1/ What Britain is witnessing is the beginning of Dark Blairism. This is the final stage in the collapse of the country. 🇬🇧🪦🧵
2/ The first iteration of Blairism was a happy-go-lucky affair. Blair and co were Marxists of a variety, but happy Marxists who rejected state socialism and embraced cultural radicalism - a new, freer society where different groups would live in harmony.
3/ But society rejected this vision. People had “biases” - a false consciousness of sorts, mostly amongst the uneducated gammons and chuds. They couldn’t get into Oxbridge to study with Tony, so the state needed to be used to educate them.
4/ Educating the gammons didn’t work. In 2001, they rioted. Annoying.
5/ At the same time the left-wing were busy rejecting Blair’s neoliberal economic vision. These people were suffering from false consciousness too. They didn’t understand that hypercapitalism, married to a didactic police state, was the path to personal actualisation.
6/ Why not kill two birds with one stone? Turn the left-wing on the gammons. Allow them to distract themselves with the ‘far right’ so they don’t complain about financialisation and the collapse of well-paid manufacturing jobs. They just needed a slogan: “anti-fascism”.
7/ Then the financial crisis hit and Blair’s fake pleasure economy collapsed. Annoying.
8/ Worse still, those stupid left-wing protestors were back. Instead of reading Derrida on the “deconstruction of race” or Stuart Hall on “reception theory” they were whining about the economy. Very annoying.
9/ No problem. Turn on the left. Send in the cops. Push them back into the libraries to “decode texts” and hand the broken economy to the Tories for 15 years.
10/ Interlude. Everything gets worse under the Tories. The culture sours and turns weird. Immigration goes absolutely bonkers. The economy stagnates. Tories collapse.
11/ Here comes Keir. Starmer is like Blair but much more embedded in the state. He was the head of the Crown Prosecution Service and knows how to use the cops when needs be.
12/ Within weeks of Starmer taking power, his Chancellor - another civil servant type from the Bank of England - informs the public that the Blairite neoliberal model has driven Britain into bankruptcy.
13/ That’s fine though. It means the Blairites can hand over control to technocrats while they work on finalising the cultural change at the heart of their project. The Office of Budget Responsibility will manage Britain’s bankruptcy, lowering living standards gradually.
14/ All going according to plan. But wait! More riots! This time bigger than 2001. Annoying.
15/ Annoying, yes. But also an opportunity. For what? Applying Blair-era counter-terrorism laws to British people angry about immigration policy. Education didn’t work. How about laws that are probably not constitutional?
16/ What about the left-wing? Eventually they are going to notice the economic decline. Hmmm. Maybe get them focused on the far right? Maybe even ally them with the police? Very good. This could work!
17/ Welcome to Dark Blairism. Declining living standards managed by technocrats. Civil unrest and disorder. Ethnic conflict. Collapsing social trust. Extra-constitutional legal processes.
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1/ 🚨☢️ The reality of the Iran War is that there are zero victory conditions for the United States. Given the new timelines being released by the Pentagon, if the US could “win” the war it would merely result in Washington DC being attacked with nuclear weapons. 🧵
2/ At the beginning of the war Iran did not have nuclear weapons. The time horizon for a win ranged from one day to two weeks. In this time horizon America could have, in theory, achieved a victory without annihilation.
3/ Iran is a nuclear threshold state. They have done this strategically. They wanted to adhere to agreements not to go nuclear while keeping the option to go nuclear in their back pocket in case of emergency. What is happening now is the emergency.
🚨‼️@Szazadveg has run an enormous “politically incorrect” EU-wide poll across 30 countries. The results are damning. Europeans are sick of war. They have lost confidence in Brussels. And they increasingly want to elect more nationalist parties. Brussels won’t show you this!🧵
2/ Majority support for sending arms is no longer present in Europe. People realise now that the war is not winnable and that sending weapons just results in more killing.
2/ 69% of Europeans are against sending their own troops to Ukraine. The only country with a majority in favour of sending troops is Sweden.
1/ On the @MultipolarPod Substack I have just posted the definitive analysis of how the USD has now entered its terminal phase of decline as the hegemonic currency. Here is a brief thread summarising, but if you're interested read the entire post.
CC @Brad_Setser.
2/ The domestic situation with USD is already bad. Larry Summers and his co-authors showed that measured properly as a cost-of-living jolt, inflation peaked above 18%, not the 9% of the official CPI.
3/ Using these numbers we see that real wages in the US have fallen around 15%. Living standards in America have already fallen dramatically.
1/ There is now strong reason to think that British people are starting to aggressively curtail their own reproduction. At the same time the government is increasing immigration to prevent the country from bankruptcy. Britain is in a phase of self-euthanisation. 🧵
2/ The abortion and birth data tell the story. Since 2022 overall conceptions are roughly the same as in previous years but the British people are opting for abortions. There is a massive reluctance to carry the babies to term.
3/ The 2022 data is official, but the 2023 and 2024 is based on bottom up estimates from Percuity. The data seems robust to me. But so long as the 2022 jump remains, as it has in Scottish data, the self-euthanisation interpretation holds.
☢️🚨☢️ 1/ Russia announced the Burevestnik nuclear-powered cruise missile is now active. The world is now one conventional strike on Russia away from nuclear war. Burevestnik’s deployment is part of a new defensive posture by Russia that seems misunderstood in the West. 🧵
2/ The key to understanding the novelty is twofold. First, its power source: a nuclear-powered ramjet engine. The mini nuclear reactor produces enormous amounts of heat. This heats the air and propels the missile.
3/ Because it’s powered by a mini nuclear reactor, just like a nuclear-powered submarine the engine can run indefinitely. This means that the Burevestnik can fly indefinitely.
1/ Central bank independence is probably coming to an end. In the short-term, this is due to radical and somewhat political moves made by the Trump administration. But in the long-term it is a failure of the ideas that were used to justify independence in the first place. 🧵
2/ Central bank independence is a technocratic competency that came out of the new model of "stakeholder democracy" especially associated with Clintonism and Blairism. Basically this is a euphemism for "rule by experts".
3/ More specifically central bank independence became popular because policymakers became convinced that central banks had used technocratic wizardry to solve the inflationary problems of the 1970s and early-1980s.