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<h3>Reimagining the Conservative movement&nbsp;&nbsp;</h3>The intellectual foundation of the renewed conservative movement would have to be sufficiently specific in its aims, but broad enough to absorb disagreement. I’ve given some thought to what that would look like, and have settled upon a secularised (and plagiarised) version of National Conservatism (.org), based on a limited number of core principles as follows (developed from <a data-mce-href="https://harrogateagenda.org.uk/" href="https://harrogateagenda.org.uk/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">The Harrogate Agenda)</a>1. National Independence. We wish to see a world of independent nations. Each nation capable of self-government should chart its own course in accordance with its own particular constitutional, linguistic, and religious inheritance. Each has a right to maintain its own borders and conduct policies that will benefit its own people.2. Internationalism not supranationalism. We support free cooperation and competition among nation-states, working together through trade treaties, defensive alliances, and other common projects that respect the independence of their members. But we oppose transferring the authority of elected governments to transnational or supranational bodies—a trend that pretends to high moral legitimacy even as it weakens representative government, sows public alienation and distrust, and strengthens the influence of autocratic regimes.3. National Government. The nation-state is instituted to establish a more perfect union among communities, parties, and regions of a given nation, to provide for their common defense and justice among them, and to secure the general welfare and liberty for this time and for future generations. We believe in a strong but limited state, subject to constitutional restraints and a division of powers. We recommend a drastic reduction in the scope of the administrative state and the policy-making judiciary that displace legislatures representing the full range of a nation’s interests and values.We recommend the localism principle, which prescribes a delegation of power to the respective states or subdivisions of the nation so as to allow greater variation, experimentation, and freedom. However, in those subdivisions in which law and justice have been manifestly corrupted, or in which lawlessness, immorality, and dissolution reign, national government must intervene energetically to restore order.We believe that government must be by consent, and that all decisions or policies resulting in fines, forfeitures or taxes are subject to a popular vote. We believe everyone has the right to freedom of speech provided they are not inciting violence or crime, or directly threatening another person.4. The Rule of Law. We believe in the rule of law. By this we mean that citizens and foreigners alike, and both the government and the people, must accept and abide by the laws of the nation without exception. The law must be enforced without fear or favour.5. Free Enterprise. We believe that an economy based on private property and free enterprise is best suited to promoting the prosperity of the nation and accords with traditions of liberty that are central to the British political tradition. We reject the socialist principle, which supposes that the economic activity of the nation can be conducted in accordance with a rational plan dictated by the state.But the free market cannot be absolute. Economic policy must serve the general welfare of the nation. Today, globalised markets allow hostile foreign powers to despoil Britain and other countries of their manufacturing capacity, weakening them economically and dividing them internally. At the same time, trans-national corporations showing little loyalty to any nation damage public life.A prudent national economic policy should promote free enterprise, but it must also mitigate threats to the national interest, aggressively pursue economic independence from hostile powers, nurture industries crucial for national defense, and restore and upgrade manufacturing capabilities critical to the public welfare. Crony capitalism, the selective promotion of corporate profit-making by organs of state power, should be energetically exposed and opposed.<h3>6. Family and Children. We believe the traditional family is the source of society’s virtues and deserves greater support from public policy. The traditional family, built around a lifelong bond between a man and a woman, and on a lifelong bond between parents and children, is the foundation of all other achievements of our civilization.</h3> The disintegration of the family, including a marked decline in marriage and childbirth, gravely threatens the wellbeing and sustainability of democratic nations. Economic and cultural conditions that foster stable family and congregational life and child-raising are priorities of the highest order.7. Immigration. Today’s penchant for uncontrolled and unassimilated immigration has become a source of weakness and instability, not strength and dynamism, threatening internal dissension and ultimately dissolution of the political community. We call for a long term moratorium on immigration and aggressive policies to promote assimilation. We demand that those with no right to be here, or no means to support themselves, are removed, and unassimilated immigrants are encouraged to leave.I think @NewCultureForum is best placed to become an entryist right wing version of Momentum. This is what we must do to restore Britain. Please engage on Twitter (buggered if I am going to call it X) @WoteUk; original thread <a data-mce-href="https://x.com/FUDdaily/status/1795137393521033508" href="https://x.com/FUDdaily/status/1795137393521033508" title="foundation ideas" target="_blank" rel="noopener">here...</a>

next moves...

<h3>The liberal position on asylum is lazy. It's not principled at all. It's pure moral posturing.</h3>A correct-thinking person should be appalled at abuse of the asylum system because it diminishes capacity and willingness to help those in genuine need.&nbsp;The soft-touch mentality says it's OK for anyone to break our immigration laws with impunity, thus they set the precedent that migrants can pick and choose which laws they respect. A functioning state cannot work with elective laws.&nbsp;This is dangerous. The public will not stand for the gaslighting. The establishment knows they are not refugees. They are economic migrants avoiding the law, in order to cheat their way onto the UK taxpayer funded gravy train. We know they are not refugees. Blatantly lying about this obvious state of affairs confirms that the establishment cannot be trusted to tell the truth on a wide range of matters where the civil and public service has been infiltrated and subverted.&nbsp;The British public are angry right now. The political class is rubbing our noses in policies they know we don't want. They're laughing at us. They know our votes are meaningless, and they win whatever happens at the election. Furthermore, they know they can deploy the full force of the state against dissenters. If we talk back, we end up in a police cell.&nbsp;They know we can't organise, and we won't take direct action, because generally we are law-abiding people. They exploit that. Everything they say and do is in bad faith. They'll keep pissing on us.Speech codes and X guidelines prevent me from fully expressing the depth of contempt I have for these people, and the effectiveness of prison as a deterrent prevents me from acting on that impulse. My only comfort is the certain knowledge that I'm very far from alone in feeling this way, and I live in hope that the shared sense of disgust will find a way to manifest itself in a productive way.&nbsp;But in the meantime, we can at least let our politicians know that they are despised without reservation, and their time of abusing their position will one day end. It is incumbent on all of us to be as unpleasant as possible to these lowlifes. We need to set a new standard of "toxic discourse". Pete North hosted an excellent space.. https://x.com/i/spaces/1OyKAWggNOWJb

Gaming Asylum

"... If you had to pick the worst prime minister of all time, it would more than likely be one of the last seven. And it wouldn’t be Sunak. He gets his own special award as the most pointless prime minister of all time. An administration so unremarkable that in a few years’ time we may even forget he was prime minister.&nbsp;He is to be commended, though, for putting an end to this run of Tory governments. It would be unfair to blame Sunak wholly for their downfall, since the damage was done long before now, and it’s hard to see how anyone could have saved them from defeat. But there is no question of re-electing him. There is no point to his existence. I think the day before yesterday removed all doubt when he backed away from making any radical reforms to the graduate visa route, after a cabinet backlash and warnings that driving away foreign students could undermine Britain’s universities. The financial difficulties that universities are in is the biggest opportunity for thirty years to reform the sector. Sunak could have done something necessary and worthwhile, while also bringing down unwanted immigration. But the blob squealed, he bottled it, and kicked reform into the long grass. That's the Tory party to a tee. They cave in immediately, every single time.This has been the hallmark of every Tory PM since 2010. They’ve whinged about the blob and complained about the ECHR and the lawfare, but haven’t lifted a solitary finger. It’s been a giant waste of everyone’s time and the most enraging waste of a majority. But we can, at least, offer our thanks and gratitude to Sunak for not dragging this out until December. We may as well get it over and done with. If they haven’t found a way to be useful in the last fourteen years, another six months won’t help them. Sadly, this offers no general relief. I have a feeling of trepidation and dread at the thought of a Labour government, and the most we can hope for is a hung parliament to stop them making things any worse. Sadly, a hung parliament is the one thing I can’t vote for, thus have no dog in the fight. I just won’t be voting at all. In recent weeks I’ve taken a very close look at all the alternatives just to see if there’s a glimmer of hope, but I see nothing that comes close to competent and compelling. There is no possibility of uniting the right, nor are we likely to see anything new pop up this side of the election. My thinking has brought me to a pretty bleak conclusion. There is no alternative.&nbsp;In my analysis of the alternatives, there’s only been the SDP worthy of any praise, but that’s a non-starter too. Superficially, they pass all my tests for what a functioning party should look like. They have a logical foundational definition, they have grassroots organisation, and they've attempted serious policy. Moreover, they're pretty decent people. I have nothing against them. But I still have to call bullshit. They've started on the triangulated premise that Britain is left leaning on economics and right on culture. This is a broadly accepted paradigm. But it's been misinterpreted, and the SDP's approach is simplistic and wrong.They're basically a British conservative party, but in order to tick the "left leaning on economics" box, they've opted for old socialist ideas of renationalising utilities and the railways. Though this is not an unpopular position, it's wrong. A change of ownership doesn't magically bestow competence, efficiency or investment. It doesn't actually solve the problems. As such, the SDP has failed the exam question. Britain's prosperity is due to our capacity to balance the public and private realm. i.e. properly regulated industry. And this is actually the essence of British conservatism. The answer to this, as I alluded to yesterday, is a clause in the American National Conservatism charter. The clause (adapted by me) is as follows...5. Free Enterprise. We believe that an economy based on private property and free enterprise is best suited to promoting the prosperity of the nation and accords with traditions of liberty that are central to the British political tradition. We reject the socialist principle, which supposes that the economic activity of the nation can be conducted in accordance with a rational plan dictated by the state. [Hence opposition to Net Zero]... But the free market cannot be absolute. Economic policy must serve the general welfare of the nation. Today, globalised markets allow hostile foreign powers to despoil Britain and other countries of their manufacturing capacity, weakening them economically and dividing them internally. At the same time, transnational corporations, showing little loyalty to any nation, damage public life.A prudent national economic policy should promote free enterprise, but it must also mitigate threats to the national interest, aggressively pursue economic independence from hostile powers, nurture industries crucial for national defence, and restore and upgrade manufacturing capabilities critical to the public welfare. Crony capitalism, the selective promotion of corporate profit-making by organs of state power, should be energetically exposed and opposed.This pretty much sums up the gist of the SDPs other positions, which leads me to believe the SDP is trying to reinvent the wheel, and getting it wrong.&nbsp; Which brings me to the point of this article. All the factional minnow parties on the right are symptomatic of the absence of a genuine doctrinal centre right democratic nationalist conservative party. All of them are basically competing to succeed the Tory party, but none of them will manage it, not least because the Tory party still exists. Regardless of how bad it gets, people will still vote for it.This multi-party morass is a total waste of energy outside a PR voting system. You might wish we had a PR system, but we don't have it, and the incumbents are not going to give it to us. We have two-party politics in a FPTP system, and everything else is pressure politics. In recent years, Ukip successfully pressured the Tories, and now the pressure politics with momentum is over on the left. The Greens are growing, as are independents. The Brexit revolt on the right is dying. The largest pressure party on the right is Reform which looks to be circling the drain.As such, the only real game in town is a revitalised Conservative Party pursuing a political agenda that the splinters can buy into, headed by someone with intelligence and magnetism. The two essential components are coherent definition and leadership. Thatcher understood this. Blair understood this. Everything else is managerialism.&nbsp; The question then is whether there is anything salvageable from the Tory wreckage. Following an election defeat there will be a space race to give the party a fresh definition.&nbsp; I suspect, then, that entryism is the only way to take back control. Corbyn's momentum showed us how it's done. We have tested to destruction the idea that a new party can unite and win. We have to work with what we've got, in the conditions we find ourselves in. Anything else is a completely delusional waste of time.I’ve previously remarked that we are at the fag end of a political era. Brexit should have killed it off for good but it still lingers on in the British establishment. It is utterly oblivious to the fact that the era of liberal internationalism is dead, the “international rules based order” is collapsing, and the post-war construct is falling apart. They have no idea how out of touch they are or how much they are despised. Starmer’s Labour will likely be the final chapter. Ultimately, Starmer cannot fix Britain because you simply can’t expect different results by doubling down on all the worst ideas of the last thirty years. British politics will not withstand another term of reheated, stale Blairism. The economy cannot withstand more Net Zero punishment. It's safe bet that that Starmer will have the cold water bucket of reality sloshed over him in his first year and his party will prove just as fractious and dysfunctional as the Tories. He will have no popular mandate to speak of and his popularity will nosedive within weeks. He does not enter Number Ten with the nation behind him. He’s an opportunistic squatter moving into a derelict building.Meanwhile, the liberal order will be collapsing around him. Odds favour a Trump victory and Europe is turning sharply to the right. The arch remainer wanting to bring Britain back into the fold will find there is no fold to speak of. Globalisation is dead, and neoliberalism is dying. It’s conceivable that the Labour party can limp through two terms until an alternative gets its act together, but in the meantime, the public mood will darken further as the world becomes more dangerous. Voters will find they have no use for the parties and politicians of the old world. The departure of Sunak may not be the end, but it’s certainly the beginning of the end.&nbsp;

Après moi, le déluge

<h3>For there to be unity on the right, there has to be an obvious frontrunner campaign organisation that can build and sustain a movement. When one comes along, the rest will evaporate. But none of the contenders have worked out how to build one. What hope for a reborn Conservative party minus Sir Graham Brady and his acolytes, but with respect for member power? </h3>For that you need an intellectual foundation, a vision, and detailed, credible policies derived from your intellectual foundation to implement that vision. You then need a working grassroots organisational structure and intelligent, credible leadership that can nurture talent. Oh, and a truckload of money.Of the players on the board, we have one-man-band nonentity quasi-fascist parties [who on earth are you alluding to, Pete? -ed], crank parties obsessed with vaccines, Laurence Fox's very online ego vessel, the incompetent populism of Reform, a defunct Ukip party, PopCons trying to rehabilitate the ever ridiculous Liz Truss, and a movement that think its only salvation is the politically spent Nigel Farage. And to top that off there's a strain of antisemitism creeping in.&nbsp;We have no serious policy thinkers to speak of, nobody thinking in terms of long term strategy, and nobody with the money to break a new venture out of the Twitter bubble. You have to build these things from the ground up with local campaigning, but you also need some kind of sponsorship/patronage from within the politico-media sphere to get any kind of recognition and momentum. The most we can ever dredge up is ex-MEPs and disgraced Tories to appear on GB News. The only outfit even close to having a clue how to do it is the SDP, who aren't even right wing, and will remain electorally insignificant for the next decade at least.With Reform circling the drain, there's nothing left to do but wait to see what, if anything, can be salvaged from the wreckage of the Tory party. It's plausible that a National Conservative party could be the successor to the Tories, but probably ends up being a liferaft for Tory flunkies who achieved nothing when they held ministerial posts, and it goes on to lose the 2029 election.I'm not trying to piss on your chips here, but the starting point has to be a realistic assessment of the materials we have to work with. We're not going to get anywhere without addressing the causes of the right's dysfunction.&nbsp;In any case, your premise is faulty. Uniting the disparate organisations does absolutely nothing, because they're all splinter groups of the same tiny cohort of autistic crackpots, halfwits and blaggers. (Seriously, who have we got who's seriously impressive?)You could unite them all under one banner but you'd still be losing deposits forever under FPTP, and will be completely disregarded by the media as not even significant enough to attack. They learned their lesson form the Ukip experience.&nbsp;Ultimately, I think we're going to have to build a movement from scratch that outperforms the existing dross, but if it doesn't get the fundamental intellectual foundation and pitch right, it will be yet another colossal waste of time, energy and resources.

If it was easy, everyone would be doing it

A large and important piece, borrowed from <a data-mce-href="https://www.turbulenttimes.co.uk/news/front-page/politics-government-kills/" href="https://www.turbulenttimes.co.uk/news/front-page/politics-government-kills/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Richard North's Turbulent Times</a>&nbsp; It is rare these days that I find myself being able to commend the writing of a legacy media journo, but even on second and third reading, the piece by Sherelle Jacobs in today’s Telegraph comes over as powerful and coherent.Headed: “The infected blood scandal exposes the toxic mendacity of our ruling class”, she tells us in her sub-heading that “Britain’s unspoken vice is elite secrecy”, adding that: “we are waking up to how long we have been taken for fools”.Her theme is as straightforward as it is powerful, asserting that there is “an unspoken phenomenon that quietly threatens the position of the British establishment”, one which might be described as “perma-gate” – the endless string of elite scandals that are shining a light on the corrupted machinations of the state.Like others – and especially evident on Twitter – Jacobs links three “national outrages”, starting with the infected blood disaster, moving on to the Post Office scandal and then taking in the pandemic response. Assessed individually, she argues, they elicit an impotent shiver of revulsion from a deferential, if disillusioned, nation. Together, though, they are dynamite.The picture illustrating her piece is a still from All the President’s Men and her text refers to the Watergate episode across the pond, which she says “exploded” faith in democracy and the ruling class – a single episode that exposed American statecraft’s amoral, expletive core.In Britain, though, this is coming more slowly, Jacobs avers. The suspension of our disbelief in the system is more painstakingly, yet no less profoundly, unravelling, “as we steadily gain a partial but in parts astonishingly detailed artists’ impression of the rancid paternalism that pollutes the state’s every tentacle, from the dingy IT offices of the postal service to the laboratories of backwater haemophilia centres”.This brings her to the release of the Infected Blood Inquiry’s report, which, she says, has left us to process the revelation that the NHS is not so much a sacred institution as a corrupted priesthood. In its paradoxically paternalist zeal for “clinical freedom” it has allowed doctors to follow unsafe treatment policies and practices, with some exploiting this so far as to experiment on children.But, as so often – and was certainly the case with Watergate, it is not so much the initial events which do the damage as the subsequent attempt to cover up the errors. And in this case, as the horrific fallout became clear, our hallowed health service refused to acknowledge its errors, instead retreating into a basilica of lies, obfuscation and destruction of evidence.If there was something seedily mafia-esque about the subterfuge that characterised the Post Office scandal, Jacobs characterises the cover-up surrounding “the biggest treatment disaster in NHS history” as one with whiffs of impudent zealotry.We must, she says, come to terms with the revelation that for years successive governments and the Civil Service disseminated fake news. With a bland militancy it maintained over several decades, it stuck to the mendacious narrative that the blood infections were a tragic and regrettable development, which occurred because of a lack of understanding of the risks.Helpfully, she points out that the Inquiry report – running to seven volumes – details how false orthodoxies (albeit described in the arid language of officialdom as “lines to take”) entrenched themselves. “Dogma became a mantra. It was enshrined. It was never questioned.”And then she comes to the politicians. As a collective, they frame the blood scandal as a historic “injustice”, churning out their platitudes about a “shameful” episode that is “hard to even comprehend”, culminating in a ritual apology from Sunak, no doubt carefully drafted by his advisors, calculated to balance gravitas with just the right amount of contrition.Jacobs dismisses this sackcloth and ashes routine as an “attempt at psychological distancing”, and it is here that she offers an observation that makes this piece so special. In this, she says, “we the public are partially complicit. Delayed justice has become a grim ritual of a country which loves authority just a little too much”.Picking up on all three current inquiries, she argues that what makes them so powerful is how they are exposing pathologies of the British state that are not historic but eternal. The past treatment of haemophiliacs, she says, speaks to an enduring culture of cover-up that officials have warned is still endemic in the NHS, with hospitals still hiding evidence of poor care.Crucially, she adds that the thing that this inquiry really hits home is that the British culture of elite secrecy is without parallel in the Western world. It is a national puzzle that one might call the British Question, harbouring an archaic ruling class code based on Victorian club governance has barely changed since it was established in the 19th century.The elite’s culture of honourable secrecy and patronising impunity, she says, has proved bomb-proof, surviving not only democratisation, but recent attempts to build better mechanisms of account into the system. Via a darkly brilliant process of “systems thinking”, an ossified bureaucracy has “learnt” how to preserve itself from democratic scrutiny – burying errors under layers of obfuscation planted by generations of civil servants who stick to an “authorised account of events”.It is here that I need to depart from Jacobs’ narrative to express my regrets that she never read my book, <a data-mce-href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Many-Not-Few-History-Britain-ebook/dp/B00LUURX68" href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Many-Not-Few-History-Britain-ebook/dp/B00LUURX68" target="_blank" rel="noopener">The Many Not The Few</a>, which revisits the hagiography of the so-called Battle of Britain (which never really existed in the form so beloved of popular historians).<figure id="figure-xah0zh75glwgu7oko"><img id="xah0zh75glwgu7oko" src="https://cdn.durable.co/blocks/1ax9Cf5FXnbEfuUoBje2iGPvh2vmyIp3eb3noIO3bq6bcEVfIidSwTPb2iBL83pf.jpg" alt="" title="" class="object-cover bg-gray-100 " style="aspect-ratio: 16/9; object-position: 50% 20%;" data-corners="default" data-aspect="16:9" data-caption="" data-positionx="50%" data-positiony="20%" data-fullwidth="false" data-mce-src="https://cdn.durable.co/blocks/1ax9Cf5FXnbEfuUoBje2iGPvh2vmyIp3eb3noIO3bq6bcEVfIidSwTPb2iBL83pf.jpg" data-mce-style="aspect-ratio: 16/9; object-position: 50% 20%;"></figure> In my research, I found in the early stages of the air war, which centred over the Channel convoys and the ports serving them – known by the Germans as the Kanalkampf – that, surprisingly, despite the RAF having the home advantage, pilot losses were substantially higher on the British side.This was largely as a result of a pre-war Air Ministry decision that a dedicated air-sea rescue service would not be needed. While the Luftwaffe had its own rescue service, bailed-out RAF pilots were left to drown – at that stage of the war not even being supplied with dinghies.But what was particularly sinister about the affair was that when the Air Ministry belatedly realised the error of its ways and instructed the RAF to set up a dedicated service – which it did in November 1941, a year after the end of the formally designated battle – it backdated its propaganda and the historical record to make it look as if the service had been fully functional throughout 1940.On a broader note, I also commented on how pre-war policy on air raid precautions deliberately excluded the provision of deep shelters in London and, when the Blitz started in September 1940, East-enders were initially barred from entering underground stations for shelter, which were locked during air raids and guarded by armed soldiers.There is no doubt that these policy failures led to the avoidable loss of many lives, but the establishment – now the focus of Sherelle Jacobs’ wrath – did what it always did. It re-wrote history and pretended the failures had never happened, aided and abetted by shoddy historical research and a public determination to embrace the Battle of Britain myth.I was driven to conclude in my book that, if you rely completely and uncritically on government, its neglect may kill you. Having done so, it will seek to obscure its actions and its responsibilities for them.Now, Jacobs is writing that a succession of public inquiries reveals to us that our state secrecy is so prolific, so compulsive, so endemic that it threatens to effectively render Britain a failed democratic state.Such a claim, she hazards, may seem implausibly strong, but the fact remains that the state is technically failing, as it lacks a plausible system of democratic accountability and ministerial responsibility, with the only recourse to truth being the pantomime of public inquiry.These are as much a gravy train for lawyers as they are the public’s only vehicle, beyond elections, to hold state power to account. Even with their enhanced coercive powers, as we have seen from the blood scandal to Horizon to the Covid inquiry, they are systematically bogged down by subtly uncooperative officials.Thus, she concludes that Britain’s crisis of institutions is becoming dangerous. It is impossible to ignore the fact that an archaic, entrenched, corrupted bureaucracy – the origin of which predates our democracy by a century – shows little compunction over lying to its people.In her last paragraph she writes: “The ruling class’s favouring of closed government over democracy, of loyalty over objective truth, of order over freedom, saving face over the preservation of public trust, have emerged so strongly as recurring themes that they surely cannot continue to be a niche preoccupation of Leave voters and lockdown-sceptics, but a burning outrage that unifies the nation”.In one of the last paragraphs of my book, I wrote that, even in times of extreme peril – or perhaps especially so – salvation does not lie entirely in government. In such instances, it is necessary to take the initiative and make the government conform to the wishes and needs of the people, rather than the other way around. Government, I observed, is a poor master. But it can be an adequate servant if forced to be so.However, as Jacobs has remarked, this is “a country which loves authority just a little too much”. And before we can expect government to change, that must change. Government is not your friend and, as the evidence accumulates, it is clear that, if you let it, it will kill you.

Government kills

A lot of people my age were pressured by their parents to go to university, as they saw it as the only path to social mobility. At one time that might have been true, but in a functioning economy, it just isn't. My other half was pressured into a degree, and now she's a mid-level bureaucrat who wishes she'd trained as a plumber. So many white collar graduate jobs are bullshit jobs that serve no real world function, and they're depressing as hell.&nbsp;I felt that same pressure because everyone around me was going to university. I didn't particularly want to go, had no real idea what I wanted to do if I did, but the job market was pretty miserable, and I didn't know what else to do. So I went to Uni.&nbsp;That didn't last long. I was pretty appalled by the whole affair. I thought I was going to be surrounded by bright people who might somehow inspire me, and it would open the door to a new social life among intellectual equals. Oh boy was I disappointed. The calibre of students was pretty low. I think there were only about three other students in a cohort of 180 who were actually going to excel at it, but six months in, I couldn't have been less interested. It was good for the university to have all those deadbeats (me included) because it was lots of fee income with practically zero overhead.&nbsp;Nobody else was getting a good deal out of it. It was a giant con. Facilities were poor, teaching was poor, tutoring was virtually non-existent, and if you wanted to use any advanced equipment, you'd have to plunge yourself into debt and buy it yourself. I suppose there's no problem with that if you're fully committed to it, but I had no business being at university, and a functioning system would have rejected my application.&nbsp;But they don't do that. They'll take anyone with a pulse. Even now they're taking in young people who aren't temperamentally suited to academic study, who will drop out in months, leaving with a boat load of debt they can't manage. &nbsp;These are young people who were always going to be better off in vocational training or full-time work, and the lack of a degree is no real barrier to well paid work. The expansion of the British university system is one of the greatest British cons of all time, so it is no surprise to find Tony Blair at the root of this evil. His legacy has cheated entire generations who would have got by just as well, if not better, without setting foot on a university campus.&nbsp;This was especially true for me. I had to find my own way. Instead of spending three unproductive years at university, I gamed the dole system for two years, went nocturnal, and learned to code. I then took up contracting work, culminating in many years at Airbus. &nbsp; To date, I still have zero qualifications, I have no intention of getting any, and my only regret is that I ever applied to uni in the first place. It was a total waste of my time, and it was detrimental to my well-being. I'm sometimes tempted to do a masters for my own personal gratification, but it wouldn't open any doors for me, and it would be a criminal waste of £10k, especially considering who my money is going to.&nbsp;The bottom line is that we don't need to produce as many graduates as we do. It's actually detrimental to society to produce so many credentialed idiots. As much as anything, there aren't the jobs to sustain them, and all it does is contribute to qualification inflation.What makes it all the more abhorrent is the unbridled greed of universities. Not content with deceiving a generation of young British people, they're ripping off foreign students while selling degrees as a back door to the immigration system, expanding beyond their capacity, and dumping the externalities on the wider community. Entire tracts of towns are converted to student dwellings, and entire districts become transient and squalid. As a consequence, ordinary people can't afford to live in these places and face longer commutes from out in the sticks. Universities are wholly parasitic.&nbsp;Many argue that studentification of towns is the only reason these places stay afloat, which may be true, but that actually points to more serious structural problems in the economy. Worse still, the only beneficiaries of this Ponzi scheme are landlords, bandit property developers, Deliveroo drivers and middle class non-jobber academics who create more problems than they solve. University expansion was a sticking plaster to mask the youth unemployment epidemic, and in so doing, we created an unsustainable bubble. And now it's popping.&nbsp;Not only will many of these universities not survive, they don't deserve to, and nothing of value is lost when they fail. In fact, if these places revert to being sleepy, slightly depressed, little cathedral towns, they'll at least feel like home again, rather than a student doss house consumed by blocks of "luxury student apartments".&nbsp;If your job creation scheme university is contingent on fraud and deception, then it's doing more harm than good. It's just another pillar of a fake economy that stands in the way of addressing the structural problems in the labour and housing markets. We need to put an end to it now. [Editor's additional comments] Pete has nailed a crucial issue yet again... and I'll add that Basic IQ and reasoning doesn't seem to be used in selection any longer. It went out of fashion with the 11+ - instead, selection criteria now seems to include an evaluation of susceptibility for reprogramming by social engineering. &nbsp; <a href="https://practicalpie.com/the-milgram-experiment/" target="_blank" rel="noopener" data-mce-href="https://practicalpie.com/the-milgram-experiment/">Milgram's experiment on obedience to authority</a> proved Goebbels' proposition that a big lie repeated often enough will obviate reality and can override basic human decency. Tony Blair's legacy of a tainted education system really does not want people capable of critical analysis, leading to the ability to think for themselves. We should also point out that online and AI is completely overtaking the notion of classroom and lecture room learning. We need a different skill set to navigate this world, which involves more intuition, discovery, adaptability and logical reasoning. The teaching profession has little to offer when outside its traditional comfort zone.&nbsp;But look at <a data-mce-href="https://www.youtube.com/@MatArmstrongbmx" href="https://www.youtube.com/@MatArmstrongbmx" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Matt Armstrong's YouTube channel</a> for a perfect example of initiative, intuition and making it up as he goes along - call it "need to know" if you like.&nbsp; Which is not to say that some sort of baseline understanding of fundamental science is not necessary. The wonderful <a data-mce-href="https://www.youtube.com/@ElectroBOOM" href="https://www.youtube.com/@ElectroBOOM" target="_blank" rel="noopener">ElectroBOOM</a> knows his ohm's law (or he'd be dead...).

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