Inside the intelligence services, special forces (themselves under attack from the Cabinet Office and NI Office as they operate as our last line of defence, see below), bits of Whitehall, and those most connected to discussions away from Westminster, there is growing, though still tiny, discussion of Britain’s slide into chaos and the potential for serious violence including what would look like racial/ethnic mob/gang violence, though the regime would obviously try to describe it differently. Part of the reason for the incoherent forcefulness against the white rioters last year from a regime that is in deep-surrender-mode against pro-Holocaust marchers, rape gangs and criminals generally, is a mix of a) aesthetic revulsion in SW1 at the Brexit-voting white north and b) incoherent Whitehall terror of widespread white-English mobs turning political and attracting talented political entrepreneurs. They’re already privately quaking about the growth of Muslim networks. The last thing they want to see is emerging networks that see themselves as both political and driven to consider violence. Parts of the system increasingly fear this could spin out of control into their worst nightmare. In No10 meetings with the Met on riots, I saw for myself a) the weird psychological zone of how much order rests not on actual physical forces but perceptions among a few elites about such forces that can very quickly change, and b) how scared the senior police are at the prospect of crucial psychological spells being broken. We can see on the streets that various forces have already realised the regime will not stop them. What if this spreads? Whitehall’s pathology has pushed it to the brink of this psychological barrier and many of them know it.
Aspects of the situation are tragi-comic. E.g if you talk to senior people in places like UAE, they tell you that bigshots in that region now tell each other — don’t send your kids to be educated in Britain, they’ll come back radical Islamist nutjobs! Our regime has spent thirty years a) destroying border control and sane immigration (including the Home Office’s jihad against the highest skilled, whom they truly loathe discussing and try to repel with stupid fees etc) and b) actively prioritising people from the most barbaric places on earth (hence immigration from the tribal areas most responsible for the grooming/rape gangs keeps rising) and c) funding the spread of those barbaric ideas and defending the organisations spreading them with human rights laws designed to stop the return of totalitarianism in Europe. In parallel, they’ve started propaganda operations with the old media to spread the meme that our ‘real danger’ is the ‘far right’ (code for ‘white people’). As Tories and Labour have continued their deranged trajectory, they have provoked exactly the reactions they most feared including the spreading meme that our regime itself has become our enemy and the growing politicisation of white English nationalism.
These deep state discussions about the growing prospect of violence, like the focus group discussions about ‘civil war’, have seeped through to few MPs or hacks. And the evolution of the Cabinet Office in recent years has excluded ministers, spads and the PM from almost any visibility inside the NSS, the National Security Secretariat of the CO, which has acquired power from the rest of the security/intelligence system and runs a failing empire within a failing empire. When I said in 2020 that, among the general changes to the dysfunctional No10/CO system, the oversight of NSS must change so it became visible and legible again to the PM’s office so we could participate in debates like — what are the actual priorities of the intelligence services vis Putin and Xi — some senior officials tried to pretend that zero political scrutiny of NSS was somehow a constitutional principle. After I left, this system became even more closed and dysfunctional, hence the total lack of true strategic thinking connecting ends-ways-means over Ukraine and all things defence procurement becoming more and more Kafka-esque as the MoD shipped stuff to Ukraine. I repeat: the lack of legibility of the NSS is without historical precedent in the UK for centuries and is related to broader issues of Whitehall’s dysfunction, the disgraceful shambles of the MoD etc.
SW1’s OODA loop has operated for years as a massive denial-of-service-attack on its own perceptions of reality — constant cycles of ephemeral emotional hysteria and Narrative Whiplash while No10 has no capability to execute priorities. A great recent example: Professor Ansell saying that the Zelensky Oval Office interview meant that Farage’s prospects had ‘peaked’ (widely Bluesky’d approvingly!) — an emotional spasm entirely in tune with SW1’s NPC network reflecting OODA-as-DOS-attack. This has, as I’ve argued for years, made it more and more vulnerable to history’s remorseless pattern: slow rot, elite blindness, fast crisis, sudden collapse.
The old parties lost their last chance to fix things in a sort-of normal way when the Trolley and his girlfriend told everyone in 2021 they were going ‘back to normal politics’. SW1 cheered including the Tory MPs who got culled en masse in 2024. Sunak doubled down on optimising for *pats on the head from Permanent Secretaries and lawyers*. After Starmer won, SW1’s NPCs tweeted to each other how they now had ‘serious grownups’ and we’d return to ‘normal government’.
But this was just another cycle of delusional SW1 Narrative Whiplash. The Starmer project blew up on contact with the reality of Whitehall. Now both parties are led by Dead Players. Both old parties are structurally knackered. And the NPCs tweeting ‘hurrah for the grownups, Sue Gray is the Jedi we need’ a few months ago are now Bluesky-ing ‘disgusting rhetoric from Starmer’.
Starmer is speed-running Sunak’s demented combination of a) massively raising the salience of immigration/boats with b) a set of policies that everyone who understands the details knows cannot possibly do what he’s promising.
Why is he doing it? Because, like Sunak, he’s caught between a) political advice that the country is enraged over immigration/boats and wants action, b) the adamantine priority of the dominant faction in Whitehall — i.e the force that actually orients 99% of policy — is maintaining 1) the HRA/ECHR-judicial review system and 2) the cross-party HMT/OBR/university-endorsed immigration/asylum Ponzi. Being a Dead Player optimised to ‘defend the institutions’ at all costs however pathological, Starmer has, aping Sunak, synthesised the political advice of McSweeney and the priority of the officials/lawyers actually running No10/70WH and generated his own version of Sunak’s demented combination.
If you’re not in the meetings, you can’t accurately estimate the relative levels of dishonesty and self-delusion involved.
