A new world

Well, we didn't expect that to happen so quickly.

Let's just take a quick recap of the shifts in defence and security policy over the past few years. Reviews are now normally every five years; past reviews in 2010 and 2015 were typical dilettante Cameronian fudges; the future was supranational and international, UN good, NATO good, EU better. And we've ended up with a pair of carriers that were obsolete as soon as they rolled down the slipway, so vulnerable to a new generation of hypersonic missiles that they can't be let anywhere near a war zone. Possibly useful as a platform for fishing surveillance drones, though - anchored in the North Sea, bang in the middle of our EEZ, each housing a clutch of admirals. Unless we can persuade the EU Navy to buy one. Our Type 45's may be able to detect and shoot down a cricket ball travelling at the speed of sound, but that's not much use when the enemy are using missiles a lot faster than the speed of sound rather than fast cricket balls to sink our carriers.

Anyway, from 2017 Mark Sedwill was charged with conducting a run-up to the 2020 review, which needed to be broadened to include threats from State Actors. Tanks are out, deniable actions by unmarked troops are in. As Putin has shown in the Donbass, you can get away with it. And as the Salisbury poisonings and a score more GRU assassinations elsewhere have shown, even when they know it's you, what can they do, apart from ineffective sanctions and a handful of diplomatic expulsions? So long as Germany is dependent on Putin's gas, he has a get-out-of-jail-free card. China too has been a disruptor, using state cyber attacks on other nations' infrastructures as well as armies of hackers who infiltrate and disrupt social media. Iran's shipnapping in the gulf is open.

If Cameron was a dilettante, May was Queen of Chaos. She hadn't got a clue what she wanted, so long as she could keep it secret and keep the public, non-government experts and parliament away. Catastrophe May was a brainless ditherer, a dunderhead. On the basis that any plan was better than no plan, Sedwill acted in what he genuinely thought were the nation's best interests. He went to Washington to talk with those conducting Trump's review. He sent trusted civil servants to Brussels to tentatively commit the UK to EU defence plans. He invented the 'Fusion' strategy, allowing the UK to do everything at once with an Eton mess of defence, security, economic and other resources.

None of this made it through to what was scheduled to be the 2020 defence and security review. On taking office in 2019 Boris radically altered the terms of reference and downgraded Sedwill's role. Dominic Cummings had also long been a vocal critic of the UK's disastrous defence procurement regime. When Covid demonstrated that Whitehall's procurement systems couldn't even procure a few boxes of gowns and face masks, it was also an explicit admission that our mandarins couldn't be trusted with buying stuff like ships. Dom has written on his blog, bookmarked here, that utterly unfit Whitehall procurement "has continued to squander billions of pounds, enriching some of the worst corporate looters and corrupting public life via the revolving door of officials/lobbyists".

Champions for the MoD such as Michael Fallon and George Robertson have tried to not only hold the UK to our 2% of GDP commitment for defence but to increase this to 2.5% or even 3%. Defence interests - the admirals and generals - have done everything they can to ringfence 'their' 2% to tanks and ships and fast jets. Simply, their ideas are as redundant as the useless carriers we've just acquired.

The USMC has just junked all its tanks.

The decades to come will mean we must fight on the battlegrounds on which we are being attacked - green men, state assassins, cyber war. The ring-fencing that the men in medals want won't work. We need a mash-up of MoD, GCHQ, SIS and MI5, FCDO and the City. We need to throw into the pot the MoD's 2% of GDP, DfID's 0.7% and the billions of secret squirrel money. On the face of it, Sedwill's 'Fusion' idea was in the right direction - but the man had a 'reservation of mind' that meant interests other than the elected government's played a part in his delivery.

And Covid buggers everything. When GDP shrinks by 20%, 2% of that smaller pot will buy far fewer F35s or anti-cricket ball destroyers. Lord Frost will have exactly the right skill set, and will be able to put together exactly the right team to deal with that new reality. And my sincere hope is that Labour's front bench under Starmer can put a broad shoulder behind the UK's national defence and security strategy - after all, they may have to live with it from 2024.    

Whitehall's lethal incompetence

I have no confidence at all that the tracing app being developed by Whitehall will work. If it's up to the abysmal standards of error, malfunction, delay and inadequacy that have characterised the rest of the actions of the Department of Health, it will collapse half an hour after release, the first week''s central data will be hacked, warning SMS messages will be sent to everyone by mistake and the bluetooth errors will destroy thousands of phones.

It follows close on the heels of the PPE procurement disaster. A disastrous central procurement model that left NHS workers short of PPE whilst firms holding vast stocks of kit that met the standards struggled against official deafness to offer it for sale; they were ignored, officials placed themselves beyond contact and hid behind websites and an RAF transport aircraft spent a week flying in a few boxes of gowns from Turkey.

And let's not even mention the central testing fiasco, or the manifest failures of Public Health England that left us so poorly prepared against the most basic and fundamental of risks. All of it, every disgraceful failure, every shaming bungle, stems from Whitehall's toxic grasp on central power at the cost of effectiveness. The command and control mindset that insists on trying to micromanage the entire nation's health response from Richmond House has been lethal.

The fall yesterday evening of Neil Ferguson can only improve the quality of the government's response. Like the departed Scottish CMO Catherine Calderwood, Ferguson thought the rules were only for little people. I'm sure these incidents aren't isolated; I'll bet that senior civil servants across the country are happily breaching the rules to visit their yachts, second homes, lovers or to receive hookers and rent boys at their lockdown dossholes, smug in their inviolability just so long as the press doesn't find them out. The hypocrisy is nauseating.

The one lesson we must take from both the Brexit fiasco and the Covid farce is that we must clear out this dross from Whitehall. We must localise and decentralise, we must trust regions, counties and lower tiers of government to be competent. We must increase democratic control, local scrutiny and accountability. If this nonsense has taught us anything, it's that we normal people can act responsibly, even if Whitehall can't.

We've had it with entitled and privileged technocrats

How very convenient

Everyone agrees. When May goes, arch-Remainer Cabinet Secretary Mark Sedwill cannot stay at Number Ten. Suggestions for his future include separating the three roles he holds - Cabinet Secretary, National Security Adviser and Head of the Civil Service, leaving him with just one, probably civil service boss, and finding him a new office away from Whitehall.

Sedwill himself is said to want the UK Ambassadorship to Washington - a strange option, given that all his previous efforts have been to align the UK with the EU rather than the USA. Perhaps it is just an extension of a blocking role. The problem is, the popular and capable current Ambassador, Kim Darroch, is in no hurry to go. He is well liked over the pond and held in high regard, and importantly is not said to be one of the Remain fifth-column inside the senior ranks of the civil service.

So how convenient - and I suggest no more than that - that carefully selected secret cables from Sir Kim to Number Ten, which certainly passed across Sedwill's desk, should now appear in the Daily Mail, to Darroch's great embarrassment.

There needs to be a leak enquiry, of course, but I'd suggest that Sedwill is not the man to conduct it.

Restoring British Liberalism means freedom from both Brussels and Whitehall

Mrs May, the consensus goes, did a fairly good job of reading-out at the party conference the words written for her. Most agree it has bought her at least another two weeks in power. But like one of those theatrical-cuisine meals with drizzles, one wonders after leaving the restaurant whether one has actually eaten at all. Allister Heath has pinned down the problem (£)

Ban, tax, regulate and intervene some more: Britain’s new modus operandi is grim indeed. The stream of silliness never ends; petty, meddling officialdom, empowered by the most controlling, puritanical government in living memory.

Only fashionable freedoms, such as the ability to get divorced at will, are promoted; unfashionable ones, such as the right to eat whatever we wish or to keep more of our hard-earned cash, are trampled upon in extraordinary fashion. There is ever-more red tape, and the tax-to-GDP ratio has reached its highest level in decades. This is neither real conservatism nor real liberalism: it is mushy, unprincipled, command politics, a regression to the Whitehall-knows-best mentality of the disastrous Harold Macmillan era.

This is the consequence of having since 2010 first the dilettante Cameron in Downing Street, and then the Whitehall puppet May. Neither have an innate understanding of the meaning of Conservatism or of true Liberalism. Until we finally break Whitehall's 1940s grip on power, a wartime-only grant of British freedom which ever since they have  refused to relinquish, we will never regain our true freedom.  

Meanwhile, Herr Tusk, one of the EU's unelected presidents, joins the Brussels grumbles about 'lack of respect' for the EU by the British press and commentators, after the Foreign Secretary's comparison of the EU to the Soviet Union. I for one have the greatest respect for the EU; in particular for

• Being able to subvert billions in national taxes to return as 'gifts' 'grants' or 'investments' to those who paid the taxes in the first place
• Allowing the fraudulent use, theft, peculation and false accounting of millions more in citizens' taxes in ways that shame crooked Russian oligarchs as GRU-type amateurs
• As a public body, hiding, refusing access to, distorting, misrepresenting and omitting financial information at all levels, from crooked expenses to institutional malfeasance, to prevent any meaningful scrutiny of fiduciary probity
• Enabling the capos to crookedly appoint as consigliere Martin Selmayr, a man whose principles are flexible enough not only to accept the appointment without shame but allow him to develop with Teutonic aggression the organisation's institutional corruption
• Stifling, choking and suffocating democracy in Europe whenever Europe's citizens dare to exercise their fundamental Human Rights at the ballot box; universal suffrage and the secret ballot are the weapons the bent capos of the EU fear most, and are most determined to destroy
• Destroying an entire bedrock European nation - Greece - to save the French and German banks. As Jonathon Bond writes in the Speccie, €230 bn of the €280bn 'aid' package for Greece has gone straight to EU banks without rescuing a single impoverished Greek.

Above all, I respect the EU's simple and powerful Mission Message "Ever Greater Power and Corruption".

Whitehall, of course, has been for forty years no more than the branch-office of the Berlaymont, deepening and furthering the crooked destruction of British liberal democracy by the EU. It is time to clear the thigh-deep shit from those Augean stables - but for that we need a Conservative Leader.

Petulant arrogant hubristic arsehole quits

Ivan Rogers, who after Balliol and the École Normale Supérieure spent pretty much his whole adult life working for government, was predictably seduced by the heady vapours of Brussels. The EU has made normal the elevation of unelected bureaucrats to positions of great power, and in such an atmosphere it was almost inevitable that Rogers, whose petulant, sulky, narcissistic face stares at the nation from today's front pages, would forget that he was just an unelected employee and start to imagine that he was someone important.  

If Rogers had been doing his job he would not have penned the extraordinary 1,400 word apology for his meretricious and dishonourable departure. If Rogers had a true allegiance to his nation and sovereign rather than to the unelected officials of the Commission, he would not have gushed his hubristic nonsense all over the papers. And if Rogers had any real intellectual grasp of the over-riding issues rather than a shallow official's understanding of the minutiae, the problem would not have arisen in the first place. The bloke is quite clearly a shallow, petulant arsehole and we're really much better off without him.