Recent debates around Restore Britain and its leader Rupert Lowe illustrate this dynamic perfectly. Critics, including some sharp observers in the dissident sphere, have rushed to declare the project dead, captured, or mere controlled opposition. They point to associations with former Tories, minor Zionist-linked figures, pragmatic disavowals of explicit ethnonationalism, and personal matters in Lowe’s family as evidence of betrayal. Yet this verdict shoots too early. It mistakes the messiness of real politics – and the constraints of operating within a hostile legal and cultural regime – for proof of oligarchic capture.

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The Nature of Competent Containment

History shows that ruling elites survive by making concessions when pressure becomes unsustainable. King John’s Magna Carta was not an act of benevolence but a calculated containment to preserve the throne. The birth of the Labour Party in response to late-19th-century strikes, which saw massive losses in working days amid imperial strain, served the same purpose: channeling working-class discontent into the system rather than allowing Marxist revolution to erupt. The system relaxed classical liberalism, accepted elements of protectionism, and granted workers a voice, however mediated. This was competent containment. It prevented collapse and bought time.

Contrast this with incompetent rule such as Richard II’s arbitrary tyranny, which saw him exiling rivals and seizing estates. This eventually ‘snapped the elastic’ and produced rebellion, abdication, and the rise of Henry IV. Elites who fail to read the map, who mix overreach with poor judgment, lose power. Machiavelli understood this: power is a delicate game requiring constant adjustment to factions, not ideological purity.

In modern Britain, Brexit functioned similarly as a pressure valve. The system did not want it, yet enough popular resentment forced the concession. Nigel Farage, for all his flaws and containment function, represents that adjustment. Recent rhetoric around the Henry Nowak case including acknowledging ‘anti-white hatred’, invoking ‘White lives matter’, and calling for ‘pure cold rage’ marks another step. Why the ramp-up? Because a genuine outsider force like Restore Britain breathes down Reform UK’s neck. Reform, whether or not its cheerleaders want to admit it, are caught inextricaby in a dialectical relationship with Restore. Even if Reform remains containment (and make no mistake this is all Farage is and will ever be), competent containment is preferable to outright regime hostility. It moves the political reality, however incrementally, and demonstrates that the system can still be pushed. Restore is the mechanism by which to push and extract concessions.

Restore Britain in Context

Restore Britain has not succumbed to the iron law of oligarchy in the manner its harshest critics claim. I think it’s worth remembering exactly what the iron law of oligarchy is as defined by Robert Michels. Recall, in The Populist Delusion (2022), I outlined five factors that make up the iron law of oligarchy:

1. The psychological need for the masses to be led.

2. The intoxication with power of existing leadership (and their insatiable need to expand that power).

3. The mechanical necessity of narrowing down democratic choices to a few ‘sensible suggestions’.

4. The technical necessity for expertise in administrative, diplomatic, financial, legal, and organisational matters.

5. The tactical necessity for coordination and leadership without which the assembled crowd devolves into a mere rabble. (pp. 45-8)

The law is said to be ‘iron’ because these five factors compound. Even if the upstart would-be counter-elite can overcome one of them, the chances of overcoming all five are stark. The status-quo enjoys an absolute advantage in communication methods, knowledge, and political skills including organisational ability not only over the mass but also over insurgent counter-elites.

Restore Britain’s young team shows inexperience and roughness around the edges. Critics of the party have been keen to use these facts against them, but surely one can see that it is the opposite of slick, professionalised capture. If Restore Britain truly succumbs to the iron law of oligarchy the first thing that one can expect to see is the young team sidelined or replaced by establishment veterans and technical experts. Authentic challengers often begin with waifs and strays from the fringes, who have deliberately gatekept out of the structures of the regime for one reason or another. When Reform UK kicked Rupert Lowe out of the party, he was effectively gatekept out of a regime institution. He has attracted kooky outsiders such as John and Irena Mappin and the former Conservative MP, Andrew Bridgen, who now frequently talks about ‘the regime’ on niche dissident political podcasts. Those wishing to paint the involvement of the Mappins or Bridgen as evidence of elite capture would do well to remind themselves that these are isolated and minor figures in the social milieu of modern Britain with practically no mainstream standing whatsoever.

Lowe’s personal libertarianism is also not evidence that he represents mainstream Thatcherite conservativism. He has cited Ayn Rand frequently. The economics of Ludwig von Mises stand far outside the mainstream of British political and economic thought. The technical experts who run Britain consider libertarianism to be a fringe and lunatic ideology on par with advocating for Soviet-style communism. The charge that his free market orientation automatically makes him a ‘Thatcherite’ is juvenile. Lowe’s opposition to certain foreign entanglements, and the party’s grassroots energy do not scream ‘Thatcherite neoconservative project.’ Besides, attacks from Brendan O’Neill, Melanie Phillips, and Lois Perry of Reform Friends of Israel suggest the forces of containment are not pleased with him.

Pragmatic decisions by Restore Brtain, such as distancing from overtly extreme rhetoric, avoiding explicit and basically illegal ethnonationalist declarations (which would run afoul of the Equality Act 2010), or admitting figures with checkered pasts, reflect reality, not betrayal. One must navigate the map as it is, not as one wishes it. Optics matter; ideological purity tests that ignore legal and electoral constraints lead to disbandment or irrelevance, as seen with various foreign nationalist experiments. Steve Laws or Tommy Robinson may cheer from outside; a political party cannot operate as their extension without inviting destruction. This is not cowardice but realpolitik.

Realism, Not Delusion

This is not naive optimism or ‘populist delusion.’ It is cold-eyed assessment grounded in elite theory. Revolution remains unlikely in the British context; the system excels at heading it off. The realistic path lies in building pressure that forces further concessions: competent containment that extracts gains for native British interests, however mediated. Restore Britain’s best role may be as a dialectical force compelling Reform (and thus the system) to address the elephant in the room more directly. Success in seats like Makerfield could amplify this. A Farage premiership under such pressure would represent containment, yes, but competent containment moves the dial whereas pure opposition (which amounts to, let’s face it, bleating toothlessly on social media in a disorganised manner) will certainly achieve nothing.

Elite theorists from Mosca onward admired Britain’s historical adeptness at such adjustments. That art appears diminished today, yet pockets of responsiveness remain. Dismissing emergent challenges too hastily because they fail ideological purity tests serves no one. Read British history: power concedes nothing without demand, but it often concedes incrementally when demand is organised and persistent.

The dream of overnight salvation was always illusory. What remains possible is forcing the system to acknowledge the realities of the mess that it has created and to extract concessions for the men and women of this nation. Restore Britain, for all its flaws and necessary compromises, fits within that logic more than its early obituarists allow. The map is what it is. You can try to navigate it with realism or remain a spectator to elite rule.

The main reason I hadn’t done it sooner was the sense of obligation I felt toward my audience. Dozens, possibly hundreds, of people are on Twitter almost exclusively to follow me. Some even created their accounts just to see my content. For a long time, I told myself I had a duty to keep posting for them.

But then I realised I was looking at it the wrong way around. If those people are there because of me, then the best thing I can do for them is lead by example: leave the platform and hopefully inspire them to do the same.

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Why am I leaving?

I’ve come to the conclusion that there is almost nothing positive about Twitter — or X — even under Elon Musk. You could argue it’s become worse: more botted, more of a cesspit. But let’s be honest: Twitter was never good. It plays to the worst aspects of human nature. It’s addictive. It fuels outrage cycles and dopamine loops. Deep down, everyone who spends any significant time on it knows it’s not good for them.

We generate endless copes to justify staying. If you have a reasonably sized account (64,000 followers is decent, though not massive), you tell yourself ‘my people need me.’ But that’s mostly an egotistical defence mechanism to justify an addictive and destructive habit.

The truth is, almost nothing of real importance happens on Twitter. If you weren’t on it, you wouldn’t be missing anything meaningful.

To test this, I stopped engaging with political content on 14^th April and switched my account to pure nostalgia and posting pictures of cottages, squirrels, and pleasant things. I didn’t miss a thing. My YouTube content remained completely unaffected. That experiment confirmed it for me.

Even when posting harmless, positive content, Twitter still has an inherently negative pull. There’s something dark and downward-dragging about the platform. No matter what you post — even a nice photo of a squirrel — the replies and general atmosphere feel like hands reaching up from below, trying to pull you down. It’s like a black hole of negativity. Tucker Carlson would say it is demonic.

I don’t want to pull people down. I want to lift them up. So, if my presence on Twitter encourages others to stay and feed their addiction, am I really doing them a service by remaining? Or is the responsible thing to say: ‘I’m going first. You can join me if you want.’

A Personal Experiment

Recently, I’ve been practising what some call ‘concentrated nourishment’: simply being fully present while eating, focusing on every bite. During this practice, I realised just how often my mind was drifting to Twitter. That constant pull had to go.

I was also fully monetised on the platform, earning a few hundred pounds every couple of weeks. But that money isn’t worth it. I can make it elsewhere.

The Business Excuse

People often say, ‘As a business owner, you need to be on Twitter.’ But do you really?

Most genuinely successful people aren’t active on it. Tony Blair never had an account. Many A-list celebrities stay away or have managers handle their social media. Elon Musk himself spent billions on his own addiction to the site.

Twitter drains your attention, productivity, focus, and presence. It constantly feeds you negativity and outrage. Why would you choose that?

Politically, some argue it’s necessary to be there. But, again, the most powerful people aren’t wasting their time on it. I also believe that since Elon took over, the amount of bot accounts and paid engagement has made it even less trustworthy. I know my own following is real and organic. Many others cannot say the same.

The Bottom Line

After ten years on the platform, I can honestly say Twitter has never served me well. It’s been a useless waste of time.

I’ve had an excellent six weeks since stepping back from political posting on 14^th April, one of my best periods financially and creatively. That data point is clear: Twitter is neither here nor there for my business.

Beyond the personal cost, I also see Twitter as a control grid. It allows those in power to map networks, monitor discourse, and keep people distracted in what my friend Scrump has called ‘the based ball pit.’

For all these reasons, I’ve made my decision. I’m not coming back. 64,000 followers is a decent number to walk away on — and a reminder that I could have done better with my time.

If even five people leave because I did, I will have brought more good into the world. To everyone reading: get off Twitter. It’s a waste of your life. Most of the people who watch my YouTube channel have never been on it and have always wondered why I was. Once you step out, you realise how small and toxic that world really is.

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We have had quite a lot of experience now. In the months before the November 2024 American presidential election, two sets of discrete, testable predictions were put forward. One came from me, from a pure elite theory lens. The other came from Charles Haywood, from a catastrophist and populist American right lens. The actual events of 2025 and 2026 delivered a clear empirical verdict. My core testable claims (pre-election) were, as many will recall (if you don’t want to search here, you can simply read the ‘America’ section of Applied Elite Theory (2025):

1. The managerial regime had already signalled by mid-2024 that a second Trump term was tolerable — even instrumentally useful — and would be allowed to happen with minimal controversy.

2. Trump would serve as a recruitment tool, channelling working-class (disproportionately white) discontent into military enlistment to address chronic shortfalls so that they could once again die in their wars.

3. Key billionaire elites, particularly those of the pro-Israel network, had shifted or intensified support for Trump after 7 October 2023, making donor realignment a material electoral factor.

Charles Haywood’s core testable claims:

1. A decisive Trump or Republican victory would trigger significant street-level violence or riots on a scale comparable to or exceeding the 2020 George Floyd unrest.

2. Democrats would engage in large-scale cheating sufficient to cast the result into serious doubt or prevent orderly certification.

3. Israel and associated donor networks are ‘less powerful than left ideology’ and ‘orthogonal’ to the ‘Left-Right axis’.

The outcome is now settled history. Donald Trump won both the popular vote and the Electoral College by comfortable margins. Kamala Harris conceded promptly on 6 November 2024. The transition and inauguration on 20 January 2025 passed without major disruption. Protests occurred but were limited in scale and intensity — far smaller and less violent than 2020. No credible evidence of outcome-altering fraud emerged in courts or state certifications. The predicted ‘cheating on a grand scale’ never materialised. On the donor side, Miriam Adelson’s contribution exceeded $100 million to Trump-aligned efforts — one of the largest individual political donations in U.S. history. Other pro-Israel billionaires such as Bill Ackman, Larry Ellison, Paul Singer, and many others, provided substantial support. Mark Zuckerberg even swapped a blue hat for a red one. Israel was not a peripheral issue; it served as a clear vector for elite preference expression and funding. Post-election foreign-policy has comprehensively confirmed the instrumental role of these networks. They have received everything they wanted, including the Iran War, Haywood got nothing he wanted and now daily wonders why Trump is not more assertive about his domestic agenda and why he does not tame the courts.

Military recruitment data from 2025–2026 further validated the second claim. The Army, Navy, and Marine Corps reported improved enlistment numbers in the first year of Trump’s second term, with notable gains among working-class cohorts. In fact it was a 15-year record. Whether this was deliberate regime engineering or the natural result of patriotic messaging is secondary. The structural outcome matched the elite-theory expectation: a populist figure was permitted to win in part because he could redirect discontent into service for the institutions he once opposed. Haywood’s catastrophist predictions were falsified at every point. No sustained street riots or breakdown in public order followed the result. Democrats did not ‘cheat again’ in any manner that altered certified outcomes. And the pro-Israel donor factor proved to become the dominant theme of his second term rather than a neglectable side issue as Haywood once claimed. His analysis, which assumed regime brittleness and progressive willingness to risk open rupture, overestimated elites’ appetite for genuine disorder. Regimes, as Gaetano Mosca and Vilfredo Pareto long understood, prefer absorption and co-option to explosion. He also underestimated the power of the Israeli lobby.

This was never merely a personal disagreement. It reflected two incompatible conceptions of power. Haywood operated from the premise that ideology is primary and power follows ideology. He expected decisive friend-enemy breaks when the regime felt threatened. My approach, rooted in Pareto and Burnham, insisted that power is primary and ideology follows power. The 2024 result was a textbook demonstration of the latter: a managed populist victory that left the managerial core largely intact while harvesting its useful energies for military recruitment and regional deterrence.

Even now, in 2026, the pattern holds. Trump’s second term has featured rhetorical confrontation with the administrative state paired with pragmatic accommodation on key issues. Donor networks continue to exert influence without surrendering control. Military recruitment efforts proceed under the banner of national renewal. These are not signs of regime collapse but of regime adaptation — precisely what elite theory predicts. The episode also reveals something deeper about the contemporary right-wing information ecosystem. In the aftermath of the election, the very term I popularised — slopulism — has begun appearing in the vocabulary of former critics. Keith Woods and others who once dismissed my analysis now casually deploy “slopulism” to describe low-effort rage content, emotional kayfabe, and vibe-driven politics that deliver entertainment rather than structural change. This linguistic adoption is telling. It shows that even those most invested in ideological rupture have quietly conceded ground to the framework that correctly predicted containment over chaos.

Slopulism thrives on the illusion of imminent rupture. It convinces audiences to invest emotion in storylines rather than in the substantive power structures behind them. It does not lead anywhere; it is just entertainment. The 2024 election provided a perfect case study. Those feeding at the trough of endless ‘the left are scorpions’ or ‘civil war is coming’ content were left with falsified predictions, while pure power analysis proved reliable.

None of this is cause for triumphalism. Elite theory offers no ideological comfort and no promise of revolutionary salvation. It simply states the iron law of oligarchy: regimes absorb outsiders, channel discontent into manageable forms, recalibrate donor alliances when incentives shift, and preserve their essential structures even while appearing to yield. That is exactly what happened in 2024–2025. Trump was not stopped; he was instrumentalised. The predicted violence did not materialise. The donor realignments mattered. The catastrophist alternative was decisively falsified. The victory here belongs not to any political faction but to the analytical method itself. By treating every movement — MAGA included — as raw material to be tested against the iron law rather than an existential bet, one gains anti-fragile distance. Predictions become falsifiable claims rather than articles of faith. When the regime behaves precisely as expected, the theory is strengthened rather than threatened. Haywood’s sincerity is not in question, but sincerity alone does not guarantee predictive power. The 2024 election supplied a clean empirical test. The regime contained the threat. It recruited from the discontented. It recalibrated alliances. And it did so without granting the outsider the power to remake the machine. Elite theory does not flatter anyone. It merely describes reality with clarity. The iron law does not mean nothing ever changes; it means meaningful change occurs only within strict limits set by circulating elites. The events of 2024–2025 confirmed those limits once again. A managed victory occurred. The predicted chaos did not. Donor realignments mattered. Slopulism was exposed. And the framework that saw it coming proved more durable than the emotional narratives that surrounded it.

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Goodwin’s sole defence for this ludicrous stance was the failure of Poujadism. The Union de défense des commerçants et artisans was a petit-bourgeois right-populist party during the turbulent and unstable Fourth Republic of France in the mid-1950s, before Charles de Gaulle rendered them irrelevant in 1958 by establishing the Fifth Republic. That’s right folks, because of this small historical detail, we must leave the business of governing to the Tory Boy-faced Oxbridge PPE wankers who brought us The Cameron Delusion and appointed such geniuses as Sajid Javid and Kwasi Kwarteng as the Chancellors of the Exchequer. These anointed few know better than business owners, smelly plumbers, even more smelly farmers, and frankly stinking electricians what needs to be done. Goodwin spoke with the zeal of a medieval guild master guarding his monopoly, and McCormack did very well to remain calm in the face of this dull, self-serving Westminster cant.

Let us be clear about what Goodwin is defending: a revolving-door of functionaries whose entire formation has consisted of drafting briefs, leaking to friendly hacks, and massaging the optics of managed decline. Their ‘experience’ is the knowledge of what is, in effect, an engine of failure. The ‘experience’ he is talking about amounts to knowing which civil servant to brief, which donor to placate, which Fleet Street editor to dine with, and a navigation Parliamentary rules. The notion it is ‘impossible’ for ordinary men and women to do this is nonsensical. Let us consider, for a moment, the entire history of the Labour Party: miners, railwaymen, cotton workers, self-taught autodidacts, union bosses, and so on. Or even the entire history of the Liberal Party: industrial tycoons, self-made men, merchants of every kind, complete ‘outsiders’ to the system like David Lloyd George. Or, dare I even say it, the entire history of the Tory Party: landlords, aristocrats, and even the occasional greengrocer’s daughter! Could it be that me, author of The Populist Delusion, believes in democracy more than Goodwin? Well, no, but the point is that Goodwin’s claim is completely indefensible and myopic. Even within my own lifetime there was Neil Kinnock delivering barnstorming speeches about being the first of his kind to ever go to university or John Major, quite literally, standing on a wooden soapbox. The professionalisation of ‘the political class’, which Goodwin sees as divinely ordained to rule, has only really existed since David Cameron. In the overall scheme of things, it is the anomaly and not the rule. Even Blair’s government had people from a wide variety of unconventional non-professionalised backgrounds like John Prescott, David Blunkett or Alan Johnson. Rupert Lowe’s call to bring in what the elite theorists such as Gaetano Mosca and Vilfredo Pareto called an ‘aristocracy of the talents’ is not some arcane restoration of the nineteenth-century but simply the overturning of something that has scarcely existed for two decades. Goodwin’s elitism is misplaced, badly informed, and simply blind to how Parliament has functioned in our lifetimes. If Diane Abbott can learn the ropes in the House of Commons, are we to believe that the likes of Connor Tomlinson or Charlie Downes can’t? A ridiculous assertion. Goodwin continually called these young men ‘strident’ and ‘shrill’ but has he ever seen old Mathematics Abbott back in the 1970s?

Lowe’s preference – and mine, and Peter McCormack’s – for government by ‘fit characters’, talented men and women of independent means, and a proven capacity in the world of affairs, is not some radical utopian fantasy, it is in the mainstream of political thought going back to the Federalist papers or even the basic idea of the House of Lords before it was castrated and turned into a retirement home for MPs. The upper chamber was supposed to be stocked with men who possessed a material interest in the realm’s continuity – land, commerce, distinguished service – rather than the fleeting ambitions of careerists like Goodwin. If one turns to the elite theorists, they too had little time for bureaucrats of this stripe. ‘Bureaucratization’, Robert Michels wrote in Political Parties, ‘suppresses individuality and gives to a society in which employees predominate a narrow, petty-bourgeois and philistine stamp. The bureaucratic spirit corrupts character and engenders moral poverty’. This serves as a good description of what Goodwin has now become: artless, mundane, career-seeking, and bereft of bigger ideas or principles. There can be no real change from a party stuffed with people like that.

Lowe spoke more sense in one interview than Goodwin managed in his embarrassing recent AI-assisted book: politics needs men and women who have built things, run businesses, met payrolls, stared down regulators and unions, what Thomas Carlyle called ‘Captains of Industry’. We need people who understand that wealth creation is not an abstract spreadsheet exercise fiddled about within think tanks, but a brutal contest with reality. Somehow, Goodwin disagrees. In many ways, Lowe’s view is simply mainline Thatcherism. The Iron Lady herself recruited people with industrial grit, entrepreneurs and who understood production and risk. One such man was David Young. Thatcher enlisted ‘buy in’ from Jeffrey Sterling (P&O), John King (British Airways), and James Hanson (a corporate raider type). Thatcher lionised tech success stories like Alan Sugar and Clive Sinclair. Norman Tebbit had been an RAF pilot and union bruiser. If Tebbit had been in Reform UK, I can guarantee you Nigel Farage would have fired him already. But if Thatcher had not had a man like Tebbit there kicking the crap out of the wets, and winning the respect of civil servants, she might have got a lot less done. Rupert Lowe is cut exactly from this sort of cloth: someone who has lived in the real world and wants to get things done and who will grab the managerial elite by the scruff of the neck, if necessary, to get it done. This is not a revolutionary or even radical aim, as Goodwin seems to think, it is, if anything, a minor adjustment to undo very recent developments which are an anomaly in the longue durée.

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This book starts with the admission that the “reactionary” pessimist, Arnold Toynbee, had been right about “progress” and that the Fabians, the liberals and the Marxists had been wrong. You can read about Toynbee in my chapter on him in The Prophets of Doom (2023). In the pre-war period, one of the leading Fabians – a hero to the Pimlico Journal – was H.G. Wells. However, the course of history left Wells feeling that he had been wrong and Toynbee right:

Towards the end of his life Wells began to despair, because he realised the failure of his implicit principle, that the enlargement of scientific knowledge, i.e. power to control nature and men, necessarily increases freedom. Faced by the obvious failure of rationalism to rationalise human nature, he moved very near to the pessimistic position of Arnold Toynbee. (R.H.S. Crossman, ‘Towards a Philosophy of Socialism’, in New Fabian Essays, p. 7)

Next comes a startling admission, the author agrees that Toynbee was right:

Most of us would now agree that Toynbee’s sense of direction was better than that of the early Wells. Yet until the 1930s Wells’s illusions were shared by Liberals, Marxists and early Fabians; they were, indeed, the climate of all progressive public opinion.

This materialist conception of progress was based on assumptions about human behaviour which psychological research has shown to have no basis in reality, and on a theory of democratic politics which has been confuted by the facts of the last thirty years. There is neither a natural identity of interests nor yet an inherent contradiction in the economic system. The growth of science and popular education does not automatically produce an ‘upward’ evolution in society, if by ‘upward’ is meant from servile to democratic forms; and the apocalyptic assumption that, after a period of dictatorship, a proletarian revolution must achieve a free and equal society is equally invalid. The evolutionary and the revolutionary philosophies of progress have both proved false. Judging by the facts, there is far more to be said for the Christian doctrine of original sin than for Rousseau’s fantasy of the noble savage, or Marx’s vision of the classless society. Our first task, therefore, is to re-define progress. (ibid., p. 8, emphasis mine)

This is a typically Fabian (and also Blairite) move: concede the point, then re-define the frame. Much of the rest of the book tries to solve the puzzle of how to move towards the socialist end-goal while accepting these basic truths.

It is worth mentioning that the cartoon caricature of the Fabian, as peddled by those pesky peasants so sneered at by Pimlico, is that of a sneaky operator who engages in a strategy of ‘boiling the frog slowly’, so that the masses are sleep-walked into socialism as opposed to jolted by revolution. The thing about that cartoon caricature is that it happens to be true. Let us hear it from the horse’s mouth:

The temper of the people will be more contented and therefore more conservative, and public opinion will take time to acclimatise itself to the prospect of each further radical advance. (C.A.R. Crossland, ‘The Transition from Capitalism’, in New Fabian Essays, p. 68)

The Fabian understands that the revolution isn’t happening, and more to the point, they don’t want it to happen, because it brings too much upheaval. Fortunately for them, they have been gifted with the most cowardly, snivelling, spineless and downright traitorous opposition God might have granted them: the Tories.

Unsurprisingly, therefore, throughout the book, the Tories are not an enemy to smite – as one might expect from Labour intellectuals – but rather a built-in feature of their plans. Here is the same author just quoted, counting on Tory cowardice for the advancement of the Fabian vision:

For these reasons, each Tory government will certainly beat a retreat (in particular toward greater inequality) from the position reached under the previous Labour administration. But the retreat will be half-hearted. The pressures making for statism are far too strong to be held back, and the Tories too intuitive a party indefinitely to play Canute. The right-wing sabotage of Labour’s programme, which every Left Book Club member expected before the war, never in fact materialised. For precisely the same reason, the Conservatives now cannot and will not restore completely the pre-war status quo. However, these partial retreats will provide plenty of material for Labour speeches and election programmes. So also, indeed, quite apart from Tory retreats, will reforms demanding to be accomplished within the broad framework of statism. (ibid. p. 59)

Of course, the stupid peasants so lamented by Pimlico know all this because it’s summed up by the old internet meme of the ‘ratchet effect’ and even discussed by writers as pedestrian as Curtis Yarvin.

What’s more interesting to me, however, is another passage in the book, by the deeply subversive Roy Jenkins, an arch-villain responsible more than most for wrecking this country, but apparently a hero to Pimlico:

The party system, which is and has been so much the essence of British political democracy that it is difficult to believe that it is not a sine qua non, may also be thought to be endangered by a substantial move towards egalitarianism. Must not the one class state also be the one-party state? Certainly the rigid Marxist, to whom this development would not in any event appear a very dreadful calamity, would have to answer the question with a clear affirmative. And even those who are a good deal less rigid but who none the less believe in the dominance of the economic motive as a spring to political action, could only escape from such an answer by postulating a new party grouping arising out of conflicts between those in one productive or geographical group and those in another — not a very likely development in a country so closely integrated and so impregnated by a common tradition as the United Kingdom.

A more realistic answer is that the move towards and even the attainment of a classless society might well leave largely undisturbed the present party basis. Certainly the immensely resilient Conservative Party, which has survived so skilfully the social changes of the past 150 years, would not collapse under the disappearance of the bourgeoisie. There is always room in British politics for a party of consolidation, and provided there are leaders prepared to play the role of a Sir Robert Peel or a Mr. R. A. Butler, and ensure that it is merely no advance and not positive reaction which is attempted, the future of conservatism is assured. Its basis of support is not only or even principally those who feel that their economic class interests would be endangered by the reformers. It comes from the much more numerous class of those who, without particular regard for their own economic interests, shrink from the intellectual adventure of supporting a government of advance. They are the sceptics, the pessimists about man’s ability to improve his own lot, who reject not so much this or that aspect of the reforming party’s programme as the whole concept that changes wrought by government can make a better society. They will always exist, and in great numbers, in a classless society as much as in a hierarchical one, and they will always offer a solid basis of support for a party of the right. (Roy Jenkins, ‘Equality’, in New Fabian Essays, pp. 88-9)

What is important here is that Jenkins, in his vision of the classless socialist state, factors-in and then bakes-in the Tories. He rejects a one-party state and instead rolls with the notion that this feckless band of losers – The Tories – will always be there, make a convenient whipping boy, and in any case, as per Crossland earlier, will serve to lock in Fabian wins. Cast your mind back to my original essay on Zero Seats. Recall the comments of Tony Blair who, in 1997, was anxious that he would destroy the Tory Party. He did not want the Tories gone because they were useful to him. Many similar comments have since been made by Labour grandees when it looked like the Conservative Party would become ex-parrots. In other words, to the Fabian mind, the Tories are not just a minor inconvenience to the smooth path of progress, they are structurally necessary.

Now, of course, the system hopes to reform T-1000 in Reform UK who – as long as they are basically Tories – can fulfil the same structural function as the old rotten party did for 200 years. Let us return now to the original question: why would the Tory Boy today defend the Fabians? It is because, in a strange way, the Fabians are the only people who truly love the Tories and think they deserve to exist. The relationship is best embodied as that between Tony Blair and his gimp, William Hague. Blair must regard Hague as a pathetic creature, pitiable almost, since he has become such a faithful Blairite dog, rolling over on his back for the master to stroke his belly. And yet also, for Blair, it is more useful to have a weak cretin like Hague occupying the space that says ‘right-wing’ or ‘Tory’ than genuine opposition. Hague knows this and that is why he loves Blair. I posit that, at the much lower Pimlico-wannabe-spad level of Tory Boy, the logic works in the same way. At some depth of their cuckolded unloved not-bullied-enough-at-school psyche, they understand that the Fabians love them as the hated peasants never could.

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On the most public and visible level, Agent Smith was activated by the release of the Epstein Files. Like many, I’ve watched with a mixture of disgust and resignation to see mutuals, MAGA advocates, GOP-adjacent operatives, former friends — now compromised and beyond redemption — try to downplay their contents and minimise awareness of the incredibly obvious ethno-supremacist network they expose. It has been incredible to watch significant portions of the “online right”, once supposedly fearless in speaking truth to power, walk in lock-step with the legacy Matrix represented by the mainstream media, in working overtime to limit damage to Trump, the US swamp, and, of course, to Israel. Earlier this week, in somewhat fired up mode, I named some names. If you didn’t get the memo yet, MAGA – where MAGA is an alive authentic dissident force for any sort of genuine change – is dead. It’s an ex-parrot. It has ceased to be. “I think people are realising”, said Marjorie Taylor Greene, that MAGA “was all a lie”. Greene might have an IQ of around 90, but she can still see the obvious, so what’s the excuse of your favourite influencer still carrying the can for all of this? What’s your excuse? Don’t think you can move on next week and slide back into the polite old fictions, you can’t. People like me won’t let you.

This brings me, of course, to the much smaller and perhaps more subtle activation of Agent Smith that was generated by my last article. For clarity, let’s summarise its core argument using five bullet points, I asked an AI to do this to keep it a value-free dissemination of what I said:

• The “red pill” promise of escaping ideological illusion (as in The Matrix) has failed for many on the right; instead of reaching truth, they have entered a new trap called the “Slop Right Matrix”—a fantasy world of performative online outrage, cruelty for clicks, and tweets substituting for actual politics, effectively a “new blue pill” more delusional than the original mainstream one.

• As per Louis Althusser and Plato’s Cave, true escape from ideology is impossible—humans only swap one “goldfish bowl” (e.g., liberal capitalism) for another; the Slop Right fills the innate human “religion-shaped hole” (per David Sloan Wilson) with a deranged, imagination-driven simulation rather than reality.

• The contemporary right is degenerating into “demonic” emotionalism and performative sadism (e.g., cheering kidnapping of leaders, celebrating ICE shootings, erratic threats against allies like Canada/Denmark/Greenland), squandering a decade of built-up moral capital and confirming liberal stereotypes of the right as driven by unthinking hate.

• This behaviour—amplified by platforms like Elon Musk’s X turning into a “sewer” of extremist one-upmanship (“based Olympics”) and fantasy (“Nationalist Narnia”)—achieves no real organizing or policy wins, while creating digital evidence trails that empower crackdowns (e.g., potential X bans) and alienate European allies, threatening NATO and strengthening neoliberals.

• The right is failing a historic test: continuing down this path risks discrediting rightist ideas for a generation, making it appear unfit to govern and putting itself “to bed for a decade”; the only path forward is resisting the easy “slop” addiction to hold onto reality instead of letting the brain “turn into cheese.”

This argument built on my previous articles “The Online Right is Almost Entirely Fake” and “Tuning Out the Clown Show”. The timing of the Epstein Files drop could not have been better for its purposes, because the collective “online right” had one of its worst and most shameful weeks in its sorry existence. Not to mention the fact that the files themselves provide hard receipts for most of my central claims about the real nature of the enemy, moving beyond tired left versus right, or red versus blue pantomimes, and so on. They provided a little glimpse beyond The Matrix where figures as disparate and on different ends of the political spectrum as Steve Bannon, Peter Mandelson, Noam Chomsky and so on, freely mingled in the same social milieu, and were in direct contact with the same perverted powerbroker. All this should totally shatter the illusions sold to you by the media, and yet many on the “online right”, decided somehow to side with the media in the week when it really mattered.

Responses to my article took three forms. First, were people straightforwardly agreeing with it. Well done: you passed. Second, there was low-level name-calling. Those people have simply been blocked. Do likewise. There must be a pitiless weeding out of people who aren’t going to make it. Third, there were longer pieces whose authors decided to take the extraordinary step of actually trying to defend the slop. These pieces are a waste of time. None of them were able in the remotest sense to engage with the core argument as laid out above. I am simply not going to respond to a 10,000-word hand-wringing exercise attempting to lay out the case for why Matt Walsh is doing “good work”. You must be joking.

Picture a man with a sock on his left hand and a sock on his right hand. In an elaborate performance, he starts pretending that the right-sock hand is attacking the left-sock hand. If someone told you seriously to support the right-sock hand’s struggle against the left-sock hand, you would rightly think them insane and probably deserving mockery. When you’re asking me to take Matt Walsh seriously, you are on the level of asking me to believe in the right-sock hand. If you think Matt Walsh is anything other than a right-sock hand what are you even doing here?

Some people, laughably, said my last article would adversely affect my credibility: the exact opposite has happened. Collectively, the online right has lost credibility by repeatedly mashing cow pats into its own face, and now the mother of all cow pats: Epstein. Like I’ve said, you have a choice to make. If your choice is to take the new blue-pill, this is where many of us – and there are MANY of us – must part company. We must be unsentimental about saying “goodbye”. It’s a shame the red pill did not “take” with you, you were destined only to worship false idols.

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Many rightists understand this; for example, with religion: in the absence of an overriding faith something, anything, will fill the void because humans seem to have a religion-shaped hole as a built-in feature of their operating software. This is explored in Darwin’s Cathedral (2002) by David Sloan Wilson. As you’ve probably already guessed from my title: I believe something like this has happened to people who thought they had become “red-pilled” and stepped out of The Matrix a few years ago. All that has really happened is that they’ve left the old neo-liberal goldfish bowl and plonked themselves in a new one that can be broadly called “Slop Right”, a strange make-believe world in which tweets substitute for politics, and performative outrage and cruelty for clicks substitutes for any sort of real-world result. Yet – strange beings that we humans are and mysterious as the universe is – there is an esoteric truth that what first happens in the realm of the imagination starts to manifest in the real world. Thus, in current year, we find ourselves living increasingly in someone else’s deranged dream. Or, if you prefer, a new blue pill. The choice for us is only: do you acquiesce and allow your brain to be turned into a sort of cheese by taking this new blue pill, which is the easy path, or do you resist and try to hold on to any semblance of reality in the face of the raw sewage pipe of slop that represents right-wing politics today? Many are now making their choice.

The present time is a critical test for the right, one which I fear that it is sadly failing. Many like to paint the civilisational struggle with “the left” as existential, a battle of good versus evil, in which “our side” is on the angels and the enemy are “demons”. It has become common for people to talk these terms. Yet, increasingly, one gets the feeling that the energy built up on “the right” has turned nasty, ugly, and, well, increasingly demonic. Over the past decade, there was an acute sense that “we” held the moral high-ground – the enemy cheated, the enemy called us names, the enemy got us fired from jobs, the enemy tried to put Donald Trump in jail, the enemy killed Charlie Kirk – but this accumulated capital has been squandered rapidly over the past month or so. I have watched “the right” degenerate into a near-mindless and emotional cheerleading squad for, among other things, kidnapping a world leader on the thinnest of pretexts for reasons that still are not abundantly clear, the shooting of a mother of three by scarcely-trained government officials (among several such incidents involving ICE), and increasingly erratic threats from President Trump against long-standing allies, such as Canada and Denmark. This cheerleading has come served with a strange side of performative sadism that seems to come from the world of Quentin Taratino movies rather than conservative political commentary. I am not simply talking about the usual slop posters on X, but very prominent voices, such as Matt Walsh.

Trump’s recent comments that he puts his own morality above the law worried many people across the political spectrum. Liberals currently have a smug sense of “I told you so”, as the President’s actions and rhetoric do at least appear to be somewhat fascistic. Names like Thomas Hobbes and Carl Schmitt, discussed only in theory on the intellectual right a few years back, are now brought up with increasing alarm that we might be seeing democratic norms and institutions dissolve before our eyes. My fear, however, is not this. I have no doubt the midterms will take place (it’s a liberal talking point that they won’t), and I have no doubt the Democrats will win them. My fear, rather, is that all this is going to kill the viability of rightist ideas for a generation: “We gave you the shot and you blew it by acting like excitable monkeys; furthermore, you confirmed our predictions and proved that the right is driven by nothing but unthinking hate”. What makes things worse is that, as things stand, the liberal assessment is correct.

On the global stage, there is serious concern that NATO cannot survive. Last week, on a very mainstream liberal radio station (yes, it’s LBC!), I heard a British general say that if American soldiers fire on European troops in Greenland, it would spell the end of American bases in Europe and signal the end of the postwar order. Again, this is nothing I am worried about (I prefer a sovereign Europe and an end to postmodern fictions!), but the political impact of all of this is that it is discredits the right in Europe. In fact, so unpopular are these moves by Trump, that the net effect has been to split the European right from the American right along lines that ultimately strengthen the neoliberal establishment. On this, Farage and Le Pen have had to fall in behind Starmer and Macron, and the balance of opinion from dissident voices on the right has also been to fall in behind them – an extremely rare moment of moral unity among the establishment, insurgent populist leaders and the so-called online right. The trouble is, those populists and many online right figures have spent the past decade cheerleading Trump too, so they have been made to look ridiculous. Again, I fear, once the excitement is over, all this might serve to put “the right” to bed for a decade as it will be argued – correctly perhaps – that it is unfit to govern. All this is especially the case when, time and again, as in the case of Greenland, Trump is widely seen “to TACO” and make his cheerleaders look even more pathetic and risible.

None of this has been helped by the continued spiralling downwards of “the discourse” on social media, especially Elon Musk’s X, which – sans the oversight of liberal overlords – has genuinely turned into a sewer of performatively extremist rhetoric and increasingly unpleasant hatred. In such an environment, people try to “one-up” each other in how outlandish and offensive they can be. Serious policy is replaced by this “based Olympics”. Some people, addicted to this environment, have sadly become “slop brained” and taken leave of reality. Actual politics is replaced by a fantasy world – “Nationalist Narnia” as I heard one commentator say – in which the power of tweets will, as if by magic, deport tens of millions of people. Not only are such plans completely unrealistic, but also, since this social media activity is done in lieu of any real political organising, all that is being achieved is a digital breadcrumb trail for the increasingly draconian governments of Britain and Europe to collect all the evidence they need to follow the lead of Australia and crackdown as hard as they can on dissidents. Starmer has even discussed banning X – and to be honest, I hope he does, it would be the best thing ever to happen to “the right”.