Dominic Cummings: The Most Interesting Man in British Politics
Sun 3:09 pm +01:00, 20 Oct 2024
“If there is hope, it lies in the proles.” That’s what the protagonist Winston Smith thinks in George Orwell’s dystopian satire Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). Winston thinks that the proles — the oppressed and exploited workers — could shake off the tyranny of the ruling party like a “horse shaking off flies.” All they needed to do was become aware of the tyranny and of how it was oppressing them.
Reality is King
But Winston was wrong: they never would become aware and never would exert their strength. There was no hope in the proles. According to O’Brien, the high-IQ inquisitor who tortures Winston at the Ministry of Love, there is no hope at all. “The rule of the Party is for ever,” he tells Winston. Yet O’Brien too is wrong. The Party’s rule is based on the denial of objective reality and on the claim that “Nothing exists except through human consciousness.” But that claim isn’t right and sooner or later objective reality would intrude on the Party’s dreams of eternal omnipotence. In the final part of the novel, O’Brien scoffs at Winston’s belief that the stars are beyond the Party’s reach and control:
“What are the stars?” said O’Brien indifferently. “They are bits of fire a few kilometres away. We could reach them if we wanted to. Or we could blot them out. The earth is the centre of the universe. The sun and the stars go round it.” (Nineteen Eighty-Four, Part Three, chapter 3)
In reply to that, Winston could simply have said: “Tunguska.” It’s the earth that goes round the sun. So do lots of other things, like the space-rocks that periodically strike the earth’s surface or explode in the earth’s atmosphere. A space-rock exploded like that over the Siberian region of Tunguska in 1908. It was a very large and very powerful explosion, but the only casualties were pine-trees and reindeer. If the same explosion had happened over Moscow or London or Paris, the city would have been destroyed, millions of people would have died, and history would have taken an entirely different course. Sooner or later, in the world of Nineteen Eighty-Four, another space-rock would have ended the rule of the Party. It might have done so by destroying the human race, of course, but the point remains the same: human consciousness does not control external reality.
Neo-clown lunacy threatens us all
But did the human race get lucky with Tunguska? Perhaps not. Perhaps we got unlucky. If Moscow or London or Paris had been destroyed by that space-rock, we would have had a very sharp lesson in how dangerous the solar system is. And we would have begun working to avert the dangers decades earlier and with much more energy. So we might have had bases on the moon and Mars by now, and a fully working SpaceGuard program to detect and destroy incoming disasteroids. As it is, we don’t have those things and the next big space-rock could arrive tomorrow and wipe out an entire country or continent. Or it could end the human race.
And what about the dangers of nuclear war? Neo-clown lunacy over Ukraine and Taiwan may end in missiles flying and mankind falling back into the abyss of barbarism with no off-earth bases to save us. But how many people in Western politics care about asteroid-strikes and nuclear war? Far too few. Countless politicians and bureaucrats in Westminster or Washington would be able to tell you all about George Floyd and systemic racism, but very few would be able to tell you anything about the Tunguska event or about Vasili Arkhipov and Stanislav Petrov, the two lowly Russian individuals who saved the world from nuclear armageddon. Among the few who know and care about such things is a man who may be the most interesting British political figure of the past century or more. He may be the most important figure in British politics too.
An evil genius loathed by leftists
Who is he? He’s called Dominic Cummings (born 1971) and he’s highly intelligent, highly competent, and highly knowledgeable about important things. To British leftists, he’s the evil genius behind Brexit. Leftists loathe him, which is a very good sign that he’s on the side of the angels. Reading him has suggested to me a variant on that failed formula above. Winston Smith was wrong when he looked at the workers and the tyranny of the Party, then thought: “If there is hope, it lies in the proles.” But I may be right when I look at Dominic Cummings and the tyranny of Clown World, then think: “If there is hope, it lies in the paladins.”
A paladin is literally a “knight of the palace,” that is, a paragon of martial virtue and valor. But you can use “paladins” in an extended sense to mean a group with superior intellects and insights, a genuine and deserving elite who can take on and defeat the undeserving and oppressive elite that currently rules the West. In that sense, Dominic Cummings is a paladin who wants to recruit other paladins for what he calls the Startup Party. He wants to destroy the Conservative and Labour uniparty and Make Albion Great Again. And also sane again. Cummings has a superior intellect and doesn’t draw his insights from Marx or Freud or Foucault or any of the other word-web-spinners who dominate the dreams and direct the deeds of Clown World. No, he draws his insights from science and mathematics and from genuine achievers like Otto Bismarck and George Mueller, the engineer who reformed NASA and was central to putting man on the moon. Clown World is run by insane adolescents, but Cummings is a sane adult.
That’s why he learned to have such contempt for the bureaucrats and systems he encountered when he worked in government under Boris Johnson and the education minister Michael Gove. He’s put it like this at his fascinating and insightful Substack account: “One of the most fundamental things I’ve learned in 24 years’ involvement [in politics] is that almost nobody has any interest in general principles underlying success and failure, nor interest in execution/management, and although political people read a lot of history books it’s hard to see any learning.”
In short, British government is designed to fail. What matters to politicians and bureaucrats is their own power and prestige, not the efficient and effective performance of their duties to the British people. Cummings has frequently excoriated “Whitehall” — the official government bureaucracy — at his Substack. He knows that British democracy is a farce, because the parties are “all so similar they can’t imagine a political world where taxpayers’ money is treated with respect.” Here’s another devastating line: “HMT [Her/His Majesty’s Treasury] officials are interested in their control over Whitehall — not saving taxpayers’ money.” And another: “Many officials across Whitehall care far more about not being CCd in to an email than they do about millions of pounds being wasted or thousands of people’s lives being inconvenienced — the former is an insult to their status, while the latter is normal daily life.”
Clown World ♥ Open Borders
The same officials also care far more about “systemic racism” and “transgender rights” than they do about performing their duties and saving taxpayers’ money. That’s all part of why an advanced First-World nation like Britain can’t stop low-IQ non-Whites from primitive Third-World nations pouring across the English Channel in small boats. But I need to correct myself: it isn’t “can’t stop” the boats but “won’t stop” the boats. Clown World doesn’t want to stop the Third World invading the First World, because Clowns like Kamala Harris and Keir Starmer prefer parasitic non-Whites to productive Whites. Parasitic non-Whites don’t threaten the power of Clown World. On the contrary, they enhance it.
Dominic Cummings is very careful to avoid the topic of race in his public statements, but there’s no doubt that he knows and recognizes racial reality. During his second stint in government, he recruited as one of his advisors a highly intelligent and insightful White male called Andrew Sabisky. Then it emerged that Sabisky is a thought-criminal. He holds “repulsive” and “totally unacceptable” views on race. For example, he thinks that “politicians should pay attention to ‘very real racial differences in intelligence’ when designing the immigration system.” Sabisky is right in all his views, of course, but that’s precisely why he was driven out of government by what the Guardian described as “fierce criticism across [the] political spectrum.”
“The old system will go crazy with hate”
In fact, he was criticized only by leftists and their cuckservative allies. He certainly wasn’t criticized by Dominic Cummings, who wanted to keep him as an advisor and must have been fully aware of Sabisky’s heretical views on race. Indeed, Cummings must share them. He’s just been more discreet than Sabisky about expressing those views. But Cummings isn’t discreet about criticizing the Conservatives for betraying voters on immigration:
We promised to take back control of the borders and LOWER the insane legal + illegal immigration rate while we built infrastructure — then the Tories sided with the Confederation of British Sex Criminal Rentiers (formerly known as the CBI [Confederation of British Industry]), opened the floodgates and refused to change the complex of laws that stops us building infrastructure ’cos immigration = GrOwTh’. (“#4 The Startup Party: Time to Build from September [2024] and replace the Tories?,” Dominic Cummings’ Substack, 11th August 2023)
Having seen the farce of British politics from the inside, Cummings has decided that reform is impossible and replacement inevitable. That’s why he wants to start what he has provisionally called the Startup Party to replace the Conservatives and Labour. Instead of insane adolescents wrecking the country, he wants sane adults repairing the country. And he thinks that the insane adolescents will work for their own replacement:
Imagine a party that a) mobilises some of the most talented people in the country and b) takes the voters’ side against the old parties and other old power structures operating on principles roughly like the above.
The old system will go crazy with hate. Tory-Labour rivalries will be mostly forgotten. They will unite in attacking this appalling new force. Danny Finkelstein and Owen Jones will sing a similar song!
Populist! FASCIST!!
This highly visible conflict will give us a powerful surge of energy. With some luck, the stronger the Insiders’ resistance and hate, the stronger and faster our energy and growth… (“#4 The Startup Party: Time to Build from September [2024] and replace the Tories?,” Dominic Cummings’ Substack, 11th August 2023)
Owen Jones is a self-righteous woke homosexual who writes for the Guardian. “Danny Finkelstein” is the little-known but highly important Daniel Finkelstein, a Vice President of the Jewish Leadership Council. He’s one of the Jews who controlled the previous Conservative government and ensured that it betrayed White voters on immigration. Finkelstein’s sister, Tamara Finkelstein, is a high-flying bureaucrat who is the “Joint Senior Sponsor of the Civil Service Jewish Network,” has supported Black Lives Matter (BLM) on an official government Twitter account, and has issued a stirring call to “fight racism.”
Tammy Finkelstein is definitely woke; Danny Finkelstein is supposedly conservative. In reality, Danny is just as anti-White and anti-Western as Tammy. Dominic Cummings will criticize Daniel Finkelstein only by name, not by race, but he must know about the central role of Jews in Clown World. It’s just that he can’t mention Jews or Jewish power. Doing that would turn the Startup Party into the Stillborn Party.
Cummings may never achieve his admirable ambitions, of course, but he isn’t the only stale pale male who wants to end the reign of Clown World. Elon Musk is another highly intelligent and highly competent White man who shares Cummings’ ambitions and antipathies. Musk wants to put men on Mars; Clown World wants to put men in women’s bathrooms. If there is hope, it lies in the paladins like Cummings and Musk. Not only in the paladins, of course, but all sane adults who read Cummings’ substack should be energized and inspired by what they find there.
Appendix: More Demonic Crimethink from Dominic Cummings
It is hard to avoid the conclusion that officials often prefer a process involving months of meetings and a long implementation timetable as this provides easy, no-pressure work long into the future. […]
Further, nobody is incentivised to solve problems fast. Ministers acquire a reputation for ‘wisdom’ simply by saying about everything ‘sounds very risky let’s not do that’ or ‘let’s add another two years to the timetable’. This limits the chances of embarrassment for the civil service but also means the problem is not solved. Officials are adept at psychologically reinforcing this, by praising ministers as ‘very wise’ whenever they demand delays and ‘very brave’ whenever they demand an aggressive timetable. The cost of going quickly is harder work by, and potential embarrassment for, officials; the costs of going slowly fall on the public. Who do you think weighs more in decisions taken confidentially in Whitehall, without the tradeoffs ever having to be crassly articulated?
The fundamental reason for Whitehall’s failure is management, not a lack of bureaucrats or money. As Colonel Boyd [the American military strategist] used to shout, ‘People, ideas, machines — in that order!’ In the DfE [Department of Education], we cut the department’s headcount by more than a third and halved running costs. We more than halved the press office, and cut 95 percent of the communication budget. Performance improved rapidly. It would improve further if the DfE were halved again. The fact that the former head of the civil service could unintentionally reveal such deep misunderstandings about the problems with Whitehall and the nature of management shows how serious the problems are.
“The Hollow Men II: Some reflections on Westminster and Whitehall dysfunction,” 30th October 2014
Whatever happens in the [2024 British general] election, 99.99% of the same people will stay running the country as now, Starmer will have the same attitude to the civil service actually running the country as Cameron and Sunak, and the situation since 2010 will largely continue: The government does not control the government, doesn’t want to, and couldn’t if it tried… Cf. Francis Crick’s plea as Whitehall wrecked Intelligence 1946: ‘It’s no use reorganising with just the same old gang’. He was ignored and he left for Cambridge.
I urge subscribers to ignore the election. It will be almost entirely clowns jabbering things not-even-wrong interpreted by hacks who’ve never built anything valuable in their lives and are anti-expert on how power works, how communication works, and how high performance organisations are created. Noise about noise. All the budget numbers will be fake because of the massive black budget horror shows and corruption of the MOD. Starmer will be given these on yellow paper soon after he goes to No10 and he and others will say to themselves ‘un-fucking-believable’. Then, probably, punt-and-classify like Brown, Cameron, May, Boris, Truss, and Sunak. I’ve been talking to various people about what should be built after the 2010-24 clown show is over and the new clown show begins. […]
- Recruit Ministers from outside parliament. I’ve done market research since 2004 on this. It’s very popular and an open goal. It’s also unarguably necessary if you’re trying to recruit the best people who, by definition, are almost all outside Parliament. The old parties won’t do this because their MPs would go insane (as Boris said to me in summer 2020 when I said we should do this to replace Hancock et al).
- Open up the civil service so appointments are open to outside candidates by default with almost zero exceptions. This is also unarguably necessary if you’re trying to recruit the best people who, by definition, are almost all outside Whitehall. The permanent closed caste civil service as it now works is one of our greatest sources of fragility and failure.
- We believe in controlling the borders, we will stop the ludicrous boats, we will cut illegal immigration to a tiny and irrelevant problem, we will ensure we actually know who enters/leaves our country
The people who think of themselves as the smart people in SW1 [the postcode that covers central government in London] regard it as literally impossible to ‘stop the boats’. This is, obviously, laughable. Many countries including us have dealt with 1000X harder problems — Pompei [i.e., Pompey the Great] famously cleared the sea of pirates in weeks, over 2,000 years before radio! I am 100% confident that the British state could stop the boats and it wouldn’t even be a serious test for a serious government — the problem is none of the old parties want to and would rather lose every election than really try (as Sunak is demonstrating). And because everybody in SW1 shares the view ‘it’s basically intractable’ and no other player will show anybody else up, they’ve all felt safe in not taking it seriously.
This problem is going to get worse and worse as environmental and political problems send more and more people, especially young men, from Africa and Asia into Europe. The EU is already knackered in dealing with this issue. It can’t handle it legally, operationally or politically. It already has serious problems with extreme/fascist parties. This will grow and grow. (NB. As I’ve said many times this was one of the core reasons for doing the referendum.) The sooner we grip this problem, the less force and disruption the solution will need — which is best for everyone. If we continue with the Tory-Labour approach, we will have millions more immigrants, many illegal, and it will get harder and harder to deal with and require more force and disruption.
Even if the old parties did suddenly try to take it seriously they couldn’t actually control our borders because they all believe in the European Convention of Human Rights and the Human Rights Act. As Sunak has unwittingly demonstrated. He let himself be persuaded of nonsense on boats. He chose to ignore those who pointed out that even if the Courts accepted his Bill (his best case scenario), his Bill did not give him the powers to actually stop the boats. No10 remains deluded on this and those who know it won’t tell Sunak he’s bogged it.
If you have any trust in the old system, it seems amazing that a smart PM could repeat what Cameron, May and Boris did — simultaneously a) promise to solve a problem, b) sort of choose to believe rubbish, sort of deep down know it’s rubbish, c) raise the salience of an issue they can’t solve because of their own laws, lawyers and courts, d) when the whole thing inevitably fails and the public is angry, start spinning that really it was a clever strategy to ‘set the issue up for the next election’. But when you understand Tory world is rotten it’s all natural, not ‘amazing’. […]
If you don’t care about controlling the borders you can already vote Tory or Labour.
The market opportunity is for a party that does care and can credibly act. You can only be credible if you are prepared to repeal the HRA [Human Rights Act] and end the jurisdiction of the Strasbourg Court, [which together:]
- Make tough surveillance of terrorists impossible. I’ve had personal experience of Kafka-esque meetings after a terrorist incident when the police and intelligence services admit they could not keep convicted terrorists (never mind suspects) under surveillance because of the ECHR [European Court of Human Rights] / HRA [Human Rights Act]. There are many, many ludicrous ways in which security is undermined. Most of these are classified in order to stop MPs and public knowing. Officials know some of these stories are so insane that publicity would undermine support for the ECHR/HRA.
- Create such Kafka-esque absurdities we sometimes have special forces call in drone strikes to whack people instead of arresting them because it weirdly makes more legal ‘sense’, given legal advice. Such cases are, obviously, kept very quiet like many other ways the intelligence services are affected. There are some truly jaw dropping examples that Sunak should make public but won’t — those of you who read the yellow paper on terrorists bringing legal action in London while on the run from JSOC will know the sort of thing I mean. Good for some rich human rights lawyers (some of whom should be disbarred), humiliating for any serious country. […]
Starmer will be confronted with a symbol of this [nuclear rot] on his first day as PM when he talks to the deep state about the submarines and his letter. And the Cabinet Secretary will say something like: PM, not for now but we will have to discuss some important aspects of this subject soon… And Starmer will read (on yellow paper above Strap 3) the detail of these horrific budgets. And he will face the same choice Boris and Sunak faced: go public, blame his predecessor and face openly the vast financial (and other implications) or classify, punt and continue the charade that means the continuing cannibalising of the open budgets by the broken black budgets and their black holes. (An interesting question that will signal power will be: is Sue Gray [a powerful woke bureaucrat] allowed in the room for the submarine chat or not?)
“People, ideas, machines VII_ ‘The Wizard War’ — lessons on technology, intelligence & organisation from World War II,” 23rd February 2024
The original VL [Vote Leave campaign for Brexit] plan to transform the Tory Party is kaput. It would have been a different story if Boris-Carrie [Boris Johnson and his wife Carrie] had enjoyed themselves smashing champagne bottles off boats while VL ran No10 and used the 80 seat majority to do the VL plan. The country and party would look profoundly different. No HS2 [High-Speed Rail Link], no £35B down the toilet this Parliament alone, and so many things happening instead. The argument would be about the winners and losers rather than ‘why bother with Brexit then change nothing?’. Starmer would have been smashed to bits. Many MPs would have ‘retired’, new MPs recruited, and CCHQ [Conservative Central Head-Quarters] closed with an effectively new party reopening in the Midlands with an edge-of-the-art political machine. Such a transformation — using four years occupying No10 with an 80 majority, changing facts on the ground and demonstrating things rather than arguing about things — is not possible in Opposition using the rotten old Tory institution. Dramatically cutting taxes for working people is extremely different to promising to cut taxes after 14 years of putting them up. So our old plan is kaput. And it was a once-in-decades opportunity — election victory on a the biggest issue in politics for decades, the biggest government crisis since 1945, clear mandate and need for huge change in economy and government, a team with a plan, a civil service willing to do a deal on massive change instead of fighting it, a PM with very strong personal incentives to change a lot (objectively speaking, but it turned out he disagreed!), opposition in chaos. This combination is highly unlikely to recur ‘naturally’ for many decades.
Fundamental to our politics is the shift of talented people out of politics/government and the asymmetrical effects on those who oppose the Left/‘progressivism’. There is a vicious circle across the west that keeps almost all the most able people out of politics/government/public service. But the ‘progressive’ Left attracts a lot of smart people who believe in more centralised state power and want to exercise this power over others. People with the same IQ who strongly disagree with them are much less inclined to spend their time navigating low quality political hierarchies to capture centralised institutions (per above).
The old parties focus on the old SW1 game and the old media but can’t even get to 1968-America levels of sophistication in handling TV (cf. The Selling of the President), never mind advanced technologies. They’re so addicted to the 24/7 cycle of chaos (‘news’) they can never focus on anything that isn’t leading the news therefore they cannot drive hard changes or communicate effectively. […] And they demonstrably have no interest in building a government that can maintain focus and build fast while the leader is inevitably focused to some extent on the news — when we started building such a machine in summer 2020 (including a new communication machine) the Tories freaked out and couldn’t discuss it intelligently (though parts of the deep state supported us).
The market opportunity is for a party that optimises for voters.
The lack of Tory interest in economic policy and the fundamental long-term stagnation of productivity is prima facie baffling given … they are politicians supposedly trying to win elections! What’s the explanation? It’s a product of a more general problem — their focus is always on today’s media and their position in Insider coalition networks, NOT winning. This more general issue also explains other otherwise baffling things, like their total lack of interest in the MOD for 14 years, their total lack of interest in actual border control and so on. They still call themselves ‘the party of business’ and ‘the party of the national interest’ and ‘the party of the armed forces’, echoing the 1980s, but they aren’t actually interested any more in any of these things.
Both Labour and Tory are locked into a media ecosystem and legal ecosystem that supports a combination of, to simplify crudely, *ESG + DEI + nutty green + nutty progressivism + technology hate*. Apart from the awful political and cultural effects, this combination is also a disaster for productivity growth and a market opportunity for TSP.
- Contra-Insiders, ‘not normal politicians’: on the side of taxpayers against the old parties, with voters against unions and the CBI, the local against Whitehall, with mothers against the violent, for women’s safety against the men-pretending-to-be-women.
“#4 The Startup Party: Time to Build from September [2024] and replace the Tories?,” Dominic Cummings’ Substack, 11th August 2023
Source: https://www.unz.com/article/the-demonic-crimethink-of-dominic-cummings-thoughts-on-the-most-interesting-man-in-british-politics/
