DS

[Scott Goetz @ScottGoetz_]

It will just be this again.

[Danny Kruger @danny__kruger]

Having already written her own job description ('steward... and guardian of the constitution'), Dame Antonia Romeo, the unelected Cabinet Secretary and ultimate boss of the 550,000 civil servants who make up the government of Britain, has now set herself the task of leading a 'fundamental review into the constitution, organisation and performance of the permanent Civil Service'. On recent form, she and her senior colleagues will attempt to elevate the Civil Service into a quasi-independent, constitutionally untouchable agency above the grubby business of democratic politics. Reform UK is planning a transformation too - starting with scrapping the role of Cabinet Secretary and restoring meaningful power and responsibility to ministers accountable to Parliament. https://t.co/PTe8lUHmbM

[Andy @PositivFuturist]

Read this to understand how institutions really work nowadays.

Solving problems makes them redundant.

Allowing problems to grow means they can scream for more money and resources and build little empires to rule over with promotions and higher pay.

There’s no accountability.

[S A M M Y Woodhouse @officialsammyuk]

Due to the Sentencing Act 2026, Arshid Hussain – the man who abducted and raped me as a child, and who did the same to dozens of other children – is being considered for early release. He was sentenced to 35 years in prison in early 2017 and was described as one of the most dangerous men in the UK. He was later convicted of further offences.

His brother, Basharat Hussain, is also being considered for release.

I honestly can’t put into words how disgusted I am with the British government.

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

Murderous migrants beheading innocent people in their home town is what’s making people angry, not “social media”!

[Richard Williams @williams_rje]

@AlistairCarns had a distinguished military career. It is damning that Benn, Starmer, Hermer, Reeves and others would not listen to him on lawfare, the Northern Ireland Bill, on defence transformation or on financial resources; and all credit to this RM veteran for stepping into the breach and his resignation on principle.

His dynamite resignation, on the back of the Healey exit represents the necessary detonation of a political bomb under UK defence; highlighting how screwed up it all really is, how badly Starmer is lying to the country, and how totally irresponsible is this @UKLabour government.

Carns is very right on the big things, the MoD and the “centre” are not facing reality on the changing technologies of war, they are not getting the resources they need and they are not defending veterans from lawfare. On this latter and vital point, this is led and encouraged by the UK’s own Attorney General as chief back-stabber.

For this, Hermer should be the next to go. And by the way, don’t expect much from the Starmer-loyalist, ex-Para Jarvis….not every Politician has the guts to do what Carns and Healey have just done…

[Dominic Cummings @Dominic2306]

My pinned tweet explains the background to Healey resignation.
We got real numbers in 2020 for first time in ~20 years.
Since then everything reverted to fake.
Thanks to Trolley & Wally, they let HMT and MoD shovel cash into things they KNEW were broken, like AJAX, and scuppered funding the future (e.g drones, robotics, AI, cloud).
The nuclear weapons supply chain is a multi-billion multi-decade fiasco and reinforces fake budgets.
MoD & CO used UKR war to prop up the lies and disasters, not to fix them. Trolley, Sunak and Starmer all went along with: classify, punt, spin fake budgets.
All these chickens are coming home to roost.
The DIP is a disaster because it combines: a/ continuing to fund old things which shd be scrapped but senior people's careers rest on lying about, b/ failure to fund the future, c/ more dodgy accounts, d/ classified nuke shitshow, which forces lies/cannibalisation of conventional, and e/ continued failure to change procurement and long term budgets despite covid and UKR.
Ive said this 100 times for years.
Also relevant to resignation --
In 2020, I got the PM & CHX to agree to take the next gen fighter AWAY from HMT and MoD. (FOI the doc screenshotted below!)
They were using a bogus 'above STRAP 3 study' to claim that AI would be irrelevant to future fighters in 2045. This 'top secret' study was written *before* DeepMind was created!!
We agreed to take away the next gen fighter/drones from MoD/HMT and put them into a new civilian project with huge commercial development of drones/robotics/AI, with procurement and budgets done totally outside normal system (like vaccines, ARPA etc).
After I left this was u-turned along with shredding all the true budget numbers.
The MoD and HMT proceeded with the usual procurement with BaE.
This has now blown up *as it was obvious it would SIX YEARS ago'.
HMT is refusing to fund it because the MoD is a corrupt shambles.
And MoD is knackered by the HMT's insane budget processes and insane procurement.
HMT and MoD have reasonable complaints about each other. 'Everyone's right and everyone's unhappy'.
The only way out is the Vote Leave plan and No10 smashing heads together with the full authority of the PM, as in the secret process of 2020. It cannot be left to 'normal processes'. Senior people must be forced to tell the truth 'or you're fired'. We did this. It works!
The MPs refuse to engage. The MPs on defence committee say they cannot ask officials re the 2020 process because 'they'll just refuse to answer'.
But our enemies know everything everything I say is true!
It is impossible for dud Starmer to solve these problems.
It is good timing that Burnham will soon take over and could draw a line under decades of Tory failure and set out a new path...
But there will be HUGE pressure from the old system, in HMT and MoD, to patch everythign up with more lies, spin, fake accounts, and massive classification...
Maybe some MPs could finally pay attention to these issues and resolve to stop constant lies, please!
Our security, prosperity and critical technologies are at stake and the old parties and old Whitehall are pathological!
NB. In 2020 we also bought LEO satellites. SW1 laughed. Starlink has been critical in UKR. Whitehall sold off the satellites!
NB. In March 2022 when the UKR disaster started I wrote: 'Prediction: 1) lessons from UKR will overwhelmingly support the arguments of those who in 2020 argued for radical MoD changes (including taking money from old tank projects that everybody privately admitted were a multi-billion pound disaster) and 2) the correct criticism of the review and connected documents will be seen as a) they did not go nearly far enough, b) the collapse of No10 follow through on defence reform in 2021 was — like the collapse of 2020 plans for planning reform, tax cuts, deregulation, Project Speed, intense focus on R&D and skills etc — a disaster for the country (and a political disaster for the Tory Party).'
NB. Special Forces who have observed the drone wars in UKR have told the senior MoD repeatedly that the mega expensive things they want to plough cash into in the DIP will get VAPOURISED in a real war by cheap drones! The SF are told to shut up and not give HMT a chance to cut the budgets!
I know it's psychologically extremely hard for SW1 but Vote Leave worked with the deep state on this in 2020 and we were right on all the big things.
The disastrous old processes have now blown up with unprecedented resignation over these exact issues.
6 years have been wasted. Tens of billions have been wasted. Lives lost. Talent resigned.. Opportunities to lead squandered...
All over Whitehall are officials involved in 2020 who know what I say is true, the MPs and hacks should finally get the details into the public...

Maybe SW1 could update its mental models?!

Ps. if you're a hack still getting Ciaran 'AI is fake, PRC infiltration is overrated' Martin to comment on tech, you're as dud as Starmer

[Jim Shannon MP @JimShannonMP]

It is time that these decisions are traceable to the individuals who are making them so they can be held to account for their reasoning.

[Julia Hartley-Brewer @JuliaHB1]

This is simply not true @Keir_Starmer.

You absolutely DO tolerate abhorrent scenes of violence like this attack. Just like you tolerate all the rapes and sexual assaults of women and girls by illegal migrants.

You - and most of the political class - decided long ago that these crimes are a price worth paying in return for achieving your multicultural, diverse, open bordered nirvana.

So don't pretend to be shocked and don't wring your hands in sadness. This is the predictable (and predicted) result of the policies YOU support.

[Auguste Prompt @augusteprompt]

@mattyglesias Yeah it’s deporting 10m people

[RAW EGG NATIONALIST @Babygravy9]

I mean, there really do need to be enormous public trials where everyone involved in this shameful evil, from the perpetrators to the politicians, civil servants and police who allowed it to continue, are made to answer for their crimes. The punishments should be exemplary.

[RAW EGG NATIONALIST @Babygravy9]

Reminder: you’re not nearly angry enough about this

[Thoughtcrime Survivalist @TC_Survivalist]

You should also table an Address to the Crown in the Commons to initiate proceedings to dismiss Judge Nicholas Rowland. The sentence is undoubtedly ‘unduly lenient’ – it’s obscene – but in this case the commentary points to something well beyond malpractice or incompetence.

Incredibly rare process (not seen for over a century) but rotten judges like Rowland need removing from the judiciary altogether. There is no justification whatsoever for the sentence or the commentary. He must be dismissed. Him continuing to be a judge is utterly unacceptable.

[Bob Moran @bobscartoons]

A man who raced Jaguars and raised lions.
Requiescat in pace. Love to all Delingpoles.

[Maxi @AllForProgress_]

A whistleblower has revealed this month that civil servants across multiple Whitehall departments have been gaming the flexitime system to award themselves up to fifty extra days of paid holiday a year

That's about 2.5 months of full-time work lifted off the public payroll without record, on top of the CS-norm 26 days of annual leave, the eight public holidays, the contractual sick days, and of course the parental allowances that are already part of the standard package.

The methods and techniques by which this fraud has been accomplished are worth dwelling on, because the detail tells you something about the institution.

The first technique is the laptop-open-on-the-kitchen-table move. Here, the civil servant clocks off for all intents and purposes at 5pm but leaves a work laptop on, accumulating "active hours" from a home Wi-Fi connection, registering the evening as labour without performing any of it.

The second trick is the commuting-time-as-paid-hours wheeze, in which the round trip from Surbiton to Whitehall - coffee-and-podcast - is logged as part of the working day.

The third con, which the whistleblower reported as the most brazen of them all, is the straightforward falsification of office attendance against the three-days-a-week-on-site rule that this government, having promised the public a return of civil servants to civil-service buildings, has manifestly failed to enforce. The falsifications, in some cases, have been running for years.

Sit, for a moment, with the kind of person who does this and the kind of institution that permits it.

The person doing it is, in the main, a desk-bound senior official on between £55,000-130,000 a year, with access to a clocking system that runs on trust, who has decided, with the active connivance of his line manager and the silent assent of his department, that the appropriate response to that public trust is to defraud it.

And it's not even ambitious or spectacular. At least with a major fraud, you have a level of vision and nerve you have to admire even as you despise the motivating corruption. No, here, it's done through a series of small, deniable engineered manoeuvres that together transfer large sums of public money into undeserving pockets.

No honour among thieves, but some thieves are even less honourable than others.

The institution that permits it is the British Civil Service, an organisation whose senior cadre has spent the last decade in a state of escalating public-facing self-pity about its working conditions while the country it is paid to run has visibly fallen apart underneath it.

These are the same people who inherited the mandate of Brexit and, because the idea ran against the Metropolitan class bromides by which they orient their lives, hashed it up on purpose to punish the electorate whom they are duty-bound to serve.

And it's the same civil service that could not, in the end, manage a single COVID procurement contract without losing about £30 billion out of the back of the warehouse.

In light of this general disposition, a flexitime fraud is its small, daily, individual expression.

And the cost is not abstract. The Civil Service pay bill runs to roughly £15 billion a year. Headcount has grown by approximately a hundred and fifty thousand since 2016, with the deepest expansion in the policy and "leadership non-teacher" desk grades, the exact cohort the whistleblower says is gaming hardest.

Every 50-day phantom holiday, on a senior salary, is around £20k of public money paid for nothing. The country has been told for years, under successive governments, that there is no fiscal room for the things the country actually wants, like policing, prosecutions, courts that sit, borders, doctors, dentists, because the public finances are too tight.

Bollocks are they. You've got a whole parallel economy of piss-artist leave-taking running in Whitehall, and there'll be plenty more cash coming in to keep its subsidy even given this whistleblower's report. I don't for a second believe that no one senior saw it or knew about it, just as I don't believe that the rampant inequities in our police departments go unnoticed by whole legions of bystanders.

But the bystanders are not arsed.

That's why I say "Hooray for the whistleblower." Their life is going to be hell. They will be hugely unpopular. They will be described as bitter, disloyal, mentally ill, motivated by personal grievance, and unrepresentative of the dedicated public servants who go above and beyond.

That is what these institutions always say when one of their own breaks ranks. It is what they said to Maggie Oliver about Rotherham, to Alan Bates about Horizon, to the survivors of the Letby ward, the Cumberlege report, and the Sussex maternity unit. The smothering of internal dissent is now part of what the British civil service does for a living. The actual public service is something it has subcontracted to itself, badly, in stolen office hours, from the kitchen table.

I was the Civil Service comprehensively remade in this country, the only way such things are ever made, which is by changing the people and all the incentives under which they operate.

These people have been on the public payroll for fifteen years and have produced nothing for which the public can be grateful.

It's time to find out where the hours went, and dispense with those who are wasting them, along with our money.

[Peter Sarris @peter_sarris]

Call me old fashioned, but I do feel it somewhat out of order for someone to come to my country as a guest on a student visa, and then set about trying to break it up? A bit like allowing a stranger to come round for tea and then sitting back as they decide to smash the crockery

[Maxi @AllForProgress_]

On a desk somewhere in Singapore, a small computer not much bigger than a deck of cards has been running continuously for the past several weeks.

It is connected to its owner's WhatsApp, Gmail, calendar, and a personal library of saved speeches and articles. It transcribes voice notes locally. It runs vector embeddings (the technique that lets an AI find what is relevant in a great big stack of stuff) locally.

It maintains a knowledge graph of every fact, every counterpart, and every piece of negotiating history its owner has ever recorded into it. It is, in short, a perfect mind-out-of-mind. Its owner calls it "NanoClaw, a second brain for a diplomat."

The owner is Dr Vivian Balakrishnan, and he is the Foreign Minister of Singapore. He is a trained ophthalmologist, a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh, and one of the very few sitting cabinet ministers anywhere in the world who writes his own computer code.

My kind of guy. And, I think, everyone's kind of guy.

On 21 April he published the entire architecture to a public GitHub gist. He did not announce it through his ministry. He did not spin it into a productivity-tool startup. He wrote it up the way a working software engineer writes up a side project, and put it in the open. The hardware cost is approximately £80; the running costs are between £5 and £20 a month.

I would invite the reader, gently, to attempt the exercise of imagining a single member of the present British cabinet doing the equivalent. Imagine Yvette Cooper publishing the architecture of a system that tracks her foreign counterparts' priors and negotiating history, on a personal GitHub account, with API keys segregated through a credential proxy because she takes her department's data sovereignty very, very seriously. Imagine David Lammy shipping a working tool that drafts his speeches against the record of his own past statements - haha, no, no, stop! I know, it's beyond the absurd.

Then consider the gap.

This is what your public servants ought to be able to do for themselves. This is the class of governing official Britain could have, being not at all absent the talent capital needed. But Dr B's excellence shows that, while we don't lack the talent, we have been getting recruitment all wrong.

Britain has been recruiting senior public servants for two political generations on the basis of who can speak well at a Tuesday lunch club, not on the basis of who can deliver a working result when everyone's back to work. The country that built the institutions everybody else copies built them with people who could think, and write, and do. We optimised on the first two and stopped caring about the third. The third turns out to have been the one that mattered most.

But that's the golden triptych - people who can think, write, and do. Imagine how much better our national fortunes will be when it is people of that calibre at the helm?

It is coming. It Can Be Done.

[Rupert Myers @RupertMyers]

What a letter

[Dominic Cummings @Dominic2306]

No, it stands for English civilisation winning.

You stand for putting treacherous lawyers who collaborate with criminals in charge of lawfare against the SAS.

A future regime will jail your mate Hermer and RICO through your network

RETWEET IF AGREE

[Richard Williams @williams_rje]

The case against SAS Soldier B was funded by legal aid and presented, sequentially for judgement to three separate and independent courts.

Each ruled that he acted lawfully, and the second two ruled that the use of legal aid (taxpayer money) was wasteful and unjustified.

This isn’t a system seeking ‘truth’ or ‘justice’.

It is vexatious, state-sponsored persecution of ageing veterans that fought as skilled, highly trained soldiers to defeat violent, domestic terrorists in an armed insurrection; and in the service of their country.

“Persecution by Lawfare” of those that acted lawfully, and at great risk to themselves, to protect the citizens of the UK against those that seek to kill them.

The @UKLabour defence double whammy: hurt those that served, underfund those that are serving… it’s quite the policy cocktail…