Westminster must fall

Spectator

a day ago

Dominic Cummings delivered a Pharos Lecture in Oxford this week on why western regimes are in crisis. Here is an edited transcript of his speech:
The old political parties, the old Whitehall institutions, the old media, the old universities, the old courts constitute a political regime. This regime has become cancerous. The cancer has metastasised and the cancer is attacking everything healthy in the country; all the healthy institutions and healthy impulses are the target of Whitehall.
If you imagine our ancestors who built our civilisation over generations, looking at a sample of recent years, what would they see? They'd see the regime fighting to maintain secrecy of the vast cover-up of industrialised mass rape of white English children by Pakistani and Somali gangs over decades, while Whitehall continues to import people from the exact same tribal areas responsible.
The system just rumbles on with its own priorities
In January, Number Ten Downing Street claimed that Elon Musk was spreading conspiracy theories about national cover-ups. This is wrong. I witnessed the attempts at these cover-ups myself when I was in working in Whitehall – including the deliberate attempt by government departments to use courts to block reporting of the entire story.
Every week in London and across Britain, people openly marched demanding a second Holocaust. And the only people who seem to get arrested are those counterprotesting. These protestors prevent access to Parliament itself and intimidate MPs; and the MPs' response is to jabber about how the real danger is white extremism, and the real priority is protecting the European Convention of Human Rights.
The regime is introducing new blasphemy laws, but obviously only for the world's most famous religion of peace. Week after week, the courts use the European Convention of Human Rights to stop deportation of the worst criminals.
The ECHR system that Britain set up to stop Europe sliding back to totalitarianism, is now being used – thanks to cross-party, multi-decade consensus – by sex criminals and terrorists to force us to prioritise them in ever more grotesque ways.
You have seen recently the news that the guy who stabbed the girls in Southport attacked prison guards, but you won't have seen why these cases keep occurring. The reason is the Cabinet Office legal advice states that it's unlawful under the European Convention of Human Rights to keep even convicted terrorists under surveillance, even in high-security jails, because it breaches their rights to privacy.
So, when cases like this happen, officials prioritise covering up the ECHR's role. They do not prioritise the rights of prison guards not to have burning oil thrown in their faces.
The regime is introducing new blasphemy laws, but obviously only for the world's most famous religion of peace
The regime destroyed border control, even though the main reason for 'Leave' winning the EU referendum was the desire for more border control. Then it imported unprecedented millions; and hundreds of thousands more simply got on the stupid boats in France and came over. They did so safe in the knowledge that MPs have created a legal regime that makes it practically impossible to deport anybody. The only people left in the world who now seem to listen to what the Home Office says are the tiny fraction of the most skilled people in the world who we actually want to come here. These are the people who the Home Office wages a constant jihad against to stop them coming into the country.
The regime has broken housing markets, so unless your parents are rich, it's going to be much harder for you to get a home, and build a family, than it was for your parents. It's executed a set of economic policies that have created the worst period since Napoleon for productivity and real wage growth.
It's broken the NHS so badly that Ukrainian refugees returned to a literal war zone to get healthcare. And these pathological institutions attack the things that work. So if this building was suddenly taken over by terrorists, we would depend on special forces to come and solve the situation. Those special forces now have to have meetings about the Cabinet Office's constant lawfare against them. They're having to hire lawyers to defend themselves over operations which they were given medals for over the last few decades.
I've sat in the Cabinet Office watching as terrorists actually on the run from cave to cave in Pakistan call on satellite phones London lawyers, using human rights laws to demand that British taxpayers give them millions. And the Cabinet Office says we've got to pay them out. And it sends over these millions, and then it classifies it all in such a high level that no MPs know about it. These cases are not discussed in Parliament. These cases are not discussed in the media.
In 2020, we started monitoring sewage and provided real time data on disease spread. It is a crucial piece of infrastructure for public health; the same way the Victorians built institutions which we rely on. So, of course, the regime closed it down.
We proved you could do vaccine research ten times more effectively. So they closed the vaccine task force. We created what I think is the West's first data science and AI team inside a Prime Minister's Office. The Cabinet Office and Treasury have tried to vandalise it for five years and close it down.
If you think, well, at least things like nuclear weapons must be taken seriously, no, that's also wrong. For 20 years, there's been a disastrous procurement process costing tens of billions, which, again, is kept super secret so that it's not the subject of discussion in Parliament, nor the subject of discussion in the media.
So neither the worst pandemic since 1918, nor the biggest land war in Europe since Hitler, have made Westminster change – quite the opposite. Since the war started in Ukraine, Ministry Of Defence procurement has got worse and worse. When I said in 2020, the future of war was drones and robots, Westminster laughed. Now we see all this playing out on YouTube. But the MOD has spent the years of the Ukraine war deliberately resisting facing this reality. And when people return from Ukraine to explain what's happening inside the MOD, they're told: 'Do not tell senior officials, do not tell ministers'. Our priority is continuing the budgets for the stupid old tanks and all the things inside MOD procurement that don't work. We want to keep the old gravy train running.
So step by step, the old regime has piled up the tinder. As Mao said, 'A single spark can start a prairie fire'. Britain, practically alone in the world, has avoided serious political violence for centuries. But the crumbling of our regime and its elites mean we're now only random viral posts away from riots and prairie fires getting out of control.
The kind of official story about how government works is that the MPs get up every day and they think about voters and they think about elections. This is not true. A lot of the reason why the news often makes no sense is that people think that the official story is true, but it is not. What MPs actually focus on all day is the old media and their promotions. Their reality comes from this old media. But, of course, this old media itself is breaking down under the power and the shock of the internet.
We therefore see this kind of what I've called a sort of narrative whiplash that now dominates Westminster debates. Everyone herds to one story. The story turns out to be complete nonsense. And then everyone drops it and they herd to a new story. But everything is memory holed.
Public health experts laughed at the supermodel Caprice when she went on TV and said: 'Why are we not closing the borders?'
I'll just give a few examples on social media. In 2008, the official story blasted everywhere from the New York Times to the British media was that social media is all nonsense and it has no effect. In 2012, the official story became, actually, it's wonderful because it's helped President Obama win. In 2016, it became, actually far from being nonsense, social media technology is evil Jedi-mind controlling technology, and that's the real reason why Brexit happened and why Trump happened.
If you look at the start of the Covid pandemic, public health experts laughed at the supermodel Caprice when she went on TV and said: 'Why are we not closing the borders?' Remember that? She just voiced what normal people were saying. And, of course, all the public health experts mocked her all over Twitter and they said: 'No, no, no, no, no. Closing the borders is racist. The actual plan is we've got no choice but to run up the white flag. Vaccines are impossible. Tests won't work. Everyone will just have to do herd immunity without a vaccine and put up with no health service for months'.
Then the whole story suddenly flipped. And, according to the Guardian and the BBC, the only people resisting this new story were the crazy right-wing Brexit people.
The same kind of narrative whiplash is played out in the stupidest war in modern history in Ukraine, the war which never needed to happen. At the beginning, the official story was that the Ukraine war is nothing to do with Ukraine joining Nato. Then the official story became Ukraine must join Nato. They started off saying the war must continue, that it is bleeding Russia dry. And then the story became that the war must continue because Russia is strengthening and they're building this terrible drone force. They're getting more and more efficient. So the war must continue.
Over and over again then, we see this constant splitting of the official story; these deranged narratives are the reality for Whitehall and for our MPs. That's what they're watching all day. That's what actually determines their behaviour.
A very telling example, I think, was that, if I'd said ten years ago that just before the 2024 US election Democrat presidential candidates will openly state that the First Amendment of America was a historic mistake that will be fixed after the election, everyone would have thought that was completely barking mad and completely inconceivable that that would be the case before.
In the days before the 2024 election, that's exactly what John Kerry said, and what Hillary Clinton said. The legendary music producer Rick Rubin said, 'Wrestling is real, the news is fake'. And I think this is a very important, important principle to absorb. Wrestling is real. The news is fake. And if there's one word now to describe the Westminster regime: fake is the word. Fake meetings, fake decisions, fake news. Fake all the way through.
The only people that are struggling to see this, though, are the people inside the system. Why is this? Marshall McLuhan said that a new medium becomes invisible during the period of its innovation to almost everyone. And I think that this is part of what's happening. This weird narrative whiplash, and this fake news is not visible to the MPs and the officials who are running around chasing 24-hour news all day.
New types emerge in literature and then become real
It's visible to to people outside; if you talk to normal voters, they see these problems. But inside Westminster, the fake story is the real story. And the reason why I think this is happening, I'll put it in a broader, broader context is, I think we're going through a normal cycle of history: slow rot, elites blind and then fragmenting, sudden crisis, fast collapse and then regime change and a new elite with new ideas. I think the core reason for this is that, over a period of a few generations, over and over again, we see a similar story play out; the ideas and institutions of the ruling elites become pulled away from reality. They struggle to adapt to reality. And then, eventually, this gap between the stories that they tell themselves, and what's actually happening in the real world, this gap falls apart and they fall down into the crack of it.
I'll give an example parallel to what I think is happening now, which is in the mid-19th century. If you go back to the 1840s, you see a generation who've gone through the Napoleonic Wars writing letters to each other. They can feel the collapse of the old order. And they write about this. They talk about the crazy ideas that are spreading in the universities and amongst the young. They discuss the crumbling of the old conservatism of throne and altar, the spread of atheism, the spread of liberalism and socialism. They discuss new technologies like rail and the telegram. And they discuss how they can feel the 1815 international system, the international security system, is also starting to crumble.
Then, in 1848, dominoes fall, regimes fall, new countries are created; and then in the 1860s and 1870s, you see a whole bunch of books being published reflecting these huge conflicts in the modern world. You have Fathers and Sons. You have Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov. You have Nietzsche publishing Beyond Good and Evil.
All of these books are grappling with these incredibly powerful forces at the heart of how the modern world is evolved; individual rights, spreading and spreading; markets, spreading and spreading; the idea of constitutions, spreading and spreading; and undermining traditional ideas.
New types emerge in literature and then become real. They play out in the Russian revolutionaries of the late 19th century, and then you can see them actually seize power in 1917. And, if you flip to 1933, you have the sight of Martin Heidegger, one of the most influential thinkers in the 20th century, particularly on the left, actively welcoming in to Germany's ancient universities, the Nazi regime.
Now in the 20th century, you have two sort of big attempts to grapple with these modern forces in ways different than the Anglo-American system: the socialist experiment, and the fascist experiment. Both of these failed for different reasons. After 1991, this new world emerged. But what's happened to us now, and why the news feels so crazy, is that we are going through the same remorseless historical process.
If you talk to the people in charge, you hear exactly the same sorts of things as these old guys were writing about in the 1840s; the rise of new ideas in universities; the young seem to be going crazy. In the 1840s, it was railways and telegrams. Now it's social media, AI, biotech. The international security infrastructure, built from 1945, with Nato, the UN and the EU – all of these institutions also seem to be crumbling in the same way as in the 1840s.
So what? What can we start to build to get ourselves out of the mess that we have got ourselves into? You have to consider the regime as a complex system, and there is no single magic thing that you can do to change it. Asking the old people to change the institutions will fail. Just putting new people in the old institutions will also fail. You have to change the people, the ideas, the institutions and the tools altogether.
It's a system that's coming apart in Whitehall and it needs to be replaced by a different system. So the first thing is that, for a very long time, the government has not controlled the government. This is the first thing that needs to change. If you look back 200 odd years to 1795 under William Pitt, you see a regime that took elite talent very seriously but took individual responsibility for projects very seriously. It understood the connections between how government buys things and the science and technology ecosystem necessary for building long-term capabilities. Pitt had real meetings in Number Ten Downing Street, not the fake scripted meetings now, where the conclusions are written by officials before the meeting ever happens. That's not a parody from Westminster. That is actually the process for how modern government works. The big battle in Whitehall over power is not what people say in meetings, which are largely fake and irrelevant. The battle for power in Whitehall is about who gets to write the conclusions of what the Prime Minister says before the meeting starts. That's not how Pitt did things, but it's how it's how Whitehall works now.
It's a system that's coming apart in Whitehall and it needs to be replaced by a different system
Back then, technologists and entrepreneurs could build great things fast and at scale because of wise procurement, which was taken extremely seriously. Parliament threw people in jail during the Napoleonic Wars for procuring cannons. In stark contrast to how, after Covid, those responsible for procurement scandals were all obviously promoted. So the Whitehall in 1795 was more like Space X 2025 than Whitehall 2025 is.
All of these different aspects therefore have to be systematically reversed if you're going to actually have a serious government and a different political regime.
On day one, a new prime minister that actually wants to take the country in a different direction and solve these problems, has to immediately fire and replace many, many, many of the existing officials who control things. The Prime Minister's Office needs to take back control of Number Ten. It needs to close the Cabinet Office, and it needs to take over the functions that the Cabinet Office has acquired over a century.
Now, remember, the Cabinet Office was set up in 1916, 1917, in the crisis of World War One, as the old Victorian system couldn't cope. This system has gradually taken more and more power, so that the real people with power inside the system have become Cabinet Office officials.
The Cabinet Secretary now has something like 100 times more power than the average minister does. People often ask me about 2019 and the Brexit negotiations: 'What did this minister think about this? What about the rows between this minister and that minister?' And my answer to them is, 'I don't really remember. And it wasn't important'. The ministers were not important in this process. I cared very much what the 30-year old officials in the Cabinet Office thought about these things, because they were the ones with real power.
If all kinds of things happen today, if when bombs go off, for example, or if a Secretary of State is caught by the security services in unsuitable liaisons, it's not the ministers that get called first. The wiring diagram of power inside the system means that it's the Cabinet secretary who is called first when the bombs go off and when crises happen. And the Cabinet Secretary decides which ministers are allowed to see what. All of that must change. We can't carry on if you want things to be different. You can't carry on with a system where the political ministers are essentially non-player characters in a video game, and the characters with real power are the unelected officials. You can't carry on with a system where the ministers all walk up Downing Street and smile for the cameras, and the media and the MPs pretend that the decisions are actually being made in the cabinet.
The Cabinet Secretary now has something like 100 times more power than the average minister does
I can tell you the decisions are not made in the cabinet. In the whole of 2020, I never even bothered attending cabinet once. The reason is because it's become fake. Fake meetings, whereas the real decisions and the real power have moved elsewhere. So you replace people, you bring in new people, you close down the Cabinet Office, the prime minister takes over the Cabinet Office, the powers of the Cabinet Office.
At the moment, the Prime Minister has literally no role whatsoever in the management of key permanent secretaries who actually run the government departments. Nothing at all to do with it. The entire HR system of Whitehall works for the Cabinet Secretary, not for the Prime Minister. If you want change on what's important – if you want to see a different regime – you have to have a Prime Minister who is actually in charge of setting the priorities for the key officials in the country. That doesn't happen now. When we started to do that in 2020, the system went crazy and complained that it was fascism. But this really should not be controversial. In the old days, ministerial responsibility was genuine. It became fake. Switching it back to being genuine is not fascism.
I think the essential concept of permanent civil servants, which was started in the 1850s, is at the root of a lot of the problems. The civil service system has become a closed caste system with Brahmins and untouchables. The Brahmins are insiders promoted through the system, regardless of failure. Look at our current Cabinet Secretary; he was responsible for pandemic preparation and planning. Of course, therefore, the old system has not fired him. It's promoted him. It's given him honours. And it's now put him in charge of the entire civil service.
The Untouchables are the roughly 100 per cent of the world's most effective people, none of whom could be hired inside Whitehall by ministers. And the insane HR system means that everybody changes jobs every two years, roughly. So if you're sitting in Number Ten, you have a series of meetings with someone in charge of, for example, Chinese cyber operations. And you talk to them and you talk to them. You have meeting after meeting, and then suddenly this person vanishes completely and some new person arrives in Number Ten and you say: 'Oh, hello, who are you?'. And they say: 'Oh, I'm so-and-so'. And you say: 'Oh, right. Okay. Um, so what are you doing?'. 'Oh, I've been in charge of special educational needs for the last two years'. 'Oh, right. Okay. You're now in charge of Chinese cyber operations?'. 'Yeah'.
So the justification for the entire permanent civil service system is supposedly that it develops expertise. But the actual way in which it works now is pathologically hostile to actual expertise. It doesn't let anyone develop expertise. And it forces people, if you want promotion and you want to get a pay rise, you have to do this constant zigzagging every two years up through the HR system.
All of that needs to be completely swept away. It was created in the 1850s, and, in my opinion, it's no coincidence that from the time that the so-called professional civil service took over, that marked the beginning of institutional dysfunction spreading throughout the Westminster system, because it became fundamentally impossible for elected ministers to change things by changing the people. And that's really where I think responsibility and fake meetings started to take over.
So there's a few other things that you need to do in parallel with this. Once you've actually taken power, and the prime minister is now actually in charge of Whitehall, the power of the Treasury has to be shattered into a thousand pieces. The Treasury's processes for all long-term projects are an absolute disaster. They make it impossible for people to plan. They make everything super expensive. Today, with the publication of this spending review, you see this process. Now, behind the scenes, what happens is everybody lies in the spending review process, and all of the budget numbers everyone knows are completely fake. Everyone at the heart of power inside the Treasury at the Number Ten system knows those numbers are all fake. The long-term budgeting process also means that you have ca constant churn whereby entities all over Whitehall can't actually organise themselves over a five or ten or 15-year period.
They're constantly told by the Treasury: No, your ceiling for budgets is just here. Even though the project extends for years beyond that. So you see completely crazy things like, the officials in charge of project X, say at the MOD, are told that everyone on project X will be fired in June because the Treasury won't guarantee that the budget is still going to be there after, say, November. People are fired, things closed down, And then, in November, the Treasury goes – oh, actually, some 30-year-old, who read PPE 100 yards from here (in Oxford) – says: 'No, no, no, actually this programme can carry on'. And the people are all hired again. All you've done is waste millions of quid and waste everyone's time. This is regarded as a completely standard, sensible way for Whitehall to organise how it spends all of your money.
The Prime Minister's Office has got to take responsibility for building a completely new process for long-term budgets, and that obviously impacts with the government procurement. As I said before, 200 years ago, this country was the best country in the world at actually doing procurement. Now it is a poster child for some of the most insane decisions that you can possibly imagine. Even the simplest things like building a dual carriageway is now scheduled to take years. That is completely normal. And if you say: 'This is mad, and what we're going to do instead is just systematically rip up all of these rules', much of the system will go completely crazy. Because the system doesn't see itself as there to deliver for you, the voters, for the taxpayers. The system sees itself as there to protect itself.
It's very routine when you're sitting inside Number Ten and you look at rolling news on TV and you see some story rolling, scrolling across the bottom of the screen saying 'Disaster on blah, blah, blah'. You look out the window and you see the official responsible for it just pottering through Horse Guards on the way to the Tube. The culture of direct responsibility is now almost completely unknown and is seen in Whitehall as something that's almost deranged if you try and do it.
So during Covid, when we said: 'Okay, we've got to try and get testing going faster, we've got to try and get vaccines going faster. We've got to try and get a thousand things going. We're going to put a named individual in charge of each of these things, so that everybody knows that person is the person to call and that person is responsible, right?' This is not exactly revolutionary management. This is how every single functioning entity on planet Earth works. And this was seen in Whitehall as revolutionary and hostile and to be resisted.
Now, if you think that that's the mindset, even when thousands of people are dying every week and it's a genuine crisis, imagine what it's like to change things in normal times now; that's why Keir Starmer is finding that he has meetings. Everyone nods and smiles. And then, three months later, no one did anything because no one really cares what the Prime Minister thinks.
The system just rumbles on with its own priorities. Why has Starmer got himself into the single biggest political disaster of his premiership on winter fuel payments? Was that in his manifesto? No. Did he say he wanted to do it? No. Did Labour MPs want to do it? No. Why? What happened? It happened because it's on the 30-year-old Treasury official's priority list. And if you've got non-player characters as prime ministers and as ministers, and a system that operates in this mad way, the system will put its priorities in front of the ministers and push them out on TV to announce things. And then the rest of the MPs go, 'Where the hell is this coming from? Why are we doing this? We don't understand'.
All of these different things need to change. The other thing that you need to do in Number Ten – so you've actually taken power from the Cabinet Office, you've closed the Cabinet Office you've got rid of the HR system so you can fire people, replace people, hire the world's best people to come and work on important government buildings – you change the procurement system so the government can now actually buy and sell and do things on normal timescales rather than on 20 or 30-year timescales.
The other central thing that has to happen is science and technology have to become embedded in the Prime Minister's Office as a core priority of Number Ten Downing Street. We can't carry on with a government system in which we have a Western civilisation that's based on science and technology and a political cultural elite dominant in politics and Whitehall that is ignorant of, or contemptuous about, science and technology. That is a recipe for catastrophe.
A new regime that's actually serious about turning the country around has to do – as well as these kind of bureaucratic and power changes that I've described inside the Number 10/ Whitehall complex – is to say that science and technology, both for prosperity and for security, are now going to become critical aspects of how the Prime Minister spends his time in the same way that they are on national security issues and budgets. They have to be at the top of the PM's inbox and completely integrated into how the Prime Minister's Office actually works.
If you do all these things, you won't solve all of our problems for sure, but you will at least have a functioning regime that can build things, rather than a dysfunctional and pathological regime.
The last thing I'll say then is, if I was going to be on a desert island, one of the top three books that I would take with me is War and Peace. And if you think about War and Peace, there are two kind of strands running through. One strand is that these inexorable human forces, inexorable forces of history, collide and smash. And it doesn't really matter what individual people do and think. They just get broken and washed along in the flood.
And the other part of the story is that, at some times, what one person thinks and does can have a huge effect on what happens. Both things are true at the same time.
Over the next five years, everyone in this room is going to live through two things
Over the next five years, everyone in this room is going to live through two things. They're going to live through these old regimes of the Western world continuing to crumble and disintegrate and fail. Both the old parties are like one of those Japanese movies where a samurai whips their heads off, but they haven't quite realised yet that they're dead. But they are. Samurai has done his bit, the Tories and Labour are (dead). And the AI and biological engineering strand is going to continue as well. And these two things are going to be very connected. These forces are going to smash into all of our lives. They're going to affect them in all sorts of ways.
But also, I would just say there's a last thing that, as per Tolstoy's message in War and Peace, we can have agency at these moments of crisis. Everyone here can build things. You can prepare for this extremely different world that's coming. One of the most obvious things to do, I think, is not everything can be about Westminster, not everything should be about Westminster. It's one of the problems that it's centralised so much power there. We've got to deal with the dysfunction of Westminster. We have to return to a civilisation in this country where other parts of the country can actually build things and do things. And the most obvious thing? It strikes me that there's something that everyone in this room could get involved with, which is the replacement of the old school system. The AI thing means it's doomed, a bit like the old parties; the current system (with) fake exams, fake curriculum created by the bureaucratic state to try to justify that it knows what it's doing, has destroyed in lots of ways the old European (system of) education and the institutions. That old system is doomed. New things are definitely going to come. And the sooner the people like those in this room start building them, what comes next, the better.
We don't have to wait for Westminster and Whitehall. They won't like it, but they're too broken to be able to stop us. So we can start building alternative things for our children to go into. And if you start creating alternative educational ecosystem in time, that will help us replace the rotten old political regime which is crumbling at the same time.