cutfrom 🇮🇪🇵🇸

That is a typical Morton's fork If Iran cannot fight back, that proves that attacking it was a great idea If Iran can fight back, that proves that attacking it was necessary & inevitable -> also a great idea

I always take these insider accounts with a pinch of salt because nothing I read here is unique to the civil service. He could just as easily be describing the experience of a mid-ranking bureaucrat in any British university. Public sector bureaucracy doesn't work like private sector bureaucracy because it doesn't do the same thing. I'm often told that the private sector is not nearly as bureaucratic, but that's not my experience having worked in large organisations (from HBOS to Airbus). They are somewhat better than the public sector in that they have a fixed definition of what they're actually for. HBOS lends money and Airbus makes aeroplanes (there's only so much scope to go off the point). Government departments, though, are Swiss army knives where in any given year, the political priority is as much a surprise to them as anybody else - which necessitates more redundancy and churn. I'm also cautious of the classic lament that so many are incompetent generalists because it works on the assumption that somewhere in the economy, there's a cadre of untapped elites who could bring their private sector experience to bear. But here's the thing... they don't exist. The upper management of most private sector movers and shakers are just as likely to the same serpentine ladder-climbing LinkedIn clones who can successfully navigate and exploit contemporary HR dogmas (which are near identical to those that exist in the civil service) - who do three years as a junior executive and swan off to the next "exciting role" at the next start-up that's pissing away start-up capital like it's someone else's money. If there's one universal facet to these people, which continues to shock me even today, is the total data illiteracy. They lack even basic Excel skills and don't have a working concept of what data actually is. As such, their approach to everything is disorganised and sporadic. While these accounts talk about civil service culture, they are in fact talking about the culture of the middle class managerial metro-midwit (the kind of person who thinks Stewart Lee is hilarious and insightful and listens to The Rest is Politics/The News Agents). They are not unique to the civil service. They're a particular species who can't actually afford to live in London but sufficiently obedient that they have the credit rating to live within one hour of London. A similar dynamic can be observed in parliament, when you take a particular breed of party drone, pay them more than they're worth, and put them all in the same building to make decisions. It produces the same culture. They've tried to remedy this by moving some arms of the civil service out of London, but to places like Swansea and Wakefield, where the recruitment pool is unambitious regionals who can master menial data entry tasks, but won't do anything unless they've been told what to do or how. And this is why it's never going to get better. Here I paraphrase philosopher and comedian, George Carlin. "Everybody complains about civil servants. Everybody says they suck. Well, where do people think these politicians come from? They don’t fall out of the sky. They don’t pass through a membrane from another reality. They come from British parents and British families, British homes, British schools, British churches, British businesses and British universities, and they are elected by British citizens. This is the best we can do folks. This is what we have to offer. It’s what our system produces: Garbage in, garbage out. If you have selfish, ignorant citizens, you’re going to get selfish, ignorant leaders". This, though, is perhaps a little bit too cynical. I think the debate needs reframing. When people talk about the culture of the civil service, they are in fact talking about Whitehall, and where you have a culture problem, you usually have a definition problem. You have sprawling bureaucracies that don't know what they're actually for - and if they don't know, you can't expect anybody else to. That's a leadership problem but it's also a structural problem. You get much better delivery when there are defined functions - which is why I don't oppose quangos. They are preferable to sprawling bloated ministries. When they work well, they not that bad. You might want to tweak the accountability systems, and purge the HR culture every once in a while, but organisations work better when everyone knows what the mission is. That, though, is harder in organisations like the FCDO, because its there to advance the national interest, but we have a political and administrative class who has no idea what constitutes the national interest and wouldn't even know where to start since generations of functionaries have been conditioned to believe that pursuit of the national interest is nationalism therefore a terrible thing in its own right. For as long as it operates on that basis, you cannot expect the organisation to resemble anything close to what it's supposed to be.

Karl Marx: ❝The English worker hates the Irish worker as a competitor who lowers his standard of life. He regards himself as a part of the ruling nation & becomes a tool of the English capitalists against Ireland, thus strengthening their domination over himself. The English worker cherishes religious and social prejudices against the Irish worker. His attitude is the same as that of the poor whites to the blacks in the USA. This antagonism is artificially intensified by the press & all the means at the disposal of the ruling classes. The Irishman does the same and sees in the English worker only the accomplice of the English rulers. This antagonism is the secret of the impotence of the working class. It is the secret by which the capitalist class maintains its power. The alternative is class solidarity.❞

BBC confirms the US is responsible for the Minab school massacre that killed 175 people, mostly girls. The "advanced" AI targeting system used outdated coordinates to hit a base next door, ignoring satellite images showing kids playing in the courtyard. Absolute war crime.

Just imagine if these rags led with headlines like: • OIL GIANTS BANK RECORD PROFITS WHILE BRITAIN FREEZES • SUPERMARKETS RAMP UP PRICES AS EXECUTIVES POCKET MILLIONS • BILLIONAIRES BUY UP HOMES — FAMILIES PRICED OUT • BOSSES CASH IN WHILE WORKERS SKIP MEALS A girl can dream…

This is a reckless act of escalation that endangers us all. No discussion. No debate. What a disgrace. How on earth can the Prime Minister still pretend we are not involved? It doesn't matter how he dresses it up. Britain is participating in an illegal war of aggression.

The failures of double liberalism are coming home. Decades building a world that, actually, is quite horrible - and defeats the human spirit. More here: unherd.com/2026/03/how-li…

It’s because we don’t have public administrators any more. We have politicians (local and national) who’s only role is to hire consultants and outsource to contractors.

We have spent £180m on plans for a tunnel under Stonehenge. The project is now scrapped. You can be for a tunnel & think spending is a good idea (even if you think the cost of planning is silly). You can be against a tunnel & think spending is a bad idea. But *nobody* can be for spending on this scale with zero result. And yet that is a peculiarly British outcome. Nobody will be reprimanded. Nobody will see their career affected. But that’s £180m of taxpayer money just wazzed up the wall. Totally without repercussions. Multiply this by airport expansions & train route plans and Thames crossings and power stations and other examples you can think of yourself, and… soon you’re talking serious money.

The Afroman Trial. -Cops raid Afromans house for bullshit reasons. -Steal money, break his door, fuck his house up. -No criminality found whatsoever, no charges at all pressed on Afroman. -Afroman spends the next 3 years making songs that make fun of all the officers involved by name, even using footage of the raid from his own CCTV cameras. -Songs had titles like "Randy Walters is a son of a bitch" and "Lick Em Low Lisa" accusing one of the officers of being a lesbian and sleeping with the other officers wives. -During the raid one officer looked like he was about to eat some lemon pound cake sitting on Afromans counter, Afroman made a whole album calling the officer fat. -The cops get mad and file a lawsuit for defamation. -Afroman turns up to court in a whole American flag suit. -Officers performatively mald and cry while listening to the songs really trying to oversell how badly the songs upset them. -One officer was suing because Afroman made a whole song about him saying he was fucking the officers wife. When the officer was asked if Afroman was really fucking his wife, he said "I don't know". Nuking his own case and establishing that there is a non-zero chance that Afroman might actually be fucking his wife. -As his only witness for the trial, Afroman brought a deputies EX FUCKING WIFE. -The jury ruled completely in favour of Afroman. This entire thing has been a great win for free speech and absolutely fucking hilarious.

The first difference between the Greens and the other parties in the running, is that the Greens are not afraid to say that neoliberalism sold off everything needed by the many, in order to create profit for a few. Nothing can change until that is admitted and understood.

BOMBSHELL: Iran offered to give away ALL of its enriched uranium during peace talks in Geneva. The British thought it was a credible offer. Hours later, Trump started bombing Iran anyway. The US didn't want peace, they wanted war.

So all the performance art and fantasy of the petrol station last week Not one Reform MP was in Parliament to vote on the fuel duty issue this afternoon

It's now unarguable that the war on Iran is one of the most blatant crimes of aggression in history. You now have not 1 but 2 external participants of the US-Iran talks (Oman’s foreign minister and the UK's National Security Advisor) who confirm that the US and Israel attacked despite Iran effectively meeting US conditions for a deal - ensuring it could never build a nuclear weapon, permanently. As per The Guardian article (theguardian.com/world/2026/mar…), Jonathan Powell "believed the path remained open to a negotiated solution to the long-running issue of how Iran could reassure the US that it was not seeking a nuclear weapon," and "UK officials [...] were impressed that Iran was prepared for the deal to be permanent." Concretely, this means the war wasn't a failure of diplomacy but a deliberate destruction of it. And it also means that the US and Israel have irresponsibly plunged the entire world in an unprecedented energy crisis, affecting the livelihoods of billions of people worldwide, when it was completely avoidable. It's beyond me how you can look at this and not conclude that the real threat all along wasn't Iran but the US-Israeli axis - they're the only parties at the table who wanted war and are making every person on the planet pay the price for it. Extraordinarily, even the UK National Security Advisor is now basically saying this.

UK NATIONAL SECURITY ADVISOR: “We regarded Witkoff and Kushner as Israeli assets that dragged a president into a war he wants to get out of.” The UK just publicly declared that the U.S. is occupied by Israel.

No one under 50 is getting a pension. I hope you all know that.

My latest in @declassifiedUK is a shocking story of incompetence, malfeasance, and unlawful behaviour: Britain's Ministry of Defence paid £1.5 billion for drones which kept crashing and couldn't fly in bad weather. The contract was awarded to Israel's largest arms firm Elbit Systems and Thales from France. Those companies squeezed the MoD for years, with the drones costing £88,400 per flying hour and executives charging £18,000 a month for hotels. Meanwhile, Elbit and Thales produced an export variant of the same drone and signed a £400 million contract to sell them to Romania. Despite everything, they were assisted by the UK government, which subsidised the production of those drones and promised to support export licenses. Shipping documents expose how dozens of drone components have been sent from Britain to Israel since the contract with Romania was signed - but they haven't been onward exported to Romania. And open-source evidence now strongly suggests Elbit has been testing the drones in the illegally occupied Golan Heights, likely breaching UK export law. Full story👇 declassifieduk.org/how-a-failed-b…

The 'oxygen' part gets me the most...the WEF wants to restrict people's access to oxygen along with water, soil & food.