We need good people to have good government… The single decisive factor that made for Singapore’s development was the ability of its ministers and the high quality of the civil servants who supported them… I concluded that it was more important, though more difficult, to assess a person’s character.We noted by the 1970s [in western Europe] that when governments undertook primary responsibility for the basic duties of the head of the family, the drive in people weakened. Welfare undermined self-reliance. People did not have to work for their families’ well-being. A handout became a way of life. The downward spiral was relentless as motivation and productivity went down. People lost the drive to achieve because they paid too much in taxes. They became dependent on the state for their basic needs… We thought it best to reinforce the Confucian tradition that a man is responsible for his family.You can galvanise people easier when they’re in a state of fright.LKYThere is nothing more difficult to carry out, nor more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to handle, than to initiate a new order of things. For the reformer has enemies in all who profit by the old order, and only lukewarm defenders in all those who would profit by the new order.MachiavelliI think Singapore is the single most successful governmental system that exists in the world… If you will make a study of the life and work of Lee Kuan Yew, you will find one of the most interesting and instructive political stories written in the history of mankind.Charlie MungerA decade after the referendum, I re-read notes from LKY’s memoirs (references at the bottom). LKY was an inspiration for doing Vote Leave and for ideas on how to change the British regime — which is deeper than, and a condition for, changing ‘policy’. Both Leave and fundamental regime change — so a government controls the government and can execute priorities — were and are necessary conditions for a general British revival. For those reflecting on the last decade and wondering how we reboot regime change after the disaster of the Trolley-Carrie abandonment, LKY should be a source of tremendous inspiration — though also a slap in the face concerning the scale of what’s needed, how hard building a new regime is, and how far beyond our current leaders LKY was in virtue and character. The Westminster crowd that told you Trolley hiring Dan Rosenfield represented ‘the return of the serious grownups’, then that Sunak’s appointment of Cameron represented ‘the return of the serious grownups’, then that Keir Starmer and Sue Gray represented ‘the return of the serious grownups’ who would ‘show Whitehall works’ after ‘Brexit madness’ — this crowd also believes that Singapore holds no lessons. This is partly because they’re obsessed with scale over institutions and character (‘it’s tiny!’); partly because they dismiss on principle foundational regime issues particularly elite talent (‘Rolls Royce civil service!’); partly because these people have deranged ideas about communication and voters, so babble ‘the Leave coalition never wanted dynamism, it’s politically impossible to sell it to voters, blah blah’; partly because of the fusion of SW1’s intense parochialism and intense anti-learning culture; and partly because ‘the mainstream’ in SW1 has polarised very hard away from their 90s view (tech is great, go Obama using Facebook!) to ‘AI is totally fake and we must totally control it to stop the fascist tech oligarchs’. Anything seen as taking technology seriously, such as Singapore, is seen as somewhere between suspect and fascist. All wrong. A/ They shout ‘but it’s a tiny island, nothing to learn!’, ignoring that Deng Xiaoping thought the exact opposite and applied lessons to the most populous country on earth! SW1 has been obsessed with scale since the transition from Empire to EEC. It’s forgotten our own history. We dominated the world despite being small because of institutions, ideas and character — and the luck of being an island so we could develop very differently to Europe. Institutions, ideas and character repeatedly dominate scale. The EU has shot itself in both feet with AI/drones because of its bad ideas and institutions and its scale has not saved it, its scale spread dud centralised entropy across many countries. Joining the EEC shattered MP responsibility and gave them fairy tales to babble while real decisions and power were exercised outside Parliament, in Whitehall and Brussels. Leave made MPs responsible again. The MPs of both old parties loathed this responsibility for our multi-decade institutional rot returning to Parliament. (Ironically, Europe flourished because of the combination of common culture with political decentralisation while China suffered under political centralisation/uniformity. Now, China has dramatically advanced on technology while the home of technology has turned against it and used its Single Market/courts to suppress it— just as I said would happen in 2015-16 and predicted Britain would reap huge advantages in AI, robotics, life sciences etc from Leave.) B/ Particularly after the referendum, it became a widespread meme to claim that ‘Singapore-on-the-Thames is politically impossible’. This communication/campaign advice comes from people who are always wrong about communication and voters. What’s impossible for the rotten old Tory Party proves nothing about communication. The fact that Tory leader after Tory leader can’t communicate is evidence for what’s possible for clowns in a clowncar, not what’s possible for a serious political effort. You could win a big majority here with an agenda including some of LKY’s big ideas: recruit talent, huge focus on infrastructure and skills, huge focus on attracting global investment, personal accounts for health/welfare that can be passed on with zero inheritance tax, stop all boats with the navy as LKY did etc.The ‘right’ hasn’t done these things because it became uninterested in policy and power, it’s a shambles at organisation and communication, it’s not had an actual ‘strategy’ (or a culture which can generate it), and it could only act out its role as Old Media News Cycle Entertainment Service. (To the extent ‘the right’ has thought about Singapore, it’s been purely in terms of ‘free trade’ which is much less important than the things discussed below.)C/ When reading about LKY, it’s important to consider how Remain-y Whitehall is intensely parochial and loathes the suggestion of learning from foreigners generally and Asia/Singapore in particular. This was dramatically shown in 2020. Vote Leave was constantly pushing ‘learn from what works abroad’ against Whitehall parochialism, which was so powerful that officials cancelled a trip I organised for officials to fly out to Asia to learn how Singapore and Taiwan were dealing with things like border control and data-sharing. It was Remain-y Whitehall which claimed to be ‘the best prepared in the world for a pandemic’, as it said to us in No10 repeatedly Jan-Feb. (You can see on the Fake Inquiry website references to Singapore in my WhatsAps of Feb 2020 and Wormald’s responses.) I found the same thing in the Department for Education 2010-14. What, learn from Germans or Swiss? Balliol-Remainer noses wrinkle with distaste.Whitehall is now dominated by officials who read the Guardian and write scripts for ministers to apologise for our history while literally giving away British territory because of Chinese-Russian propaganda campaigns, yet they also perpetuate the worst aspects of imperial hubris, as if they’re dealing with the Boer War.D/ The ‘AI is totally fake … we must totally control it’ meme has become a core identity element for the very online ‘mainstream’, beyond reason, beyond ‘discussion on policy’, as I’ve explained many times. ‘It’s totally fake’ because those doing it are evil/despised, and evil/despised people couldn’t be building something very valuable. Elon is evil so AI must be fake, as they say on Bluesky. And ‘we must totally control it’ because you can’t let the tech fascists control technology — they will do misinformation to fool the plebs into ‘voting against their interests’! You saw this response demonstrated again in recent days in the deranged responses from ‘the mainstream’ to Blair telling SW1 to take AI seriously. Because anti-AI is now an identity and has polarised-radicalised (like ‘destroy our own borders’ became an identity beyond reasoning and polarised-radicalised), ‘the mainstream’ ignored all substance and just bleated ‘he’s a shill for the Silicon Valley fascists, he’s evil’. Ironically, the mainstream, which is temperamentally Blairite and is defined by its desperate desire to turn the clock back to 1998, attacked their own exemplar for ‘being stuck in the past’ because of his attitude to technology! Literally as they were bleating ‘Blair’s a shill, AI is fake’ on Bluesky at each other, over on X mathematicians were announcing the use of AI to solve important mathematics problems. This contrast could not have been put in a novel or movie a decade ago: clearly too mad to be real. The ‘AI is totally fake … we must totally control it’ network are also almost all super keen on ‘more strikes on Moscow, nukes are irrational so we can chill’, and they’re also the same network who most fell for the ‘trans rights human rights’ cult (which united networks from Antifa street thugs to Blackrock). This is our timeline, the timeline in which the most moronic views increasingly correlate. The ‘mainstream’ radicalised on immigration, BLM, transing kids, treating the grooming gangs as ‘a far right conspiracy theory’, Greta etc: LGBTQH(amas)+. Next will be radicalisation on a renewed drive for real socialism combined with state control of technology, ‘to fight fascist billionaires’. LKY’s lessons point to a different path we could take… In 1942 LKY faced the collapse of old apparent certainties including the presence of the British Empire, apparently so enduring, and suddenly he had to live on his wits to survive Japanese barbarity. He and his friends had to create a new regime out of the rubble of war and the end of empire. LKY is the closest thing I’ve seen in the 20th century to Bismarck-level performance. You don’t feel the same absolutely stunning impression from LKY that you get from watching Bismarck’s diplomacy, for which there is no equivalent since. But in many ways he’s even more useful for those thinking about how to execute some sort of western renaissance. Why? Inter alia —He had to grapple with America vs China and the Taiwan issue, the equivalent of Belgium 1914 today in terms of a Great Power flashpoint and debate over deterrence and ‘what justifies a war’. NB. His advice to the West was: negotiate peaceful reunification, do not try to fight it and absolutely do not suggest you might fight a nuclear war over it.He watched China’s growth for decades and studied Deng carefully. He had to deal with the intersection of politics and technology/investment much more than Bismarck.He had to deal with modern issues like health services, welfare, women joining the workforce etc.Unlike Bismarck, who inherited the Prussian bureaucracy then had to shape it, LKY had to build a new governing regime with a new talent network and new bureaucracy practically from scratch on the crumbled foundations left by Britain.While Bismarck’s diplomacy and approach to war remain of fundamental importance to us and studying general lessons of how he did politics are the best apprenticeship, LKY’s domestic policies are more relevant today. For example, in No10 we set up the Office for Talent to change policy on immigration, talent, eliminating visa friction etc. We started setting up the Office for Investment to create a LKY-style one-stop shop for investors where they could call and get dedicated support in smashing barriers to action, in the spirit of LKY’s office. Neither were properly reinforced by the PM after I left, both were soon seen as no longer priorities so were sidelined, scuppered and shuttered. MPs didn’t care and SW1 continued the trajectory of decades: pointless meetings and failure. Similarly we started implementing LKY’s ideas on bringing top talent into government. This was reversed, brilliant people were pushed out of government and off to companies like Anthropic rather than serving Britain, and Whitehall returned to business as usual: keep power with its closed caste and exclude talent on principle. Despite all three things supposedly being ‘priorities’ for Tory and Labour MPs, they wouldn’t and won’t use the constitutional authority of the PM to execute them and force Whitehall (particularly HMT and CO) to accept change, with the consequences we see all around us. Starmer watched post-Vote Leave Trolley, Truss and Sunak then copied them. If you are thinking about how we can escape from this cycle of collapse, there are few more useful things to study, arguably in particular on health and welfare, than LKY. We have embedded deeply pathological systems which kill thousands a year and suck in more and more money on an unsustainable trajectory. We need new approaches such as LKY’s individual savings accounts and his health system, which has neither the pathologies of the NHS nor those of the American system. There are also deep reflections on Western individualism vs Chinese Confucianism, welfare and family, and government and technology. Also to ponder: the radicalisation of the Remainer-SW1-NPC world to ‘everyone who disagrees with us is fascist’ means that advocating views expressed by LKY is now ‘fascism’ for much of SW1. You dissident elites — and those pondering joining them — hoping you can ‘just make sensible arguments’ and avoid being attacked as ‘fascist’: you do not have this option. Nothing worthwhile is easy — in startups or politics — and if you want Britain to recover, you will have to get over fears of name-calling. Name-calling is not as bad as most of you fear and life is much easier in many ways once you realise it doesn’t matter if irrelevant NPCs call you names, and, if you have any character, you’ll be mad thinking back from your rocking chair near death’s door if you got put off by that. (Also, four years of a serious regime plus AI means the NPC class will be >95% retired/replaced and irrelevant.)Would-be PMs ‘must have that iron in him’, as LKY said. You do not have to be +4 standard deviations in intelligence to have effects like LKY but you do have to be +4 standard deviations in character. (SW1 both over-rates the importance of intelligence to achieving things in politics and under-rates the other qualities that make people practically effective, and has made SW1 a place where it’s practically impossible to bring people with +4 SD in intelligence.) An advantage of Britain is that for centuries we generated such people among elites at maybe the highest rate on earth, though for decades they’ve abandoned politics, with disastrous consequences. We don’t need many but we need a handful and the chief must be one of them. This is more important than ‘policy plans’, which are relatively easy to figure out in most areas (because they mostly do not require ‘radical new ideas’), or ‘political strategy’/campaigning, which is relatively easy to figure out if you have the character to ignore conventional wisdom and the judgement to hire a few great people on Skunk Works/ARPA principles (below). You cannot be another cosmopolitan at home with modern Whitehall in siding with foreigners against this country (hence our need to exclude much of the FO and CO from Brexit negotiations). We need someone who is with Leeds, Manchester, Newcastle, Northumberland, Cornwall, Yorkshire — not with Davos-Brussels-Harvard. You must really truly be on the side of the people, going to Westminster to champion the best of the nation against those who came to dominate Westminster. Britain’s revival needs organisers but is not mainly a technocratic project. It’s mainly a spiritual project defined by whether you’re on the side of those who’ve dominated SW1 and academia for 50+ years and destroyed so much, or taking back control of Parliament for the nation, from the two rotten old parties, from rotten Whitehall, from a rancid London political culture which waged jihad on our old character and gradually ostracised it from SW1. This old character must be restored at the centre of power with new institutions. A coalition of great people who still make the things that work work must put aside their chosen paths, take over SW1, and spend some years on this restoration. Great people, our old character, new institutions, new technology.As Colonel Boyd would say to people about the choice of careerism (To Be) or doing something worthwhile (To Do):To be somebody or to do something. In life there is often a roll call. That's when you will have to make a decision. To be or to do. Which way will you go?To brush up on this old character — which the Northcote-Trevelyan system has systematically excluded over generations while sanctifying the most depraved aspects of modern culture — read memoirs from Alanbrooke and RV Jones and study how Pitt organised to beat Napoleon. The sections below are:Deep lessons on high performance applicable everywhere always.Core policies.Core principles, e.g handling a multi-ethnic country, Confucian values etc.Views on important subjects like EEC, Deng, Taiwan, future of China.A few thoughts re SW1 views on LKY and lessons for the future.This blog will soon have to return to the new SW1 farce and where it’s all going. And Ukraine — by far the worst and craziest thing I’ve ever experienced in politics, the cursed, absurd, lying, monstrous, comic, shameful expression of our Idiocracy. It’s tragic that the MAGA White House didn’t pull the plug on the UKR disaster and focus on internal regime change, dismantling the left-NGO networks, the cost of living, immigration. Meanwhile Europe’s Idiocracy has encouraged the reality TV star with alpha Twitter skills to escalate strikes on Russian civilians, and he is sending drones through NATO airspace to hit Russia hoping to provoke our Idiocracy into getting entangled in the war. Zelensky recently organised honours for a famous Nazi collaborator. Given his political skills, he clearly thinks this is a powerful domestic message and his international Idiocracy bankrollers, who keep the supply of gold toilets and Monaco Ducatis flowing, will ignore it. After all, it used to be illegal to fund Ukraine’s Nazis then in 2022 they were rebranded ‘freedom fighters’ and sent money and weapons. And of course he’s been proved right. No coverage, totally ignored, more money to the regime honouring literal Nazis. It used to be uncomplicatedly bad to be pro-Nazi but such is the derangement of our Idiocracy that the Ukraine war swept even this simple principle away and we now have full LGBTQH+ professors re-Blueskying the Azov Nazis, alongside re-Blueskying Greta and attacks on JK Rowling, and this is ‘mainstream’ in SW1…We’re experiencing both AI progress and Idiocracy on exponential curves. Peace abroad, regime change at home…Why more SW1 NPCs will pivot to ‘REJOIN’ (March 2025)What are the core things needed to change our trajectory? (Feb 2025)Whitehall and Starmer, why he’s failing and will keep failing (Feb 2025)Insider attention and why No10 can’t get things done (Feb 2025)Why the Kemi project is a farce (2025)What Farage could do to finish the Tories and win the next election (and why it’s psychologically very hard for him to do it) (2025)Personality types, coordination problems, and why changing Whitehall is so hard and so misunderstood (2025)The Pathological Simulacrum, the Cycle of Narrative Whiplash and the collapse of consensus reality (2024)The series on People, Ideas, MachinesI’m going to do a summary of summaries of this series then a summary of the summary of summaries in pursuit of the greatest simplification/compression to high value tokens as possible, but no simpler! It’s the highest value tokens that stop wars and genocide and may stop a billion dead in a pandemic…XV: TS Eliot on culture, religion, class, elites, education, ‘progressives’. The culture of Europe has deteriorated visibly within the memory of many who are by no means the oldest among us… There is no doubt that in our headlong rush to educate everybody, we are lowering our standards and more and more abandoning the study of those subjects by which the essentials of our culture … are transmitted; destroying our ancient edifices to make ready the ground upon which the barbarian nomads of the future will encamp in their mechanised caravans.XIV: Lessons from preparing for government in 1979 & how No10 worked in the Thatcher regime. Hoskyns’ Just In Time. XIII: The origins and evolution of the Cabinet Office, the heart of darkness in the permanent government. How was the CO set up? How did it evolve? What critical lessons and questions for the next regime? E.g to ‘reform’ the CO or close the CO? (Close.)XII: Theories of regime change and civil war. Notes on Turchin’s book. And on Timur Kuran, preference falsification/cascades, how sparks start prairie fires.XI: Leo Strauss, modernity and regime change — and an update 20/5: Notes on: On Classical Political PhilosophyX: Freedom’s Forge — the story of American business and industrial production in World War II. Incredible contrast between the America of WWII and now viz building things. Highly relevant to current debates on tariffs, supply chains, AI/drones/robotics etc.IX: A) Britain’s ‘Organization of Victory’ under Pit 1793-1815 and B) Metternich & European Community. How Whitehall-1795 was more like SpaceX-2025 than Whitehall-2025 is. Real meetings. R&D taken seriously. Procurement and infrastructure taken seriously. Over 230 years, Whitehall has gone backwards.VIII: CIA counterintelligence chief James Angleton, ‘a wilderness of mirrors’, covert operations, assassinations, moles & double agents, disinformation. A blog on Angleton and the broader history of the CIA and US elites’ attempts to understand the political world. The long-term failures of the CIA on critical geopolitical issues, their security failures and penetration by the KGB, the fundamental problems of building effective intelligence agencies and integrating their work in an overall institutional structure — these deep problems are all extremely relevant to today as Washington increasingly can align on just one thing, hostility to China. Given this history we should not bet on the Washington deep state outperforming the PRC on intelligence and in many areas it seems the PRC has learned lessons from America’s victory over the Soviet Union better than Washington learned them.VII: On RV Jones, Scientific Intelligence in World War II, how Whitehall vandalised the successful system immediately after the war. Many issues explored in the RVJ blog are relevant to those interested in the future of AI, ‘safety’, and security.VI: Alanbrooke diaries, incredibly relevant to today’s problems and what military ‘strategy’ really is.V: Colin Gray and defence planning. What’s the difference between ends, ways, means? What’s the difference between strategy, tactics, operations? Why such confusion? What is defence planning, how does it fit with strategy?IV: Notes on The Kill Chain — US procurement horrors, new technologies, planning for war with PRC.III: More on fallacies of nuclear thinking / strategy / deterrence. If you read this and the earlier one you’ll see that almost everything the media says about Putin and nuclear threats is wrong / misguided and, worse, so is much of what is said by international relations/historians/military academics.II: Thinking about nuclear weaponsI: On innovation in militaries, when does it succeed/fail — e.g why US got ahead on aircraft carriers, RAF defence in 1930s.[March 2022] 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).Other related stuff…On rationalism and politics (2022)On high performance government, ‘cognitive technologies’, ‘Seeing Rooms’, UK crisis management (2019)On AI, nuclear issues, Project Maven (2019)On the ARPA/PARC ‘Dream Machine’, science funding, high performance, and UK national strategy (2018)On ‘systems engineering’ and ‘systems management’ — ideas from the Apollo programme for a ‘systems politics’ (2017)On China vs US, the ‘Thucydides trap’ book (2017)If you’re thinking through AI and geopolitics you should study, or at least skim over a few weekends, my chronology of Bismarck (2023). A month of study and you’ll be in the top 0.01% of people who really understand high performance politics, an incredible shortcut! If you take this path, you will have a great advantage over your competitors.And the use of AI to analyse this Chronology (2026)On Tolstoy and War and Peace (2022)2014 speech on what’s wrong and what to do, including make science/technology central to British national strategy after we leave the EU.Deep ‘unrecognised simplicities’ of high performanceKnow the enemy and know thyself, in a hundred battles you will never be in peril.Sun TzuNo action communicates a manager’s values to an organisation more clearly and loudly than his choice of whom he promotes. Andy GroveThe number of people having any connection with the project must be restricted in an almost vicious manner. Use a small number of good people. Kelly JohnsonLook for intelligence, will, and character — if they don’t have the last one, the first two will kill you. Warren BuffettIf you’re good at course correcting, being wrong may be less costly than you think, whereas being slow is going to be expensive for sure. Jeff BezosDeciding what not to do is as important as deciding what to do. Steve JobsThere isn’t one novel thought in all of how Berkshire [Hathaway] is run. It’s all about ... exploiting unrecognized simplicities... Warren and I aren’t prodigies. We can’t play chess blindfolded or be concert pianists. But the results are prodigious, because we have a temperamental advantage that more than compensates for a lack of IQ points.Charlie MungerWhat the Skunk Works does is secret. How it does it is not. I have been trying to convince others to use our principles and practices for years. Very seldom has the formula been followed.Kelly Johnson, founder of Skunk Works which built U2, SR-71, stealth etcThe most interesting thing [about ARPA-PARC] has been the contrast between appreciation/exploitation of the inventions/contributions versus the almost complete lack of curiosity and interest in the processes that produced them.Alan Kay, part of the ARPA-PARC project which created the internet, personal computing etc, in pursuit of Licklider’s vision of networked interactive computing worldwide Read more