Loading summary
Transcript60 lines
- [00:03]
A
Captain, the UK government has sent two interceptors after us. They're hailing us now.
- [00:07]
B
What's going on, Midshipman? They have no jurisdiction over orbital space pipes.
- [00:11]
A
I've got a stormtrooper on the line now, sir. He says the Online Safety act now encompasses the vast infinitude of space. It's over.
- [00:18]
B
There's nothing for it. Midshipman. It's time to deploy our deadliest weapon.
- [00:22]
A
Sir, you can't mean the Cummings interview.
- [00:26]
B
I mean it. Mr. Drysdale. Initiate the broadcast.
- [00:32]
C
Who now has anything to say about the deindustrialization of this country?
- [01:04]
B
Townhouses on the moon, the highest GDP
- [01:06]
A
per capita in the Milky Way.
- [01:08]
B
Small modular reactors under every village green.
- [01:11]
A
This is Anglo futurism.
- [01:30]
B
Dump. A key faction of the world as we see it right now is that the rules based international order is crumbling. So there are many examples of this. Tariffs, the Iran war, perhaps even the frore over the Chagos Islands. What do you see in this respect?
- [01:49]
C
Yeah, I mean if you go back to the institutions built in the rubble of 1945 and as the Cold War was beginning, you have obviously UN, NATO, WTO, EEC as it was, EU, etc. Etc. Who IMF all these sorts of things and they all seem really kind of played out and exhausted, right? They're in many ways just clearly incompetent. Their legitimacy, trust in them has imploded. Covid obviously undermined a lot of things. Brexit happens partly because the pro EEC slash EU forces lost the argument over a couple of decades about that. So yeah, you have what you often see in history, right? You see this sort of pattern in European history of every kind of like 50, 75 years or so. You have the international order of its time. The institutions and the ideas kind of gradually drift out of alignment with reality. And then you have crisis. So you can, I think it's. It's interesting to think about the mid mid 19th century. So if you go back to 1815, you have the end of one huge cycle. French Revolution, Napoleonic Wars. 1815, you have the Treaty of Vienna and a set of new ideas about how the world will be organized. Clear kind of great power concert. Metternich. Britain has a role in the system. You fast forward to the 1840s and you can see people all over Europe start to write letters. Metnik and Bismarck and Gerlach and all these people saying the old system's running out of, out of rope. The young people are going crazy. There's all these new technologies. Then you've got telegraph and Railway coming through, et cetera. You can sense that things are coming to a crunch. And then you have the 1848 revolutions, regime change, and then a new world arises out of it. And same thing essentially is happening now, right? It's a similar sort of thing. You've got 1815, 1945 set of new ideas institutions. That generation has died out, gone. And the ideas institutions that they left behind clearly are clearly failing. And something new is being born. But for the moment, unclear exactly what
- [04:37]
B
I'm going to quote something which you have put many times at the end of your blog posts, which is technical changes such as genetic engineering and machine intelligence are bringing revolution. And then there's abismo quote, it would be better to undertake it than undergo it. So what I want to know is what is the world that you think we could be heading into maybe 30, 40 years from now? Are we talking a billion Chinese with 150 IQ? Are we talking American superintelligence organizing a vast space economy? We're like, what actually is at stake?
- [05:09]
C
So even the people at the actual frontier in the AI labs will tell you that it's very hard to predict how the models are going to evolve. In some ways, various of those guys put straight lines on graphs a decade or so ago, and in all sorts of amazingly interesting ways, the straight lines on graphs have turned out to be true. Much derided by most of almost all of academia at the time. Yeah, professors here, there and everywhere laughed at these guys, at the idea that scaling laws would be true. But in all sorts of ways they have been. But within that, they're very spiky, right? And as Dario and Sam and Demis will all say and say publicly, each time you do it, they spike up on that. But they're weirdly rubbish on blah. So there's no theory of it at the moment. It's just an empirical thing and you find out with the. With as it comes out. But I guess one of my observations on it would be I've watched this since 2020 and it is kind of amazing that the most optimistic, if that's the right word. In any event, the people who predicted the most success for machine learning and the most dramatic changes and were most optimistic about the straight lines on graphs and the three labs who were completely divided by the entire mainstream have actually turned out to be the most accurate predictors of the future. That's extremely striking. Extremely striking. And I think that at least for the next two years. So they release these models, but they have line of sight internally to at Least I would guess, roughly speaking, to like a year or two ahead of what they can see privately before things are released. And as far as I can see, they're very confident that the straight lines on grass will continue for at least another couple of years. Now, if you think of what that means in terms of the exponentials, that's very, very, very, very dramatic. And I think for sure people in politics have not got their heads around it. We saw in Covid that exponentials are extremely hard. I experienced this myself sitting there watching exponentials being real and watching the political class cope with it. And I don't think they've learned much. And you can see from the general mainstream discussion on AI right, even now you head over to the blue sky world and it's all still. It's a crypto scam, it's a bubble, it's bollocks. It's going to use all the water, it's going to use all the water. It's going to use all the water. There's no way we can get it back. Exactly. Kieran Martin, former senior official at GCHQ Romaniac just a few months ago, is tweeting away on BlueSky, assuring all the blue sky NPCs that don't worry, it's just all plausible nonsense and hype. The political world is doing what it's done repeatedly, which is just deliberate blindness to the whole thing. You've also got in parallel, you've got very rapid changes in biotech and the democratization of genetic engineering and the two things are in some sense coming together because one of the other things that the models are improving at radically is all kinds of bio stuff. Demis proved it with Alphafold and protein folding, but there's all kinds of other stuff now. And one of the, I think most important things going on is the research inside the labs on how good these models are potentially with bioweapons. And of course with our just thinking about all the things we've already talked about. One of the amazing signs of the pathology of the system is that even after Covid, we are still allowing and funding gain of function in America. The regulation of bio stuff is so appalling that they just keep finding these weird random Chinese labs full of Chinese people with all kinds of like completely crazy pathogens inside. Just like some random thing with 50 people in LA and no one knows like how the hell these things were set up. Again, it's like a sort of weird sci fi story that these things could exist. What are they doing? Who did it no one knows what. What are we doing as a civilization that that's allowed. So if you think of. And of course also we haven't actually taken security seriously in supposedly the most secure Biolabs, the BSL Level 4 things. So that also remains a shit show. So you've got a bunch of things democratizing biological engineering. You've got the models improving on an exponential, you've got the models increasingly going to be plugged into the democratization process and you've got completely crackers, agencies in charge of regulating, surveilling, monitoring, all of that, and a bunch of public health people whose official story is that we all did a cracking job in Covid. So that's one. That's a whole set of things. Britain still has some great strengths in this area. It's still got huge talent, it's got a couple of great universities, it's got a great ecosystem in London and a few other places for some of these technologies and to some extent has captured some of the flow west out of Europe. So all these young people leaving mainly to California and Texas, but some have also stopped in London and that's been to our advantage by default. So almost all the positive things that we could have changed after Brexit, Westminster's Tories and Labour have been adamant in refusing to do anything, but just because of inertia, we haven't adopted various of the EU regulations and therefore we haven't shot ourselves in both feet the way the Brussels has, which is good.
- [12:13]
B
Well, it seems that the world is perhaps partitioning into blocks. So we have the crinks, the US increasingly doing its own thing and some might say that our place is with Europe, you might disagree.
- [12:33]
C
So, yeah, I mean, there's so much you could say about that. Right. But if you go back to the arguments that I made before the referendum, what were the fundamental arguments there? One set of arguments was about the weaknesses of Britain itself. The. The actual regime in Britain is knackered and is failing and the institutions are knackered and they're not going to be able to cope with the world that's coming. That was an extremely niche view in, in 2015. Extremely niche, regarded generally speaking as crazy. Now, of course, you know, you can go on Twitter today and you can see the vast majority of Westminster is now kind of having to face up to this reality that the old parties are knackered, old white wall is knackered, the old media ecosystem is knackered, the universities lost huge credibility, etc. Etc. So there's one set of arguments about Britain itself and British ideas and British institutions and the British ruling classes. Another set of arguments was about the state of Europe. So my argument was, if you look around, what do you see? You see a mix of stagnation, anti technology, anti growth, anti future bureaucracy dedicated to Leninist bureaucratic centralism in Brussels, and everything will improve if everything is uniformly controlled by, by the Commission. But low growth, high debt, rising debt, nightmare, pension systems, nightmare demographics, immigration out of control and fueling the rise of extremist parties. The argument that I made before the referendum was, if you look at what's happening technologically, increasingly it's China and California which are dominating and Europe is not in the game. Again, that was regarded as a very eccentric argument to make 10 years ago, but now it's an obvious, very mainstream thing. Okay, if you look at Britain's position now, we've obviously got huge problems and in all sorts of ways we have not done what the kind of vote Leave plan was and what we started doing in 2019, 2020, because the Tories stopped it all. But is the answer to that to say, oh, yeah, the bureaucratic centralism of the European Commission, we need more EU AI Acts, we need more of that kind of regulation. That's the future. I mean, does anyone in their right mind really think that? Right, so how does Westminster respond to this? Now? Westminster doesn't want to face all the technology issues, never has done. That's part of the reason why we've got a huge number of problems is that our political elites and Whitehall elites, for complicated reasons from the kind of 60s and 70s, stepped back from thinking about frontier technology very deliberately and explicitly inside Whitehall. So now people don't want to look at those questions and they go, oh, well, we've got to. Their response to our problems now is instead of looking at all the very, very obvious big things like totally farcical procurement system, totally farcical planning system, totally farcical energy, totally farcical housing, totally farcical mod. Right, you just go down the list. Totally farcical welfare, A Westminster and Whitehall that is pathological on technology and doesn't want to take it seriously. The answer to those problems is to rejoin the eu. Why? Because the old people from the old system are determined not to face reality, determined not to face the future. They just want to retreat to their comfort zone, which is having more stupid cultural wars about Brexit, because that's where they're happy. They don't want to be thinking about the things that we actually started doing. In 2019, 2020, to get to grips with the real problems now pretending that rejoining the single market is somehow the great thing when you can barely even see the single market in the data. And if you look at the Draghi report, which of course also is basically ignored in London because it's super bad for the eu, right, but you have perfect example of the actual EU technocracy itself recently writing about how basically a lot of Europe is deluded on the single market. Westminster doesn't want to face any of those problems either. It doesn't want to actually deal with the nitty gritty of what British problems are, how you get to grips with them, how you change policy and all these things. It's just all hand wavy. And it's because the Remain thing became central to their political identity emotionally
- [17:51]
A
and
- [17:52]
C
as a political culture, Westminster stopped being interested and stopped being capable of arguing and discussing these sorts of things. You go back to the 80s, right, and you think about Thatcher and you go back and look at the newspapers at the time and the news of the time, there's obviously a lot of bitter arguments, but the political class is actually engaged with the real issues of the British economy, right? That is actually what dominates the news. And you have a whole set of people reading things and arguing about them and making complicated arguments in public about what we have to do on privatization, you name it. You look at the 10 years since Brexit, it's basically characterized by Westminster being absolutely pathologically determined not to deal, not to face any of these core problems in any kind of coherent way. Constant soap opera. And weirdly, on both sides, in a way, both sides in the sense of the kind of inside Westminster, left and right were much happier arguing about all the trans madness in 2020 than they were. The Guardian was and the Telegraph was, Labour were and the Tories were. They were happier about arguing about that and Brexit than they were about dealing with any of these other actual core problems. So as long as you have these parties and as long as you have the Civil Service that we've got then, and as long as essentially like the senior people are the same, I don't see how that's gonna. How that's gonna change.
- [19:45]
A
You may count that it was the. The 80s that we were sort of dynamic in the 80s. I'm reminded of there's a Dickens, but little Dorrit, where an inventor has an invention that will supposedly massively improve the health of the nation and things for the Navy, called Daniel Doyce, and he comes and tries to sell it or provide it to the government and the Circumlocution Office bats it away. I would suggest that these are problems that are not just 40 years old, but potentially are deeper. My kind of question to you is, Britain has been like this for a long time and we've sort of muddled on what now are the sort of things that we could do now to sort of a break out of that, because if it hasn't changed in 160 years, it's probably not going to. And two, how could we be more of kind of, what would that actually look like? What would the outcomes of that actually be?
- [20:50]
C
So a lot of different things in your question there. So if you go back, I think it's definitely the case that a lot of the problems that we see now, it's been a slow train coming. That is true, but I think you also have to have to divide it up in various ways. So if you go back and look at, for example, Avi Jones and Alan brooke dealing with two great heroes dealing with the Nazis in World War II, it's interesting in their memoirs and their letters and whatnot of the time, you can see some of today's Whitehall pathologies already there. Then that's interesting, right? You then go back a bit further and you look in the period in, you know, like the 10 years or so before 1914. You also see quite a lot of current pathologies in that period. Right. A thing which is really, really remarkable. We get into World War I. The kind of proximate question, cause of that is the Belgian guarantee. Chaos in the Cabinet. It's mainly thinking about Ireland. Then this whole looming European situation gradually intrudes itself into the Cabinet and then finally, you know, we have this disaster situation which we end up fighting over the Belgian guarantee, but having communicated to Germany that we're not going to. So you have this scene, you know, the scenes around about 30, 31st of July in Germany when they're toasting champagne and saying Britain's going to stay out, and then a couple of days later we're actually in. You then go back and look at it. How many. You think we couldn't have got into World War I on this issue and then not discussed it. Right. There must have been all kinds of elite discussions about what does this guarantee mean and what does it mean for military planning, blah, blah, blah. How many discussions were there with senior cabinet and the Prime Minister with the military to discuss The Belgian guarantee? One in 1911, where the committee of Imperial Defence has a kind of session and it sort of touches on it and then it's all very difficult. And it's then literally at no point ever again does the Cabinet discuss with the military what the hell that is, what. And what are we going to do in certain situations? Situations sort of extraordinary in a certain way, less extraordinary. Like me, you sat and watched Covid happening in the cabinet room. But it feels very similar. You feel this huge. I felt in 2020, this feeling of this huge historic crisis is coming. And you look around and you realize, holy shit, this room is sort of like it was in summer 1914. It's confronting this huge thing, but the actual machinery for thinking about it and acting is just completely broken and can't even see it, never mind think intelligently about it.
- [23:52]
A
Does that not mean it's always been broken? That this is just like the nature of large and complicated systems, that they will always struggle to take on these big, big challenges.
- [24:04]
C
So in some sense. Yes, yes. In the sense that whenever you have major disruptions on the scale of, you know, major wars, Napoleon, blah, blah, obviously all kinds of things are going to be chaos. But I. So I think that there's always going to be chaos. But there's different kinds of chaos, right? And there's different kinds of responses. If you look at, there's a fascinating book called Organizing for Victory written about Pitt and It's kind of 1790s, 1800s and how Whitehall actually organized itself to deal with the growing threat of Napoleon and whatnot. The story you see there is much different than the story that you see now. And I would say a lot of the disasters around 1914 and the dealing with the Nazis in the 30s are because of particular kinds of bureaucratic problems that certain kinds of bureaucratic entities create. If you look at the 1790s, Whitehall is very, very different thing. Pitt has actual real meetings. Like Elon Musk, he actually goes and gets the junior people that know about exactly blah. And he brings them into Downing street and he quizzes them directly in conversation and says, right, we should do that. And it turns out that Charlie is rubbish. Get Charlie out the way and put so and so in instead. So you have this sense of dynamism and actual real players and real responsibility and really building capabilities as well. Completely different attitude towards procurement. 1795 Whitehall is better on procurement than 2025 Whitehall by a massive, massive factor. Right. The legal mechanisms were much better. They just pay people off. We've got to build this new armory for the naval station, right? The locals get bonged, blah. Build the Fucker. And get it done. The interplay between the armed forces, building capabilities, technology, procurement, all of that worked way, way, way, way better. Your point about? Then you've got the new Bismarck state. You look at 1880s, 1890s, 1900s. It does have this strong feel. It's a very interesting book, if you haven't read called the Weary Titan by a guy called Freidberg, which was, interestingly, partly, I think, paid for by the Office of Net Assessment in the Pentagon. And he looks at that then, the kind of internal Whitehall discussions about these kind of issues then, and it is, it's very, very noticeably different. And my argument is the reason, fundamental reason, why it's different is because of the disaster in the 1850s of the Northcott Trevelyan system. System, right, that ends the old British constitution in very important ways. Before Northcote Trevelyan ministers were actually responsible to Parliament in a true, real way. If you go back and look repeatedly, people like Palmerston and whatnot in 1820s, 1830s, 1840s, they say things. If it goes well, they get the credit for it. If it goes tits up, they're responsible for it and they're responsible in Parliament and everyone knows what the system is. And turning up and blathering away about how it's not your fault because the Civil Service didn't da da da da is not, you know, that's not how. It's not how things work. After the 1850s, you then start to have this completely different thing growing. You have the Foreign Office changing and then it's no surprise, right, that then when you look at the outbreak of World War I and you look at the 1930s and you, you know, you go and read Alan Brooks memoirs about what the total shit show the Foreign Office was all the way through World War II. The reason is because of North Kartavelian changes and the development of this permanent bureaucracy, which it becomes fundamentally extremely difficult to change outside of, actually, Churchill in crime crisis in 1940. Cabinet Office is obviously created in 1917. This is also central to the story, right, Cabinet Office is created in 1917 out of the disaster and failures of the bureaucratic system on the Western Front. But the Cabinet Office is created with two fundamental principles. It does not do policy and it does not do personnel, right? And everyone agrees, okay, we're creating this thing basically to improve secretarial work, secretarial work between government departments, that's it. But it can't do personnel and it can't do policy. Fast forward a century later, the Cabinet Secretary is literally defined as the chief policy advisor to the Prime Minister and has merged with the head of the Civil Service to be in charge of all personnel. So the two things that everybody agreed would be a total disaster if the Cabinet Office came to be are now literally its official functions. That this tale is central to what's gone wrong inside the British state. And that's why, you know, people constantly ask me what happened in the cabinet in 2020. You know, you're allowed to sit in these meetings, so what was said, Blah, blah, blah. And the answer is, I didn't bother going to the meetings because Cabinet, outside of, like, leadership crises, like in the last week, where Starmer might go, that's basically now is the only actual real function for Cabinet is possibly getting rid of a dud Prime Minister. Apart from that, Cabinet has just become a complete, completely Potemkin process. The actual decisions, everyone knows when you work in number 10, are taken by some DG in the cabinet Office or in some task force that no one in Parliament even knows exists and the media never report on. That's where the actual decisions are now taken. That's where the real power is. If you ask me, what did the Foreign Secretary think about what was happening on the Brexit negotiations between Summit 2020 and the election in 2019? I have to force myself to try and remember who the Foreign Secretary was, because they just weren't important. But I know extremely well who the Prime Minister's Private secretary in number 10 was dealing with foreign affairs, because I had to deal with him like, five or ten times a day. And what he thought was actually really important to the whole process. So that is a very, very huge structural change that's happened, but which is now essentially completely not discussed. Right. And the whole way in which politics is discussed in Britain now is really the opposite. It's discussed as if the old system is real. But everyone who's actually on the other side of the number 10 door knows that the old system is totally fake. And that's a big part of the reason why we have, why we're in the situation. We are. So circling back to your main thing. When you've got war, revolution, things like the Great Depression, whatever, anything like that, there's always going to be chaos, right? Because you're dealing with extremely complicated events and humans are imperfect, but there's chaos and there's certain kinds of bureaucratic pathology and they're different. Pitt had to deal with chaos, but Pitt could actually make decisions, decisions and get stuff done because of how the system worked then in ways that you fast forward to, like the COVID crisis. Everyone just sits there with literally thousands of people dying, saying, well, doing any of these things is all defined as illegal. So what do we do? The only thing we can think of is to go to the Prime Minister's office and say, prime Minister, will you just declare that we should just do these things? Even though it's all illegal, no one else can think of anything else to do? Right? So that the fact that the state has evolved in that way, and the fact that the political parties and the media and academia and the old media do not want to discuss these core things and they want to talk and live as if we're all living in the old Palmerstonian system, where the ministers go into Parliament, say, I take full responsibility. Which now of course means the opposite of taking full responsibility. Where a minister now says, in Parliament, I take full responsibility. Well, the action means I take zero responsibility because I can't replace any of the people. And I may well not even know why the disaster that's on the news even happened in the first place, because no one ever told me and no one ever asked my permission. It's just manifested itself from the bureaucratic shit show. So, yes, these things are in many ways very long term. I think that's true. But if you're really going to think about that, I think you have to go back to this fundamental transition from the 1850s and how that started to reprogram all these institutions like the treasury and the Foreign Office, and how power then shifted and then the Cabinet Office change, obviously in 1917. It's also crucial. And that means the Cabinet themselves lose power. The Prime Minister in lots of ways loses power, but the Cabinet Office sucks in all of this power.
- [34:01]
B
You're describing pathologies that crop up in pretty much everything the state does at this point. And it brings to mind actually the critical minerals. And to me, this crystallizes some of the pathologies that you often write about, because it's very clear to any interest in technology that we're going to need a lot more critical minerals over the coming decades and we can't rely, as the government wants us to, on recycling. But Weyhull has seemed seemingly oblivious to this trend and this track that they released last year kind of acknowledges some of the situation, but doesn't really acknowledge the kind of multiplying of critical minerals harvesting that will require. So we're in this situation where the US is going to get there first and we're going to get squashed and to me it seems to, as I said, really crystallize these faults.
- [34:57]
C
Yeah, but I think you can multiply that across. It's a much broader phenomenon. Right, yeah.
- [35:02]
B
Imagine that happening in like the fundamental
- [35:04]
C
phenomenon is that after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 91, Westminster
- [35:14]
A
then,
- [35:14]
C
well, the Western world in general becomes in all sorts of ways super complacent. And actually you can read it in Lee Kuan Yew's memoirs. It's interesting how he talks about the kind of transition in western elites pre 8991 period to post 8991 period. Post 91 they basically say this is a total vindication of everything that we do. We've won the Cold War. Now our big push is to lecture everyone outside Europe and North America about democracy and human rights, which of course goes in an increasingly left wing direction on every dimension. And in Britain it particularly develops a pathology for that. The single most important thing is Britain supporting international law. Now Chagos is obviously a particularly amusing example, tragicomic example of this where that is Westminster's overriding priority. Even when you actually look at the court and the process and whatnot, it's completely farcical. Right? It's all actually being manipulated by the Russians and the Chinese. It's totally corrupt. In no remotely serious way is this an actual, actually decent process. But that doesn't matter anymore. In Westminster it's simply labeled international law, therefore it's the highest thing. Officials came to me in 2019 about this Chagos thing and they said, well there's going to be the international tribunal that's going to rule, blah, blah, blah, blah. So we're going to have to give it away. What the fuck are you talking about? It's just some bullshit tribunal. It's ours, we're going to keep it. No, we're not even going to start a fucking process like Dominic, can we just start a process to have the Prime Minister discuss with the lawyers? No, because as soon as you start a process you're then legitimizing this entire farcical bullshit process. We're not having any meetings with the Prime Minister, we're not engaging with this thing. Tell this fucking tribunal that Chagos Islands is British and it's going to fucking stay British. We don't care what some Chinese judge or anybody else says. That's our position. And by the way, the US Deep state has an extremely deep interest in what happens on Chagos and they are going to be supportive and we're not going to be handing it over. Panic, panic, panic. Why? Because The Foreign Office doesn't regard its job and the Cabinet Office lawyers did not regard their job as upholding British interests as their number one thing. They regarded their number one priority as doing what the lawyers say international law wants and what some, like international lawyers meeting in Strasbourg or whatever might say is the right thing to do. Remember, we had to exclude large parts of the Foreign Office and the Cabinet Office from the Brexit negotiations because they were leaking to our enemies. The Cabinet Secretary came into the Prime Minister's office in 2019 and said, I'm extremely sorry, Prime Minister. I must apologize on behalf of the Civil Service. For the first time in Britain's recorded history, the government's own lawyers are leaking to undermine the British government in international negotiations, I'm afraid, because there's a lot of people inside the Cabinet Office that are very strongly on the remain side, right? That's the actual situation with how this thing is, has developed. Look at Herma and look at the lawfare situation, right? That's in some ways even. I mean, it's even more morally disgraceful. Over the last few years, you have a situation in which SAS in Hereford are tasked on black operations, fly into place X or Y, execute Operation Z against this terrorist entity. They do it, they get back off the helicopter on the tarmac in some shithole country, and they're literally arrested for murder by plod, right? That has literally been happening repeatedly over the last few years, because elements of the mod, elements of the Cabinet Office, elements of the Foreign Office and the government legal service think that what a set of lawyers looking at the European Convention of Human Rights think about certain things trumps everything else. And if some lawyer sitting in the Cabinet Office says, well, I reviewed this drone footage, and I must say, I think he was a bit hasty in this gunfight, right? I know it sounds fast, all right, but this is literally what's happening. You have a bunch of total tools in the cabin office looking at drone footage and saying, well, you know, he could have maybe given another three seconds before he fired, right? As all fucking hell is breaking loose in the middle of some Syrian village and bombs are going off and IEDs are going off. And the lawyer says, oh, well, I think that. Oh, well, the. Well, the lawyer thinks that, well, we better start investigating it then. Get that guy in. It's completely batshit crazy thing that no one would kind of almost believe is possible. When I said, you can go back, right, I said, In 2021, possibly 2022, we're in a situation where because of how Cabinet Office lawyers have defined things. We are drone striking people in the third world because that is deemed lawful under the echr. When Special Forces and the MOD have said we could actually get, nab that guy coming out the building, lift him, put him on a helicopter, fly him to X, interrogate him, try and find out what the fuck is actually going on, burrow into the terrorist organization, get actual intel. No, you can't do that. That's unlawful. That's unlawful. But droning him is lawful. That's what the lawyers say, right? Completely crazy. I say that publicly, what happens? All of these QCs and whatnot go, this is obviously total conspiracy theory. Nothing this insane could possibly be true, blah, blah, blah. Now, of course, like all these things that I say about how the system works is all now leaking out and now it's actually no longer denied and it's been officially stated and former Tory ministers have all confirmed on the record that this is what's happening. This is the product of the situation that you're talking about. When you have a combination of pathological bureaucracy decisions being sucked away from any kind of responsible ministers into parts of the Cabinet Office that have now zero political oversight, zero political visibility of any kind, operating entirely with the likes of Herma and pro remain maniac commie, anti British lawyers sitting in the Cabinet Office. They're the ones driving these processes, I
- [42:22]
A
think, I mean it's, it's, it's interesting you say this. I, I played the other day with Claude and I tried to play through sort of diplomatic situation in Kashmir and I went right, I'm going to be really pro British and I'm going to be really forceful and you try and say some of this stuff and immediately Claude pushed back and goes, well, actually your Cabinet Secretary is going to start briefing against you. Ministers will resign, this whole thing will fall apart. Because actually it's literally impossible to try and do what you are trying to do. And part of that as well was because you have, whatever side you kind of picked, you'd have, your Pakistani MPs would resign of one and Indian MPs would run over the other. That is just a problem that we have, we have to consider. We have to remember that a lot of these systems emerged out of kind of horror of the first World War and horror of war. You said that there was one Cabinet meeting about the Belgian guarantee, but that wasn't because Lord Grey or Sir Grey was basically just having everything in his head that these systems were very dependent on individuals and individuals, it's hard to systematize an individual. This is the inevitable process that happens through systematization. We talked before we started recording about Hong Kong refusing to collect statistics because that would then prevent them from interfering. Is this just the plate of democracies, the modern democracy, now that actually voters keep on more freebies, the rich will keep pressing the more immigration button, Basically, there's no way of kind of summoning up enough power to break down these obstacles. The people who can stay in their job for multiple terms on end, that is lawyers and civil servants, are just there because they're more stable, they can have longer careers and understand how everything works.
- [44:19]
C
I mean, again, there's lots of different questions wrapped up in take your pick. So it's clear that a lot of what we're talking about, about the bureaucracies, are common Western things, right? And Covid was a complete demonstration proof of this, because you see practically identical problems happening in every Western country. Exactly the same patterns of failure, exactly the same problems of procurement over and over again. You also see in Britain and America identical processes whereby because Britain and America are different than continental Europe in various ways, we spat out each of us a different process to do vaccines than the EU did, which was much more effective and much faster. But then in both places, the response of the deep state was close them both down rather than keep going and figure out what may be wrong with these vaccines, how me have fucked up. What should the next generation be? The vaccine that we actually want is one that you just squirt up your nose and then you don't pass on the disease which the scientists wanted to do and which could have happened in both places. The institutions looked at Operation Warp speed and in Britain, the Vaccine Task Force and said, this is a total disaster for us. Because why? Because it's demonstrating that if you create something with not normal procurement, not normal hr, not normal regulation, and you bring in people from outside the civil service who actually know what the fuck they're doing. Oh, my goodness. Well, amazingly, everything goes 100 times faster and is 100 times more productive. This is a disaster. Right? So they closed down vaccines in Britain. They also closed down testing, they closed down sewage monitoring. I think we were the first country in the world to do a bunch of things. Thanks to Ben Warner in 2020 on sewage monitoring. Exactly. His brother Mark then actually helped build it with faculty and some excellent officials. Nature write papers about it. Dozens of countries all over the world copy what happens in 2021. Britain closes it down. Britain's tried to do it again to restart it four Times and Whitehall is so completely broken, four times in a row, it's proved unable even to restart it, right? We did it once we closed it and Whitehall literally can't reopen it. So very clear patterns of problem. Exactly the same things repeated in country after country. But also fascinating other pattern, right? Which is in basically no country in the Western world did the opposition say, here is the catalog of failures of the deep state in all sorts of ways. We invested all this money supposedly in pandemic preparation. It was all total shit show. Clearly failed, right? When you vote for us and we get in, we're going to actually get to the bottom all of this and we're going to change how all of this works. No one, any, anywhere did it. What actually happened everywhere across the Western world, there's actually consensus in the old school. Parties should defend the old system. When Elon said prosecute Fauci, everyone in Westminster is completely appalled. Elon is completely correct, right? Because now it's impossible to deny, but Fauci was lying about everything. Fauci was spreading or was spending all this money on gain of function and whatnot, and then cheating it and lying about it. There was an actual conspiracy in quarter one, 2020 to hide all this and to get Nature and Science and all these journals to lie about it as well. I actually witnessed this in the Prime Minister's office as well, with everyone saying to the PM, it is 100 guaranteed that this was not a lab leak and it's scientifically proven and the people saying that this might be engineered or blah, blah, blah, talking nonsense. Thanks to James Phillips, who I brought into number 10, who's actually worked on See Me on the pod. Okay, great. So James had come over and if you had a situation in which all These people, number 10, are saying, this is impossible, this is scientifically impossible, blah, blah, blah. James Phillips says to me, I've literally like, this happens in labs all the time. I don't know why they think this is not possible. Like this became possible three years ago and people do this kind of stuff with genetic engineering. You're just being told complete garbage. But my main point was the most fascinating thing, the theory of democracy, is when these sort of things happen, there is political advantage from the opposite for the opposition parties in blowing the whistle and saying, this is obviously a failure, we're going to do things differently. But what you actually saw was a purely pathological response around across the Western world, which was the opposition parties dug in to support the likes of Fauci and all the things that had failed. That was extremely interesting. You then have Ukraine. You have a very similar process happen on Ukraine, right, where nominally, again, a kind of completely bizarro thing, because nominally you have an unprecedented unity across all mainstream, that the Ukraine war is great and Ukraine is not a completely corrupt nightmare country run by mafia kgb, but a beacon of democracy. Zelensky is a new little Winston Churchill, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. That's the official story. The official story is we will do whatever it takes to make sure that Putin will fail. And in some sense, psychologically, all of these people parroting this clearly actually believe it. They're not lying. But then if you look at what have they done? They have complete. In Britain, they completely doubled down on supporting all the worst aspects of the MoD. So in 2020, MoD admits dozens and dozens and dozens of projects are multibillion pound total fiascos and they should be closed. We should actually move the money out of these things and into that or secretly. They admit this. The procurement system is completely fucked and we should all shift to a different way of doing it. Right, okay, Ukraine happens. They promise Putin must fail. We promise whatever it takes. What do they actually do? They put all the money into all the things that are completely broken and they double down on a completely pathological MOD procurement system that can't build anything at scale or at pace. But they all keep getting interviews about how Putin must fail. And they actually do mean it, emotionally. They do want to do things, but the one thing they will not do is change procurement law so you can actually build anything. So you have two things happen together which doesn't make any kind of sense. Right. No one a priori would predict that. You could say we really value the current system. So Ukraine's sorry, Ukraine, but it's on its own and we're just going to keep how we do things because that's our actual priority. Or you could say we really care about Ukraine and therefore we're going to change procurement. It's completely batshit to say we really care about Ukraine and we're going to keep the current procurement system and not debate it. Yet that is what the entirety of Westminster did. And like on Covid, did you see anyone in labor going, but hang on, Boris, hang on, Sunak. You keep saying you really care about Ukraine, but like, we can't actually make any of these drones. We've got this retarded Watchkeeper program that everyone in the MOD knows is stupid. Why are you doing that? Why are we not actually doing the real thing? Ukraine keeps asking why can't we come and do drones at scale in Britain and the MOD keeps refusing and rejecting them to do it? Do you see anyone in labor say that? No. So again, you see this pattern, right, where both parties revealed preferences. The actual important thing is not to challenge how the deep state works and not actually even to engage and even discuss it. Again, important to stress this is not just a British thing. It's basically the same across all Western countries. Now there's obviously some differences in defense. Some countries like Finland and, and Estonia and whatnot act on some of these things a bit differently because they're right on Russia's border. But overall, the really striking thing is how common these patterns are across the Western world.
- [53:19]
A
What explains that? Why is this just a nature? Is this just an inevitable consequence of prosperity? I mean, things like NIMBYism I'd have thought were the product of people in highly urbanized packed conditions having to find a way of getting on right.
- [53:37]
B
Isn't it more fruitful to ask about how we actually deal with this problem? Should we be remaking, is it in Britain's interest to be remaking international institutions or should we retreat from bodies like the who?
- [53:50]
C
I think we should largely get out of them. I mean, either ignore them or actively leave. And new things are being built. The idea of reforming any of these things is basically impossible.
- [54:02]
B
The only people China has all the leverage, right?
- [54:05]
C
Partly because of that, but also just even Britain and Europe, Europe is in favor of just putting more and more money into all of these useless things anyway. So Europe's never going to argue for anything. The only people that could actually exercise some leverage on it is America because they're the ones, generally speaking, who put in the money. And if America says look, either change X or we're yanking all the cash, that might have some effect, but Britain can't, Britain by itself can't change any of these things. I think in general it would be much more fruitful for Britain to be just a be ad hoc in terms of international alliances and creating new things. So if it's precious minerals, for example, then we should just go to America and whatever the allies we've got, stop printing and say, right, here's our, here's our thing, yeah, and here's our new system. And if you want to be part of this alliance to do blah, blah, blah, blah, and maybe that alliance also does some other naval stuff and maybe it also does some anti piracy stuff or whatever and just again ignores what the UN is doing in places like Somalia and says, right, the following 10 countries will sort out the Somalia piracy problem and the trawler problem and the this problem and that problem. And you just do it and you just kind of ignore whatever the UN committee is and you just move on. That's the only way you're going to see progress on lots of these things.
- [55:32]
B
How can we apply this to other fields like biotech and space? I mean as I understand it, we can actually make our own rules on biotech and space, but we could be more adventurous.
- [55:44]
C
Well, yeah, I mean in a hundred ways. Right, but, but that goes back to the core problem. The Whitehall priority is not making progress in any of these things. The Whitehall priority is saying we are part of the old completely crumbling rules based order. And Whitehall will go down like that, like kormical Ali in Baghdad shouting we support. They'll be the last people off that bus. So the problem, I think that a lot of you know, whether it's Yimbys, whether it's the tech people, whatever, I think it's a mistake in a way to think of Whitehall as. People often discuss it as if like there's an argument to be won. And then if you actually win the argument and we agree that we've got to make progress on these things, then Whitehall will actually do that. It's a category error because Whitehall doesn't care about the things that you're talking about. It doesn't care about solving the housing problem, it doesn't care about biotech. It doesn't care. Whitehall cares about preserving existing power and existing institutions and existing budgets. And it cares most importantly about itself retaining control over its own personnel caste system. That is its actual priority. And everything will always be sacrificed to that. As you saw in Covid, as you could see in Ukraine, as you can see on everything. So it's a, we can say, right? Well if you really care about doing blah, blah, then you should do, then it's logical to do these things. But that is evading the core problem. The core problem is Whitehall doesn't want. Whitehall's actual priority is stopping you do the sensible thing. Because doing the sensible thing is undermining their real priorities. See what I mean?
- [57:47]
A
Well, okay, let's, let's play.
- [57:49]
C
That can only be overcome by one thing. That's having a prime minister who actually cares and is prepared to use his full constitutional authority to say to Whitehall we are no longer playing your game. Everyone who doesn't get on board with the following things will be removed.
- [58:10]
B
Should we play a little game of what would Otto von Bismarck do well,
- [58:14]
A
in the sense that, you know, let's take the Clarion Clipperton Zone or Lee Kuan Yew. Or Lee Kuan Yew. The British Prime Minister announces that he's going to start issuing these licenses. What these are, then government lawyers say absolute meltdown. Well, meltdown in the press meltdown by, you know, a lot of his government lawyers. How do they. How did they try and stop him? 1.
- [58:42]
C
Well, first of all, they say it's unlawful.
- [58:44]
A
Sure.
- [58:45]
C
Secondly, they say it's against the Civil Service Code for us to work on this and that there'll be some serious resignations. Prime Minister, remember again, I saw this with my own eyes in 2020. Jonathan Jones, then the senior lawyer in the Cabinet Office, said what the government is trying to do. Very interesting test case. Right. Jones said, what the government is trying to do with this primary legislation is unlawful under international law and therefore I will not work on it and do it. Very radical move. Right. Because the old constitutional position in Britain for centuries has been British Parliament can write whatever it wants in domestic law, and if it says it's lawful in domestic law, then it's lawful. And international law and treaties do not grip domestic law unless they are instantiated in domestic law by domestic legislation. Right. That is the classical, agreed, conventional position of the British constitution. What Jones and people like Jones, people like Jones said was to protect the rule of law. We oppose the following things because it breaks international law in our interpretation. So they allied the rule of law with what we, as lawyers say is international law. And then we define it as unlawful for civil servants to operate against the rule of law. Do you see what I mean now? The way you solve it is to do what I did in 2020 and say, fantastic news that you can't participate in this. I want the rid of you. Good luck with your resignation. Off you go. And Jones left. So if you want to do these sort of things, you have to be prepared to say, we are removing these people from the Civil Service. If you are not prepared to do that, then you will not get anywhere because the officials will simply refuse to do what you want. And they'll say, you can't do it, Prime Minister, because it's unlawful and it's not lawful for us to actually participate in what you're talking about behind the scenes. One of the things which is going on at the moment is officials are looking to get work with Herma to actually rewrite the Civil Service Code again to make some of this kind of thing explicit so that they can inch their way forward into the courts, trying to get a judgment from the High Court or something, which then solidifies some of this kind of revolutionary constitutional thinking. They want to start getting instantiated in some kind of High Court judgment, which they can then turn around and say to the political authorities and the Prime Minister's office in the future, well, it's now just a little awful to do this because the court said so. So tough shit. You can't do any of these things. So that process is in the background. But the fundamental answer to your question is in many, many areas of trying to get your bulldozers bulldoze your way through the system. The single most fundamental thing is, are you prepared to remove the officials or not? The officials have incredibly good senses for this question. Extremely good. So you could go to official after official after official, who's currently senior in the system, presided over one disaster after another for their entire career. Totally useless characters. But they have brilliant senses for watching the MPs and trying to figure out what are their real priorities, what do they really care about, what will they fight about? And they're extremely good at maneuvering them with legal advice, which they do constantly, often by the way, literally writing memos saying, legal advice says you can't do, blah, blah, blah. Where if you then say, bring the legal advice to my office, there is no document, it doesn't even exist. So they literally just invented, sometimes completely as well. Parenthetically, that shows you the kind of games that are played on that. But the only way you can actually bulldoze your way through these problems is if you're prepared to put bring in these people and say, right, out, out, out, out, out. In 2020, the only way that we could get various emergency, emergency things done on Covid was literally me bringing people into number 10 and saying to them, if the following thing doesn't happen 24 hours, I'm going to tell the Prime Minister to remove you from the building. And after weeks and weeks of everyone thinking around going nowhere, like that was the one, and they knew because it was me saying it, he will actually do that. So, okay, suddenly then things unlock and things change in less than 24 hours. But that's the only reason why it happened. The fact that 30,000 people might die because you haven't got enough tests is not enough for them to actually do the thing. It's only if you say Buggins is out in hours that suddenly the system will act. And the fundamental thing is the MPs do not do. The MPs don't understand how to get things done. Very few MPs have ever been in any kind of high performance organization. They've got no concept of what direct responsibility even means themselves. They've never been in an organization where people have direct responsibility. So they have no way of actually dealing with these kind of complicated things. Right? They've done PPE or some other bullshit degree. They arrive in these jobs, they've never hired and fired, they never built anything, they don't know how responsibility works. And then they're surrounded by people who, generally speaking, are clever than them and who also can also say, well, the legal advice is blah, so you're just constrained, oh, well, we just have to do that then, and it's not my fault. And the officials create a psychological environment in which. Right, so that's illegal. You can't actually do that. You run off and give your interview to the Spectator and go do your podcast and blah, blah, blah, blah, and we'll treat you like a little king. You can have a chauffeur and various ambassadors from Africa will come in, kowtow to you and pretend you're important. Meanwhile, we'll actually just get on with running everything and you go and do the potemkin bits. And 99% of the MPs have been happy with that. Now, going back to what you said before, I think a crucial element of what's changed now is if the economy is growing at 3% a year and there's more and more money, a lot of these pathological things can keep going for a very long time because there's always more money. Okay, it doesn't work very well, but every year the realtor's budget goes up because you're growing at 3% a year. One of the things which is breaking the system now is because they've screwed the economy up so badly and there's no growth. These things need actual budget increases just to fail. If you say, oh, your budget is flat, a whole bunch of shit just starts breaking instantly, even if you give them more money. These things is now so broken. Look at the nhs. You could increase its real terms budget by blah each year, but things would just still keep breaking all kinds of faster. Exactly. Everything is breaking faster than 1 or 2% real terms growth. But large parts of the system now, I don't know what a good example. I mean, look at the courts, I suppose, is one good example, right? Total disastrous handling from the Tories on everything to do with crime in the courts. Courts have had not only no real terms increases, not even flat but actual real terms, cuts. So of course the entire court system is in a total meltdown and they're just punting out like multiple child rapists out onto the streets and letting everyone go because the system's in complete meltdown. So I think that what you said earlier is a critical, is a critical factor now in what's happening. The old 3% growth could mask a lot of these pathologies. And the voters kind of like, well, you know, if I feel better each year, feel as though like life's going on the up each year, how much do I really care about the MOD being a shit show? Not that much. Right. How much do I really care about importing Somalis who then just take all the money and export it back to Mogadishu? Not that much. It's invisible. Media doesn't report it and my life's getting better. Okay? That was the story of the 90s up until 2008. But what happens in 2008 in the financial crash is a bunch of richer people, middle classes, people with assets recovered, bounced back and have got richer and richer post 2008. But in many parts of the country, people have never recovered from 2008. Their lives have just been in misery since then. In an unprecedented way, right? You've got to go back to kind of like pre Napoleon to have a situation in lockdown large parts of Britain where you have actual, no real terms growth for like 15, 20 years, right? Literally unprecedented. You can have two world wars, didn't manage to do that, but we've now got that and that is their part of this problem. So you've got stagnant growth, you've got completely pathological institutions that actually, actually need real terms increases in money just to stand still. And you've got political parties and senior civil servants completely dedicated to not changing how anything works. If you put those three things together, you've got what we can see all around us, which is every part of the system now failing and those failings interacting with each other in various ways, right? So you got a shit show with. You can't deport people, but you're scraping up immigrant like crazy Afghans off the street and putting them in prison. But then that means you've got to let all these people out. And then that means you've got. And then that means you've got dirt, and then that means the budgets for this are all knackered as well. So all these things are now starting to ping into each other in. So you haven't just got one defunct bureaucracy that defunct bureaucracy, internal silos going haywire. You've also got horizontally the more smashing into each other and breaking. But also no one has authority to deal with the interactions between all these different parts of the system.
- [69:06]
B
You're describing this unbelievable Gordian knot, right? And it will be basically impossible to slice through it.
- [69:14]
C
No, it's not impossible. It's not impossible. In all sorts of ways, Britain is actually the best placed country in the west because of our constitution, which of course is another interesting thing. So in practical terms, it is much easier to do real regime change in Britain than it is in America or anywhere in Europe because of unwritten constitution and the weird way in which powers of the Prime Minister actually work. So, unlike Trump, the Prime Minister can go in today and say, fired, fired, fired, fired, fired. Government department is closed and I'm creating this new government department. The Civil Service have to do it. And the courts can't stop, can't stop and even judicially review these things, right? Nowhere the Western country is that possible. That is why you see two things happening on the left now. One, change the electoral system to pr and then secondly, discussions about how you encode protections for the Civil Service to make it extremely difficult to actually do what I'm talking about. So what they're thinking is, and it's actually logical from their point of view, if you pass certain kinds of legislation defending the current Whitehall system and then you do pr, it becomes effective even if you haven't got an actual written constitution. And the revolution of that and the difficulty from their point of view of, of how to do that, if you just do those two things, you make it practically extremely hard for anybody coming in to actually change anything. You completely now embed the current catastrophic situation, which is what they want to do, they want to make it impossible. What they're terrified of is Farage doing some kind of Doge type thing and saying, right, I'm going to bring in 20 hotshots, fire all the perm sex, put them in charge of this, use the actual powers of the pm, close, open fire and then pass a whole series of primary legislation. Repeal the Human Rights act, repeal the Equalities act, reform how judicial review works bin the Climate Change act, right? You go through 15 things, you whack them all in year one with primary legislation, the CRAG act as well, Civil Service Commissioners, if you have an actual serious list of these things you could go through, the right way to do it would be you draft all this legislation in opposition, you make the case in the election, in the Manifesto, you win on the Thursday, Monday morning, these bills start go hammering through into Parliament. And you also make clear to the House of Lords, we said this, anyone thinks that they can fuck around, we're going straight to the King, we'll appoint 600 new peers. You're not doing that either. It'll be blitzkrieg on you guys. You smash that through in primary legislation. If you have that combination of primary legislation, changing fundamentals and you actually use the constitutional powers of the pm, as I've discussed, whole thing starts to shift. That's what they are terrified of, correctly, from their point of view, in Whitehall, in labor, in the inner temple, etc. And that's why you start to see this mix of rejoin the eu, PR censorship and how do we have embedding legislation to protect the Civil Service? And they're thinking, right, well, if we can bring off some combination of those things, then we get to the state we want to, which is we don't have to worry about elections anymore. They've convinced themselves that everyone who doesn't agree with them now is fascist. That's the other thing that's happened. They don't think, if you go back to pre referendum, people hated me, mainstream people in the system, in Westminster hated me, but sort of thought I was like, crazy, stupid, wrong. But they didn't say I was actually a fascist who should be in jail now. Their argument about people like me is that we're actually fascists who should be in jail and shouldn't be allowed to actually participate in democratic politics. Right? People like Dominic Grief and whatnot said Cummings should be jailed and Parliament should pass laws to forbid him from participating in future elections. And that's not a weird position if you look what's happened in the states, right? If Anyone had said 10 years ago former Democratic nominees to be president will publicly describe the First Amendment as, quote, a historic mistake that must be fixed, unquote. Everyone would have said, including me, that's like, that's crazy. No way could that be the case. Before the 2024 election. Hillary and John Kerry both said that very, very explicitly. And I think that's very important, very important. They truly, what you could sort of describe as the mainstream left really have persuaded themselves that anyone not with them is part of a fascist conspiracy, possibly working with Putin, and is beyond the kind of bounds of democratic acceptability, and therefore must be closed down, arrested and treated in that manner. Which is super, I think, super dangerous, right? You can see it in the States in some ways more clearly than here. For the moment. But the dynamic in the States is moving very rapidly towards. You're just going to start jailing your opponents. That is what, that's the, that's what, that's what the emerging picture is for the next five years.
- [75:19]
A
And this is, but this is downstream, right?
- [75:21]
C
Of.
- [75:22]
A
I think you talk about this in your writing about there being no political class that actually really knows each other or likes each other anymore, right? That when you're just pulling random people from a population, you identify far more with your ideology. There's far less of a sort of convivial attitude to your enemy. So it means that you can't really have a coherent body politic anymore. The only thing to do is win or you get jailed, right? That is the breakdown of democracies as you're pulling, as you move from a coherent political class that has a coherent political culture and agreed standards and norms.
- [76:06]
C
I mean, I sort of, I partly agree with that, but I think it's. I think there's a couple of other things. One is the implosion of, I think the effect of the Internet, okay, A few different effects from that. Number one, it brings a lot of transparency into things that were previously not transparent. And that's been super bad for all kinds of elites. It's been bad for Harvard, it's been bad for the BBC, it's been bad for public health experts, it's bad for military experts, or it's bad for all kinds of supposed elites. So you move from a world in like 1970s to a world of today where you can just go on the Internet straight away and you can go, oh, the supposedly high status professor or government minister, whatever, is just talking like obvious crap. All institutions, credibility of trust in them is declined because of this force. Lots of ways this is a healthy force, but it's also simultaneously destabilizing in various ways. Simultaneously, you have a crack up of consensus reality amongst the elites. So what are even basic facts is also cracked up, right? One of the themes probably is similar to you on WhatsApp now, right, is you get sent something like, is that real or is that fake? Oh, it's like everyone, the Tories in Labor all say that's a conspiracy theory, but that's another conspiracy that turns out to actually be true. You know what I mean? So I think that's another very important thing. It's increasingly hard to know what's true and what's not true. And therefore you have different inside the political elites. You also have now these kind of silos and different networks Blue sky is an interesting example of it. So the Blue sky Flight Post November 2024 if you look at Blue sky now where a lot of the high stages Westminster people hobnob, it's a completely different information environment where a lot of stories simply don't exist, right? So if some story happens, let me think of an example. An example is like Supreme Court judgment on the trans ruling, right? It's big enough that Westminster, the MPS and whatnot and the government ministers have to do something about it and think about it that day because the Supreme Court has said that, right? You go look at Blue Sky Tumbleweed. The professors of political science and the FT pundits are just ranting at each other all day about Elon and whatever, some America, some like very niche thing about Texas or something that day. I can't remember exactly what it was, but it was very interesting watching. Well, they just didn't discuss it. The Supreme Court judgment on trans, it's like how can we even comment on that without ignore. So the subject doesn't exist. You look at a whole bunch of stories that might happen on a day regarding crime, immigration, right? Some crazed migrant slaughter someone or whatever it might be. One set of people in Westminster are looking very carefully at that and saying where the hell does he come from? How did he arrive in this country? Which authorities fail, blah blah blah. Look on Blue sky story doesn't exist. So I think that's another thing which has happened. You have collapse of consensus realties. You have all these MPs running around physically co located with the journalists in Westminster the same as they have been for hundreds of years. But what's actually going on in their heads and what's going on in their phones is radically different. And their perception of stories and politics becomes radically different. So you have, what's another example I call Ukraine on the Ukraine war pipeline gets blown up, everyone says well this is terrible, Putin's blown up the pipeline. I say why would Putin blow up the pipeline? That's like his pipeline. That would be really stupid. The pipeline gives him leverage. Putin shill psychopath moron. Six months later, New York Times quietly says CIA say that actually the Ukrainians pipeline, it wasn't beaten after all. Zero coverage. No one updates to that fact at all. Doesn't change the story of how they think about Ukraine at all. It's got completely different informational realities on these things. So I think that is another really. I think that's another really important thing. And, and almost by definition as well, it's almost impossible to Discuss, right. So an effect of that is being a kind of breakdown of discussion before 2015, 2016. I would argue with a lot of these people and discuss things and they'd say you're stupid and blah, blah, blah. But there was interaction and there was some kind of debate to a large extent that's ended because they think I'm insane and I think they're insane. So kind of what's the point of talking to each other? They think it's pointless talking to me and I think it's pointless talking to them. So that's another, I think very, very big, very big change and no short term thing is going to fix that. The leader creates a system where there is direct personal responsibility through the organization. And that pattern is. Read it. So you can see that pattern whether in state things like General Groves and Manhattan Project in World War II. And you can see it today if you go and look at how SpaceX works with Elon, right? But the cultural difference of going from organizations like that and then you walk into the Capitol office, it's like just walking into an insane asylum. Because everything in the Cabinet Office operates on the exact opposite principle. And not just in the negative sense of things don't exist, but in an anti sense of. When you sit in the Cabinet Office, it's extremely explicit and clear that you can't talk about personal responsibility, that's bullying or fascism. You just can't have a whole set of conversations. So if you sit there and go, hang on a second, for example, I'll give you an example. Recently spilled out into the public domain about this whole massive shit show where Whitehall let the Chinese just buy all of this critical infrastructure which is used to communicate secret data between mod intelligence services, Cabinet Office and whatnot. It's a sort of thing where. It's a classic thing where if I put it on my blog 10 years ago, everyone would have said that's totally batshit. The GCH, the MI6 big listening station on the outskirts of the, on the M25 sits. There's a listening station with a whole bunch of equipment in it, which sucks in MI6 stations from globally. China didn't bug it. China bought the fucking building that the thing sits in. They bought the whole thing, right? Completely crazy. Completely crazy. They didn't need to bucket because they bought the whole building and all the wires going in and out. So when that. When I was actually originally briefed on that in the bunker underneath number 10 in summer 2020, and I go, so Cabinet Secretary just so I'm Clear. Because what you're saying sounds so batshit. I want to just say it in my own words so we're clear about what you're telling us. I repeat it. And he goes, yes, Dominic, that is what's happened. I go, right, okay, so which official signed off Global Switch buying all of this in 2018 or whatever it was? Which actual official? Because someone must have approved it. Everywhere you can see, they all go in the chair. Dominic, that is not the discussion which we're here to have. We're here to inform the Prime Minister, blah, blah, blah. Yeah, I know, but there's a lot of things this conversation should have. And one of the things that we should have is if you have a fuck up so massive as this, how did it actually happen and which particular people made these decisions and why? So we need to figure that out. So how the hell do we not know that this is not happening again? All over the system, right?
- [85:04]
A
Do you think that system is still possible to be the sort of CEO, Prime Minister? Has it almost decayed so much that
- [85:13]
C
you can come in and you can
- [85:14]
A
try and take on as much personal responsibility as you want? Because I imagine you saw a little bit of this, right, okay, I'll be. I'll be the guy who still moves around you and tries to make sure that you can't have that responsibility.
- [85:28]
C
So in the current situation, it doesn't exist and everything is set up to avoid it happening. And there's also a huge amount of theater goes in to try to program the PM psychologically so that the PM doesn't even literally know what their powers are. So, for example, one thing that I noticed, which I think was really interesting, is that there's this process whereby on a Friday, into the PM's box goes a whole bunch of appointments, right? But the way they do it is amazingly clever. The first ones, the pm. Imagine you're Prime Minister, right? You've gone through a week, it's Now Friday, like 9 o', clock, you've poured yourself a large drink and you've been given this fucking box. You told you've got to look at it overnight and then hand it in tomorrow, like it's your prep and you pull out and the top one is the Queen is appointing the Bishop of Leicester, blah, blah, blah, and you're like, tick, right? And these are things where no Prime Minister has actually made a view since maybe Gladstone on bishops, right? I think Gladstone is the last person who actually said, no, we haven't. So. And so is the Bishop of Walt. So no one in like 150 years is actually but constitutionally the prime, because of our weird system, it's still the Queen appoints and the Prime Minister has to, you know, like formally approve, even though it's not a real decision. So what they do is they give the PM a bunch of these things, right? And then it's the DG in charge of technology working with the intelligence services is moving to defra to deal with cows tick as well, right? Because it's just like, I don't know what the fuck this list is, but I like, my job is to take them all through. If the Prime Minister does what I started doing and go cross, everyone's like, the are you doing official's coming to me. The Prime Minister is just like put written no on the, on some. On these appointments. What the hell's going on? So, well, are you saying that these are like. They're all like the Bishop of Leicester, in which case the whole thing like, tell him that. Right, well, no, Dominic, come on. They're obviously not all like Bishop or Leicester. Right? So he is allowed to say that the DG for tech is not moving. Well, formally, you know, he could, but, you know, it's completely improper. And what on earth is the Prime Minister know about a dg? And, you know, does he even know who that is? I mean, I think we all know Dominican, you don't want Phil Duffy to move because you're working with him and you want him to stay there because you're doing a whole bunch of, okay, you don't want that. But the PM doesn't know shit about this and it's not your job to interfere in civil Service appointments. So that's why we're unhappy and why we're saying it's improper. Formally, the PM can do that, but that's not what's happening. You've got the PM discover it, but you shouldn't have any involvement with this. You shouldn't even see the fucking document. You see what I mean? But that's how they tried to condition it, right? They tried to condition the PM into thinking that they don't actually have this. And I had that conversation repeatedly in 2020 during COVID where I would have to say to him, cabinet Secretary, please explain to the PM that he actually has the authority to do X. And Sedwell would say, dominic's right, you know, if you want to do blah. There was one where I said, hang on a second, you're all talking about like, we have to appoint so and so, so and so. To this day, couldn't we just. The actual constitutional position is the PM can appoint whoever he wants to as a Minister. Prime Minister goes, what are you talking about? Of course I can't. Cabinet Secretary goes. Dominic is correct, Prime Minister. And Churchill actually did it on a few occasions. What? I can appoint him. I won't. What? Oh, right. Well, that was all part of the conversation about Kate Bingham and the Vaccine Task Force. Right. You can just do. But the whole system is. Tries increasingly over the years successfully to try to make the PM think that you just can't do that and that will be undermining the norms of the system. Prime Minister, of course, I wouldn't say this personally, but some might say that it's Trump like or even Orban like behavior for you to try to exercise power in that way. It will be seen as really the foundations of our system. And the rule of law, Prime Minister, will be regarded as creepy creaking very dangerously. Oh, well, no. Well, I mean, obviously I completely respect the rule of law, so I'm free and I wouldn't possibly do anything that might be construed in such a way. Of course, Prime Minister, we knew. Just a misunderstanding. Prime Minister, my fundamental argument 10 years ago and the argument I made in Downing street and the argument I made subsequent at Downing street that Covid in Ukraine will not make my point, that rebuilding Britain's economy and rebuilding British politics and government capacity and everything else, and armed forces, MoD must have at its center that science and technology becomes a fundamental aspect of the PM's job and the PM's priorities. It's not just some fourth order issue that you appoint a junior science Minister to and they run around having meetings. But real politics and the big issues of Westminster are obviously separate. That's how Westminster has thought about it for at least 50 years or so. I was hopeful that the combination of Brexit and US winning in 2019 and then Covid and Ukraine, logically speaking, those things should have changed. I think it's changed some rhetoric around science and technology. I think you see a few more MPs saying that it should be important, but at the core of remains a fifth order issue at center of power. You don't. It's not agreed that the Prime Minister is actually going to have priorities and in the sense of you have task forces, you wake up every week, you're smashing things on through your to do list and everyone in the system knows the PM really cares about this. The people who work sit next to the PM all day, really care about this, they're on the phone to us, we've got to report back every week, we've got to show progress, but people are getting fired. The whole like, again, what I said before about priorities, right? Whitehall has an extremely good sense of does the PM's office have any priorities or is it just a farce and they've collapsed? And if they do have priorities, what are they? And actually Whitehall is good at in lots of ways responding, even if their response is, we're going to try and stop them having this priority, we're going to close it down, blah, blah, they do know what is a priority, right? That does not exist at the moment, obviously, and I don't think it will exist in the next few years. But if we are going to climb out of our nightmare, I continue to argue that a central aspect of it will be the Prime Minister arriving and saying, science and technology is a top three issue for me. And it's embedded in everything. It's embedded in the economy, it's embedded in security and it's embedded in how we actually grip and change, how our institutions work, government itself, how number 10 itself works, how the rest of Whitehall works and everything else. So of course all of the three kind of pillars of the thing, foundations of government itself, the economy, productivity and all of that. And then on the other hand, security and forces and police, blah, blah, all that technology is central to all three of these things. And I am going to be engaged with these issues every week for the next 10 years that you see me in this job. That's what needs to happen at the moment.
- [93:28]
B
It seems that when technology comes up against an ideological commitment from, I suppose our governance class, technology loses. One recent case study I think is SpaceX saying that they want to, they want to enter partnerships with governments to build spaceports across the world. We should be jumping at the chance because we have a great satellite sector. We'd be one of the best places in the world to work. But Master Arrangement Syndrome is going to overpower what could be an exciting possibility. I see no prospect of the government ringing up Elon and saying, we'll do business with you.
- [94:07]
C
Also, if you want about spaceports, there's another fascinating story over the last 50 years, which is, if you go back in time, great World War II movie is Barnes Wallace and Colditz and the famous bouncing bombs right after World War II. Barnes Wallace wants to build various new planes to keep Britain at the frontier. And there's tragic stories about how basically Whitehall from the 60s shut down that whole way of thinking that Britain is actually going to produce frontier things. Now. In the 80s a very interesting thing happened in a classified program. People came up with an idea for how to do a space plane. Ken Clark and Michael Heseltine coordinated with Whitehall to close it down and stop the classified program happening because they wanted to do a European project instead, rather than Britain actually doing something itself. Fast forward. The technical people involved with that went off and did a non classified version of the project in the open world and built this thing for 20 odd years. They interacted with Whitehall, tried to get funding and tried to get support for it. Finally the thing is blown up now. This is after core aspects of the technology such as the heat exchange and whatnot were also explored by NASA and proved to actually work. So again you have a very interesting thing right Brilliant British technical people. So look at the. Also the overall context. Overall context is one of the most fundamental technical things that America and China are both looking at is hypersonics, hypersonic missiles and hypersonic space planes. DARPA has been trying to do a space plane repeatedly for decades. Failed. We actually come up with some critical ideas, new ideas that you could use to do this that neither America nor China has done. The idea of Britain doing that though, I've sat in meetings in Whitehall discussing this and it's like a sort of allergic reaction in Whitehall and the fact that it actually works and it's such a big deal makes them even more panicky and even more determined to make sure that the project doesn't go ahead. I think that is a classic example of this cultural problem. The people deciding fundamental budgets in Whitehall and things like can you build a spaceport here? Are you going to try and work with Elon? Are you going to try and do that? The people with the actual regulatory power and the budget power are extremely hostile to the fundamental concept of Britain trying to develop something like this itself. It is not seen as something that Britain should do. The Whitehall view since the 70s has been these kind of very, very big, very futuristic projects are Britain is out. The same way Britain got out of the Empire, Britain got out of these kind of projects. That's why we closed down the space project and British space program in the 70s. And we might do some odds and sorts with BAE, but fundamentally British military aerospace is going to be based on whatever the Americans bill. Right, that's that, that, that's been the mindset. So again the sort of tragic situation. There's a lot of talent here. We a lot of things that could actually be done. But the people responsible for the budgets and the power are actively hostile to. To. To.
- [98:14]
A
To. Captain, we've lost the transmission, but the
- [98:17]
C
drives are back online.
- [98:19]
B
Wherever you are, Agent Cummings, thank you. Now, Midshipman, set a course for the Andromeda system. I heard there are aliens there that don't know how to use tablecloths.