti-fascist endorsed violence against police by Islamic nutjobs (he’s referring to the people who broke a police woman’s back with a sledgehammer getting no jail).

Last thoughts

I don’t think Westminster can absorb the realities of voter opinion sketched above.

I don’t think the critical Whitehall institutions, quangos etc, can escape the entropic forces or even discuss them sensibly.

Voters dislike Starmer so much he was touching record levels BEFORE the recent Epstein debacle. He is seen as not a real leader, weak and a useless liar. His awful priorities are summed up by his immediate move to take pensioners cash: ‘Why would you start with this given the state of the country?’ And he is seen as making one bad decision after another since then.

The Tories are seen as ‘not relevant anymore’ and people actively ignore them. Almost nobody knew about anything Kemi has said.

I think Labour and Tory parties will continue to disintegrate and both leaders are knackered. Labour MPs should think about successors most importantly in terms of ‘what are their priorities and what chance do they have of being able to govern well’, NOT in terms of ‘who polls well now’. If you get someone who has decent priorities and can build a team and govern then you have a fighting chance by building a team who can make ‘communication’ work but if you do the usual SW1 thing and prioritise ‘comms’ and polls, you’ll probably make the wrong decision.

What are the counter-forces, what could reverse failure? Not even covid and Ukraine have forced change — in many ways they encouraged the old system to band together against the menace of renewal.

The deep worry, fear and anger about the COL crisis provides a huge opportunity for a political force able to campaign at scale. The combination of a) voters do not know anything like the true story of immigration numbers since 1997 and the Boriswave and b) almost none of the cases involving the immigration system and violence and legal madness are known, provides another huge opportunity.

Voters don’t think Labour, Tories or Reform have anything like a serious plan to deal with any of the top problems.

Voters are much more hostile to tax increases than 5-10 years ago.

Voters are more negative about the NHS and more open to new ideas than any time in 30 years — ‘just give it more money’ is no longer clearly agreed.

Voters are much more upset about benefits cheating than SW1 realises — including voters on the left — and think here too SW1 ignores them.

Voters have shifted on Net Zero and will shift more if those who want a change of tack start using things like the graph of PRC emissions we showed the focus groups. SW1 hasn’t realised this.

Voters know that some violent crime like robberies are out of control and don’t believe official claims about ‘falling violent crime’. There is deepening concern about ‘the police giving up’ and ‘joke sentences’.

Voters know very little about the mad ECHR/HRA cases.

Voters are fearful of the spread of radical Islam and don’t think Westminster has a plan and it will get worse. They are obviously right. This will grow as awareness of the grooming gangs and other nightmares grows. I don’t see LAB, CON or Reform dealing with this. The problem has been allowed to grow so big that an appropriate response will be psychologically shocking for SW1. The median MP will continue to burble nonsense about ‘British values’ and ‘diversity is our strength’ and ‘we must all come together’ after each news disaster. The Birmingham police shocker is just a tiny sight of the rot in the British state. MPs have created this, few will face it, those few will be smashed by BBC etc. For something sensible to happen, it will almost definitely have to come from forces outside SW1 but as this problem grows, the problem of people staying quiet from physical fear — already important in SW1 with MPs and hacks — will grow. Attacks on MP offices and journalists across Europe has affected SW1 a lot.

There is no force on the right which can campaign at scale.

I think Farage will delay talent recruitment unless it starts feeling like things are no longer dropping into his lap. He can profit from the Tory disintegration but cannot hope to control Whitehall with his current approach. The collapse of Starmer will strengthen those in Reform thinking ‘it’s dropping into our lap, no need for anything hasty’.

We will continue to see young talent and old money leave the country.

We will continue drifting towards financial crisis and blood on the streets.

The core issue remains — can some network of elites outside SW1 solve the inherent coordination problems (problems solved partly in America by Elon) and muster talent density plus ~£50-100 million, before crisis hits, or do new forces arise only after crisis hits?

I was more hopeful about ‘before’ last year. I have more of a feeling now that we will drift into chaos.

If it becomes clear by 2027 that the likely choice in 2029 will be Labour, Tories, the rainbow coalition of doom, or a Tory dominated Reform clownshow, then there will be a big rush for the exits.

I think those who won’t leave should mostly focus on small local efforts to create small zones of sanity and cooperation, outside the grip or even notice of London, which could cooperate and build larger networks. As more breaks, people will naturally turn to local problems and solutions. If a national effort arises, it may be from successful local efforts which spread and combine. Two obvious focuses for such efforts are alternatives to school and alternative security/local resilience.

All of Westminster’s problems will get even worse because of Ukraine, the most stupid, delusional, pathological and unnecessary war of recent decades. Westminster deluded itself more, and more universally, than any other NATO country. Not one senior person spoke out against the farce, everybody herded. As the crash accelerates, our elites will be most exposed in many ways. They will find the psychic shock hideous and this means more chaos as they try to cope with the cognitive dissonance — the gap between what they told themselves and unfolding reality. Westminster handled it so badly that it hasn’t even been able to use UKR to build drones properly even though UK forces have been closest to the action with drones and UKR wanted to build drones here — the MoD is soooooo pathological and corrupt it’s even screwed that up. This disaster will be with us for decades, as those responsible cash in on the speaker circuit and sit on boards advising on ‘strategic risk’ and ‘geopolitics’. China is the big winner, as I said would happen in Q1 2022. It’s made a fortune selling stuff at inflated prices to have Russia blow up NATO stuff for free while fragmenting NATO, undermining US credibility, and banking a treasure trove of data on NATO systems from embeds on the Russian side — while also absorbing a load of European industry fleeing Europe because of the effects on energy markets etc. While Europe mostly retains disastrous procurement, China will learn drone lessons and build build build.

Despite Ukraine, British forces do not train properly with drones. They still run exercises which people who have been in UKR look at and say — if you do this like this, everybody will get killed by drones. Advanced drones built in America and Britain are broken up for parts in UKR. The real state of the art is in UKR and Russia, not western defence industries. If SW1 sends British forces somewhere to operate as they are now trained and equipped, a) they will have to come home straight away because MoD vandalism means they cannot sustain a force in the field, and b) if they go to UKR they will get vapourised. British Special Forces — while dodging getting arrested by the Attorney General — have warned about all this but they are told to shut up. Everything on the MoD front will keep getting worse.

NB. A few years I wrote about how some of those at the AI frontier were experimenting with the idea of synthetic polling / synthetic focus groups. The core concept is: the models are ingesting internet text so this includes all sorts of political feedback like Reddit groups and social media posts, so political opinions should be in the models, so we should be able to extract these opinions.

As you’d expect the usual suspects including many ‘professors of political science’ laughed when I wrote about this on this blog in 2022-23.

It’s now clear the core idea works, will change the economics and speed of market research, and is valuable for everybody interested in analysing, shaping opinion.

Westminster sucks on all things technology. It never mastered TV — terrorist groups around the world are routinely better at TV than Labour and Tories and SW1 campaign groups. So it’s silly to think SW1 will adapt well or fast to such technological developments.

If interested in this frontier, I strongly recommend getting in touch with the startup run by Alex Cooper and Ben Warner. Warner did data science for me in 2016 and 2019 and set up the No10 data science team now being copied across the world.

The above comments are all from real voters, not synthetics. But I’m also doing experiments with synthetics and there is no doubt that the synthetics will play an important role in America 2028 and I will be watching this year for signs of experiments by both sides in the midterms.

Generally if you know interesting X accounts, websites etc covering the detail of the midterms, please leave in comments. I will spend a lot of time on US midterms and 2028. In particular, I’d like to see: interesting sites/accounts on polling/models, tracking ads (online, old school TV, inside games, anything novel) and trying to infer campaign strategies and spending from public data.

Thanks for subscribing.

If interested in government and SW1, two things…

A/ Pamela Dow — ex official I worked with — is recruiting for Civic Future here.

B/ I’ve been impressed by the team building PHAROS. Young, energetic, not SW1-y! If rich consider giving them cash please!

I’m reading a lot about Communism, including McMeekin’s new book, and a fascinating short book by TS Eliot, Notes Towards the Definition of Culture, which, like Dostoyevsky or Nietzsche, one reads saying to oneself ‘yes, happened as he sensed it would happen, yes, that seemed crazy then but it’s played out like that, yes schools and universities evolved like that my god, X seemed very pessimistic then but actually it turned out even worse’ etc. It’s striking reading Eliot how he regarded his own time — say 1910-50 — as a much fallen culture and education, yet it now seems impossibly high relative to our’s. The normal level of elite education in 1900 has almost totally disappeared in the west as the shared culture of Greece, Rome, and the Jews has disappeared from education along with the greats of European literature since Dante. Apart from elite maths schools in places like Russia and France and computer science, what other positive elite education examples are there to set against the spreading cultural waste land? Please leave links below.

Thanks to some subscribers of this blog, in 2025 I helped some bright young things develop plans in specific areas for what a serious No10 should do. A lot of what’s needed is mapped out. There’s a network of great people who want to do it. The core problem is not devising a policy plan or a winning political strategy, it’s finding the people to build the political vehicle for controlling No10 and a majority in Parliament.

More soon…

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235. Regime Change 2026-29: Results from a Market Research project: By Dominic Cummings